WordPress CMS Tips – Part 2

April 6th, 2010Tutorials, Wordpress, WordPress Tutorials1 comment

This is a continuation of my previous post, WordPress CMS Tips, that is geared towards developers and non-developers alike wishing to utilize WordPress as a Content Management System.

This post will be focusing on useful plugins.

General Use Plugins

Enable Media Replace

By default, wordpress does not allow you to upload a piece of media, attach it to a post, and then upload a new version of that media without also manually editing your post and replacing the attached media with the new version. This plugin fixes that problem.

Search Everything

Wordpress has pretty weak default search capabilities. This plugin expands it to include configurable options like tag searching, author searching, and more. I install this on every site I build.

Post-Page-Association

This allows you to attach a specific category of posts to a page. A list of the posts is then displayed after the page content (or anywhere else if you choose to modify your theme template file).

Great for “related posts” sections.

WordPress Advanced Ticket System

Zendesk is a tremendous system that provides “ticketing”, essentially user-submitted questions, problems or anything else with assigned “priority” settings. Zendesk is used a lot for support systems.

WATS is a plugin that provides zendesk-like capabilities to your wordpress site, for free. This is one of those plugins that takes your site one step closer to being located entirely in one place, rather than having a “support” HQ, a “blog” HQ, etc.

Social Networking Plugins

Sociable

This makes it a breeze to add share links to every social network out there to the bottom of your posts.

Find Me Elsewhere

While the plugin above makes adding links to your posts easy, how about a widget that can be viewed site-wide? This is it.

WP to Twitter

Why bother manually updating your twitter account whenever you write a new post or page? This plugin will automatically update your twitter status whenever you post an update. It’s highly configurable.

Twitter for WordPress

Makes displaying your twitter feeds a breeze, either in your theme template files, or as a widget.

Post Plugins

Most Read in XX Days

If you don’t want to mess with your theme’s template files, this will provide a nice little widget that displays any number of posts from the last XX days. Maybe you’d like to display the last 5 posts in the past 30 days? Sure, it’s easy.

Recent Posts

Similar to the above plugin, but only displays a number of latest posts, regardless of age.

Advertising Plugins

WP Simple Adsense Insertion

If you wish to include google adsense ads after each post, this is going to be one of your easiest way to accomplish that. You can create up to three different campaigns that can be set to appear on perhaps category pages, archives, and single posts, in which ever configuration you’d like. If you don’t want ads site-wide, you can also include ads only on specific posts.

Advertising Manager

This plugin is great for managing all of your ads across several different networks. Allows you to see statistics without logging into your ad network account.

Extra Theme Integration Plugin

The Excerpt Re-Reloaded

If you’re a theme developer, this plugin is for you. There are lots of hacks out there to change how the excerpt is display, but they all have one common problem: they apply to every the_excerpt(); tag. What if you want to display excerpts of 50 characters in one place, but 80 characters in another? And what if you’d like to preserve images and other html tags in your excerpts? Nope, the_excerpt(); can’t do that.

The Excerpt Re-Reloaded replaces the default excerpt tag and adds a lot more functionality.

SEO Plugin

Greg’s High Performance SEO

Very similar to Platinum SEO, but I feel it works a little better.

Remembering to perform search engine optimization on your site is extremely important. This plugin will make your job a lot easier.

Useful Tool Plugins

Redirection

Occasionally, you may be tasked with converting a clients old website to WordPress. A common problem with these kinds of upgrades is preserving permalinks to pages that may be spread throughout countless sites on the web. This Redirection problem will allow you to create 301 (and other) redirections. For example, your about me page is at /blog/about, but the old site had the same page at /about. This plugin will allow you to simply redirect any /about queries to /blog/about.

WordPress Download Monitor

Being able to monitor how many times a file has been downloaded is really. Not only will this monitor downloads, it also provides an intuitive interface for uploaded and managing downloadable files.

Admin Mod Plugins

CMS Press

Custom post taxonomies are wonderful additions to any site. They allow you to define extra details about a post that help describe the post’s content. These can be added manually to your theme, but if you’re not a developer, this plugin is an easy way to accomplish the same thing.

CMS Tree Page View

Sitemaps are really useful for finding your way through the maze that is your site’s pages and posts, especially if you have more than just a couple dozen. While this plugin doesn’t provide a site map like Google XML Sitemaps does, it does create an easy-to-use tree view of your sites pages and posts. Extremely useful for large sites.

WP CMS Post Control

If you’re providing a wordpress-driven site for a client, you’re not necessarily going to want them to see all the options included by default in the wordpress post editor. This plugin makes hiding things like “Post Tags”, “Post Excerpt”, etc easy to hide.

It’s a lot better than saying “Just ignore that over there.”

WordPress CMS Tips – Part 3 will be coming soon and will be focused on theme development tricks and tips geared towards developers.