3 Must-Have WordPress Plugins

I build almost all our websites in Wordpress and then depending on customer requirements I either use existing plugins or create my own. Over time I’ve noticed the same plug-ins being used over and over again so these days I have a folder with the latest version of Wordpress and these three plugins all ready to FTP to new sites.

More Fields

This plugin is just essential. It allows you to add additional fields to your blog posts or pages in a nice easy to configure plugin.  Custom Fields have been a feature of Wordpress for some time but they lack a useful interface and that’s exactly what More Fileds does for you.

A good example of more fields in action is in this recruitment website we recently built. In this instance the jobs are created as special blog posts and all the job details such as salary, location, etc. are stored as custom fields. This also means that I have an RSS feed for new jobs up and running right out of the box.

More fields lets you turn Wordpress into anything, a car dealers website,  property portal, jobs website, product reviews, etc.

Note: More Fields requires that you can customise your wordpress theme to display the additional fields in your posts or pages so you will need FTP access and a basic understanding of php and html.

More Fields Plugin Home Page

Cforms

Whenever you want to create a form for your website visitors then Cforms is the way to go. Cforms is one of the most complete Wordpress plugins out there and it can handle anything from a simple contact us form right through to multi-page application forms with file uploads, etc.  Captch’s, required fields, success pages, date pickers, drop-downs and radio buttons and the ability to easily style your forms are just some of the many features.

CForms Plugin Home Page

Tinymce Advanced

Clients aways want to make tables and the toolbar on the default editor lacks this feature. While it is possible for users to go into the html editor and build their table there, that’s not a workable solution for most. Tinymce Advanced lets you take control of the toolbar and decide what you want and where, including tables.

TinyMCE Advanced Plugin Home Page

WordPress.TV launched.

Wordpress.TV

The folks at wordpress have certainly been busy of late, the latest version 2.7 sports a much improved interface on what was already and excellent blog and website publishing tool. The support site is as good as any developer could wish for, theming with plug-ins, code examples and helpful fans.

Today Automatic, the company that created wordpress announced the launch of Wordpress.tv.

In their words,

“WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress”

In my view,

The helpful fans I mentioned earlier will have this site packed with videos on managing your blog or website and wordpress.tv will be an incredable resource for website owners maintaining their own website and blog. There’s also going to be plenty in there for developers but I think the benifets of wordpress.tv will be best enjoyed by the end users.

As a company, we build all of our client websites on Wordpress because it’s such a great platform, but our main reason is that it’s the best their is for our clients and the launch or wordpress.tv is just another example of why wordpress kicks ass.

WordPress 2.7

I’ve just used Wordpress 2.7 for our latest project and although it took a few minutes to find everything it is definetly easier to use for newcomers. From a functionality perspective little has changed that is very noticeable with the exception of how media is managed.

The media or image manager in Wordpress has always been clunky but finally it has been integrated nicely with the rest of the application. The new design is a little grey for my liking and can definetly be improved but overall 2.7 is a god improvement on an already great piece of software.

From here on out we’ve decided to settle on Wordpress as our only CMS offering and now use it to build almost all of our client websites.