Top WordPress plugins for 2010

It’s the start of a new year, and what better time to start fresh with a new blog, and put in some of our favourite plugins!

In the past 5 and a half years, I’ve installed WordPress more times than I care to remember. Since 2004 it’s been my platform of choice for blogs, and in the past year or so, it’s become perfect for small-scale websites.

A large reason behind this is the plugins. Anyone can whip up a plugin that taps into pretty much any of the built-in features of WordPress, to make an already brilliant platform that little bit better.

Theres a handful of plugins that I couldn’t work without, going from behind-the-scenes of WordPress to sidebar widgets:

WP Dummy Content

By Zvi Band – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dummy-content/

When you’re working on a WordPress theme, the last thing you want to do is spend 20 minutes making a bunch of pages to fill the menu, and enough posts to make your page numbers show up. Even then, there’s only so much Lorem Ipsum you can use.

This plugin gives you as many posts/pages/sub pages as you want, with paragraphs, lists, quotes etc. So you can style everything as you need, then just hit the “Delete them all” button when you’re finished!

Page Lists Plus

By Tim Holt – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-lists-plus/

This plugin is so powerful, it’s hard to sum it up in a couple of paragraphs. In a nutshell, it overrides the wp_list_pages function, adding heaps of new features, like

• Changing the title text of your menu links from the default of the page title
• Open certain links in new windows
• Redirects (ie. Links to external sites in the header)
• Include (my personal favourite, removes pages from the list)

There’s also a ton of options for the list as a whole, such as adding span tags around links (perfect for weird background images), adding a ‘home’ link to the start of the list, unlinking the current page, and heaps more.

Twitter For WordPress

By Ricardo González – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/

Every man and his dog (well, just about) uses Twitter, and with over 200 websites using WordPress, there’s some overlap.

There’s a ton of different ways to integrate twitter into your blog, but Twitter for WordPress gets my vote. Automatic @reply recognition, URL hyperlinking and email linking are options, and it can be used as a widget, or by a call to twitter_list_messages(); in your template code if you want it somewhere different.
I love this plugin so much, I’ve been working on a modified version that supports twitter lists…

Widon’t 2.1

By Shaun Inman – http://www.shauninman.com/archive/2006/12/05/widont_2_wordpress_plugin

The effects of this plugin probably go largely unnoticed by a large portion of people, but the few that notice it will love it.

It removes ‘widows’ (a word by itself on a line) from page titles (and any other specified tag), by adding a none-breaking space between the penultimate and last words.

Simple Flickr Photos

By Onur Kocatas – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-flickr-plugin/

This one does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s simple, and it shows Flickr Photos. My only disappointment with this plugin is that you have to know your Flickr user ID (idgettr solves that issue though). Aside from that, It’s simple, but has a load of options (user photos, group photos, tagged photos etc). You can see it in action at the AFLPA Blog.

WP-PageNavi

By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/

Out of the box, WordPress adds ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links to blog pages. While this is useful, some people want a little more control. That’s where this plugin comes into play. It adds page numbers to your archive pages, and in the case of a lot of themes (such as those from WooThemes), there’s ‘plug-and play’ support for it.

Obviously there are a lot more useful plugins, but these are the main ones that I use with any fresh WP installation.

Which plugins can’t you live without?

Tagged as: 2010, blog, blogging, plugins, thinktank, Wordpress