If you have read ProfHacker for any length of time, you know that we are big fans of WordPress as an alternative to a Course Management System (CMS) or as a platform for professional and personal websites. WordPress is a powerful content management and blog publisher with hundreds (thousands?) of themes, styles, and functions that help writers create and publish content. One of the ways WordPress is so powerful is by user developed plug-ins. (A quick aside: WordPress is open-source blogging software that is available to Internet users with a free WordPress.com account. A more robust WordPress option comes from WordPress.org. With WordPress.org, a user needs to install the software on an owned server or with a 3rd party provider. Plug-ins are only available to WordPress.org users.)
We’ve written about plug-ins in the past: Earlier this year, Cory wrote about Access Keys: A WordPress Plugin to Improve Accessibility and George wrote 5 More Essential WordPress Plugins. Ethan wrote, 5 WordPress Plugins That I Simply Can’t Live Without (and Why), and the series started when former ProfHacker Managing Editor Julie Meloni wrote Thinking about WordPress Plug-ins?
These previous posts are terrific resources, and they are worth revising if you are unfamiliar with WordPress and its functions. Even if you read those pieces, the world of WordPress and plugins has changed. Today there are many more WordPress plug-ins than there were just a year ago. When Julie wrote her post in September of 2009, there were almost 6,500 plug-ins listed in the WordPress Plug-in Directory. Today, there are almost 17,000. With so many options available, it’s helpful for us to receive recommendations from others who use WordPress, thus the point of this post.
On my professional website and on sites that I’ve created for others, I’ve stumbled upon plugins that have been both useful and surprising. These plug-ins range from those that support the sharing of information to new ways of displaying that information. A few of my current favorites:
- Broken Link CheckerIf you are like me, you become annoyed at broken links on websites. Broken Link Checker to the rescue! I love this plug-in for its ability to check links (images, YouTube videos, etc.) throughout my site and to alert me if any of them have been broken, removed, or deleted.
- EventsPlannerEvents Planner is a comprehensive event management plug-in that contains support for multiple event types, payments, custom forms, and etc. You could schedule student conferences with this program, departmental programs, personal events (a photography showing, for example). I haven’t used this plug-in much yet, but it has potential.
- FlickpressFlickpress is a WordPress plug-in that adds a multi-user popup tool to the WordPress toolbar for browsing and inserting Flickr photos into posts. Flickpress also supports searching for Creative Commons, government, and Flickr Commons photos. Photo captions are included by default, but may be disabled. For this plug-in to work on your site, you must have an API key from Flickr, but those are easy to obtain.
- Jetpack by WordPress.comAs you might already know, plug-ins are available only to those who host their own sites or their own domains. While WordPress.org has all the nifty plug-ins and widget/gadgets that make the program very powerful, WordPress.com (the free account) does offer terrific services that are not available to the .org users namely, “cloud power.” Jetpack makes those .com services available to .org users.
- TinyMCE AdvancedI installed this plug-in so I could have an ability to create tables in WordPress posts, but I found many more tools that are useful: TinyMCEAdvanced adds 16 plug-ins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor. These additions to a standard editor include, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emoticons, a smooth Full Screen function, IESpell, Layer, Media, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters, and XHTML Extras. These plug-ins can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
These are my current top five favorites. How about you? What are some of the WordPress plug-ins that you find most useful? Most interesting? Plugins that you never expected to find but now find how useful they are? Please leave your suggestions and comments below.
[Flickr image by user j / f / photos and used under the Creative Commons license.]
