For the past two weeks, I’ve been leading a WordPress class at 3rdWard. During the first two classes, we covered how to setup hosting, how to use a feedburner account, and how to install plugins and themes.
During the 2nd class, I also listed out a few of my favorite themes and plugins. For a review of what we covered in our 2nd Class, download this document.
In this post, I’ve included a few favorite plugins. For a list of some my favorite themes, visit this post.
WordPress Plugins
Wordtube
This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 5.1 and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages. Various skins for the JW PLAYER are available via http://www.longtailvideo.com
wordTube supports the streaming video format (Format .flv or .swf), sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG grafic files. With wordTube you can simply insert it into your blog with the tag [media id=”media id”] or as playlist .
Since Version 2.0 it supports LongTail’s AdSolution which allows you to run pre-roll, overlay mid-roll, and post-roll advertisements in your media player. Click here to sign up for LongTail.
You don’t need to change the WYSIWYG mode or special HTML knowledge to insert such a tag. You can show a simple media file (i.e. a flv Format) or a playlist of all your media files.
All in One SEO
Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
download the plugin or read more
Contact Forms 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
WP-Cache
WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.
jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries
jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.
To create the below gallery, all you have to do is upload a few photos to your post, and insert into your post’s content area. No modifications are required to get the Lightbox working.
WP-Ecommerce
This is my go to plugin for any ecommerce site built using wordpress. It has everything you need to get your store up and running.
Visit the plugin site
Download the plugin
Watch how to setup the plugin
MyFTP
If you need to access your host remotely (away from your desktop or laptop, this is the way to do it. It is a WordPress FTP like plugin that can be used to manage folders and files via the WordPress admin panel.
Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast
This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog. That’s it’s main functionality, it adds a few “extra’s” though.
Visit Yoast’s site to find out what those extras are. You’ll also learn a crapload about wordpress.