My Recommended WordPress Plugins

I love Wordpress no doubt, but it’s nothing without its’ drawbacks – one of which is the lack of administrative features in the default control panel. Fortunately, thanks to clever developers and witty users in general, some admin plugins have emerged which can make filling in the functionality gaps virtually painless.

Wordpress Database Backup

This is imperative if you don’t want to risk losing everything on some idle Tuesday afternoon. I speak from experience. Even if your host provides regular backups for you, it’s better to take matters into your own hands. Admittedly I’m a control freak, but in my opinion this plugin is probably more essential than any other I can name. Now managed by ilfilosofo.

Advanced WYSIWYG Editor

Save yourself loads of time in formatting posts… add headings, anchors, horizontal rules, sub/superscripts and even special characters right from the visual editor. I don’t mind code at all, but without this plugin, you have to switch to code view and hand-code the HTML for any of the above, and it just gets old. Still can’t figure out why these features aren’t part of the core WYSIWYG. Oh well, Labnotes trac can fix that.

Contact Form II

A basic drop-in contact form, customizable via template page. Offer visitors a way to contact you from anywhere on your site, without ever having to publish a mailto link. Not only will you be providing readers with a user-friendly way to contact you any time, but it prevents those damn harvesters from getting hold of your email address, helping you minimize the daily onslaught of spam you’ll eventually get.

Smart Update Pinger

Wordpress by default allows you to ping any update service you wish. Notification takes place every time you publish or update a post. The concern here is possibly flooding the update services and getting banned for “ping spamming”. I don’t know if that’s really worth worrying about, but I’m listing Smart Update Pinger because of its log. You can see exactly which services are pinged and when. Out of the box, Wordpress offers no such information.

Maintenance Mode

This begs to be included due to the sheer volume of WP updates rolled out. I have a small panic attack every time I have to upgrade, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of others do as well. If you tend to screw things up in the process, and you don’t want the world to know you sometimes annihilate your blog, this has you covered. Activating it displays a short message informing visitors of maintenance downtime. Everything is still accessible to administrators while in maintenance mode.

FeedSmith

Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin was recently adopted by Feedburner (who were themselves recently adopted by Google). With it, you can provide format-independent “smart feeds” to your audience, and effectively track and manage your readership. Incidentally, signing up with Feedburner offers a great number of benefits aside from FeedSmith, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Akismet

This extremely popular plugin bears mentioning just in case someone missed it. It’s a comment spam catcher, and a very effective one at that. If you don’t already have it running on your blog, you can learn more and download it from the official Akismet site.

Each of these plugins are recommended because they’re simple to install, configure, and use. Independent of your blog niche, work-flow or site design, these all do their small part in enhancing the functionality of the Wordpress admin, and for you, that means working smarter and happier.