Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

Posted in Web Design News, Web Design Tutorials, wordpress by Adam Freetly | Mar 13, 2008

Adam was trained as an architect, spending 5 years designing buildings before turning his web design hobby into professional expertise, working for Blueprint Design Studio. He has been active in the WordPressâ„¢ community for the past 2 years, building open source templates, and providing technical support.

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:

209 Responses to “Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins”

On March 13th, 2008 at 7:26
said:

Nice list there.
On March 13th, 2008 at 8:51
said:

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

sweet list. thanks heaps for linking.
On March 13th, 2008 at 9:12
said:

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

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!
On March 13th, 2008 at 11:28
said:

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

@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.
On March 14th, 2008 at 4:42
said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
On March 14th, 2008 at 9:44
said:

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.
On March 14th, 2008 at 10:49
said:

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.
On March 14th, 2008 at 2:02
said:

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.
On March 14th, 2008 at 3:43
said:

What a fantastic list! I already use CForms II and Search Everything for my clients but the rest are really great!
On March 15th, 2008 at 3:50
said:

Nice list, but I wish if there is any plugin for social networking……
On March 15th, 2008 at 5:23
said:

Nice post, found TinyMCE Advanced by this. Thanks
On March 15th, 2008 at 8:20
adam said:

@ najam –
I wish there were one i could heartily recommend. (later versions phone home to sharethis.org) is the most useful to people who know what they’re doing, but doesn’t really explain what it is.

is a little better, but it’s still very much only for people who already know what the icons are for. In general, I just code social bookmarking into the theme.
On March 15th, 2008 at 2:45
said:

Here’s the ones I’d add:

Gallery2, , is a great free opensource piece of software for gallery sites; combined with the Wordpress plugin WPG2, , it’s a pretty impressive way to incorporate a photo gallery into your site.

Yet Another Photoblog, , is another really strong photo-oriented plugin. I like it because it associates signature photos with pages and posts, and includes thumbnails in archive lists. Sweet!

Vito Tardia’s iinclude page has made managing pages on my website easier, as I can create different css sections on one html page and manage each section individually as a Wordpress page.

Lester Chan writes great plugins: . I use his WP-PostRatings and WP-Polls a fair amount. .

I have also had enormous success working with programmers who specialize in writing wordpress plugins to adapt sites for e-commerce, for republishing html versions of books, and for operating contests online. It’s an awesome, international, talented community! I feel lucky to be a part of it.

Thanks so much for your list and for the chance to share.
On March 15th, 2008 at 3:29
said:

Thanks for the list of these great plugins

-Mike
On March 17th, 2008 at 11:54
said:

I recently switched from the XSPF Player to the JW Media Player:

It’s more of a personal preference thing I guess, but worth checking out if you include a lot of audio/video on your sites.
On March 17th, 2008 at 12:03
adam said:

@ Dan –
The JW player looks interesting, although the CC licence would be problematic for many of our clients. I’ll keep it in mind for our NFP clients, though, thanks!
On March 18th, 2008 at 4:24
Poster said:

Fold Page List?
On March 18th, 2008 at 5:44
said:

Have you tried the Comment Luv plugin, it has to be one of the best for Wordpress
On March 18th, 2008 at 11:21
said:

Fold page list is an old (1.5 era) plugin. the Walker class now makes all of that possible via CSS. Comment luv isn’t really applicable to non-blog uses of wordpress, which is the context of this post.
On March 19th, 2008 at 11:45
said:

Wow
Very Usefull!!!
Thank you.
On March 21st, 2008 at 9:20
said:

Yeah this is a nice list! Straight to the point. Wordpress is a great CMS platform, it’ll probably only get way better too over the next couple years.
On March 24th, 2008 at 5:15
said:

Thank you !
On March 26th, 2008 at 5:44
said:

great collection. it couldn’t come at a better time for me.

my thanks to you.
On March 30th, 2008 at 3:05
said:

A very good plugin list, defenately!
On March 31st, 2008 at 4:51
said:

