One of the great aspects about WordPress is its ability to do exactly what you want it to do with very little programming knowledge. Think of an interactive application you’d like to feature on your blog, and there is bound to be a plugin that will magically execute it. At the same time, it is time consuming to find the best and most up-to-date plugin for your needs – often there are more than one with the same functionality.
But not all plugin programmers are equal, so here are 5 Hostwire-tested plugins that will totally transform your blogging experience:
1. Dagon Design Form Mailer – Interactivity is the beauty of a blog, so on occasion, you may ask your readers to submit PDF, jpg or .doc files. You could always embed a simple mailto:spam@email.com in your blog, and your readers could attach their files to their email, but you are opening yourself up to a ridiculous amount of spam, and the attached files run the risk of becoming corrupted.
A cleaner, more user-friendly method of interactivity for both you and your readers is a WordPress plugin that gives readers the ability to upload files directly to your server. Contact Forms 7 has a really nice interface and is relatively user-friendly. In order for it to work, send an email to Hostwire.com customer support to change your server’s uploading permissions.
A much safer and easier-to-install plugin that allows your users to upload files to your server is the Dagon Design Form Mailer. After installing the plugin, it is relatively easy to configure as long as you READ carefully. If you are on deadline or multitasking, chances are you are going to make a silly mistake that will cost you more time than necessary to make the plugin function correctly. Click here for the very thorough, and well-written directions. We give this plugin a 7 out of 10 for Hostwire WordPress blogs – while most of the forms traveled successfully to our inbox, some were lost in Cyberspace. This was most likely due to users trying to upload files that were too large. If you don’t need this capability, we recommend Contact Forms 7.
2. Category Order. The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop. This plugin is quite handy when you want to re-arrange the navigation order of your categories because the timing of when you create them isn’t always the order you want them listed. Moreover, as you build your blog, some categories may become more important than the others, and this makes it easy to re-order them. We give this plugin a 10 out of 10.
3. FLV embed. This plugin makes it incredibly easy to embed an original .flv file (including YouTube) into a blog post or page. We give this plugin a 9 out of 10.
4. Post Sticky Status/WP-Sticky. This plugin will allow you to stick a particular post at the top of its category page permanently. That means all new content added to that category will appear AFTER your sticky post. Once you install it, a new menu will appear on the right hand side of your “Add New Post” admin area, with the options to make the post an “Announcement.” It’s easy to use, but you may want to check on these posts every once in a while because the sticky marked post isn’t sticky anymore when more posts are added a few days later. We give this plugin a 5 out of 10.
5. Get-a-Post. This plugin will allow you to feed the content of a particular post onto another page of the site by embedding a line of code in the theme template of where you want the content to appear. This can be a quick and dirty way of bringing in new elements to the homepage without having to mess with the template too much. We give this plugin a 6 out of 10.
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