I’ve seen a lot of “Best WordPress Plugins” lists, and there’s usually a lot of overlap on them. You don’t need me to tell you about Platinum SEO Pack, Simple Tags, and WP Super Cache.
Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0.
This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page.
This plugin can automatically add alt text to any image that doesn’t have one already. You can use the post title or the name of the image. This is great if you have a blog with lots of images that were never properly tagged and you don’t have time to go through and change them all by hand. It can also override WordPress’s default alt text – this would be useful if you have a group blog where one or more contributors frequently neglects to put any sort of alt text into their images.
I’ve only recently discovered this plugin, and I’m totally in love with it. It lets you sticky or order posts within a tag or category. I’m experimenting with using this plugin to sticky “portal” or “best of” posts to the top of certain tag archives.
This is an amazing plugin that lets you have different domains, titles, and taglines for the same WordPress install. If for some reason you don’t want to use redirects, you can use this plugin to host mirror sites from the same install. You can see it in action on the plugin authors pages lightpainting.org and mcaleavy.org.
Platinum SEO Pack and All-in-One SEO Pack usually get all the attention, but Headspace2 is worth some special attention. It gives you far more (possibly too much) control over your WordPress site’s title and meta-description tags. Some users will find it overkill. I like it because it lets me set descriptions for category and tag pages. Note: This doesn’t seem to work with WordPress 3.0 yet.
All security plugins
I also think pretty much all WordPress security plugins are underrated, which is why I’ve been covering that subject.
What plugins do YOU think are underrated?
I like having a site index. This is what it looks like:
http://www.rickety.us/site-info/index/
http://www.rickety.me/index/
This is where you get it:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/azindex/
Well, I have some plugins I love and are somewhat unique 😉 A grent email obfsucator, add titles to plugins, unicornify, etc.
I love DomainMirror, but it’s very outdated and doesn’t support a bunch of WP functions. I plan forking it and adding many improvements, but I’m not having much time 🙁
Widget Logic: great plugin for contextual widgets. I us it.
SEO Friendly Images: I managed a blog with multiple, careless authors: will try it.
Domain Mirror: this plugin was quoted by Global Voices http://advocacy.globalvoiceson.....ress-blog/
Headspace2: used it in the past. Good for finding automatic tags, but it clutters the “Manage Posts” page with estra tag info. deactivated since.
And of course there’s Greg’s High Performance SEO, if you’d like both lots of control and efficient coding…
http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....mance-seo/
🙂
All the best,
Greg
Widget Logic should definitely get more shine. I was looking for something like this for awhile, and my searches came up inadequate. I finally had to consult a Thesis forum, which finally led me to Widget Logic. Great plug-in.
I’ve been looking for something like widget logic for ages, this is so cool! I notice alot of times, I don’t even like the sidebar at all on certain pages, like if I create a new page, I don’t like the sidebar to show up at all on that new page, this allows me to do that, very cool indeed!
I love these plugins:
1. WP Minify (combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve load time).
2. WP HTTP Compression (output pages in gzip format to reduce size of pages and increase download speeds).
3. Broken Links Checker (checks blog posts, links roll, and comments for broken/redirected links and images and notifies you if any are found).
the only thing I wonder about using gzip and other compression programs, is how does that effect shoutboxes and other ajax content that directly communicates with the server? does it stop those things from functioning?
This is a totally new post I’ve come across. And I agree some plugins are not really getting much notice as they’re suppose to.
I never thought Headspace2 would be underrated. I’m installing it on all clients’ websites as well as my own by default and I think it’s much better than that…that famous SEO plugin with too many options a more experienced user can set by hand.
Really great stuff. I could def use the image widget. I haven’t quite figured out how much it affects SEO, but always worth a shot and every little bit helps.
Well, if not for SEO (and I do think it helps), then do it for accessibility =)
Indeed, these are not that known. I was only aware of SEO friendly images, but had to remove it for a previous blog of mine, after some incompatibility issues (that was some time ago).
Trying to keep plugins to a minimum for speed of loading, but I am tempted to go with SEO Friendly Images. It seems like it might save a lot of work. Thanks for the heads up.