WordPress Plugins I Recommend

I’ve been developing MESMER.me and I’d like to share some plugins that I’ve found useful, but you may not have heard of…

Autoptimize and Quick Cache work together to speed up your site and ease the load on the server. I tried a few other plugins, including some that optimized and cached at the same time, but found them too complex to comprehend; these two work just fine.

BackUpWordpress and WP-DBManager do similar things, so why would I use both? WP-DBManager is excellent at scheduling database optimizing, repairs and backups, but it doesn’t backup the file system. I’d hate to lose invaluable themes and image uploads. So I installed BackUpWordpress, which schedules backups of the whole system, database and files. WP-DBManager keeps the database tidy, and BackUpWordpress saves it for me. Together they should keep me from running into any issues.

FD Feedburner Plugin - up until now, I’d heard of Feedburner, understood the advantages of tracking feed usage, but never went any further. Now I know how many people read via RSS. Feedburner also has an email subscription service which I encourage RSS-illiterate users to use (and it saves me from implementing yet another plugin).

Fluency Admin changes the administration side-menu into a hover-flyout, instead of a click-to-dropdown. It also improves other parts of the admin section, including making the All Posts screen easier to understand.

I hate seeing stuff I don’t want or need to see. WP Total Hacks lets me get rid of administration elements entirely and change the login logo, amongst many other things. It also lets me restrict the number of post Revisions saved, and configure Auto-Save. This plugin is all about removing built-in WordPress stuff.

There are tons of social bookmarking plugins out there. I went with Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share because it’s simple and gets the job done with minimal fuss.

WordPress Editorial Calendar gives me an overview of recent and scheduled posts, lets me re-schedule and easily select a date. It’s dovetailing with my goal of producing an article every day.