Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

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

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.

Cforms II - 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 delicious days
WP e-Commerce - 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 Instinct Entertainment
Search Everything - 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 Dan Cameron
Google Sitemap Generator - 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 Arne Brachhold
Subscribe2 - 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. plugin homepage
Event Calendar 3 - 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 Alex Tingle
Page Links To - 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 Mark Jaquith
TinyMCE Advanced - 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. plugin homepage
XSPF_Player - 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 Boriel
pageMash - 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 Joel Starnes

Bigger than Plugins:

DFGallery by Dezinerfolio 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.

WP Contact Manager by The Design Canopy 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 microformat support, easier installation, and eventually the ability to use it as a paid-inclusion directory:

160 Responses to “Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins”

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

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

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

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

IMHO the Yahoo Media Player, 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
Sharon Hurley Hall 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
Mikael 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
Adam Kayce 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
Welcome to Paradise said:

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

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

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
Sander 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
Missy 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
tartanproject 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
Christina Fowler 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
Najam said:

Nice list, but I wish if there is any plugin for social networking……
On March 15th, 2008 at 5:23
Jan 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. Share This 1.4 (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.

Sociable 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
Sara said:

Here’s the ones I’d add:

Gallery2, http://gallery.menalto.com, is a great free opensource piece of software for gallery sites; combined with the Wordpress plugin WPG2, http://wpg2.galleryembedded.com , it’s a pretty impressive way to incorporate a photo gallery into your site.

Yet Another Photoblog, http://johannes.jarolim.com/blog/wordpress/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. http://www.vtardia.com/blog/improved-include-page/

Lester Chan writes great plugins: . I use his WP-PostRatings and WP-Polls a fair amount. http://lesterchan.net/wordpress.

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
Mike Huang said:

Thanks for the list of these great plugins

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

I recently switched from the XSPF Player to the JW Media Player: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=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?
http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/wordpress/30/
On March 18th, 2008 at 5:44
Pete White said:

Have you tried the Comment Luv plugin, it has to be one of the best for Wordpress

http://www.commentluv.com
On March 18th, 2008 at 11:21
Adam Freetly 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
lukep 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
blacksnoopy said:

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

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

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

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

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

thumbs up
thank you
On April 15th, 2008 at 5:19
Website Promotion 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
Website Design 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
ant said:

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

Bookmarked for sure
On May 25th, 2008 at 1:11
Olaf 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
Sueblimely 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
diana 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
Dan Milward said:

Hey guys. Thanks for posting about our WP e-Commerce plugin!!!

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
Ramon Thomas 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 Moset Tree, the Joomla Directory plugin (commercial).
On June 23rd, 2008 at 6:16
Jason 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
Htoo Tay Zar said:

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

http://www.themedreamer.com/demos
On July 18th, 2008 at 11:49
speedybiz 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
David Mackey said:

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

Great list. I’m especially happy about the site map plug in!
On September 21st, 2008 at 5:29
Velvet Blues 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
Wordpress CMS Blog 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
Aaron 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
James 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
Aleem 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
Photographion said:

Thank you.
On December 30th, 2008 at 10:43
Woo 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:
http://interactivewoo.com/2008/11/21/top-10-most-useful-wordpress-plugins-plus-a-few-more/