Handy WordPress Plugins
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:
- To keep the site code as slim as possible
- To maintain control over the backend code
- Avoid any compatibility issues (i.e. Javascript, CSS)
- Keep page load time to a minimum
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:
- hyphenation
- widow protection
- forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses
- intelligent character replacement
- adding CSS hooks for styling special characters
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!