Top Ten WordPress Plugins

There are cur­rently so many “top 10 lists,” but I’ve decided that I’m vain enough to add one more to the pile. These are the plu­g­ins that have made my expe­ri­ence with Word­Press all the more enjoy­able. These are the plu­g­ins that save me time, energy, and heartache. They are listed in no par­tic­u­lar order.

1. FAl­bum

FAl­bum is one that has made my Flickr expe­ri­ence even bet­ter. I can now pull my Flickr pic­tures through their API and dis­play in my own blog. It con­tin­ues to be devel­oped, and it nows has the abil­ity to change titles and descrip­tion on your own blog with­out hav­ing to go to Flickr! »

2. WP-Contact Form

So long tedious CGI pro­gram­ming! This is one of the few plu­g­ins that makes it onto every one of my Word­Press projects. With a sim­ple inter­face in the admin sec­tion I can receive feed­back con­fi­den­tially. »

3. Installer

This plu­gin has prob­a­bly saved me the most time of any of these plu­g­ins. Instead of hav­ing to FTP all my plugins/themes now I can just upload through the admin page or even pop in the link to the file. It then installs and can acti­vate after instal­la­tion. »

4. KG Archives Plugin

I remem­ber look­ing every­where for a good archives plu­gin, and I didn’t find it until this one. I then wanted some func­tion­al­ity so I e-mailed expect­ing no return, but Kates fixed it and put out a new ver­sion the next day (v. 2.8)! »

5. Side­blog

I’m not done with Kates yet! He has also made the best side­blog plu­gin for Word­Press. He has a new ver­sion that has a wid­get built into it! »

6. Easy Admin Access

This plu­gin is the newest to the list (just installed today), and it has already made the list. I love the admin bar at the top of my WordPress.com blog, but I have been unable to find some­thing for my other sites with WP installed. Prob­lem solved. »

7. Now Reading

I always wanted a list of books that I’m read­ing, plan­ning on read­ing, and have read; and I didn’t find any­thing until this plu­gin. One of the most pow­er­ful plu­g­ins I’ve seen, and there is now an accom­pa­ny­ing wid­get. »

8. Scrip­tur­izer

Over on my main blog where I write about Chris­tian­ity, I loved this plu­gin that changes bible ref­er­ences to hyper­links. Sim­ple yet effec­tive and nec­es­sary. »

9. Search Pages

Word­Press still won’t build into their appli­ca­tion the abil­ity for the default search to go across posts and pages (only posts). This adds the abil­ity for the search to include pages as well. He also has a plu­gin to search com­ments as well. »

10. Google Sitemaps

This plu­gin is essen­tial if you take being indexed by Google seri­ously. It cre­ates an XML file that is parsed by the Google engine to improve vis­i­bil­ity. »

Nota­bles

• del.icio.us Inte­gra­tor
• Related Posts

Con­clu­sion

Word­Press is a great prod­uct, but what makes it even bet­ter is the great com­mu­nity sur­round­ing it. These plu­g­ins, and many more, help to make Word­Press (I believe) the best open source prod­uct on the Inter­net. (PS. Be sure to check out the Word­Press Plu­g­ins Data­base page which has done a lot for me.)