drakard.com

Yes, it’s another list of Wordpress plugins:

Front End Functionality

• Advanced Search – expands the default search capabilities of WP (return results by relevance instead of post date, search term highlighting etc) – and, with a bit of cribbing from Search Everything, can be easily hacked to search custom post fields – which is vital if you’re using something like the Contact Manager theme.
• Contact Form III – dead simple web form to add to your Contact page.
• CryptX – if you have a lot of email addresses visible on your site, then install this to hide them from spam bots.
• Subscribe to Comments – allows your users to receive notification when new comments are posted on a story that they’ve commented on themselves.

Back End Functionality

• CMS Post Control – if you plan on using WP as a multi-user CMS, then odds are you need to hide some elements of posting from some users.
• DB Manager – manually optimise and backup your Wordpress database from within the admin section or automatically on your own schedule.
• Developer Assistant – very useful during the initial development of new themes and plugins, or when you’re bug hunting later on.
• HTML Purified – replaces the default WP comment filter with a better one and gives a bit more piece of mind regarding XSS.
• Level 2 Categories – stop users from being able to post in categories you’ve defined as above their permission level. I may well expand on this plugin to use capabilities rather than the simpler 1-10 user level, but that’s for another day.
• Login Lockdown – limit login attempts to avoid your admin account being hacked via brute force password guessing.
• Ping Optimizer – don’t spam the new post notification servers every time you edit posts in Wordpress.
• Plugin Central – until the new plugin controls (introduced in 2.7) are upgraded, this remains the easiest way of installing and updating multiple plugins at once. Having said that, updating lots of plugins at once can be a quick way of breaking your blog, so as always – it’s good to try the updates on a development server first…
• Register Plus – add custom fields (and a few other tweaks) to the register form so you can personalise the user signup process for your own needs.
• Role Manager – along with the not-quite-mutually-exclusive Role Scoper, this allows you to fine tune the user permissions and use Wordpress as a multiple user CMS.
• Simple Tags – tag multiple posts at once, merge tags and manage them properly, tag autocompletion and suggestion; in other words, everything that should be in WP already.

SEO Enhancements

• Google Analyticator – if you use Google Analytics, then you probably either use this plugin already or have hardcoded it into your themes.
• Google XML Sitemaps – one of the must have SEO tools, this plugin automatically keeps your site easily spiderable by the major search engines. Note that this will rebuild the sitemap after every post, so if you’re doing a lot of editing you’ll find it much quicker to temporarily disable it…
• Headspace – another well known plugin, this allows you to have much more control over what goes into the head of your HTML.

Speed Improvements

• Post Query Accelerator – Straightforward plugin that makes it possible for MySQL to cache database queries.
• WP Cache – And one that caches the HTML generated from a page view; most handy when your blog is visited by many anonymous users compare to those signed in (which is normally the case). Just don’t forget to turn it off during theme development…

Optional

• My Favourite Posts – allows your users to build up a shortlist of the posts they want to refer back to. Depending on your site, this type of functionality is either a requirement or irrelevant.
• RewriteRules Viewer – can be useful if you’re redeveloping an existing site and have a lot of old urls to keep working, or if you just have a lot of redirection going on anyway.
• Similar Posts – uses the Post Plugin Library (which also gets used by a few other plugins) and provides the ability to display keyword related posts on your post pages.
• Where Did They Go From Here? – like the Similar Posts plugin, this can be useful in displaying other posts from your site that your users may be interested in.

Others

Of course, Akismet and WP Stats should be enabled on most sites but as they come with a default install, I don’t really see the need to point them out again

Manageable was essential before 2.7 integrated it into the core (although not as completely as I’d prefer) and AStickyPostOrderER was useful to alter the order of posts but doesn’t seem to work correctly in the latest Wordpress.

And finally, No Update Nag removes the annoying “a new version of WP is out, please tell your site admin” message that pops up. I know when a new version is out, and I do not need reminding by WP or my users – new versions get installed when I’m good and ready; or, in other words, after it has been shown that there are no accidental show stopping bugs, that the plugins I use still work and after I’ve upgraded and tested it on a development server.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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