In my role as a web design consultant, I often need to do a fair amount of research into a specific client’s needs. In that research, I tend to come across a lot of really cool technology and parts of it that enhance a website in really useful ways.

As it seems WordPress is the talk of the web publishing world right now, I’m busy with a lot of WordPress related projects. I had to looks for some specific extensions for the system called Plugins. and in so doing, I came across some nifty addons that I’d like to share. Some I will use on client sites, some on my own, and others I’ll just keep a note of for future reference.

Google Sitemap Generator

This one was actually found in a search for a meta tag management plugin for WordPress, and although I discovered that there are other ways to solve the meta tag debarcle (another time), this one was a good find, and already on this site.

Sociable

This plugin gives you a huge selection of social websites that your visitors can use to share the content of your site/blog. I’ll integrate it into this site, but need to do some offline testing before it doesn’t post links below my intro blurb on the front page (my entire site is WordPress driven).

WordPress.com Stats

Now, don’t get me wrong, I use Google Analytics every day, as I believe it to be the most effective and easiest to use analytics software available. However, the WordPress.com (hosted WordPress) stats plugin gives you instant statistics in your dashboard which is handy and doesn’t require you to log into GA for a quick glance at your traffic.

CForms II

To me there is no debate over this being one of the most useful plugins for WordPress. Create, manage and edit your forms for your website. Publish them on pages, posts, whatever. Submit to email or a database. Built in AJAX form validation… etc.

Subscribe 2

Allow your visitors to subscribe to notifications of new posts and content. Even taking your content and sending an hourly, daily or weekly digest of your new additions. This one is really handy to keep those unfamiliar with RSS up to date via email.

Well, those are them. Some are almost essential (CForms & Google Sitemap Generator), while others are nice to haves that definitely won’t hurt.