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After reading Blueprint Design Studio’s blog post Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins I started to ponder what other plugins I would add to their list. At Oxeye Daisy we have used WordPress as a content management system for a few clients. Nothing comes close to it’s ease of use and simplicity to install and maintain. We’ve looked at ‘proper’ CMSs but they are generally over the top for our customers needs.

So, here are our additions:

Role Manager

Useful for hiding all the more complicated admin options. We tend to use it for preventing page deletions of top level site pages, things that may make the site unusable if allowed.

Flexible Upload

The biggest problem we generally encounter with WordPress is how it handles images. This plugin removes the reliance on customers learning to resize images themselves. We tend to use a modified version of this plugin which prevents anyone but the admin user from being able to change the image size settings. Image size is generally part of the site design and not generally something to be changed willy-nilly.

wpSEO

An invaluable plugin for optimising page titles which helps with search engines. This separates what appears in the browser title bar on a page from what is used as its button name in the navigation. Also allows for adding of keywords.

Dashboard Editor

Used for tidying the WordPress Dashboard. We remove the WordPress Planet feeds and put in a simple menu to direct customers to the admin pages they will most like use, like page editing or updating their profile. Removing the feeds also makes the admin load a lot faster.