WordPress Plugins 101

Plugins are what makes wordpress such a great platform to for blogging and website development. There is a plugin for pretty much anything you can possibly think of. Below I’ve listed plugins which I either use myself, or that I think would be useful for affiliates.  This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive, just useful.

Nearly all these plugins are OpenSource or freeware. I’ll cover paid plugins on seperate pages.

Core WordPress stuff (Free Plugins)

  • WP-Insert
    Ad management plugin which does a lot more than ad management. Wp-Insert can manage your feeds, google analytics, blog editing and even make editing your themes easier for you.
  • Secure WordPress
    Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
  • W3 Total Cache
    The up and coming #1 cache module for wordpress. Has everything + kitchen sink. Makes static files, minifies CSS/JS and other page content. I’ve been using it on newer blogs and have been happy with the results.
  • wp-cache
    Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”.
  • cbnet Ping Optimizer
    Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer. (Note: this plugin is a fork of the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin, with registration/activiation functionality removed.)
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
    This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
  • Google XML Sitemaps
    This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
  • TinyMCE Advanced editor
    Adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ wysiwyg editor: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Very useful IMO.
  • Simple affiliate link masking plugin (GoCodes redirect plugin)
    This plugin lets you create shorter URLs that link to Longer URLs much like you would with .htaccess files and 302′s.   Also see WP Link engine and Kb Linker for more robust solutions to outbound link management.

    For example
http://www.massiveafflink.com/?id=7777&scary=true
becomes
http://www.yoursite.com/goto/somethingNice

Content Display Plugins

It’s likely you’ll eventually want to display something that’s not in the default types of content WordPress displays out of the box.
As per usual there’s dozens of options. I’ve tried to narrow it down to a shortlist.

WordPress 3.0 will be adding custom post types which will make some of these plugins below irrelevant. It depends on what you’re doing. Read more here. Check out a screenshot here.

Flutter CMS Plugin


Custom Write Panels (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). You can create custom write panel pages or posts + duplicatable fields and groups + import and export them.  Surprisingly easy to use and get going with.

Pods CMS framework for WordPress.

Also see here for an intro and tutorial
The Pods CMS plugin allows you to create your own content types (pods), and add the fields you need to each pod. Once your content types are set up, you add items to them. This involves filling out a form — with the input fields being the fields you’ve created.

While flexible, this is not easy so if you’re not confident checkout flutter or the more fields plugin. It’s also a lot better maintained & supported than flutter.

  • WordPress Custom Field Plugin
    The Custom Field Template plugin adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page. The template format is almost same as the one of the rc:custom_field_gui plugin. The difference is following.
  • More Fields + Idealien Category Enhancements plugins
    JamieO writes…. “It offers dead-simple creation of named fields and types (radio buttons, drop-down list, input, etc) so that users don’t have to remember a custom field name / format that is required to make the theme development possible.Create custom write panels where you specify what custom fields are on display in the post / page panel and a separate admin menu section for those content elements. I would say that it enables the more advanced user aspects of “Wordpress-as-a-CMS” without the complexity of Flutter, PODS or other large scale plugins.
  • Link Library
    Create a page on your web site that will contain a list of all of the link categories that you have defined inside of the Links section of the WordPress administration, along with all links defined in these categories.
  • WP-Table reloaded
    WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML. Good for reviews and comparisons.
  • WordPress business and link directory plugins (list) at wpfeed.com
    A good roundup of 4 different plugins for listing things.

More on custom lists

Plugin Developers

Urban Giraffe

  • Headspace SEO plugin
    One of the most powerful SEO plugins to manage SEO, meta-data, tracking codes, and many other tasks related to optimizing your blog to rank well. Not the simplest, but in the right hands, one of the best.
  • Regular Expression Search and replace
    Does what it says on the tin.
  • http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/sniplets/
    Text insertion (replacement) plugin. Can dynamically replace text in your posts with text that may be defined elsewhere in the database, or created by some other module. Can be automatically inserted at key points on a page.  EG. highlighting of files, execute custom PHP code, insert data from a database, automatically insert text on every RSS post.

WESG WordPress plugins

Yoast.com WordPress plugins

http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/

  • This guy must be one seriously busy mothefucker, having 62 currently active plugins listed.
  • Some of the cooler ones are dynamic text replace, Linkify Tags, Linkify categories., Get Custom Field Values (powerful).
  • Clearly both parties are holding up their end of the coffee for code bargain. Some real gems among these 62 plugins there, check them out.

Lists of plugins elsewhere

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