Friday, January 27, 2006

Top 50 Tools For The WordPress Admin

Running your WordPress blog can feel like a full-time job sometimes. We’ve compiled an A-Z list of more than 50 plugins to help you streamline everything you need to do out back. As with any plugins list, don’t install them all at once!

404 Notifier – Gives you a log of all your 404 errors so you can see why your readers are ending up on broken pages.Admin Dropdown Menus – Make your crowded admin panel menus neat and orderly by turning them into dropdown menus.

Admin Panel Comment Reply – Adds a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of the admin area.

Ajax Spell Checker – Uses a combination of dictionaries to check your posts.

Auto-hyperlink URLs – Gives you several options for having URLs automatically turn in to hyperlinks.

AWSOM Pixgallery – Designed to allow artists and webcomic creators to create a portfolio of their artwork.

Batch Categories – Adds a page to the category management, showing all the posts that belong to a category making it easier to add to another category, or when using an import tool from another blog.

Custom Admin Menu – Gives you the power to rename, hide or move just about anything you want in the admin area.

Custom Write Panel – Allows you to customize the “Write” panel of WordPress. Hide things you don’t need such as “Post Password” and add things you feel you may need.

Dashbar – Let admins have admin access while working in the frontend of the blog without having multiple windows open.

Dashboard Editor – Ever wanted to change the Dashboard to be more useful? This is the plugin you need.

DashNote – Adds a post-it note feature to the dashboard to jot down notes to yourself.

Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.

Domain Mirror – Will allow one WordPress install to be accessed from multiple domains and will even change the name and URLs based on the address people access it with.

Download Counter – Counts and tracks the downloads of all your files.

Email Users – This plugin allows you to mail registered users on your blog based on their role.

Enforce WWW Preference – Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www to make sure your search engine indexing is uniform.

Excerpt Editor – Gives you more control over the excerpts such as length and auto creation.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Make sure all your RSS feed sbscribers get counted along with the ones signed up via FeedBurner.

Fix Database – Will check your WordPress database for errors and attempt to fix them.

Genki Announcement – Allows you to add an announcement before your first post without editing your themes, can even run on a timer.

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder – Forget to set your categories before you publish? Write yourself a reminder!

Google Analyticator – Inserts Google Analytics on every WordPress page

Google Sitemaps Generator – Will create a Google compliant sitemap of your blog.

GT Post Approval – Adds “Approve” and “Reject” buttons to the administrators view on all posts, very handy for blogs with multiple authors.

Instant Update – Will handle the tedious chore of upgrading your WP install with just one-click.

Just Unzip – Upload a zip folder from the Write page; this plugin unzips the contents and associates them with the current post.

Khanh’s Instant Notepad (KIN) – Allows you to jot notes to yourself on a notepad.

Leprakhauns Word Count – Adds a Java powered word counter to your editing page, very useful for writers working to a word count on professional blogs.

Mass Post Manager – Allows you to move or delete all the posts in a category at once.

Mutliply – Allows you to control multiple blogs from one administrator.

NextGEN Gallery – Adds an image gallery to your control panel and can even add a flash gallery.

OneClick Install – Adds an extremely powerful uploader and installer for plugins and themes to WordPress, eliminates the need to unzip or FTP!

Page Link Manager – Allows you to easily rearrange pages, hide them, and move them at will.

Permacop – Allows you to redirect any URL to another.

Post2Page – Write a post that should really be on permanent display? Turn it in to a page with this plugin and have it handle the URL redirects to boot.

PlugInstaller – Point this plugin to a new plugin you want on the web, it takes care of obtaining it, uploading it and unpacking it.

podPress – Numerous features for bloggers wishing to add podcasts to their WordPress install. Previews, RSS feeds, adding cast to posts, and many, many more.

Search and Replace – Search all your posts at once for specified text, quickly replace it.

Share This – Adds multiple social bookmarking links and an e-mail-this function in one handy button.

Simple Pop-up Images – Add a thumbnail image to your post; when the user clicks on it, they get a larger pop-up of the picture.

Simple Tagging – Simplifies the tagging process to drop down menus, can import from your current tagging plugins.

Site Unavailable – Puts up a message your site is down, customize the message, all the while, the admins can still log in.

Throttle – Monitors your bandwidth and limits non-essential items during heavy load times to help performance.

Wikipedia-NoFollow – Written in response to Wikipedia’s implementing a “nofollow” rule to their outgoing links, a plugin to add nofollow to links you give to Wikipedia pages.

WordPress Mobile Edition – Strips your blog down for easy reading on phones and PDAs.

WordTube – Why use YouTube when you can host and stream your videos as you please? Includes a flash player.

WP Grins – Adds clickable smilies to both the administration area and comments section at once.

WPAds – Add rotating banner and text ads to any position you define in your blog.

WP-Custom Login – Allows you to modify the user login page logo to an image of your choice to allow you to brand your site more completely.

WP- DBManager – Gives you the power to optimize the database, back it up, restore, delete the backup database , drop emptied tables and run selected queries.

WP-phpMyAdmin – Gives you quick access to your PHP databases directly from the WP admin area without haveing to login to phpMyAdmin. Very handy.

WP Plugins Tracker – Will verify all of your plugins are the latest version by checking them against the wp-plugins-db.org database.

WP Super Edit – Gives you more control over the Visual editor including emoticons, layers, style attributes and more.

WP-Table – Allows you to add a table directly in the Visual mode or import from a spreadsheet. (via)