Home for Top 10 WordPress Plugins
1. WordPress ‘Branded Admin’ Plugin
If you are a web designer then you must have set up a few WordPress based websites for some of your clients. This plugin enables you to rebrand the /wp-admin pages to follow your own styles. Great if you want to remind your client just who put in all that hard work re-skinning and hacking that theme as they set about trashing your lovely site.
2. ‘Branded Login Screen’ Plugin for WordPress
Completely hides the fact that your site is a WordPress Installation (or at least make it less obvious) with this plugin and the plugin listed previously. Does what it says, allows you to rebrand the login page with your own graphics.
3. GD Star Rating for WordPress
Want to put a rating systems on your post content? How about your comments? This nifty plugin allows you to do that and much more. Have statistics generated and displayed in your sidebar by using the GD Star rating widget and have full control over the look and feel of your stars (or whatever graphic you choose!) Looks great too! The author has even put together different star sets for you to upload.
4. Old Post Promoter
Allows you to promote old posts back to the top position on your home page and back into your RSS feed. The Old Post Promoter randomly chooses a post from posts in your blog and updates the timestamp. When the timestamp on the post is updated, the post will appear to be the latest post on your WordPress blog, returning it to the front page of your blog. Ideal if your blog sin’t going to get updated for a while but has planty of content to keep new visitors interested. **IMPORTANT – DO NOT USE IF YOUR PERMALINK STRUCTURE INCLUDES DATES – UPDATE YOUR PERMALINK STRUCTURE FIRST!**
5. WordPress Backup
Something we should all do on a regular basis – backup. This handy plugin backs up your upload (images), current theme, and plugin directories. You can specify a regular scheduled backup that can be then sent to an email address of your choice. PLEASE NOTE: You will still need to make sure your database is backed up seperately!
6. Akismet
Bundled with WordPress and for good reason. Without a spam blocker such as this your comment queue would be full of trash in no time at all. Requires a WordPress API key to function. If you haven’t got this plugin activated already, do it now!
7. Google XML Sitemaps
Once set up this plugin will inform Google of any changes or additions made to your site automatically. Generates Sitemap favourable for Google indexing.
8. My Adsense
Manage Google Adsense ads that you wish to display on your wordpress blog posts or sidebars. Easy to use and fully featured.
9. In the Loop
Ever needed to add things to the end of every post or page but had to hack the theme to do it? Well if you don’t want the bother or don’t know how then this plugin may be for you. With this plugin you can add any code you like to your posts and pages without ever having to mess with templates or theme files. The plugin provides an options panel with two input boxes. One is for content you want to appear before your post, the other for after it. Each box comes with a set of options to control whether to show it on Teasers, Single Posts, Pages, The Feed and whether or not to execute PHP. Genius.
10. RSS Includes Pages
And this is STILL at number 10 because I just can’t dispense with this simple plugin. If like me you use WordPress as a CMS to build websites as well as blogs you will no doubt have found that Pages are not included in the RSS feed. Well, with this plugin your problems are over. Simply install, activate and voila, your pages will appear within the feed.
