Havoc Inspired

I seem to be developing a lot of Wordpress sites recently and thought I’d share with you 6 of the plugins I’ve been finding invaluable.

WP Dummy Content

If you’re building a theme for a brand new blog that doesn’t have any posts or pages it’s a nightmare having to create these one by one so that you have some content to work with.

WP Dummy Content to the rescue! It allows you to add any number of random posts of categories as well as pages, nicely filling up the site with content. And when you are done, there’s a delete all button that removes the dummy content (but not any posts or pages that you may have entered manually).

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dummy-content/

Redirection

If you’re migrating a site that was previously running on a different previous blogging platform, such as Movable Type, you may find that the URLs for your posts no longer match. Obviously you want to avoid dead links.

Instead of writing redirect rules directly into your .htaccess file, you can use the Redirection plugin to manage them.

You simply enter the old URL along with the new URL. Simple!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Improved Include Page

Thanks goes to Mr Stocks for suggesting this one to me. :-)

Improved Include Page lets you pull any pages content into another page. For example if you have an About page with three areas of content, one of the areas could be the content of the About page itself, and the other two could be split into sub-pages. You can then create a custom-template for the About page and use the Improved Include Page to pull them all together. Quite handy if you want to have something more diverse than a single block of content on your page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/improved-include-page/

Update URLs

If you’re like me, you’ll develop your sites in a client or development area before making them live. In Wordpress, URLs for your images in particular are hard coded into you posts/pages. Everything works fine until you make the site live, then you have to go through and update all your URLs?

Not with the Update URLs plugin!

Simple enter your development area URL:

http://clients.example.com/clientsite/

And the replacement URL:

http://www.clientsite.com

Click Update URLs and you’re done.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

Maintenance Mode

I’ve built sites for clients who want to write a few blogs and learn their way around Wordpress before they make the site live. The maintenance mode plugin is quite hand for this. You can activate the plugin and a splash screen appears to all visitors, logged in administrators still see the front-end of the site as normal.

You can even create a 503.php template so that you can customise the look and feel to your hearts content!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/

Scissors

Not really essential but the Scissors plugin adds the facility to resize, crop and rotates images. Much needed additional functionality for the media library in my book.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/

Any more?

Have you guys come across any additional plugins for wordpress that you just couldn’t live without?