Eli Kirk

WordPress is not a new Content Management System (CMS), but it is rapidly gaining in popularity. Originally, this PHP-based system was intended to create a basic content management environment for the ever-increasing pool of internet bloggers. Over the years, a growing number of custom plugins as well as heightened security has made WordPress a more solid platform. It allows web developers, like those here at Eli Kirk, to build entire sites—with or without actual blog functionality—for businesses of all types and sizes. The WordPress Dashboard allows even non-technical customers the ability to add content and maintain control over their own website without the need to know how to program on their own, while the custom plugins allow us to implement professional designs for the website itself.

Anyone who has spent time looking through lists of plugins on the WordPress Dashboard knows that there are literally thousands of plugins for this CMS. Each developer seems to have their preference of plugins to use on websites, but I thought it might be good to put together a list of the plugins I most commonly use and why.

This list is by no means comprehensive, nor does it reflect the views of all Eli Kirk developers. If you have a plugin you really enjoy and I missed it, please let me know in the comments below!

Contact Form 7

Author: Takayuki Miyoshi
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Why I like it:
Contact Form 7 is a simple, easy-to-use way to add a contact form to your site that automatically contains validation and an e-mailer, yet at the same time retains the ability to perform more complicated tasks via customization. Most of our developers can add a basic contact form to a client’s site with customized questions and e-mail output in less than 10 minutes. More advanced projects can take 30 minutes to an hour, but the amount of time it would take to build the basic functionality from scratch each time makes it well worth the time a developer might take to learn how to customize the plugin once.

Advanced Custom Fields

Author: Elliot Condon
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

Why I like it:
Many of our clients feel intimidated by code, and that’s okay. Most of the time, our developers wouldn’t want to trade jobs with the client, either. Advanced Custom Fields takes the concept of Custom Fields in WordPress and—well, advances it further. This plugin allows us to create beautiful, custom layouts on a website with almost fill-in-the-blank functionality on the client’s side. If a client wants to change the text of a sidebar paragraph and the associated image, this plugin allows us to put it in an easy-access location with a simple interface. There are other methods of doing this, but Advanced Custom Fields is probably one of the easiest to set up and maintain.

Pods CMS Framework

Author: The Pods CMS Team
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pods-ui/
Why I like it:

This plugin, in many ways, falls into the same category of Advanced Custom Fields. It allows us as developers to create customized content for clients that allow them to edit their own site, without an extensive knowledge of code, while maintaining a professional-looking website. There are pros and cons to both this and Advanced Custom Fields, and it is a matter of using the right tool for the right job. Several of our recent custom WordPress builds used both plugins.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Author: Joost de Valk
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Why I like it:
If you have a website and a Google e-mail address, you should have Google Analytics. If you’re using something else, you probably have some very specific functionality that you don’t feel is met via Google, but due to the low price point (free) and great features, Google Analytics seems to be the new standard in online metrics. For those not familiar, metrics are essentially the data that tells us how many visitors view a site on a particular day (which can be broken down by hour), what country they are from, what browser they are using, etc. This plugin makes integrating a Google Analytics account into your WordPress-based website even more simple—just plugin in the UA number given to you by the Google Analytics site when you sign up, and you’re good to go.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Author: Carson McDonald
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard/

Why I like it:
This plugin is not for everyone, but it is handy in many situations. If you’re already running Google Analytics on your site, this plugin uses code to grab your site’s data from Google’s Analytics site and allows you to view it within your WordPress dashboard. The advantage is that you can view visitor data very quickly while on your own site. The disadvantage is that it is limited in what it will display. Also, PROTIP: Go to Settings > Google Analytics Dashboard, and check “Disable Post Stats Display,” then “Save.” This disables the plugin from creating individual viewing charts for each page/post, which greatly increases page load times when using the WordPress dashboard. When you want to view metrics for individual posts, just go reverse this step temporarily and then go back. If you spend a lot of time looking through pages on your site and want to use this plugin, you’ll appreciate the ability to disable those charts.

Simple Social Sharing

Author: Andrew Norcross
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-social-sharing/

Why I like it:
Social networking has always been an important factor of business, and online social networking is becoming increasingly important. There are many plugins for taking advantage of multiple social networks, but Simple Social Sharing is an easy-to-setup, easy-to-use plugin that allows users to share your posts and pages on their favorite social networking sites with one or two mouse clicks.

WordPress Meta Robots

Author: Designstudio, Philipp Speck
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-meta-robots/

Why I like it:
A lot of the time, when building websites, there are individual pages that we don’t want search engines to index. It might be a “Thank You” page, a landing page for a specific marketing campaign, or other custom one-off page that is not intended for general public consumption. With this plugin, it is simple and easy to control whether you want the page to be available to general search engines or not.

Update Notifications Manager

Author: GeekPress
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/update-notifications-manager/

Why I like it:
This is not a plugin for the average WordPress user, but is fantastic for the developer who has built a customized WordPress environment for a client and wants to preserve that. This plugin allows a developer to hide the update notifications from the Dashboard, including core, plugin, and theme updates. Many of the updates in WordPress core are great and contain additional security, but sometimes other custom plugins haven’t been updated to work with the new core release at the time. Your average client user logs in and sees the message “Update your WordPress now” and innocently clicks the “automatic upgrade” button. Updating the core without updating the plugins can cause chaos, site breakage, and other nastiness. This plugin can prevent that by hiding those upgrade messages completely. Combine this plugin with one that reminds the developer to do an update test on a separate development site works well to keep things updated without the possibility of accidental breakage.

Twitter for WordPress

Author: Ricardo González
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/

Why I like it:
Twitter for WordPress allows easy integration of the Twitter feed for the business on the site. If you have a business with its own active Twitter account, this plugin can be a quick and easy way to simultaneously add updates to the site and online social networks, especially if used in conjunction with a social network aggregator. It can also be customized and styled. To see an example of this, check out the bottom of the Eli Kirk homepage (the birds on the fence).

Stop IE6

Author: Alen Cvitkovic
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-ie6/

Why I like it:
This entry may get me into some trouble, partially because of its intentional snarkiness and partially out of “disrespect for the dead.” First of all, I would never add this plugin to a client site unless they requested it, but I proudly fly the banner on my personal blog. Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been the bane of most developers’ existences since its official release in 2001. Pre-packaged with many Windows Operating Systems, users of the browser were slow to adapt and upgrade, depsite the fact that 99.9% of web browsers are free. It handled styles differently from other browsers, which proponents of Microsoft web technology claim was a better way of doing things (see: IE Box Model Bug), but the fact that other browsers were quicker to adapt to updated trends in coding and styles, combined with the lengthy time it took IE6 users to upgrade, made it the most frustrating browser on the market to develop sites for. In an effort to help end-users realize that there were much better browsers out there, including IE 7, 8 and 9 (despite their own flaws), this plugin detects when a user is using an inferior browser and not-so-subtely lets them know that they’ll need to upgrade to proceed. With IE6 officially being laid to rest and IE 9 shipping with Windows 7 by default, its only a matter of time before the plugin is updated to target the next biggest offender, Internet Explorer 7.