My Top 10 Most Useful WordPress Plug-ins

Posted in WordPress, WordPress Development on 29. Jan, 2010

One of the greatest things about WordPress is the ability to use Plug-ins. Plug-ins enhance the functionality of WordPress, but are seperate from the core system, so that when you update your WordPress version in the future, your plugins still remain. Here are, not in any order, my 10 most useful WordPress plug-ins.

1. Maintenance Mode

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/

Once activated, this plug-in allows you to set up a custom splash screen that will be displayed to anyone not logged in to your WordPress as an administrator. Very useful for a “Coming Soon” site or just when you need to take your site down for 5 minutes.

2. Contact Form 7

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Hate making contact forms? Me to. This plug-in makes it really easy, all you do is build your form with their GUI and paste some code wherever you want the form to show up. A huge time saver!

3. Exec-PHP

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

The most useful plug-in you will ever install. Allows you to run PHP code directly from a post or page.

4. Customize Your Community (CYC)

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/customize-your-community/

If you’ve ever wanted to customize the look of your WordPress log in then you need this plug-in. “The Customize Your Community (CYC) Plugin for WordPress … will help you theme your backend WordPress pages using your existing WordPress theme and will not show obvious traces and branding of Wordpress on the registration, lost password, login and logout pages to all users.

5. Register Plus

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/register-plus/

Register Plus also allows you to customize your registration, but differs in that it allows you to add custom registration fields, allows the user to set their own password, and provides Captcha validation, among other things. When used with CYC you can have a fully customized experience for users of your site, without them knowing you are running WordPress.

6. Store Locator

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/store-locator/

An amazing plug-in that allows you to create mappings of a clients stores, with built in functionality to allow end users to search for a store near them. Uses the Google Maps API, so most users will be familiar with it. Does require a Google Maps API key, which are free.

7. Sociable

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

This plug-in will automatically add links to your favorite social networking sites on your posts, pages, rss feeds, etc. Very customizable and almost 100 different sites to chose from.

8. Google AJAX Translation

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-ajax-translation/

Adds a translate button to your pages, posts, or comments that when clicked lets the user quickly translate the page into another language via Google’s translator.

9. Akismet

http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It also comes pre-installed with WordPress.