10 Useful WordPress Plugins
We have been using WordPress for several weeks now and one of the things I love about this tool is the amount of plugins available. Everytime we want to do something new we just Google a few words and chances are we will find a WordPress plugin that does what we need. Another great feature is that since it’s open source we can easily change any plugin to suit our needs.
So here’s a list of a few plugins (no particular order) we use on a regular basis for our customers.
1 – TinyMCE Advanced
WordPress uses TineMCE as it’s WYSIWYG editor, this open source HTML editor is filled with features that are for most part hidden in WordPress. TineMCE advanced allows you to activate a few of theses features back on. For example the creation of tables and context menus within the editor. The user interface is simple to use, just drag and drop the features you want to activate.
2 – All in one SEO pack
SEO is an important part of your web design today, this plugin allows you to change the title, description and meta tags for your pages and posts.
3 – Exclude page from navigation
This plugin allows you to hide certain pages from your website navigation (menus) Useful if you want to create pages that are not accessible from any menus.
4 – qTranslate
Essential for all multilingual websites. qTranslate allows us to easely create multilingual posts and pages. Additional plugins have been created that uses the qTranslation functionality (Meta tag, Sitemap)
5 – Viper’s video quicktag
This plugin will add a toolbar in your editor that allows you to add different video formats (Youtube and friends) I like this plugin beacause it’s simple to use with youtube juste paste the url of the video page and voila!
6 – WP-Filemanager
This is my most recent discovery, creating a lot of themes for clients I always had to upload additional images to themes folders which took some time and was a pain. This plugin gives us a web base file browser so we can manage the files that are on our webserver.
7 – NextGen
NextGen is a picture gallery manager that offers a good user interface to manage your pictures. It comes with a few gallery layouts and several other plugins have been created that offers additional layouts. NextGen integrates itself in the editor toolbar so it’s easy to insert picture galleries in posts.
8 – Google XML sitemap
Great little plugin that creates an XML sitemap and submit’s it to Google. A sitemap is a file with the list of all your pages on your website. This file is used by search engines to help them scan your website pages.
9 – Google analytics
Allows us to include our Google Analytic javascript code in our website. One of the features I like of this version (because there are a lot of Google analytic plugins) is that we can paste the actual javascript code. This allows us to add other tracking code, for example quantcast, beezilla and so on, at the same time.
10 – Inline PHP
This one is a little more technical, it’s a plugin that allows us to include php server code within our posts and pages. Very useful for us programmers maybe a little less interesting for non programmers.