As many of you know – plugins can add significant functionality to your website. For instance there is a plugin that will add an entire forum to your site (Simple:Press) and there is another one that will allow your visitors to contact you via a customizable form (Contact Form 7).
What if you were just looking for a few plugins to fancy up your site a little bit or maybe add a small piece of functionality or info? Well they exist as well and sometimes it is the simple touches that really finish a site off.
Here are a few of my favorites:
- Shockingly Simple Favicon changes your sites favicon – that is the small graphic that shows up in the address bar of your web browser when your on a site. This even sticks when you switch themes after installing it.
- Simple Feed Copyright inserts a copyright notice at the end of full text articles in your RSS feed.
- Branded Login Screen lets you add your own graphical logo or brand to your login screen.
- Blog Copyright (BC) inserts a copyright notice in your websites footer. It automatically updates the year range each new year and prevents you from having to manually go in and provide an update to the date range.
- WP Relative Date uses terms like ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘2 Days Ago’, ‘2 Weeks Ago’, ‘2 ‘Seconds Ago’, ‘2 Minutes Ago’, ‘2 Hours Ago’ to describe when a post was written instead of just the date and time.
So what are some of your favorite simple plugins for WordPress?
Thanks for the post. WordPress is an awesome blogging tool because of its ability to be customized. You have offered explanations of some very good tools. I have already installed a couple and will be adding more. I wish you all the success you could dream of.
Great List, thank you!
Thanks for featuring my WP-RelativeDate =D
You bet – been using it myself at WindowsObserver.com – just adds a nice touch to the times and dates on posts.
Thanks for mentioning of my ‘Branded Login Screen’. Some very nice plugins mentioned here. ‘Blog Copyright’ is great if your theme doesn’t have this functionality built in. I hate going to a site that is relatively popular and seeing the copyright year 1 or even 2 years off. Thanks again.
No problem Kerry – it is a unique plugin that adds some nice customization to a website.
Nice to see the ‘Branded Login Screen’ get some props. I use it at my site, and I LOVE it! Very cool, Kerry!
Shockingly simple favicon is useful especially for some one like me who switch themes quite often.
I personally would like to recommend RSS Footer. For those who scrape RSS feeds and attempt to repackage them as their own, using the RSS footer plugin will at least embed a URL back to the original site and will give credit where credit is due. I would also recommend that people use the Feedburner plugin to off-load website RSS syndication to Google.
I personally use 14 plugins at the current time, and love all of them. Thanks for your list !
Some nice plugins.
I saw one website have a different background of the login screen, do you know how they did that. I know how to change the graphic, but not the background.
I had prob w/spambot posting hundreds of spam comments for prescription drugs! I use SimpleCaptcha to force a real person to enter the numbers in order to publish their comments. Zero spam since! I also use WordPress.com Stats to seewho and all the mind numbing info for my site.
I have set up a few sites using WordPress’s scripts from the .org site it is easy enough to show anyone how to add plugins or change themes. I Love how easy it is to customise and make one of a kind!
If you’re a plug-in junkie like I am, then the Better Plugin Compatibility Control (http://www.schloebe.de/wordpre.....ol-plugin/) is great. I use it on all my WP sites. Description: “Better Plugin Compatibility Control makes it easy for the blog administrator to check compatibility of all installed plugins. The plugin adds version compatibility info to the plugins page to inform the admin at a glance if a plugin is compatible with the current WP version.”
One of my favourites is “KB Linker” – nice simple back-end text-based list you create that swaps out your choice of words or phrases and replaces them with links – great for in-text affiliate linking, but doesn’t have to be affiliate links, could be to friends blogs, search engines, downloads or whatever.
If you have a list of links you regularly insert into posts, give it a shot – it’s a major time saver (and stops you forgetting about little used affiliate links etc.
never tought my plugin will be cited in this kind of list 😀 thank you im really honored!
Thanks for a very handy plugin!
Thanks for the list of plugins. I really like the relative date one. I can’t count how many times I read a blog entry thinking it had just recently been written but it was actually pretty old. very handy
Thanks for the comment on RSS Footer, my content gets taken all the time, cheers. I can’t live without statpress and related posts plugins, but that’s just me