I just code social bookmarking into the theme.
On April 12th, 2008 at 9:15
said:

thumbs up
thank you
On April 15th, 2008 at 5:19
said:

Some amazing plug-ins, I am going to look at the e-commerce plugin. That looks incredible.
On May 5th, 2008 at 2:29
said:

Its good to have such list bcoz wordpress have thousands plugin. This list is really helpful. I specially like contact manager and tinymce advanced plugin- bcoz i dotn have awareness with that 2
On May 21st, 2008 at 7:10
said:

oh yes, this definitely gets a bookmark, great post
On May 21st, 2008 at 7:43
said:

Bookmarked for sure
On May 25th, 2008 at 1:11
said:

Interesting list, since there are too many plug-ins to test them all ! But I notice that the discussion above would have been more readable with a plug-in such as Commentag, have you heard of it ?

It really improves your comments, so that you can filter them easily and get eactly to the comments you care about.

Give it a try on commentag.com…
On May 30th, 2008 at 9:24
said:

Wonderful – I am creating my first CMS site using Wordpress and these plugins will come in extremely handy.
On June 5th, 2008 at 9:02
said:

Thanks a bunch! This is a very helpful list. I am going to try Event Calendar. I’ve been looking for something like that for a while now but have had trouble finding exactly the right thing. Thanks!!!
On June 8th, 2008 at 8:10
said:

Hey guys. Thanks for posting about our !!!

We’ve just released 3.6.5 which might interest some of you… a couple of nice new features have been added which you can read about in our forums.

Ciao,

Dan
On June 14th, 2008 at 12:05
said:

This is an awesome list. Even though I’m a long time Wordpress user there are plugins here I have not used yet.

Can you please recommend a Wordpress plugin that is similar to , the Joomla Directory plugin (commercial).
On June 23rd, 2008 at 6:16
said:

You forgot one that I use on my site: TreeMagic Cypress by AmbientWebs. Basically it allows you to double-click any word on your site and get a drop-down list. From the list, you can select the definition for the word, search it on Google, or any other query that you can possibly think of.
On June 30th, 2008 at 5:55
said:

Useful post for me who want to use wordpress as cms. Thanks
On July 5th, 2008 at 2:05
said:

Nice post, found TinyMCE Advanced by this. Thanks
On July 18th, 2008 at 3:12
steve said:

Not really a plugin as its is an extension to Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver users may want to try ThemeDreamer. You can edit your wordpress theme files like regular xhtml files.
On July 18th, 2008 at 11:49
said:

Thanks GOD, its so easy now to make better SEO & manageable site for my client than use static type html site.
On August 23rd, 2008 at 6:22
said:

Nice. But how about one that makes the front page static?
On August 26th, 2008 at 3:43
said:

Great list. I’m especially happy about the site map plug in!
On September 21st, 2008 at 5:29
said:

Good list, but we’re missing some SEO plugins such as Uberdose, the FCK Editor is easily the best WYSIWYG for WP… Also, there are some pretty nice comment plugins…

@david – You don’t need a plugin to make the front page static… What plugin are you referring to?

@steve – That’s a nice DreamWeaver add-on. I’d never heard of it. Of course, I always hand-code, but that will definitely help my do-it-yourself clients.
On September 26th, 2008 at 4:55
said:

Thanks for this wonderful list. One other plugin I suggest is the all in one SEO plugin, for clients who wish to get some search engine traffic.
On September 29th, 2008 at 1:32
said:

great list of plugs here IM LOOKING FORWARD LEARNING HOW TO USE PERM LINKS ANY HELP ABOUT THIS WOULD BE GREAT
On October 24th, 2008 at 11:02
said:

Good list of plugins. I had tried to make pages that link to external pages by changing the coding, but that plugin makes it a lot easier.
On October 24th, 2008 at 12:13
said:

Really Great List of Plugins i am going to put them on my blog.
Thank You So much
On November 16th, 2008 at 12:53
said:

Thank you.
On December 30th, 2008 at 10:43
said:

Great list! Three that I would include for blog performance are: WP Super Cache, Database Backup and SEO Pack. I know you focus on CMS but these are not to be missed.
My Top 10 Useful Wordpress plugins:
On January 6th, 2009 at 2:18
said:

that is just an amazing post , please keep up the good work and post more this year
On January 18th, 2009 at 7:23
said:

thank you very much
On February 23rd, 2009 at 6:21
said:

Hi there,

thank you for sharing this list. very helpful. Can you also suggest some productive Plugins? Maybe say something that can be helpful to the reader or something like that.

