Getting "plugedin" with WordPress
One of the things I truly love about WordPress, is the huge plugin community. I’d like to start this post with a thank you to everyone in that community for all of the hard work you put in to your plugins. I often donate to plugin authors especially if I use the plugin on a commercial site and I highly encourage you to donate to your favorite author or two too. Usually even $5 is enough to make a plugin developer happy.
Enough blathering, here are my top ten favorite WordPress plugins…
#10 Advanced excerpt – I like this plugin for content management WordPress themes that utilize the excerpt as part of the design. It adds some filtering plus it adds some HTML capability if you are looking for it.
#9 Post plugin library with recent posts, similar posts and recent comments – this family of plugins makes adding “recent” stuff really easy through widgets and through short codes. I find this family of tools to be very easy to use and manipulate. Two big thumbs up. You can find this on several of my ecommerce WordPress themes like 2Jane.com.
#8 Reveal ids – Shows the post ids in the admin so you can reference the numbers without having to look at the site or the database.
#7 Socialble - The icons are cute, it is always up-to-date and has nice features like email and print, not just social media.
#6 Google sitemap generator – Its almost shocking this isn’t just built in at this point but you need one. Make sure you have a Google Webmaster account too. Must have!
#5 Google analytics – Every site should be tracking with Google Analytics. This is a free service, so if you don’t have an account, go get one now!
#4 Robots-meta – This tool gives you great control over the robots meta tag and makes adding your site verification codes (Google<Yahoo,Bing) very easy.
#3 Raw-html – WordPress adds its own HTML to posts and pages. This plugin strips out all of the WordPress garbage and renders your post in the proper HTML.
#2 Custom Post Template – Have you ever needed three kinds of post templates? This plugin is crucial for really tweaking every post on your site and using it offers a designer/developer a lot of freedom and creativity. It does this by allowing you to create any number of post templates and by tagging them with a little bit of php (just like a page template) you can call the new template easily in the editor.
#1 HeadSpace 2 – I used to be a big fan of All in One SEO but after comparing the two, HeadSpace 2 is just so much more feature rich. It allows you to specify meta date on posts, pages and categories without having to use additional plugins. I will say this, HeadSpace is a little more “overwhelming” and if you are a total newb it can seem daunting. If you are totally baffled by HeadSpace, definitely go get All in One as something is far better than nothing.
What do you think? Were any of these helpful for you? if so, please leave a comment.
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Great, you’ve shown some cool custom Wordpress themes here, just been looking at some of them, and there are some amazing themes in this listing. How interesting that a lot of good themes you will find out there for Wordpress.
Hi, just curious since All In One is not recommended by Yoast, what do you consider to be the best as a replacement plug in for All In One?
As this article describes, I prefer Headspace 2 to All-in-One. Headspace 2 offers finer control of pages, posts and even categories.
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