WordPress is the underlying platform for a lot of our website development. Alongside the base platform, there are thousands of plugins that make developing websites easier. We really love three of those plugins; they feature in many of our projects: All in one SEO, cforms, and improved include page.
All in one SEO
The all in one SEO plugin from Michael Torbert is first out of the box. A few small tweaks and it automates all our on site search engine optimisation. We’ve no complaints, and the search engine ratings for our clients have been impressive. We were even happy to pay for the Pro version!
cforms
When we need a contact form on our websites, we invariably turn to the cforms plugin. It’s the only plugin I know of that’s written by food bloggers. It’s also, for licencing reasons, excluded from the official WordPress plugin pages. Despite that, it’s one of the most popular plugins out there.
The feature set is very rich, although some of the customisations we’d like to make are sometimes difficult to implement. I’ve also just noticed that like all in one SEO, cforms is German in origin… Vorsprung durch Technik and all that.
Improved include page
Improved include page is a real help when we’re treating WordPress more like a Content Management System than a blog platform. It lets us easily include subpages of information. We typically use it for multiple column text, or dropping content into a sidebar. Improved include page (iinclude_page) was created by Italian developer Vito Tardia.
WordPress plugins
There are a lot of other great WordPress plugins of course. We’ve used BuddyPress in a number of projects, although don’t think of it as a plugin, and are quite excited by Twitter Widget Pro (which we use on the front page of 21 inspired). We are also looking forward to trying the Author Spotlight widget from Debashish Chakrabarty.
The WordPress image is courtesy of Jose Pardilla on DeviantArt. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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Skoro eto sluchitsya …
Improved include page sounds like a useful one. I didn't know about that one, and having the ability to easily include things in pages, and posts is sometimes needed. I create custom functions that do it, just don't have control of it in the dashboard. Thanks.
I prefer contact form 7 for forms. It is true that cforms can be styled better, has more options, but i want to keep things simple.