Cheers,
Eddie Gear
On February 27th, 2009 at 2:42
said:

Definitely going to check out WP E-commerce. Thanks for sharing.
On February 28th, 2009 at 8:41
said:

Thanks For Such nyc plugins List
On March 1st, 2009 at 2:05
said:

very interesting information
On March 5th, 2009 at 2:56
said:

cool stuff!
On March 21st, 2009 at 10:52
said:

Really great list of plugins, including some that I had not heard about before. I use a similar setup for many of my clients’ sites involving wordpress and much of the CMS functionality required to keep my clients happy (and make it a heck of a lot easier for me).
On April 3rd, 2009 at 7:21
D Mang said:

WP e-Commerce is always being updated. I am glad to see this development for Wordpress.
On April 7th, 2009 at 7:48
said:

WP E-commerce is a horrible plugin… MUCH better is the Shopp plugin — it actually works, it’s stable, and more fully featured. I am not an affiliate, just a happy user.
On April 16th, 2009 at 7:38
said:

Like the DFgallery. But i think there are more useful wordpress cms plugins.
On April 22nd, 2009 at 12:29
said:

very nice usefull list.. thx
On April 29th, 2009 at 11:14
said:

which งาน plugin is the best? I look at many website but it’s very simple plugin.
I prefer wordpress.
On May 2nd, 2009 at 5:42
said:

Excellent list. Found this just in time for my next project. Thanks!!!
On May 9th, 2009 at 10:54
said:

Nice list, but I prefer Market Theme to using wp-commerce. It suits my t-shirt site perfectly, whereas wp-ecommerce is really fiddly to use and requires purchase of the useful features like grid view.
On May 9th, 2009 at 11:37
said:

That is a great collection of the top 10 wordpress plugins!
On May 23rd, 2009 at 2:16
said:

Nice collection thanks for share with us.
On May 31st, 2009 at 10:48
said:

Great list! I’ll definitely be grabbing a few of those plugins.
On June 1st, 2009 at 1:52
said:

its really a wonderfull plugin, well done , keep it up
On June 8th, 2009 at 11:31
said:

Hi Dude,

Wonderful list. Great information.
On June 11th, 2009 at 6:36
JamesD said:

Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
On June 28th, 2009 at 1:04
said:

Excellent List, when it will be updated?
On June 30th, 2009 at 3:25
Jamie said:

My top 10 would include the linkbuilding plugin from IBL Builder, its getting me quite a few decent one way backlinks for my blog. Its on their homepage at
On July 8th, 2009 at 10:15
david said:

very good

but it would like great to see plugins to really manage contents !

for create our contents and publy it
On July 9th, 2009 at 5:03
said:

Great list! Thanks for that!
On July 11th, 2009 at 2:00
said:

Thanks for the list of CMS plugins.
I’m interested in using Wordpress as a CMS, so this info is very useful.
On July 21st, 2009 at 6:21
said:

Excellent List, I am looking for some more plugins .
On July 23rd, 2009 at 1:28
said:

Hi,

First of all thanks for providing a good list of plugins, dont you think you need to update the list as almost one and half year has been passed and some of the feature of listed plugins are already into wordpress default.
On August 5th, 2009 at 3:26
said:

Good list….thanks for sharing this post.
On August 12th, 2009 at 2:44
said:

Nice collections. I appreciate your work.
On August 17th, 2009 at 1:54
said:

I use WordPress for a kind of ‘book-like’ reference site. Your article was an invaluable starting point for extending my site. Thanks for this!
Meanwhile I have created my own description of all the plug-ins that I added over time. It can be found at