10 WordPress plugins you should know about

We love WordPress – nothing less… The blogging platform has rapidly developed into the preferred in it’s category worldwide! The flexibility of WP makes developers capable of developing great content management systems (CMS) with WP, which have been a great influence on it’s popularity! Another thing that have made WP so popular is the handling of, and the big library of, plug-ins. A plug-in is a small kind of add-on to the default WP installation / theme. And with more than 5.500 plug-ins, the flexibility is endless…

All around the web you can find top 10s, top 20s, top 50s etc., of the best WP plug-ins. But you’ve never seen a list like this one. The Mums list of WordPress plug-ins you should know about! Hang on…

01_Scissors

A powerful tool which makes you capable of cropping, resizing, rotating, watermark, etc. images right within the upload module. No more Photoshopping for an our to create content for your blog-posts. Do it all in the WordPress admin panel.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/

02_TinyMCE Advanced

This plug-in adds several improvements to the write panel. Highly customizable!

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

03_Advanced Excerpt

While we’re at it, remember this one. I really find this one a must-have! Among other things, this plug-in allows HTML markup within the excerpt. Nice..

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-excerpt/

04_Custom Post Template

Another, in my mind, must-have! Gives you the ability to work with different post templates. Just like different templates for pages, this opens up for the use of different post templates. Really handy if yo post both “text-based” posts, video-posts, gallery-posts, etc.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-template/

05_More Fields

If you use custom fields, this the plug-in you’ve dreamt of! Instead of pasting code / URLs into custom fields, this plug-in makes you capable of using file-lists (drop-down), nice text areas, WYSIWYG boxes, etc., instead of default custom fields.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-fields/

06_WP CSS

Looking to speed up you blog? This is one of the solutions… These two plug-in will strip your CSS and JS docs naked and compress them into one CSS file and one JS file… With the capability to cache everything, it can really make a difference on your page loads. Off course depending on how many kbs of CSS and JS you have…

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-css/

07_WP JS

Same functionality as WP CSS, just with Your JS docs! Smooth huh…?

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-js/screenshots/

08_Contact Form 7

For a long time I preferred cForms (http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin) because I thought their admin was a lot easier to use… Now I’m completely opposite… Contact Form 7 is flexible, easy to use, easy to skin, simple, and just nice!

Use it…

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

09_Google XML Sitemaps

If SEO is important to you – and I’m sure it is – this is a killer plugin! The plugin creates a Google XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

10_NextGEN Gallery

Though I know that almost every WordPress user know this plug-in, I had to list is here… The plug-in gives you a powerful gallery in itself. But with a little PHP / HTML /JS knowledge, you can use this plug-in for complex AJAX galleries. The sliding gallery in our project-pages is powered by this plug-in. The possibilities are many…

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Do you know other WP plug-ins which you think I or people should know about, feel free to comment on this post!