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My Favorite WordPress Plugins
Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Sep 10, 2009; Category: Blogging, Design/Development; Tags: Design/Development, Plugins, WordPress; 2 Comments
I love plugins that solve a problem or expand my capabilities. The following plugins have earned a place on my standard WordPress implementation list because they do one or both, and because they are extremely reliable.
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
Simplifies the admin area of WordPress and creates more space on the admin page by putting a horizontal dropdown menu at the top of the screen. It’s one of the first plugins I install on every WordPress implementation. Plugin site»
UTF8 Sanitize
Takes care of or prevents virtually ALL broken characters due to misinterpreted HTML entities. I rarely even think about broken characters anymore: no need to. (Plugin site seems to be down).
All in One SEO Pack
Such a useful plugin! Allows you to craft meta data for each post and page as you would expect, but also allows you to make the navigation links different from the h1 page title. Extremely useful for blogsite implementations. One minor complaint: the developer updates this plugin frequently, and everytime you update, you must re-enable it. Plugin site»
Akismet
Almost forgot about this one because it comes standard with the WordPress installation (you have to activate it with a WordPress API key). Catches about 99.9% of comment spam; turns spam into a non-issue.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
One of the coolest plugins ever! Generates a highly configurable site map so that lost visitors can find their way. Again, this is invaluable for blogsites using WordPress as a CMS. Plugin site»
Simple Section Navigation Widget
Another plugin that’s a must-have when using WordPress as a CMS, it generates subnavigation for pages within a section. For example, if you attach several pages to your "Services" section, it generates a subnav menu listing those pages. And, it incorporates WordPress "current_page_item" and "current_page_parent" classes so you can easily hilite the current page menu item. Plugin site»
Google XML Sitemaps
Generates a spider-friendly XML sitemap that Google loves and is also supported by supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. And you don’t even have to think about it, once installed. I love that part. Plugin site»
Contact Form 7 with Really Simple CAPTCHA
Contact Form 7 is such a nice little plugin, easy to create, style, and configure forms. Be sure to get the companion plugin Really Simple CAPTCHA, which prevents spambots from submitting the form. I had one instance in which the plugin would not work on a blog, which may have been a conflict with another plugin (at some point I gave up trying to figure it out and used another form plugin). Other than that, it’s been one of my staples. Plugin site»
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2 Responses to “My Favorite WordPress Plugins”
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Those are some great plugins. I really like Akismet because I never get SPAM. That’s pretty cool. One that I hadn’t heard of was the site map generator from Dagon. That looks to be very helpful!
My Favorite WordPress Plugins…
I love plugins that solve a problem or expand my capabilities. The following plugins have earned a place on my standard WordPress implementation list because they do one or both, and because they are extremely reliable.
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