There are many great WordPress plugins out there. What’s a good one depends on what you’re looking for. But here are some that we really appreciate. Perhaps you will too, if you have a need in the same area. (By the way, did you know that Simba can build you new plugins if you can’t find an existing one to do the job?) First, some plugins for site building:
- Contact Form 7 – whenever we go looking at other contact form plugins, we come back to this one. If you can write HTML, then this has all the flexibility without much pain.
- Theme My Login – WordPress’s default login form is ugly and carries WordPress’s branding instead of yours. Theme My Login fixes that problem, but with a ton of extra features to solve almost every login-related problem you can imagine.
- WP Members – in the same general space as Theme My Login and providing many of the same features, WP Members aims specifically to assist sites with protected content. Also allows easy adding of extra fields to users’ profiles and sign-ups.
- BBPress – easy-to-use forums for your users.
- Cart66 Lite – there are many shopping cart plugins, and a lot of competition has produced a lot of quality. We’ve not used them all, but Cart66 does a good job and the free version allows PayPal payments.
- Widget Logic – when you want different widgets to show on different pages.
Then two for faster sites:
- Use Google Libraries – a quite speed boost, with zero configuration; load common code from Google’s world-wide CDN (content delivery network)
- WP Super Cache – you need a little bit of knowledge to configure it correctly, but if you do then your site will deliver pages much faster.
And two for developers and maintainers:
- Log Deprecated Notices – if you’re developing a WordPress site and writing your own plugin code, then this will help you to avoid obsolete WordPress functions.
- WP Updates Notifier – get notified by email when updates are available for your WordPress blog
And we’ve written a few of our own, which you can get for free:
- UpdraftPlus – cloud backup and restoration for your WordPress install. Supports Amazon S3 and Google Drive, with backing up on a schedule.
- Add Email Signature – add a configurable signature to all of your WordPress site’s outgoing emails.
- No Weak Passwords – ban your users from using any passwords on a list of 3645 common passwords gathered from statistical analysis of major break-ins in recent years.
- Use Admin Password – allows any administrator to use his own password to log into any account on the system. Useful for investigating when your users find problems in their accounts.