35 WordPress Plugins that Get the Job Done: Freelancing Favorites
Tuesday, April 14th 2009Here's quick list of my favorite WordPress plugins that I've come back to time and time again on client projects. Each of these plugins have a) withstood the test of time (when it comes to new versions of WordPress), b) have excellent support in the community, and c) remain stable to date. I'll be returning to this post from time to time to provide hacks wherever mentioned.
- Ad Minister. The best tool for serving banner ads I've come across.
- The Advanced Excerpt. WordPress' built-in excerpt function, the_excerpt() leaves a lot to be desired because it strips out HTML by default.
- Advanced Category Excluder. Sometimes I just don't want to go through all the trouble of making sure a particular category doesn't show up in search results or the feed. This little plugin is great because it does all the work for you.
- All in One SEO Pack. Can't live without this one. SEO-friendly page titles + automatically using post and page excerpts as meta descriptions + automatically using tags as meta keywords = better visibility on Google. It's one of the reasons why my website is on the first page of results in Google if you search for "Boston freelance web designer."
- Disable WordPress Core Update. Now now, before you chastise me: I recommend disabling WordPress' Core Update nag only if you're diligent about updating yourself. As I said before, one of the difficulties with WordPress is that if your plugins get out of sync with your version of WordPress, this means trouble for the stability of your installation. I check WordPress.org regularly, and prefer to do an update and compatibility check for my plugins all at once, so the nag only ends up annoying me.
- Disable WordPress Plugin Update. Same here. I often have to modify plugins to suit my needs, so this one's an eyesore.
- Email Users. A great tool to send out a quick message to all registered users.
- GD Star Rating. The slickest of the "star ratings" plugins I've seen, since it comes with sweet icon themes and scores via Ajax.
- Google Sitemap Generator. A must-have for SEO purposes. The plugin generates a fully customizable XML sitemap of all your content so spiders can crawl you more easily.
- Lifestream. A lovely way to vomit all your social media activity in one place.
- New Tag Cloud. A classic. This plugin gives just a bit more granular control over the tag cloud than the default one allows.
- NextGen Gallery. I personally find the Dashboard for NextGen Gallery unintuitive, but as far as galleries hosted on-site go, it's the best option available. I've hacked NextGen to suit my purposes at Rokkyuu Magazine, but out-of-box the plugin combines many of the features that I find lacking in its competition. *updated 8/22/09* As of 2.7, just use WordPress' built in gallery shortcodes. You can upload a whole set of images and "Insert as Gallery," then with a bit of filtering, remove the default CSS for the gallery and use Shadowbox to display the full image as a lightbox. This way thumbnails get automatically created, and if you dump galleries into their own category of posts, you can handle a gallery as you would any other post.
- Page Excerpt. Why this was removed from WordPress still baffles me (among others)—in conjunction with All in One SEO Pack, Page Excerpt allows you to provide better meta descriptions for your pages, as well as prettier excerpts in search results and archives.
- PS Auto Sitemap. A fancy, automagically generated sitemap with fancy icons.
- Redirection. This one's indispensable. I'm no good at writing rules for mod_rewrite in my .htaccess, so this plugin is a lifesaver. If you use Google's Webmaster Tools in conjunction with this plugin, you can have a pretty cleanly running site with no loose ends, as far as 404s and errors in your sitemap are concerned. Would be perfect if it weren't for the fact that its log files, which can't be turned off, eventually get enormous and bloat your MySQL database.
- Subscribe2. The Dashboard is very clunky, but as a site-wide subscription manager, Subscribe2 does the job.
- Register Plus. After extensive experimentation with the plugins out there that extend the functionality of the user profile in WordPress, Register Plus appears to be the key to making it work without resorting to writing your own plugins. I'll be writing an article about extending the user profile (a la Rokkyuu Magazine) to include custom fields arranged in a preferred order and user-selected color themes. Great when combined with the User Photo plugin. (Albeit, other than for this purpose, Register Plus is somewhat useless; half of its functionality expired with WordPress 2.6.).*updated 8/22/09* There are a few plugins out there that may make this whole setup even more interesting, such as logging in and editing your profile from the front end. More to come. Read my new series Extending User Profiles in WordPress for more on this. (added *8/29/2009*)
- Search and Replace. Useful if you need to migrate your WordPress installation from a local environment, to a testing server, and then to its final live host. Simply search and replace http://localhost/a-temporary-path/ with the final domain path and you're done.
