20 wordpress plugins and resources

Posted on 16th January 2009 by James Young | There is just 1 comment so far

I’m a huge fan of wordpress and the fact that with the great development team and hugely active community of developers, you can pretty much do anything with it. Here is a list from my bookmarks of 20 tweaks you might want to consider making to your templates when designing your own theme along with some of the plugins I find most useful for expanding wordpress or indeed changing it into something completely different!

Tweaking your wordpress templates

There are some things you might want to do when it comes to designing your own template, here’s a list of things I’ve found hugely useful to know when developing custom wordpress themes:

1. The only theme you’ll ever need (to use as a baseline when designing your own)The “starkers” theme from Elliot Jay Stocks is a great baseline theme which strips out all the superfluous markup and CSS from wordpress and allows you to start designing from scratch.
2. Remove author name from sidebar comments widgetA simple enough thing to do you’d think, it is if you know where to look.
3. Using wordpress excerptsIf you’re remotely interested in improving the usability and search results for your site, you should be writing a descriptive excerpt for your posts.
4. Multiple layouts in a single templateDoes what it says – a brief tutorial on how to create and deploy multiple layouts in a single template.
5. A static homepage with dynamic content includedYou’ve designed and built your site already and you just want a bit of the wordpress functionality (eg – latest news) included on your static page, here’s how.
6. Using a different sidebar for pages and postsCreate multiple sidebars and use them on different pages of your site.
7. An introduction to the use of the custom fields featureThe custom fields feature is under-used but offers a great deal of additional functionality, here’s a brief intro to them.
8. Making use of Functions.phpExpand your wordpress themes using some custom functions
9. How to exclude the sidebar from specific pagesDon’t need a sidebar on a specific page? Don’t show it.

Useful wordpress plugins

Want your wordpress install to be more than just a standard looking blog? here’s some great plugins that show what you can do with wordpress:

1. Facelift font replacementReplace boring system fonts easily with Flir to give your theme a new look.
2. Use wordpress as a membership directoryProof positive that wordpress can pretty much do anything – here’s how to convert it to create a directory listing service.
3. The only contact form you’ll ever needA simple, secure and easy to configure contact form.
4. A booking and availability manager (downloads)This plugin adds a great availability checker and booking enquiry form – ideal for a holiday rental client.
5. Page link to ..A plugin that allows you to make certain WordPress pages or posts link to a URL of your choosing
6. NextGen photo galleryAdd a highly configurable photo gallery to your wordpress site.
7. Pagination for your post and page archivesReplace the “older/newer” links at the bottom of your archives with a neater pagination system.
8. Display related postsEncourage people to read more by displaying related topics to the one they’ve just read.
9. AJAX Pagemash organisationA useful admin feature to organise your pages using ajax drag and drop.
10. AJAX search formUse AJAX to show a live list of search results
11. Google XML sitemap generatorImprove your sites visibility in search engines by creating a simple but effective sitemap.

Got any favourite tweaks or plugins you want to share? Please feel free to post them in the comments.