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Handy WordPress Plugins

May 31, 2010 | tags: plugins • wordpress

If you haven’t noticed, the lat­est release of my port­fo­lio is dri­ven entirely by Word­Press. While Word­Press is fan­tas­tic by itself, it took a few nice plu­g­ins to send it over the top. I’ll get to these in a sec­ond but first a lit­tle back­ground. (Can’t wait? Skip to the plu­g­ins).

The Road To WordPress

Over the years the site has taken many forms. Ver­sion 1 was entirely Flash-based. While hav­ing some pretty cool func­tion­al­ity it was utterly dread­ful to main­tain. Not too much later I switched to hand-coded HTML and CSS. Ver­sion 2 was much eas­ier to main­tain but entailed hours of cod­ing for every new entry or port­fo­lio piece.

A Breath Of Fresh Air

A few years back I down­loaded Word­Press and began toy­ing with it in the back­ground. Word­Press was an imme­di­ate breath of fresh air. While devel­op­ing ver­sion 3 of this site – what you’re cur­rently view­ing – I was also cre­at­ing a site in another CMS. This CMS shall remain name­less to pro­tect the inno­cent. Cre­at­ing the two sites con­cur­rently gave me valu­able insight into the ease-of-use, sim­plic­ity and extend­abil­ity of WordPress.

I had one main ethos while design­ing my cus­tom Word­Press tem­plate (yes I said ethos). Let Word­Press do all the heavy lift­ing. Only when the CMS absolutely couldn’t do any more would I turn to a plu­gin. Don’t get me wrong, I think plu­g­ins are great. My rea­sons for design­ing this way were:

So with all that said here are the plu­g­ins I’m using on this site along with a lit­tle descrip­tion of their func­tion­al­ity and why I chose them.

Akismet

Akismet checks your com­ments to see if they look like spam or not. Keeps out all those nasty lit­tle spam­mers try­ing to sneek in.

Con­tact Form 7

Con­tact Form 7 is a sim­ple and flex­i­ble con­tact form allow­ing mul­ti­ple forms and cus­tomized for­mat­ting. It worked on the first try – and I like that.

HITS– IE6 PNGFix

I use trans­par­ent pngs in sev­eral pages on the site. This plu­gin makes sure that Inter­net Explorer 6 doesn’t com­pletely destroy them.

Kim­ili Flash Embed

Kim­ili allows me to eas­ily embed Flash movies in my posts and pages. I tried a num­ber of other Flash plu­g­ins. Sim­ply stated, Kim­ili just worked.

The Excerpt re-reloaded

I found the Word­Press excerpt a lit­tle restric­tive. The Excerpt re-reloaded pro­vided an ele­gant solu­tion to my problem.

Use Google Libraries

This plu­gin allows you to use the Google ver­sion of com­mon javascript libraries. The ben­e­fits of this include using Google as a CDN for faster deploy­ment of the library and increases the chances that the user already has the file in their browser cache.

WP-DBManager

My pre­ferred Word­Press data­base backup of choice. This is the first plu­gin I set up with a new site.

wp-Typography

This plu­gin pro­vides a num­ber typo­graph­i­cal improve­ments to Word­Press posts and pages including:

WP Super Cache

Have you ever vis­ited a Word­Press site and it took a lit­tle while to load? WP Super Cache speeds up load time by cre­at­ing a sta­tic html ver­sion of the page mak­ing it much eas­ier for the browser to process.

Plu­g­ins pro­vide a num­ber of valu­able addi­tions to a Word­Press site. How­ever, it is easy to suf­fer from plu­gin over­load. With each plu­gin read the reviews, look for alter­nate ver­sions and test, test, test. Now go have some fun!