tbathgate
info@clearbluedesigns.co.uk
0131 208 4112
WordPress Plugins – well there are certainly plenty of them floating around on the internet, but which are the ones that are going to help with what you need. This is my top five used here at CBD to make my WordPress site happy
1. All In One SEO Pack
Well this little plugin is a great place to start with on your website/blog. The ability to control all the Meta data of each page/post from within the post is fantastic. Setting page titles, descriptions and keywords (if you use them) straight on the post or page editing page is great and speeds up posting. You can also control master settings via the control panel. This is a must for any WordPress website owner.
Available in free or pro versions.
2. WordPress Database Backup
This is a great tool to take regular automatic backups of your WordPress database. From “Tools > Backup” you can select form various options for your backup. The plugin will automatically backup all the core tables; bust also gives you options for other tables from your database. You can then decide to have it saved on your server, emailed to you or download straight away. After that all you need to do is to setup the regularity of the backups and click Schedule Backup and you are sorted. Personally on quieter sites I have a backup email once a week, but on a busier site I would recommend once a day. The plugin can even schedule backups hourly or twice daily, the choice is yours!
3. TinyMCE Advanced
I love this plugin, using this allows me to import all my styles from my css so I can format my text as per the rest of my site. The most important part of the plugin is the ability to stop WordPress from removing the <br /> and <p> tags from my content which drives me round the bend. The plugin also offers advanced image, link and tables support, Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers and the ability to control the layout of the WYSIWG toolbars and icon that you want displayed.
4. RB Internal Links
I originally found this plugin whilst looking for some visual way for non-technical users to link to other WordPress pages. CMS Made Simple includes a great drop down menu that allows you to select the page you want to link to but WordPress was lacking this feature. This nifty little plugin offers a popup menu that allows you to select the page you want to link to, set the options of the link text, the anchor text and if you want the link to open in a new window.
On top of that it also allows you to easily link to posts, categories and to search your posts. Very handy for non-technical users
5. Redirection
When I was launching the new cbd site I wanted a really quick and simple way of adding 301 redirects to the website, not just for myself but for clients that want to control these themselves. I eventually found Redirection, which was so quick and simple it fitted the bill.
On the settings page simply enter the old url, select from the various url matching options which can include the url and login status, the action, in most cases is redirect to url and then the new url. The plugin also supports custom expressions as well.
There is a lot more to this module, but for the average user you really probably only want the redirect option, but you can redirect urls to the 404 page, do nothing but count the page being requested, redirect to a random post or, Pass through which is an advanced option that allows you to masquerade one URL as another (i.e. when the source URL is accessed it actually displays the contents of another URL without the user being aware)
So this is my top five WordPress Plugins that make my WordPress site tick, I’ll be doing a top five social plugin posts and a top five pages/posts plugins post as well.
Thanks for reading and cheers for now (cfn)
Tom
