Having now developed a few dozen websites using Wordpress as a back-end, I’ve come to find myself installing the same plugins over many of those installations.
Initially finding those plugins was often quite a challenge though. While I often sing the praises of Wordpress, the plugin area of their site is honestly an embarrassment to the platform, if only because there is no way to sort through plugins. Thus one of Wordpress’s biggest benefits – the massive community – becomes a huge problem due to the sheer number of plugins. Without a way to filter or sort, you’re left with a massive list of plugins, the vast majority of which haven’t been updated in years.
So here is a list, in no particular order, of plugins which I’ve found very useful for a variety of sites:
WP-DBManager: A wonderful backup manager, it also includes optimize and repair functions. It is relatively easy to set up, as long as you have your database paths configured correctly. It’s also very simple to setup a recurring backup and have it stored on the server and/or emailed.
Clean Options: I’ve had a few issues with some of more heavily used Wordpress installations where a multitude of plugins have created a lot of orphaned data in the wp-options table, which can also really slow down a site.
flickrRSS: An easy way to use simple PHP code to display recent images from Flickr.
All in One SEO Pack: A very popular plugin, for good reason: It’s nearly essential for decent SEO in Wordpress. Offers lots of customization, and works flawlessly.
Search Everything: I actually use this for the opposite purpose: To exclude certain pages and posts from search results.
WP-Table Reloaded: This has saved me (and my clients) hours upon hours of work by allowing easy importing of tables (from Excel and other sources) into Wordpress, and then also easily allowing users to update those tables without having to deal with messy HTML table code.
WP Page Numbers: A simple plugin which replaces the boring (and limited) “Next Page” and “Previous Page” links with a list of page numbers, with several attractive styles to choose from.
Tags: wordpress