- Subscribe to Comments. A really great way to enable users to follow your comment thread without subscribing to its feed.
- Codesnippet. An easier method to displaying markup or code in posts, although you'll need to hack the plugin to make it standards-compliant. Normally the plugin generates a <pre> with two <div>'s inside of that, which in turn get squashed inside of <p> tags; I replaced these <div>s with <spans> and then styled the <span>s to be display: block. Of course, then you still have to deal with the fact that WordPress will invariably mangle your inline code if you switch to the Visual Editor. *updated 8/22/09* An even better option is Syntax Highlighter Evolved by ViperBond.
- Sitemap Generator. If you're looking for a plugin that generates a simple, unordered list of all your posts, pages, etc in a hierarchical fashion, this is it. All you do is create a page template for it and plop it in.
- Member Access. The best way to make your WordPress members-only.
- User Photo. A wonderful enhancement for the user profile. If you don't want to approve each user when he/she changes her photo, though, you'll need to cripple the plugin to remove this functionality, and then also rip out the chunk of code that sends you an email (even after you've disabled the moderation feature). More on this later.
- Viper's Video Quickags. Simply the best way to insert YouTube videos.
- WP-Ban. Easy as pie. You can ban by IP, referrer, or host name, and display a custom page to blocked users.
- WP-Commentnavi. Lester "Gamerz" Chan is one of the great plugin masters. I've had to alter his plugin's markup a bit to suit my purposes (which I'll be sure to share), but otherwise his plugins are almost prescient when it comes to much-needed WordPress functionality.
- WP-DB-Backup. Nothing beats having your WordPress database delivered to you by email once a week.
- WP-Pagenavi. Another of Lester's, which I use in almost every project.
- WP-Polls. A nice, ajax-powered polling system (also Lester's). I'll discuss the related tw-sack.js problem later, but otherwise a solid piece of code.
- WP-UserOnline. Displays a list of spiders and users (anonymous as well as logged in) who are currently browsing your site (as well as what page[s] they're viewing).
- Posts Plugin Library. And finally, one of the sweetest plugins out there: bypass dealing with multiple loops in a template by making single-line calls to the Posts Plugin Library, which grabs exactly the posts you need. And the great news is, there's a whole suite of options:
That's all, folks! Should I come across some other sweet plugins, or if you recommend them, I'll add them here. Stay tuned.
Addendum
So here are a number of plugins I forgot:
- Last.fm RPS. *added 8/22/09* After trying out numerous Last.fm plugins, this is without a doubt the best out there. Allows you to display information from your latest tracks/albums on Last.fm. Used in conjunction with Last.fm's Scrobbler for iTunes/Windows Media Player.
- Role Manager. *added 8/22/09* Sometimes you need more granular control over what users can do in the back-end of WordPress, and that's where Role Manager comes in. What's great is that when used in conjunction with Flutter, you can restrict access to Custom Write Panels you create on a user level basis.
- Search Unleashed. *added 8/22/09* Use this plugin to beef up the relevancy of the WordPress search function. Since Search Reloaded went commercial, this is the only plugin left that will allow you to search by relevancy reliably.
- Search Excerpt. *added 8/22/09* To further beef up WordPress' search function, why not use Yoast's quick Search Excerpt plugin to return excerpts on the search results page that highlight only the relevant portion of the post that the user requested.
- WP Snap.*added 8/22/09* I use this plugin when I need to display posts in an alphabetical index. Great for glossaries, indexes, and encyclopedias. Also check out my post about sorting by last name when using this plugin.
- Picasa Images Express. *added 8/22/09* The alternative to storing all your photo albums on your web server is hosting them off-site, at Picasa or Flickr. Most people prefer Flickr because of its enormous community and sweet photo management features, but I use Picasa because it allows me to create unlimited albums of my photos and the feed for each album is unlimited, as opposed to limited to 200 photos (for free). So if Picasa is the way to go for you, this plugin will integrate with TinyMCE and provide its own upload management library like the Media Library. Then with one click, you can dump linked thumbnails to all your Picasa photos (an album at a time, or photo at a time, whichever you prefer) into your posts.
