We have been using WordPress for several weeks now and one of the things I love about this tool is the number of plugins available. Every time we want to do something new, we just Google a few words and we will likely find a WordPress plugin that does what we need. Another great feature is that since it is open source, we can easily change any plugin to suit our needs.
So here is a list of some plugins (in no particular order) that we use regularly for our clients.
1 – Advanced TinyMCE
WordPress uses TineMCE as its WYSIWYG editor, this open source HTML editor is packed with features that are for the most part hidden in WordPress. TineMCE advanced allows you to re-enable some of these features. For example, the creation of tables and contextual menus within the editor. The user interface is easy to use, just drag and drop the functions you want to activate.
2 – All-in-one SEO package
SEO is an important part of your web design nowadays, this plugin allows you to change the title, description and meta tags of your pages and posts.
3 – Exclude the page from navigation
This plugin allows you to hide certain pages from your website navigation (menus) Useful if you want to create pages that cannot be accessed from any menu.
4 – qTranslate
Essential for all multilingual websites. qTranslate allows us to easily create multilingual posts and pages. Additional plugins have been created that use the qTranslation functionality (meta tag, sitemap)
5 – Viper Video Quick Tag
This plugin will add a toolbar in your editor that allows you to add different video formats (Youtube and friends) I like this plugin because it is easy to use with YouTube, just paste the URL of the video page and voila!
6 – WP File Manager
This is my most recent discovery, creating many themes for clients. I always had to upload additional images to the theme folders, which took some time and was a hassle. This plugin provides us with a web based file explorer so that we can manage the files that are on our web server.
7 – NextGen
NextGen is an image gallery manager that offers a nice user interface to manage your images. It comes with some gallery layouts and various other plugins have been created offering additional layouts. NextGen integrates into the editor toolbar, making it easy to insert image galleries into posts.
8 – Google XML Sitemap
Great little plugin that creates an XML sitemap and submits it to Google. A sitemap is a file listing all of your pages on your website. Search engines use this file to help them scan the pages of your website.
9 – Google analysis
It allows us to include our Google Analytic javascript code on our website. One of the features that I like about this version (because there are a lot of Google analytics plugins) is that we can paste the actual javascript code. This allows us to add another tracking code, eg quantcast, beezilla, etc., at the same time.
10 – PHP online
This is a bit more technical, it is a plugin that allows us to include the php server code within our posts and pages. Very useful for us programmers, perhaps a little less interesting for non-programmers.