There are so many plugins available these days that it’s hard to decide which ones are the best. The following is a list of my top 10 best WordPress plugins – definitely not in order!
1. CMS Press
CMS Press is a really good plugin that allows you to create custom post types with ease. In under 5 minutes you could have set up a variety of custom post types with a lot of options!
The great thing about this plugin is it allows you to choose the permalink paths for each custom post – just make sure you tell your custom post type to be publicly queryable.
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2. Verve Meta Boxes
Verve Meta Boxes goes hand in hand with CMS Press on almost all WordPress sites I build. As long as your custom post type has custom options enabled, then you can add an array of meta boxes to each custom post type. This allows you to create your own input fields, drop down options, check boxes, file uploads and more – and the final result is truly user friendly!
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3. All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is great for optimising your WordPress website. It has a huge amount of options, but offers a lot of great SEO techniques by just using the default settings.
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4. Admin Menu Editor
This little plugin allows you to completely modify the sidebar menu in your WordPress admin panel. You can add new items, dividers, edit existing items, change icons, change permissions and much more! Just get it.
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5. Shareaholic
I’m sure everyone has seen this before, but what you probably don’t know is the amount of information it offers you in the back-end. You can view stats to see how many people have used the social links – it is a great tool for discovering your most interesting content.
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6. Contact Form 7
Contact form 7 is an awesome contact form plugin for WordPress. It is really simple to install and use and offers some pretty nice jQuery validation (once you style it up properly!)
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7. Really Simple Captcha
If you are using contact form 7, then you will most definitely need to try out the Really Simple Captcha plugin. This adds a 4 letter captcha image to your contact form, that you can style in a variety of ways; including, background colour, foreground colour and size.
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8. Attachments
The attachments plugin is truly great. It allows you to add attachments to any post type, whether you are looking to attach an image, PDF, or video – this plugin seems to do it all!
I have found it is a great way of creating a simple, per-page, image gallery system.
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9. Google XML Sitemap
As I am sure you have gathered, this plugin creates an XML sitemap of your site, which is then submitted to the major search engines, including Google. It makes managing your sitemap really simple – so it is a must have.
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10. Regenerate Thumbnails
I’ve come across this problem many times before; you add a new thumbnail size to your WordPress site, only to find your existing thumbnails don’t seem to pick up the new size. This is where the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin comes in use! With the click of a button it will regenerate all your thumbnail images, and create them in all the different sizes you have activated in your functions.php file.
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Bonus Plugin! My FTP
One more – My FTP. This plugin acts as an FTP client, to be used through WordPress’ back-end. It takes on the owner permissions of the server, rather than a normal FTP user, and can often allow you to delete or edit files that can’t be accessed as a normal FTP user.
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23:56 06/05/2011
This is a comprehensive list but you could also include some plugins for backup and recovery. As a WordPress Admin we often face the problem of backup every time there is a new version of WP. Would you recommend any plugin for backups?
09:38 26/05/2011
Nice collection. Thanks for sharing. I’ve also published such a top10 plugins list with a short description on my blog. (includes backup plugin too)