- Netflix plugin for WordPress. *added 8/22/09* While I'm using the original Netflix plugin by Albert Banks, Eric VanBergen made a reimplementation of the plugin with new features. The plugin can display your various Netflix feeds, such as images of the movies in your queue (see my footer throughout the site).
- Facelift Image Replacement plugin, or FLIR, (*added 8/22/09*) is an image-replacement technique I use on my site to display headings in a specific font that end-users won't have on their computer. This is an alternative to the popular Flash-based image-replacement technique, sIFR. It's a bit complicated to use, in that your stylesheet needs to match up with the settings in FLIR, but it works great (and now actually functions on a local installation too!).
- Excerpt Editor.*added 8/22/09* A very simple tool that will call up the excerpts of all posts and pages on your site, allowing you to check whether or not you made excerpts for these posts. This is especially useful if you use your excerpt as a meta description through the All in One SEO Pack plugin.
- WP Super Cache. Can't believe I left this one off the list! WP Super Cache turns dynamic WordPress pages into static html files, without using PHP resources to serve the files. That way WordPress (hopefully) won't implode when you're squashed by the "Digg Effect." Setup can be tricky when applying the .htaccess rules, but the plugin is otherwise very friendly.
- WP CMS Post Control. *added 8/22/09* If you need to hide certain portions of the Dashboard for whatever reason, this is the easiest way to do it, short of attaching your own stylesheet and using display: none.
- Flutter. *added 8/22/09* There's a lot to be said about this amazing plugin, which is slowly being transformed into "Breeze" by Freshout. While it requires a lot of hacks to use in production, I still use a modified version of it in most of my client projects. Flutter "styles" the GUI of custom fields, so that if you're making a WP site for clients, they won't have to deal with WordPress's custom field variable/value pairs. We definitely need to keep an eye on new developments on Flutter's end, as it has the potential to transform WP into a real CMS.
Thanks a lot for this excellent article!
Glad it helped -
which งาน plugin is the best? I look at many website but it's very simple plugin.
I prefer wordpress.
I would be VERY keen on learning more about extending user profiles. I have struggled with CIMY extra fields and a number of plugins. Any news on your tutorial - i wd love to know how you put together the Rokkyuu profile. Great list. I would also add a couple such as Adminimise (fantastic for customising Admin), Flutter for custom posts etc, and simple and great is Rich Text Biography..thanks for your list!
@dave
Adminimise, Flutter, Rich Text Bio - never heard of them before, but I'm definitely checking them out now. Flutter especially. Sorry I haven't posted that tutorial on the user profiles yet; I worked with CIMY's user profiles before, but ultimately the dead plugin called RegisterPlus is the key to getting an archive of user profiles like on Rokkyuu.com working. My classes just finished last week, so that's why WordPress365 has been on hold!
oh my god, Flutter is the best thing to hit WordPress since sliced bread. And we don't even have that yet. I love you Dave. Love.
Thanks a lot for priceless feedback about that great list of plugins.
You mention Register Plus works great when combined with User Photo. I would love and even pay to learn more about the topic as I having a challenge adding the user photo upload to the registration process.
Hey Claude, I hope to write an article about it soon. I've been a bit busy finishing up freelance projects, so I had to put WP 365 on hold.
Hi I have started a new wordpress blog and looking for the right kind of plugins..I am happy that I have landed in this page..thanks.
I added a few more useful plugins and updated others. Enjoy.
Added some ideas for Extending User Profiles in WordPress. Take a look.
I love and hate Flutter.
The most frustrating thing about Wordpress development is poorly executed, brilliant plugin concepts.
It's a fantastic idea and would instantly make Wordpress a brilliant CMS if developed as core functionality.
Instead, it just feels like a hack. Such a shame!
I agree, but there's a possibility that Matt may make something like Flutter part of core functionality in the future. But in the meantime...