I’ve been away from fiddyp for a while but not away from wordpress as I’ve been working really hard on some WP based sites that have turned out pretty well using WP as a CMS combined with some useful and custom plugins.

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with some customized templates and a bit of hacking the code here and there so I thought I’d list some of the useful tools I work with to make life a little bit easier.

Cforms II

This is a really easy plugin to use straight out of the box just by entering <!–cforms–> onto a post or page where you want the contact form to appear.

Select which fields you want in the options page and you can’t get a simpler contact form made on WordPress!

It can be used in a more complex way too, it has options for AJAX, custom fields and even a file upload function. Get into the code some more and there are ways to generate custom contact forms within the wordpress template code so for example, you could generate a “request more information on this product” form on a product listing which has the product code automatically inserted as a hidden field which will be sent along with the contacts details and message.

You can read more about Cforms II and download the latest version at
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

It works well and is constantly being updated with new features and options.

Search Everything

This is a useful plugin if you use custom fields in your posts that need to be searchable, this plugin can be configured to search all different parts of your WP content.

* * Search Every Page
* * Search Every Tag
* * Search Every Category
* * Search non-password protected pages only
* * Search Every Comment
* * Search only approved comments
* * Search Every Draft
* * Search Every Excerpt
* * Search Every Attachment
* * Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
* * Exclude Posts from search
* * Exclude Categories from search

You can download it from the authors page http://dancameron.org/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/search-everything-wordpress-plugin

Fluency Admin

This plugin will completely change the look of your admin dashboard. It looks wonderful in Firefox and gives a much more proffesional look to the dashboard. I like to put this on sites that have been developed as a simple CMS or mainly static content. Create an author account and give that to the client, they’ll log in to a nice looking dashboard and have access just for managing posts.

You can see more screenshots (plus one below) and download the plugin here
http://deanjrobinson.com/projects/fluency-admin/

Dashboard Editor

This is another useful one for improving the clients experience, it allows you to remove any and all of the items you usually see when you first log in to the dashboard.

You can enter your own html and widgets which is really usefull for putting up instructions and videos for your client to use (see the enlargement of the picture)

You can download it from here
http://anthologyoi.com/plugins

I guess I should have shown you this one first because it makes the installation of plugins and themes so so so much easier!

Once installed and activated, you can install new plugins simply by pasting the url to the download location into the box of the plugin page, choose if it’s a theme or plugin and it’ll pop off and download and extract the zip file to the correct location leaving you only needing to activate the new plugin.

Even easier is using the plugin with a firefox extension which lets you right click a plugin download link in your browser and choose to install it direct to your wordpress site (provided you set the url to your site in the addon options)

You can download it here
http://anirudhsanjeev.org/oneclick-plugin/

Instant Upgrade

This plugin will take all the pain out of upgrading your WordPress version, it’s always a good idea to back up fully before doing any upgrade but this plugin takes all the pain out of deleting your wp files and updating with the new version. I’ve managed to upgrade all the way from 2.0 with this without any problems..

You can download the plugin here
http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade/

That’s it, my list of plugins that always get installed on a new WP install if I’m designing for a client. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll find one or two of them useful..