People love Wordpress because it is so extensible and can be used to power a wide range of websites.
It can be customised with relative ease, and there are more than 4,000 plugins available to enhance the back and front end of Wordpress, adding functionality for administrators and visitors.
There are already a bunch of useful plugin-related lists, which in-the-know authors have compiled, such as 25 useful Wordpress plugins, and the 13 Wordpress plugins you don’t use but probably should, and 20 Wordpress plugins to improve SEO.
But since new plugins are created every day, I thought I’d ask the question: what’s your favourite? Which plugin really does the business for you, or has made the biggest difference to your key metrics, or is helping you to become a much more efficient operator?
Please let me know in the comments below. A brief description on what it does and why it rocks would be appreciated.
I’m especially keen to hear about the best plugins to add Twitter functionality to a Wordpress site. Having checked a few out I’m wondering whether TweetSuite is the best one to go for, as it seems to cover most of the key requirements. Or should I integrate Tweetmeme, rather than using the TweetSuite ‘retweet this’ buttons? Any thoughts?
[Image by tomsaint11 via Flickr, various rights reserved]
Chris Lake is Director of Product Development at Econsultancy, an entrepreneur and a long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter, Google+ or connect via Linkedin.
Recommended reports
State of Social Report 2011
Econsultancy's State of Social Report, produced in partnership with LBi and bigmouthmedia, is the most comprehensive study of its kind around the strategies, tactics and websites companies are using to harness social media for marketing, sales, customer service and other business objectives. The research, based on a survey of more than 1,000 companies, benchmarks budgets, resourcing, measurement and barriers to success ... plus much more.
1:59PM on 26th March 2009
Funny you should ask "Which plugin really does the business for you" becuae I would love to say the wp-ecommerce plug in developed by Instinct.co.nz is my favourite, but it is infuriating to use! It's another permanent beta and although there is a somewhat expensive manual the ability to add shopping cart functioanlity to Wordpress is key. It marks the advent of social-commerce - a buzz word that has been around for sometime but never fully demonstrated - a social platform mashed up with ecommerce functionality.
Account Manager at (Untitled) London
2:29PM on 26th March 2009
You might be interested in this article - 10 Awesome Ways to Intergrate Twitter With Your Website; http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/10-awesome-ways-to-integrate-twitter-with-your-website/
2:34PM on 26th March 2009
Boring but true: "all in one SEO" and/or "XML Sitemap". Like many of the best made things in life, they aren't exciting because they just work. Set them-up and, assuming your content is decent, search engines will give you love.
WordPress › Google XML Sitemaps « WordPress Plugins
WordPress › All in One SEO Pack « WordPress Plugins
Creative Director at Foliovision
3:01PM on 27th March 2009
We can't live without our own handrolled Foliopress WYSIWYG editor.
Foliopress WYSIWYG does a few things the built-in editor doesn't do. It respects your code so your fancy e-commerce pages doesn't get trashed by the built-in editor.
It allows really quick image upload with correct URLs and titles for SEO.
It also looks really sharp. Given the amount of time we spend in Wordpress I want to look at an attractive editor.
Finally, it is relatively client proof - we built an essentials toolbar which keeps them a long way away from the font tag.
Otherwise we depend on John Godley's Filled In for easy form management and his Redirection for dealing with a lot of site maintenance/changed URLs.
We have some very fancy tracking plugins that we wrote and use and love but unfortunately we can't release them to the public as they would get put onto all the adblockers then and we need them for our clients sites.