WordPress Basics Recommended Plugins
This is a list of WordPress Plugins that I use and recommend for almost every WordPress site I work on. There are plenty of great plugins out there, but I find myself using these ones over and over again.
Best Plugin for Spam:
• Askimet – One of the default plugins. It has been all I have needed for spam so far. Activate this right away.
Best Plugins for SEO:
• • • • • All in one SEO Pack – Lets you control metadata on everypage and post. Google XML Sitemaps – Automically generates a sitemap and submits it to Google, MSN, and Ask.com. SEO Friendly Images - Adds the all important ‘alt’ and ‘title’ attributes to images, using the posts category and title. Can add greatly improved image placement in searches. KB Robots.txt – Easily control your robots.txt file and help search engines know which pages to crawl and which ones to avoid. Google Analyticator – Adds the code for Google Analytics and allows you to shut it off so that visits by admins are not counted. You wouldn’t want to inflate your stats with the 100 times a day you visit your site, right?
Best Contact Form:
• Contact form 7 – Easy to use. Add endless contact forms to your site.
Improve Navigation & SEO:
• • Yoast Breadcrumbs – Add easy to customize breadcrumb navigation to your site. Enhances SEO and navigation. WP Page Numbers - Instead of next page, previous page links, add easily customizable page numbers to the navigation of your site.
Best Social Networking Plugins
• • • • • PingPressFM – Use ping.fm to broadcast your content to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Myspace and more. Twitter Tools - Send your posts to Twitter as status updates. Or get your Twitter updates as blog posts. Twitoaster - Twitter Conversations - Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies to your Blog's Posts, which show up as comments using WP built-in comment system. Share This – Add buttons to every post to enable easy sharing by visitors to Twitter, Facebook and more. BackType Connect -BackType.com tracks comments and allows you to follow other people’s comments. This plugin will bring in a lot of conversation, including other people linking to your post, and Tweets that mention and link to your post. This is a great way to add some conversation to otherwise slow posts.
Make Your Life Easier
• • Post to Page converter – Convert posts to pages or pages to posts with the click of a button. Photo Dropper - Adds a button to the WYSIWYG editor, right next to the regular image uploader. It searches Flickr for Creative Commons images that can be used for free and automatically adds the neede attribution and credit. Insights - Easily add Wikipedia links, images, links to content on your own site, Google Searches, Blog searches, etc. Improve the content quality with an easy click. User Photo – Upload and assign photos for each user from within the admin panel. Great for multi author blogs! WP-DBManager - Optimize and backup your database. Includes the ability to email yourself a backup of your database as often as you want. Weekly is probably good.
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Great Plugins for Developers
• • • Reveal IDS for Admin – Especially for theme creators, this will display all the ID’s for categories, posts, pages, tags… right in the admin page. The Excerpt Re-Reloaded – Control how many words are in an excerpt, what html tags are allowed, and what the text for a ‘read more’ link would say. User Level Themes - Allows you to activate different themes so that when logged in as an admin, you can see the new under-construction theme, while other visitors will see the current one. Flutter - Add custom write panels to any category or style of page. Very powerful way to expand the possibilities of WordPress.
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All WordPress Tutorials:
Up to date list of all Tutorials & Resources: http://martythornley.com/downloads WordPress Basics - Editing Your New WordPress Site http://martythornley.com/downloads/wordpress-basics-edit-your-new-site Optimizing WordPress http://martythornley.com/downloads/optimize-wordpress Recommended WordPress Plugins. ( The latest version of this document: ) http://martythornley.com/downloads/recommended-wordpress-plugins WordPress Theme Developer’s Resources http://martythornley.com/downloads/wordpress-developers-resources
com/2009/11/wordpress-theme-developers-resources/