Aftere revamping my site a month ago, updating an old plugin of mine and writing a new one, I decided to take a look at the various plugins out there that could make my life using WordPress even easier than it already is. Here are the plugins that I settled on:

  • Collapsible Archive Widget: After running this blog for six years, the monthly archive that the wordpress sidebar widget generates started to be quite long. With this new plugin, archives can be collapsed into monthly and yearly groups.
  • Contact Form 7: This plugin is great to easily add a contact page to a site.
  • Flexi Pages Widget: Excluding pages that I did not want to see listed in the default Pages widgets started to get really annoying. This Pages Widget replacement makes it very easy to pick pages to display from a list.
  • Flickr Manager: After using Flickr manually for many years to host the images that I post to this blog, I found this handy plugin that automates the task of uploading pictures to Flickr and then including them in my posts.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress: Very simple in nature, this plugins add the necessary code so that hits on your site can counted on Google Analytics. I installed this one after I forgot to put the code back when I changed my theme.
  • Add to Any: A plugin that adds a menu onto my post pages so that you can easily e-mail someone or save off an interesting article that you read.
  • WPtouch: A plugin that will display a nicely formatted iPhone / iPod Touch version of the site to people visiting using safari on the these devices.

You might find some of these plugins very useful yourself.