WordPress Plugins we Often Use
Preserved from the old Uncharted Design blog for nostalgia. This is old web-business advice, not current guidance.
On every WordPress site we draft up, we'll need to extend the basic functionality. It's a great system, but it isn't intended to provide a full website out of the box. We use these free plugins to kick it up a notch, hopefully you'll find one of our magic bullets useful.
Exclude Pages from Menu
Each page will have a check-box that defaults to including it in the user's menus. But when you have a page that you'd rather not be in the main navigation, this will quickly remove it.
Dragon Design Sitemap
A simple, friendly map of your site is useful for both users and search engines. There are a lot of them out there, but this is simple and flexible. To go further, you can create a sitemap just for search engines with Karailiev's sitemap.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a great plug-in for building a quick customizable contact form. You can create your own fields, drop downs, radio buttons or anything else you need and it works flawlessly. This means coding an entire contact form can be reserved for working on a very custom project.
Role Manager
When you present your site to a client, you may want to give them access to just the essentials. You may also want to create a new class of user that differs from the generic WordPress standard user classes, and Role manager gives you control over these very specific attributes.
WP-DB-Backup
We use this to schedule database backups which are emailed directly to a gmail account where they are filed away. We haven't needed it yet, but being able to resurrect the dead is a pretty good skill.
Search Unleashed
Extend the search plug-in utility with increased ability, and improve the presentation of the results. Search Unleashed allows for highlighting and customizing your search index which is very nice for quickly evaluating if you found what you were looking for.
Page Links To
Useful for linking to non-WordPress pages, but integrating them into your dynamic menus.
Insensitive
Insensitive simplifies the login process by allowing usernames to become not case sensitive. Simple but appreciated.
d13slideshow
This image carousel plug-in works very well and we have used it on a number of projects. In customizing it for our own purposes we ended up adding a feature to the plugin available today.
pageMash
Ajax goodness to let you move pages around. Makes creating submenus much easier.