WordPress plugins that will save your life

Remember! Clients are not developers!!!

As a developer, it’s second nature when working on our own personal projects to drop in a little hard coded stuff here and there. We know what it does and how to amend it when we want but, clients are not developers so they need the easiest way of updating content and get good use use of site functionality through WordPress via the admin panel without touching a line of code.

I have compiled below a few life savers to help you along when a client requires some complex solutions which are not native to WordPress.

Smart WYSIWYG Blocks of content

This is a really handy plug-in widget which enables site admins/authors to create a custom content area. In the Smart WYSIWYG Blocks of content settings panel you simply create a new content block and give it a name. A small WYSIWYG editor will open and from there you can input your content and save it. You can create as many of these blocks as you like. You then go to the widgets area in the admin section and drag the widget into your chosen widgetized sidebar and inside the widget there is a drop down list of all the blocks of content you created. Choose one of them, save the widget settings and you are done.

Download link: Smart WYSIWYG Blocks of content
Requires: WordPress 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.1.4

Display Widgets

This widget enables ‘page by page’ implementation of sidebar content widgets. It avoids the need for lots of multiple sidebars and templates which could confuse someone new to WordPress and those who are not technical types.

It ‘hooks’ on to your installed plugins/widgets by putting a drop down menu and a series of check boxes inside those widget you already have installed. You can simply decide which pages a specified piece of sidebar content will display just by ticking and un-ticking boxes.

Download link: Display Widgets
Requires: WordPress 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1

Image Widget

Great for inserting custom text and image boxes into a sidebar of a wordpress site.
Just drag a widget into a sidebar then browse/upload an image and add some text – very simple. This also works well with the Display widgets plug-in mentioned above.

Download link: Image Widget
Requires: WordPress 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.1.4

Easing Slider

I have tried out numerous image slider plug ins and this was by far the best. It’s very simple to use as you just browse and upload an image which inserts it into the slideshow. It is fully customizable and components within the slider can be moved around/switched off in the admin panel. It has a large array of transitional effects and can be made to display images of any size. It features pipped navigation, previous and next controls (optional).
The only caveat I found with this was that you can only upload a maximum of 10 images. It has its own section within the admin panel and everything relating to this plug in can be set and configured within this section.

Download link: Easing Slider
Requires: WordPress 2.9.2 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1

Kimili Flash Embed for WordPress

Back in the old days it was pretty ‘hacky’ trying to embed flash content into a WordPress site. Kimili Flash Embed for WordPress does it very very easily. It’s simply a matter of installing the plugin and inserting a short code into a post or page linking to the flash file and it’s done. There are plenty of options to tweak also in the plugins own admin section.

Download link: Kimili Flash Embed for WordPress
Requires: WordPress 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.1.4

Hierarchical Pages Widget

This is a real kicker! How many times have you searched for a plugin or code snippet to get 2nd level sub menu navigation to appear in a sidebar? I bet it’s a lot and many solutions don’t do what you want or need.

The Hierarchical Pages Widget enables child navigation to sit in your sidebar. For example, we could have an ‘About Us’ link in the horizontal main navigation, when that link is clicked it takes us to an ‘About Us’ page which has a sub menu in the sidebar. The sub menu would have all the children of ‘About Us’ in this sidebar menu. Clicking on any of these sidebar items would then reveal and child elements these item may have. It’s a real life saver as it supports deep level navigation over 5 levels deep!

Download link: Hierarchical Pages Widget
Requires: WordPress 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1

I have tested all of these plugins on the latest version of WordPress (at the time of writing 3.2.1) and they all worked flawlessly. But be aware as always of what version of WordPress you are running against the plugin version.

Have fun!!