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My Top WordPress Plugins

October 17th, 2009

The expansive capability of WordPress is phenominal, mostly thanks to plugins. There are plugins that add functionality, organization tools, search engine optimization, photo galleries, fun gizmos, and more.

I use plugins for every site I develop, whether they are for content management, data organization, portfolio displays, or anything else. Below I have put together a list of my favorite plugins, in no particular order.

• My Page Order – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/
  
  A wonderful tool for easily managing the order in which your pages are displayed. Rather than messing with the code in your theme file, this plugin gives you a simple drag-and-drop ajax interface that lets you more pages and subpages around anyway you like.
• Google Analytics – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/googleanalytics/

  Monitoring your site’s traffic is extremely important for maintaining any good website. Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there that accomplishes this task with ease. The Google Analytics plugin makes adding the javascript code a breeze. It automatically adds the code to every post and page within your site, giving you complete monitoring capability.A plugin that goes hand-in-hand with Google Analytics is the Google Analytics Dashboard plugin, which puts the analytics graphs and data right up front on your wordpress dashboard, making it even easier to monitor traffic.

• Link to Post – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/link-to-post/

  Adding links within post or pages to other content on your site really helps direct people around your site, landing them on the important (possible proffitable) content. Sure typing in the hyperlink with WordPress’s default insert-link button isn’t difficult, but why not make it easier? Especially when you are managing a site with hundreds of posts and pages.This little plugin makes linking to other content a breeze.

• NextGen Gallery – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
  
  Finding a simple, effective way to display portfolio items is not always easy, but the NextGen Gallery plugin accomplishes this task beautifully. Easy to modify and theme to your liking, NextGen Gallery provides probably the easiest possible way to display photos, screenshots, and all other kinds of images. Simply upload into a gallery and you’re done.

  There is also a whole slew of additonal plugins that work alongside NextGen Gallery to make it even better. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=nextgen+gallery
  

• The Attached Image – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-attached-image/

  A lot of websites have begun displaying thumbnails alongside an excerpt of the post content on their blog, feed, and homeages. With only the default WordPress installation, this is a very difficult task to accomplish, though one with wonderful end results. The Attached Image plugin, however, makes showing thumbnails really simple. It just takes the first image attached to the post and makes it into a thumbnail.

• Category Visibility – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-visibility-ipeat/

  Restricting which categories are displayed on certain pages can be rather a pain if you’re trying to do it by modifying the wordpress loop. If you have more than a few pages, you’re going to have either lots of conditional if/else statements in your theme file, or you’re going to create many different page template files. Neither one of this is desireable, especially not when you can use a simple plugin to do it all for you.

These are just some of the plugins I use when developing new sites, but I have found them to be some of the most useful.

Enjoy!

Tags: plugins, Wordpress
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