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Posts Tagged ‘Plugins’

Thirty Top WordPress Plugins

If you’ve ever used WordPress, you know the mass of WordPress’ functionality resides in the plugins.  Any high quality theme, blog, or website is loaded up with plugins.  The problem is not the ability to locate plugins, but the plugin’s actual ability to work without the need for special coding.

Below is a list of my favorite plugins.  These plugins are both functional and easy to use.  The augment WordPress’ core functionality and require little or no coding.

  1. Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service.
  2. All in One SEO Pack – Supports easy definition of page specific meta tags for search engine optimization.
  3. AWS Easy Page Link – Easy interlinking between pages when writing content.
  4. Breacrumb NavXT – Generates breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog or website.
  5. Contact Form 7 – Simple and fully customizable contact form.
  6. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap.
  7. Datafeedr Random Ads V2 – Aallows you to simply and easily show random ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets.
  8. Events – Enables a list of events with a static countdown to date in both pages and sidebar.
  9. Featured Content Gallery – Rotating images on home page.
  10. Fun with Sidebar Tabs – Adds a tabbed sidebar to existing themes.
  11. Google Maps Anywhere – Interactive map to locations utilizing Google maps.
  12. KB Robots.txt – Creates a standard robot.txt file for regular WordPress and WordPress MU.
  13. Link to Post – Supports easy internal linking to post entries.
  14. List Pages Shortcode – Introduces the [list-pages] and [child-pages] shortcodes for easily displaying a list of pages within a post or page.
  15. PhotoSmash – PhotoSmash Galleries makes it easy to create photo galleries in posts or pages that your users can upload images into for sharing with other users.
  16. Really Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA field that supports multiple contact forms.
  17. Show IDs – Adds a column to the administrative dashboard to show page and post ID’s.
  18. Simple Google Sitemap – Generate a sitemaps.org compatible XML sitemap of your WordPress.
  19. Simple Image Link – Sidebar images within existing sidebar format
  20. Simple:Press Forum – Easy to configure forum that integrates with the standard version of WordPress.
  21. Simple Sidebar Navigation – Adds in a customized menu within sidebar widgets. Support multiple instances and integrated easily with tabbed sidebars.
  22. Social Homes – Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons.
  23. Special Text Boxes – Adds simple colored text boxes to highlight some portion of post text. Use it for highlights warnings, alerts, infos and downloads in your blog posts.
  24. Subscription Options – Adds subscription option icons for your RSS Feed URL; your FeedBurner Email Service URL and your Twitter Stream URL.
  25. TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE.
  26. TubePress – Displays professional YouTube galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar.
  27. Twitter Friends Widget – Widget to display your Twitter Friends in the sidebar.
  28. WP-Table Reloaded – allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.
  29. WP Easy Uploader – Easily upload any type of content without the need for FTP.
  30. WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Pimping my Website with Plugin’s

Virtually everyone has heard of MTV’s Pimp my Ride. The world of web development has been blessed by a little friend called a plugin that allows webmaster’s to pimp their websites. A plugin is the webmasters best friend when designing personalized websites via open source (aka free) CMS (content management systems) like WordPress or Joomla. They are many times free or available for low subscriptions or onetime fees.

WordPress and Joomla are common open source or free software packages that are available for download and usage via the Internet. These two CMS packages represent a easy to use software program that allows provides the backbone or a website. Both come with fairly basic functionality that can be expanded by searching for and adding any number of plugins. These plugins are mini-applications that perform a specific action or task for a given website. While many times free and easy to install, they do pack a powerful punch for building a tripped out website and pimping this website to meet a company’s or webmaster’s specific requirements.

Plugins come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can create a social network, help provide SEO or search engine optimization, or they can provide quick contact form for website visitors. There are many and they are readily available for open source CMS’s packages regardless of the webmaster’s knowledge level.

In fact, in all honestly, WordPress plugins require little effort to install. The webmaster simply needs to find the plugin, click install, and review the available setting options. The plugin does all the heavy lifting and work.

So before you second guess the power of a CMS package, you might want to review the available list of plugins. These little guys can take your website from ho-hum to outstanding in just a few clicks.