In the article I wrote a while back about why you would use WordPress called “5 Reasons WordPress Should Be Your CMS“, I outlined a number of reasons. One of those reasons was the plug-in capability. Plug-ins provide a mechanism to customize the capabilities of WordPress and extend the main capabilities. There are thousands of plug-ins available to WordPress users. Here are some of the plug-ins that I have tried and found to be very solid for specific needs.
Akismet
Akismet is great tool for dealing with all the spam comments that are received. It does a great job of filtering the comments and keeping spam off of your site. I would say that it is an absolute must-have.
All in One SEO Pack
This plugin gives a huge amount of control over the SEO on your blog/website. You can control site level tags, page level tags, and post level tags. Great tool and highly configurable.
cforms
Very advanced WordPress forms editor. Allows you to build the forms that you need for your site and very simply plug them into your pages or posts via the standard editor. It is extemely customizable. Great plug-in.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
If you are using FeedBurner, you must have this plugin. It makes it very simple to replace the standard WordPress RSS feed with your Feedburner RSS feed. Extremely simple and functional.
Google Analytics for WordPress
This is a very simple way to manage your Google Analytics setup on your WordPress site without editing your template.
Photo Dropper
Awesome tool. Allows you to access photos that you can use from Flickr and it inserts the pictures into pages/posts and properly credits and links to the sources. Use Creative Commons licensed photos.
ShareThis
This plugin installs the ability to share the post/page with many of the existing networks. It has options for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc., etc., etc. Very simple to implement and support.
TinyMCE Advanced
If you want more capabilities out of your post/page editor, I recommend downloading this plug-in. It extends the functionality of the standard TinyMCE editor in WordPress. It adds abilities to add tables, non-breaking spaces, anchor tags, etc. Extremely useful if you are looking to allow more capability in your web editor.
WordPress Related Posts
Simple plugin that displays related posts on your post pages. Is great for displaying other posts on your blog that are similar to the current post.
WP-Mail-SMTP
At times you need to have the ability to override the default mail capability of WordPress and send to an SMTP server. This plugin is for you. It allows you to configure how all of the mail is sent when sending via an SMTP server.
WP-Print
Ever wanted to have a printer friendly view of your posts/pages? This is the plugin you need. Once installed and configured, a user can simply click on a “Print this page” link and they will will see a printer friendly view of the existing page. Excellent plugin.
WP-reCAPTCHA
Are you interested in adding CAPTCHA verification to your comments or registrations? This plug-in is extremely professional looking, nice readable CAPTCHA text. It’s very easy to implement as well. I tried out a few different tools before finding this one. It is definitely one that you want.
Do you have other favorites? Some that I missed? Maybe you disagree with me on one of them? Let me know!!
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