I've been doing a lot of web site development lately, all of it based on using WordPress as a cms (Content management System). I've found that V2.0 of wordpress makes an excellent CMS if you just dig around for the right set of plugins to go with it. Lately, I've found the following set of plugins to be extremely useful and (for the most part) stable. I thought I'd share them with you.
Admin Advanced Drop Menus
WordPress's administrative pages use a simple hierarchical menu where you first choose the top level domain and then, after that page is loaded, you pick a specific topic page. This means bouncing around the menus is usually a two-page load process unless you happen to be going to the top of one of the menu domains. AdminAdvanced Drop Menus is a plugin that comes from YellowSwordfish.com and provides a Javascript based menu with drop down submenus. This makes bouncing around the administrative interface of WordPress much faster. While it does require you have to have Javascript enabled, it's worth it.
Counterize II
There are about a bazillion web site counter tools out there that can provide statistical information about who is coming to your site. The concept of “hits” vs “page loads” is often something that has to be resolved when using your Apache logs to gather the information. An alternative method is to embed a plugin that tracks the requeest as it happens. This is the method employed by Counterize II.
This plugin drops in like most other plugins to the WordPress plugins directory. Once activated, it adds an admin menu option next to the Dashboard. On the Counterize II admin page you get (once stats start piling up) a really nice set of graphs showing traffic patterns. You also get IP addresses of frequenet visitors and – and here's the real bonus, if you can figure out exactly how this can help your site – it includes links to a web site that maps the IP address on a world map for you! Very slick. This might be useful if you have a business doing international business or if you need to tailor your site by languages. Another very slick feature is the list of queries run against your site. You can see how people got here with their google search, for example. That let's you know what products are hot or what topics in your blog are of interest to visitors. I'm really quite fascinated with this particular plugin's potential.
Simple Forum
If you run WordPress as a CMS then you may not be using the user features (login/logout, roles, etc.). You might only have administrative logins for the site. So how do you allow discussion on the site? You could place the blog features on their own page and allow registered users to blog as usual. But blogging is a little less organized than you might like. You'd rather have specific forums that you allow discussions on specific topics, Well, you can get precisely this with Simple Forum.
This is another plugin from YellowSwordfish.com (re: Andy Staines). It provides forums on their own page, where visitors to your site can “subscriber” to the forum to post. Subscribers to the forum are separate from the WordPress users, so there isn't any conflict with using the latter as administrative users only. Setup and use of the forums is extremely simple and the layout is rather nice too (you can see it in use on the authors own web site).
Popup Image Gallery
Most image galleries I've found are pretty weak or are too fancy. The latter type all seem to offer support for LightBox displays. I use one of these, photoshow, on my gimp Galleries. Photoshow is nice because it generates the entire gallery and HTML for you. You pretty much just need to upload the original images to a directory and let Photoshow do the rest.
But Photoshow and galleries like it are a bit heavy for some of the sites I work on. In many cases, the site's owner just wants to show a few images in thumbnails next to a larger version that changes depending on which thumbnail is selected. I've written a PHP gallery that does this sort of thing but never integrated it with WordPress. But then this weekend I found the Popup Image Gallery. Problem solved.
This plugin comes from the same guy who did the Advanced Menus and Simple Forum plugins (he's on a roll, to say the least). I can zip up my originals, submit them using the PopupImage Gallery admin interface, and the gallery is automatically generated. After it's generated, I make minor adjustments to the appearance of the gallery, including adding captions to individual images. The gallery is associated with a specific page – a requirement for CMS styled web sites.
The plugin is very useful and quite stable, but it does have a few quirks. It sometimes creates thumbnails at the wrong size. If that happens, I delete the gallery and remake it. The gallery has a slideshow option that has mutliple effects (cross, slide, etc.) The effects work but seem to offset the intial image used in the effect slighlty which causes image jitter as the effect is played. Also, the slideshow comes with next, previous, play and stop buttons that are GIF images of round buttons with transparency – yuck. These need to be replaced with square buttons so they fit on any background, which is what I did. I had to modify the code slightly since I switched to JPEG images instead, but that only required finding the places in the code where the file was “something.gif” and change it to “something.jpg”. Not to difficult.
The real problem with this plugin is that it requires that the page id be used in the URL. If the page id is not used then the gallery doesn't know the page is associated with a specific gallery. This means the gallery cannot be used on static front pages since those get displayed without the pageid in the URL. A minor annoyance, but it is something I'd like to fix. The only way I know of fixing it is to add a field to the db table to mark a gallery as the front page and look for the page slug instead of the page id. Something like that.
WYSI-Wordpress
I used to use EditorMonkey as a WYSIWYG editor for WordPress but found that it loaded too slowly. EditorMonkey, like many such editors, relies on either the FCKEditor or TinyMCE as the underlying editor technology. EditorMonkey provided nearly every HTML feature you could ask for, including tables and horizontal rules. Unfortunately, EditorMonkey is no more – it's been dropped by it's author (perhaps he took it commercial or maybe he just lost interest). EditorMonkey had it's own way of uploading images that was separate from WordPress's uploads and that sometimes caused problems. Since many HTML features don't work quite right under WordPress anyway (has to do with how the CSS for the theme is written too) and because some features didn't display properly (I had problems working with lists at times), I decided it was time to find something else. That lead me to WYSI-Wordpress.
WYSI-Wordpress is also built on TinyMCE but it loads much faster than EditorMonkey even when the latter was in TinyMCE mode. Maybe this is just because of the limited icons that have to be loaded in the menu bar. In any case, it loads quickly. I've had no problems with lists, which is something I create quite a few of for web sites. I style the lists in various ways for pages so it's important that editing lists in pages is easy. The WYSIWYG display is very good too. I have no problems when working with images since they all get uploaded to the same place WordPress uses for uploads. I wish it supported tables and horizontal rules, however, though I can always enter the HTML editor and manually insert that code. All-in-all, WYSI-Wordpress is an excellent WYSIWYG replacement for the built-in WordPress editor.
I should note that V2.1 of WordPress is out now, but I can't recommend it just yet. I ran into some problems using it, especially with the plugins I'm using with 2.0. One of the problems had to do with using the SemiLogic Static Front Page plugin, where the front page no longer displayed. But I'm sure the plugin authors and WP developers will work these things out over time. Eventually, I'll migrate up to 2.1.