My Favorite WordPress Plugins

The abundance of “Top Ten” Lists of WordPress Plugins helps reinforce those plugins that are extremely necessary; like the All In One SEO plugin, or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. However, my most essential plugins are never listed. So, while some of the following may not be as sexy as the Increase Your Traffic By 2000% plugin, they do come in extremely handy.

Broken Links Checker plugin by Janis Elsts. Aptly named; once installed, an administrative panel in the WordPress Dashboard displays broken links found within your content.

Nice Search by Mark Jaquith. Takes your ugly search URI (/?s=search-term) and makes it pretty (/search/search-term). I am a big fan of human-readable, hackable URLs.

Improved Include by Vito Tardia. My buddy, Paul, taught me this trick first day on the job: Let’s say you have a complex homepage with three columns of separate content. Laying out this page in HTML/CSS is easy… unless you need the client to be able to change the content. Just make separate pages to hold the specific content and use Improved Include to pull that content in:

Of course there are a lot more uses for this, but I’ll leave that for you to discover. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article on WordPress plugins, and maybe even learned a thing or two. What are your favorite, unknown WordPress plugins?