Bob Murray

With Wordpress fast becoming the site engine of choice for many designers, it is useful to have a range of tools which can ‘tune-up’ the basic offering. I’m talking of course about the extensive range of plugins which are continually being designed and which probably gives Wordpress its broad appeal. I often see lists of these from other sources and have found them invaluable since the Wordpress community is such a dynamic breeding ground for innovation. So, I have my own (current) set which I have pulled together and which I incorporate into every standard Wordpress installation. Of course, you can simply install these from the plugin interface on a per-site basis, but if you produce a lot of sites – then incorporating them into the core WP-Content files is much more efficient. It also means that even if you don’t use them all immediately – you can activate them in a snap later. So here goes – my best plugins!

Roles Manager. If your sites are being prepared on behalf of user-clients, then you are going to want to customise the permissions that they have to different elements of the Wordpress functionality – or risk them beggaring-up something important! In effect, you want to customise their experience of maintaining or adding to the site. Roles provides the ability to do exactly that in a very simplified way. In short, this plugin provides you with a simple page view of all of the functionality within Wordpress for each user level (and you can create your own, custom levels). You simply click (on or off) any element of the default functions assigned. You have a variety of views of each of the main components. Perfect!

Adminimise. In tandem with limiting access to client functionality – you will also want to remove screen components that are of no use – or those which may only confuse the client user. The very best way to do this is with Adminimise. It is a simple page-menu set-up which permits the allocation or otherwse of virtually every screen menu withn Wordpress – across all user groups. The different menu sub-systems are all available in grouped format such as: backend, global, menu, write (page and post), links and setting theme(s). For customising the user experience, I’ve found nothing better.

Pagemash. Ever wondered how to override the Wordpress default setting which produces navigational menus based on alphabetic page order? Enter Pagemash. Here you can simply drag and drop the navigational order to that which suits your preferred display. Yes, you can fiddle with code and page IDs – but why would you? Especially since altering individual file code can easily lead to all sorts of unforeseen issues much later, when you forget what you did and overwrite the file by mistake!

BM Custom Login. On the subject of customisation, it is a nice little professional touch to create a login panel that reflects the website – or the client’s brand (or in fact your own). This is easily achieved with BM Custom Login. This plugin is provided with it’s own photoshop template file, which you can amend and substitute. In practice, I found that a couple lines of the Wordpress login.css file needed to be removed for this to appear entirely satisfactorily – but this is pretty straightforward and can be amended in your standard Wordpress install files.

More-fields. If you’ve ever experimented with Wordpress Custom Fields, this is for you. Adding specific field containers is straightforward, although this is one of those plugins that you will need to complement with the relevant code entered into the appropriate file, in order to get the output to present itself. It’s not rocket science, and the ease of creating custom client fields more than outways this slight inconvenience.

Maxblogpress Favicon. If you are looking for those personal touches, adding your own, personal site favicon is simply achieved using this plugin. It is dead simple to use, although signing up for it entails registering with MaxblogPress. You subsequently get the occasional email suggesting Affiliate-type opportunities, but they are not intrusive.

sLayers Custom Widgets. I’ve only recently become a fan of widgets. I realised that it was more sensible to keep my core files as far as possible without alteration – and try to utlise widgets to do the clever stuff. Easier to turn on and off and providing you use widget-enabled themes – soo much easier to change appearance. I’m not saying that I’ve gone widget-crazy, but what I do try to do is to have widgets that are related to the content they are displayed alongside. So, for example, I try to avoid any advertising on the homepage and I definitely want it contextualised beside the post or page that it does appear. This is where sLayers Custom Widgets plugin is fantastic. You can choose which widgets appear where – the sidebar used, and alongside which page or post. Especially useful if you use simple text widgets on a regular basis. You can commit them to (say) the left sidebar, but then say exactly where that particular content appears. So, for example, you may have a book review post – you can add an amazon-affiliated sidebar advert within a text widget to appear against that review only – or on a review page with others.

Adsense Manager. On the subject of managing widgets, I have often struggled to insert the relevant Google code in template files successfully. Adsense manager provides for all that in a sidebar widget. Using it in tandem with SLayers (above), you can get contextual ads on any post or page as you wish – and no worry about the code needed, or for that matter, in having to remember where you put it.

Tinymce. As a designer, you will love the additional layout management capabilities provided by this plugin. you simply drag and drop the button capabilities you require onto the standard toolbar and you have a number of goodies at your disposal – and in particular – tables. If you love coding then you may find this insulting. I don’t. I like the facility of being able to generate tables as and when I need them throughout a post or page using a handy dialogue box – rather than recalling which relevant table tags are necessary. You can also cut and paste things, add emphasis through the use of dropdown font menus and much else. There is nothing tiny about it!

Beyond the foregoing, the standard plugins that I always install are of course, Google-Analyticator, Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Form 7 and  All-in-one-SEO. This latter plugin has largely replaced my use of Headspace lately, having encountered the odd problem with Headspace’s Google analytics code and although it is a powerful plugin, I’m happier with the more focussed capabilities of SEO.

So there you have it, my best plugin picks – there are thousands more out there and more added daily, but at the moment, these are the ones that that are pretty much standard for me on every Wordpress Installation. I urge you to give them a try!