Essential Admin Plugins for Wordpress
Jun 11th, 07 | 12 remarksI love Wordpress, but it’s not without its’ drawbacks - one of which is the lack of administrative features in the default control panel. Fortunately, thanks to clever developers and witty users in general, some admin plugins have emerged which can make filling in the functionality gaps virtually painless.
Wordpress Database Backup
This is imperative if you don’t want to risk losing everything on some idle Tuesday afternoon. I speak from experience. Even if your host provides regular backups for you, it’s better to take matters into your own hands. Admittedly I’m a control freak, but in my opinion this plugin is probably more essential than any other I can name. Now managed by ilfilosofo.
Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
Save yourself loads of time in formatting posts… add headings, anchors, horizontal rules, sub/superscripts and even special characters right from the visual editor. I don’t mind code at all, but without this plugin, you have to switch to code view and hand-code the HTML for any of the above, and it just gets old. Still can’t figure out why these features aren’t part of the core WYSIWYG. Oh well, Labnotes trac can fix that.
WP Tiger Administration
Sleek and simple, this is a skin for the Wordpress admin by Steve of OrderedList. Meant to emulate the Mac OS environment, it’s a very nice alternative to the WP default. The color scheme is a bit on the drab side, but the clean layout, smaller text and muted tones make all the admin panels more readable, navigable and just generally more usable.
Edit: (10/02/07) Tiger is a little buggy on v2.2, and doesn’t play well with v2.3 at all. :(
Contact Form II
A basic drop-in contact form, customizable via template page. Offer visitors a way to contact you from anywhere on your site, without ever having to publish a mailto link. Not only will you be providing readers with a user-friendly way to contact you any time, but it prevents those damn harvesters from getting hold of your email address, helping you minimize the daily onslaught of spam you’ll eventually get.
Maintenance Mode
This begs to be included due to the sheer volume of WP updates rolled out. I have a small panic attack every time I have to upgrade, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of others do as well. ;) If you tend to screw things up in the process, and you don’t want the world to know you sometimes annihilate your blog, this has you covered. Activating it displays a short message informing visitors of maintenance downtime. Everything is still accessible to administrators while in maintenance mode.
FeedSmith
Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin was recently adopted by Feedburner (who were themselves recently adopted by Google). With it, you can provide format-independent “smart feeds” to your audience, and effectively track and manage your readership. Incidentally, signing up with Feedburner offers a great number of benefits aside from FeedSmith, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
Akismet
This extremely popular plugin bears mentioning just in case someone missed it. It’s a comment spam catcher, and a very effective one at that. If you don’t already have it running on your blog, you can learn more and download it from the official Akismet site.
Smart Update Pinger
Wordpress by default allows you to ping any update service you wish. Notification takes place every time you publish or update a post. The concern here is possibly flooding the update services and getting banned for “ping spamming”. I don’t know if that’s really worth worrying about, but I’m listing Smart Update Pinger because of its log. You can see exactly which services are pinged and when. Out of the box, Wordpress offers no such information.
Each of these plugins are recommended because they’re simple to install, configure, and use. Independent of your blog niche, work-flow or site design, these all do their small part in enhancing the functionality of the Wordpress admin, and for you, that means working smarter and happier. Yay!
Excellent! :)
Installed Tiger Admin, which looks like a cross between MoveableType 4.0 and the Typo CMS… Certainly an improvement over the standard one IMHO!
I *was* going to install the Contact Form plugin too, but then I read the author’s page: “Folks who donate substantial amounts of money for my time will receive support. Freeloaders won’t. This is how open source works.”
Um… Nope. That’s not how it works. I’ll keep looking for a replacement to the one I had working before 2.2 killed it! :)
Thanks for the post though! :)
Jun 11, 07 | 12:24 pmWow I never caught that before, and I agree - that’s NOT how open source works. Hm… let me know if you find a good alternative! I’m curious, which one were you using before?
I read somewhere recently that Wordpress is planning to incorporate a notification feature for whenever plugin developers make updates, but I have no idea when. Won’t it be great though. :)
Jun 11, 07 | 2:11 pmI was originally running ‘Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form’ by green-beast. It’s undoubtedly the most secure and most flexible that there is - but it didn’t like something about my 2.2 upgrade… It worked fine on everyone elses upgrade, just not mine!
More info here:
Jun 11, 07 | 2:38 pmhttp://paulenderson.com/2007/05/17/upgrade-to-wordpress-22-successful/
Maybe some conflict with another plugin? That’s frustrating when you can’t find the cause so there’s no chance of finding a solution. Thanks for the link. :)
Jun 11, 07 | 3:46 pmMy testing (which included disabling all plugins and then putting them back on one by one) pointed to it being an incompatibility between the theme I was using (a heavily-modified version of K3) and WP 2.2.
When I changed to a default theme it worked fine, so that was the only conclusion I could draw!
I’ve been working on a CSS reboot for the last month or so, which is based on a totally different theme - so it won’t be an issue for that much longer! That’s an exclusive for you by the way - I haven’t mentioned it anywhere else! ;)
Jun 11, 07 | 4:33 pmWoohoo! I feel so privileged, I can’t wait to see it! :)
Jun 11, 07 | 4:37 pmNeither can I! ;)
Jun 11, 07 | 4:39 pmCharity - great list, I am going to take a look at the database back up sounds a lot easier than what I do now. Can you set it up t make scheduled back ups?
Jun 12, 07 | 7:39 amTara - the DB backup doesn’t support that functionality unfortunately, but if your host allows you to run cron jobs, I think you could schedule backups that way.
Jun 12, 07 | 8:23 amGreat list! I’m new and just getting my site setup and these were all excellent suggestions. Thanks!
Aug 1, 07 | 6:28 pmHey Charity,
Real helpful post. Seeing as how there are umpteen million plugins available at WordPress’ site alone, picking out the best of the pack is much appreciated!
And I’m glad you wrote that note about the contact form plugin, Paul. I was going to install it myself too, when I saw that fairly obnoxious disclaimer on it.
Aug 1, 07 | 9:18 pm@ Valerie and Andrew - thanks I’m glad you found some use in it! Finding the right collection of plugins (that work together) seems like half the battle sometimes. ;)
Aug 1, 07 | 11:42 pm