Best WordPress Plugins

Angela | 18 April 2009 | Plugins | 6 Comments

Following is a list of my most frequently used plugins. Let me know your favorites! Be sure to also see my post at Ask WordPress Girl of 25 WordPress Plugins You Should Know About.

I’m only listing plugins that I think are used most frequently, and that I install time and again on various sites. I’ll post other, more specialized plugins in separate posts.

SEO WordPress Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack — allows easy updating of meta tags within each post and page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Google Analytics: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Image and Media WordPress Plugins:

Streaming .flv or .swf files: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordtube/#post-489
The best image gallery plugin: http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/
ImageFlow – very cool plugin for showing images in a stack that you can look through: http://shabushabu-webdesign.com/wp-plugin-nextgen-imageflow/
Embedding video from a variety of portals: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embedded-video-with-link/
Displays larger versions of images with a cool lightbox effect: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2-wordpress-plugin/
Flash embedding – more straightforward than Wordtube: http://kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed/wp

Displaying Pages and Posts WordPress Plugins and Widgets:

Display a list of posts from a given category on any page or post on the site. Last time I used this, it only had 1 widget, whereas the Category-Posts plugin below allowed for multiple widgets: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/list-category-posts/
Exclude pages from being visible in the navigation menus: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
List pages and subpages in sidebar, multiple instances of widget and more: http://srinig.com/wordpress/plugins/flexi-pages/
Add a widget to sidebar that shows a specific category and the posts titles within that category: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-posts/
Easy way to change the order in which pages display in your navigation menus: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/
Display subpages anywhere on the site: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/list-subpages-plugin-for-wordpress/
Stick a post to top of page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-sticky/

Archive and Category WordPress Plugins:

Exclude a category from archive, search, front page, or RSS feed: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simply-exclude/
List specific categories and/or posts from a category on a page or post using a shortcode: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/list-category-posts/

Social Networking WordPress Plugins:

Wordbook — display your WordPress posts on Facebook: http://www.tsaiberspace.net/blog/2007/07/29/wordbook/
Share This is my favorite, unobtrusive social bookmarking plugin that allows for people to share posts or pages via email, post to Facebook or submit to other social bookmarking sites: http://sharethis.com/publishers/getbutton/wordpress/
Feedburner Smith plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483&topic=13252
Perishable Press has a set of plugins that I haven’t tried but look very good, including a plugin to add metadata to your head section, addmysite to allow visitors to add your site to popular social bookmarking services, blog stats, and more! http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/09/04/perishable-press-wordpress-plugins/
More Social Bookmarking plugins can be found here: http://speckyboy.com/2008/10/20/top-20-social-bookmaking-plugins-for-wordpress-share-your-posts/

Styling WordPress Plugins:

TinyMCE Advanced Editor allows easy insertion of horizontal rules, tables, style sheets, and more: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
CSS drop-down and flyout menus: http://aplus.rs/adxmenu/instructions/
Ajaxed WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajaxd-wordpress/
Expand and Collapse text — I had mixed results with the previous version of this plugin, so I’m not sure how well it is working now: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/expanding-text-plugin-for-wordpress/
Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin — safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-test-drive/
Displaying different sidebar content on different pages. I love this plugin, and Daniel just updated it for 2.7 (see comment below). You have the option of adding sidebar content in fields at the bottom of each edit page or adding different widgets to each page in the Widgets area. See http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-sidebars/
Make WordPress more like a real CMS like Drupal: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pods/
Create custom content type (similar to above plugin): http://wpcandy.com/plugins/creating-custom-content-type-with-flutter-plugin.html

Admin Plugins:

Converts your WordPress admin panel into a simple CMS: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ryans-simple-cms/
Broken link checker: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Search and Replace plugin — I use this after moving a WordPress site from a subdirectory to the root to be sure any links to the old URL are replaced with the new URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/
WordPress Database Backup Plugin: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup
Disable revisions and autosave plugin is really helpful as I have encountered so many confusing problems with this feature enabled. It’s a nice idea but more of a problem especially with multiple editors of a blog: http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/.
Redirection plugin: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

Other WordPress Plugins:

Contact and Customized Forms: http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
Some other cool plugins by Vladimir. Should check what you need with WP 2.7: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins

YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THIS PLUGIN:

Creating internal links between posts and pages easily with dynamic URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rb-internal-links/ Since cross-linking on key words is essential for search engine optimization, this plugin is a must have!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-sidebars/ Daniel

Hi Angela!
I’ve updated my Page Sidebars plugin to fix some errors. It should now be fully working if you want to give it another chance:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-sidebars/

I’m also updating all my plugins across the board to reflect my coding as many of my plugins have not been updated since the summer and I have improved my coding since then.

Thanks for plugin mention!
http://www.adaldesign.com Adal Design Web Contractor

I love using wordpress to create websites that customers can maintain, and this list of plugins is worth its content in gold. Thank you so much for taking the time to share!
Liongress

Hi, I found cool flash photo galleries plugin for WordPress. Named GRAND Flash Album Gallery – multi category flash skin based photo gallery with powerful admin. I used it in my blog. There are so many different settings. You can adjust the color scheme for your blog as you wish. There are many different skins. You can present your photo gallery in a wonderful way, there is a full-screen mode. This is a very cool plugin.
Angela

Serendipitously, I had found out about Grand Flash Album Gallery just a couple days before your post!

The thing I don’t like about the Grand Flash Album Gallery is that it is really over done. If it were simpler, I’d like it a lot better. But, it has so much stuff going on that it’s too busy for many of my clients’ needs. So, I’m also checking out WP Slideshow Gallery at http://wpgallery.tribulant.net/. It’s very simple and doesn’t have an image uploader, so you need to know the URL for each image you add to the slideshow. I think it can convert images loaded into the Gallery of a page to a slideshow. I’m still playing with it. It doesn’t have a variety of skins, but you do have access to all the code and can customize to your heart’s content.
Sabine

Thank you Angela!
Is there anything out there to make the text editing easier. It seems wordpress does it’s own weird thing, throwing off the text completely. Integrating pics and aligning the text around it seems to be a hit and miss, meaning a lot of time with not the desired results
Sabine
Anonymous

Hi Sabine, You should install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin and check the option to tell WordPress to stop removing paragraph and manual breaks. In terms of aligning text around the pics, if the issue is that the you want to push some text down below the pic, then the above plugin will work. Other issues related to picture runaround has more to do with your theme stylesheet settings and whether the theme has the appropriate style to float the images and pad them correctly. You can use Firebug (a Firefox extension) to see what style if any is being used for the image float/padding. With the TinyMCE Editor, you can add more buttons to your toolbar for typography as well as load your own styles that can be selected in the Visual Editor to gain more consistent control of the look of text beyond the heading tags. Hope this helps! Be sure to read the Tiny MCE Advanced documentation at wordpress.org.

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