Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins: I am a sucker for top 10 lists about WordPress, especially if they contain useful information. This list of top ten plugins put together from the experiences of a professional design firm, will help you create a full CMS out of a WordPress blog. I have used a few of these myself on various projects and their flexibility and speciality together with WordPress’ versatility and extensibility make a phenomenal combination. From the post: For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. Of course, it does this best with the help of a good theme, and some great plugins. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost anything you can think of with it. Here are the best plugins we’ve run across, the ones we install for nearly all of our client’s sites. Thanks Adam, via WordPress News
Good list. 🙂
Excellent topic! Some of the items on the list, I see right off how they CMS … others I’ll need to look into more. Good idea, collecting them. Thanks!
Some people load up on plugins; I am in favor (instead) of installing just a few of the most useful. I use three or four on this list and may try a couple more for my WP/CMS sites.
I will say a great list. Very useful for those non-profits site. Great to use a blog as a notice board with the calendar plugin.
@mark- thanks for the post, I’m glad the list is helpful.
@chris – we do stick to the few relavent plugins per client. Most clients don’t have use for more than 3 or 4.
Interesting list – there’s a couple on there I’ve never heard of and might investigate. One of the most useful I’ve found is ‘Custom Field GUI’ which looking at the page is going to be superceded by somethign called ‘Custom Write Panel’.
Love the idea of this plugin – it gives different ‘Write..’ buttons for individual categories so ‘Write Book Review’ could be one for example. They’re looking to combine this with the Role Manager plugin so you can say who sees what. Genius.
PS My latest (and biggest) site using WP as a CMS was a website for a magazine called Huck, WP works a treat.
This is so true for me, i load up on plugins. I feel bad for doing so, though. Plugins is a little cheatish, isn’t it? 🙂
@Alex C: I really loved Custom Write Panel and had it working on one of my sites, but last time I checked it wasn’t being updated any more, although someone on the forums had already patched it for 2.3.3. With 2.5 just round the corner, I’m hoping that Joshua (I think) will be back to support it. Such a clever but under-rated concept!
I’d also like to plug Alex Rabe’s Table plugin. How many times have people wanted to just create a TABLE (not a database table) within their content? Alex Rabe is the same guy who brought us NextGEN gallery (http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins)
For the other plugins recommended, I definitely agree with ‘page Links to’ ‘Subscribe2’ and also Google Sitemap Generator. I’d be interested in testing out pageMash as well as Search Everything. One day if i get into Ecommerce, I think that plugin will be amazing as well 🙂
@Mosey That’s a real shame to hear that plugin isn’t being updated anymore – it sounded abssolutely perfect for using WP as a CMS.
My next stage of using WP as a CMS is to investigate WP MU and see how I can get a community of bloggers together for Huck.
What a fantastic list! I already use CForms II and Search Everything for my clients but the rest are really great!
Alex C: somebody in Russia is already doing such a thing — he’s ceatring a socialnetwork-plugin for WP.
There are some really good tools there, I use a couple of them already, but I will be checking out the page links to one.
What a fantastic list! I already use CForms II and Search Everything for my clients but the rest are really great!
That is an interesting article. In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.
We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.
It seems that the individualised data gives a more enlightening perspective.
What a fantastic list. I have been using Joomla so far but have recently found that clients prefer WordPress about 10 to 1… With this list it’ll be easier to try to recreate some of Joomla’s functionality within WordPress. Thank you!