Essential WordPress Plugins & Themes

Mainly for my own reference, but I thought others might find this useful: these are the WordPress plugins I use often and/or rely on. Last updated: 13th August, 2012

Themes

  • Elegant Themes – A huge selection of great-looking themes. Premium, so they’ll cost you, but well worth it.
  • Thesis – The Thesis Theme framework is a premium template system for WordPress that is designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website.
  • Bootstrap – A WordPress Theme based on Bootstrap, from Twitter. It features a 100% responsive layout, a superb gallery and image handling with a custom image meta widget and carousel for gallery post-formats.

Security

  • Better WP Security – The easiest, most effective way to secure WordPress. Improve the security of any WordPress site in seconds.
  • WordPress Firewall 2 – This WordPress plugin monitors web requests to identify and stop the most obvious attacks.
  • Exploit Scanner – Search the files and database of your WordPress install for signs that may indicate that it has fallen victim to malicious hackers.

Maintenance

  • BackWPup – Schedule comprehensive WordPress backups to Dropbox, Amazon S3, e-mail, FTP and more…
  • Private Only – Redirects all non-logged in users to login form.
  • Maintenance Mode – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance.

Performance

  • WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

Troubleshooting/Development

  • Cron View – Allows you to view all WP Cron events. Handy for development.
  • Active Plugins – Generates a list of plugins that are currently in use, on Multisite.

Feature Plugins

  • Events Manager – Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, booking management.
  • Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. Includes widgets for Analytics data display.
  • ©Feed – Extends the feed at copyright, a digital fingerprint, IP of feed-reader, comments, related posts! Search for content theft and many more features.
  • Admin Menu Editor – Lets you edit the WordPress admin menu. You can re-order, hide or rename menus, add custom menus and more.
  • Members – A user, role, and content management plugin that makes WordPress a more powerful CMS.
  • DoFollow – The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments. Because nofollow will not work.
  • Fancy Gallery – Fancy Gallery associates linked images and galleries with the jQuery Fancybox.
  • Geo Tag – This plugin adds location information to your posts and pages.
  • Gravity Forms – Easily create web forms and manage form entries within the WordPress admin.
  • Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments allows commenters on an entry to subscribe to e-mail notifications for subsequent comments.
  • TBM Pretty Tables – A nice plugin for creating attractive tables with little effort.

Miscellaneous

  • Disable Pointers – Disable the pointers (tooltips) introduced to admin screens in WordPress 3.3.
  • Widget Logic – Widget Logic lets you control on which pages widgets appear using WP’s conditional tags. It also adds a ‘widget_content’ filter.
  • Moderation stop words – A list of words that you can use to force pre-moderation of potentially spam/offensive comments.
  • Moderation blacklist words – A list of words that will trigger a comment to be immediately marked as spam.

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