Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. Of course, it does this best with the help of a good theme, and some great plugins. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost anything you can think of with it. Here are the best plugins we’ve run across, the ones we install for nearly all of our client’s sites.

- This is far and away the best contact form plugin there is. The reason? configurability. You can easy build literally anything with it. We’ve built out employment application forms, wedding checklists, and more for clients. It also drives our own quote form. There’s also built in spam protection, via question and answer or captcha. by
- Unlike cforms, this plugin has no competition. It provides an easy to manage storefront and shopping cart as an integral part of your wordpress installation. It includes the ability to sell digital downloads as well, which is great for photographers, musicians, and authors. By default it includes support for PayPal, although the $29.99 fee for the authorize.net module will pay for itself in lower fees for most serious e-Commerce sites. by
- Since most of the sites we develop focus more on their static content than on their blog posts, this plugin is essential for allowing users to search your entire site without leaving your site and relying on google. by
- The biggest benefit of using wordpress is the manual labor you save because the software already knows where all of your content is. This Plugin submits a comprehensive index of your site to google, yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com every time you update your site. It’s a huge boost to your site’s SEO. by
- Subscribe2 is a newsletter plugin for your site. It allows you to create newsletters and manage subscribers within your WordPress Dashboard. It also allows you to email subscribers when you post a blog entry, which allows you to have a permanent copy of the newsletter that you can refer people to.
- There are a ton of event plugins out there. This is the best & most integrated one we’ve used. It provides an iCal feed, in addition to the standard RSS feed. Since the events are created as Blog posts, it’s easy to integrate them into your site. by
- by far the simplest plugin on this list, This plugin allows you to create “pages” that link to something else. It’s the easiest way to add links to your main menu, without mucking around in code. It’s good for adding a link to an external photography portfolio, for example. You could also use it to link to sections of a page, rather than an entirely seperate page, which could be useful for linking to sections of a restaurant menu, or other small sections of a larger page. by
- I’ve posted a lot about using this plugin. It was referred to me by Jim Burke from TSG Real Estate, who needed a way to easily add classes to blockquotes, tables, and images. The plugin also does a great job of making tables work well with WordPress posts.
- As much as I’m not a fan of auto-playing music on websites, This MP3 player makes it easy to manage playlists, cover art, and artist links. It’s a great way for music venues to highlight upcoming shows. Used in conjunction with Event Calendar, you can make the track link lead to the post for their upcoming show, all of which is easily manageable from your wordpress dashboard. by
- I just posted about this, but it’s worth mentioning again. This plugin makes it very easy to put your pages in order, without having to edit every page individually. by

Bigger than Plugins:

provides an easy way to set up a flash slideshow without relying on flickr, or another external service. There’s not really an easy way to manage the photos, but we’ve used the gallery successfully for several clients.

is a great start on a project to make wordpress into a directory. It’s not just one plugin, it’s actually a series of plugins and a custom theme. While a public LDAP server would certainly make a better (and easier) contact manager, we’ve used the project to create vendor lists, and we’re working on building in support, easier installation, and eventually the ability to use it as a paid-inclusion directory:

Posted March 13, 2008 at 7:26

Nice list there.
Posted March 13, 2008 at 8:51

I like this list, saw a few new plugins which seems pretty useful.
Posted March 13, 2008 at 9:11

sweet list. thanks heaps for linking.
Posted March 13, 2008 at 9:12

I don’t know I think there are some other plugins that deserve some recognition for making WP a nice CMS.
Posted March 13, 2008 at 10:12

Awesome list, I was looking for a new e-commerce solution for my site (currently using Joomla/Virtuemart). I always wondered if someone was making one for Wordpress. Turns out they are! Awesome!
Posted March 13, 2008 at 11:28

IMHO the , which seems to be a better version of the del.icio.us mp3 playtagger is much prettier and works everywhere.
adam
Posted March 14, 2008 at 2:03

@jenny - yes, there are more plugins, but these are the ones that we A) are the most universal B) are the easiest to explain to our clients.

@ia - yes, the the Y! player is prettier, but both it and the del.icio.us player require much more special formatting by the user, rather than just managing playlists in the backend.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 4:42

Great list - just what I’ve been looking for. I am definitely going to use PageMash.
Charles
Posted March 14, 2008 at 6:22

Great list! Thanks for very useful information. You’ve helped to greatly improve the quality and functionality of my sites.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 6:45

Yes, this is a helpful list, although I would like to see a bigger list. I’m a list-freak. Why not top 50?
Posted March 14, 2008 at 7:52

Very interesting list… some I know, some I use, and others are brand new to me.

Thanks for compiling them in one place.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 8:09

These are really great pluggins. I just loved them. Thanks for this article.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 9:41

Excellent list- thanks!
What do you think about Peter’s custom anti-spam? I love having anti-spam phrases that are site relevant.

I think one of the up and coming questions we need to consider in WP plugins is: What’s the effect on page load time? Because Google is now taking page load into account for Adwords and SEO. I blogged about it here:http://www.1goodreason.com/blog/2008/03/10/big-changes-affecting-every-website/

Thanks,
Chris
Posted March 14, 2008 at 9:44

Thanks for compiling this great list. I’m just working my way around to create a commercial website wordpress based. I can recommend using wordpress as a CMS. Good luck.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 10:49

The ecommerce, pagemash, and the audio player plugins all look cool. Hopefully they are not to complicated to install or manage.

Thanxs for the heads up on these.

Missy.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 2:02

Hi,

nice article, and rather useful too. Altough if you know php and have any idea about mysql - it’s always better to code thigs in - this way you don’t have to deal with all those filters every plugin is attached to.

a.
Posted March 14, 2008 at 3:43

What a fantastic list! I already use CForms II and Search Everything for my clients but the rest are really great!

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