Plugins We Use

WPCandy packs a ton of features and content into its single-installation site. Naturally, we’ve had to rely on a large set of plugins to give the site its fluid functionality. Here’s what’s currently helping to power our site.

Batch Categories

We used this plugin heavily while re-organizing the posts on our site. Instead of editing each post’s category manually we were to move multiple posts at a time quite easily. We still had to do all the .htaccess rewriting ourselves, though.

Category Selector Back to the Sidebar

This simple plugin puts the category selector back under the Save and Publish buttons when writing a post.

cforms II

cforms powers the forms on our site on both the Submit and Contact pages. We also use its awesome tracking feature to let any admin see the latest submissions from the WordPress admin.

Content Extract Plugin

This plugin helps us manage the HTML formatting of the excerpts in the “Featured” boxes on both the home page and the Plugins pages.

Custom Login Logo

This is our own little plugin that lets you change the login page’s logo in two steps. It’s available for a free download from our site.

DagonDesign.com Sitemap Generator

This plugin powers our site’s site map.

ExecPHP Plugin

The ExecPHP plugin allows us to execute PHP within our posts and pages from the WordPress post editor.

Feed Count

Keeps our Advertise page’s feed stat up to date.

Feed Footer

Adds a single banner ad to our posts in feed readers. This ad spot might still be for sale.

Flash Video Player Plugin

Flash video player for a certain easter egg video on the site…

Got Banners

Manages our site’s banner ads ads and randomizes their display order.

Lighter Menus

This one is for the admin. It moves the navigation to the top and lists the subpages in dropdown menus, making for much easier navigation.

Maintenance Mode

It may not be as secure and advanced as Apple’s tactics, but the Maintenance Mode plugin helped keep the new site under wraps throughout the two months of development on two different servers. Now we use it when making larger changes to the site and doing routine maintenance.

Post Ideas

Helps us to keep track of any ideas our genius authors come up with for future posts.

Pre-Publish Reminders

Adds a set of reminders to the new post page for Mike so he doesn’t screw up the site. ;)

Related Entries

Powers the Related Posts section beside an article. We took the time to tag all of our articles so it’d work, so hopefully some peple are using it. We’ve also modified the plugin a bit to work better with our unique site setup.

Reveal IDs

Puts the post, category, page, and link IDs back on the manage pages so we can see them.

Simply Exclude

Manages a few categorial excludes for feeds, archives, etc.

Sociable

Lets us and our readers share the site with the rest of the world’s nerd community.

Top Level Category

Simply hides the ‘/category/’ from the URLs. We needed this because the posts are organized into parent categories for the different sections of the site and it makes our URLs look pretty. Because Dan pushed for this, we also manually rewrote some 150 URLs in the .htaccess file and are anticipating on finding a plugin that could have automated the process very, very soon.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade

Automatically upgrades our WordPress installation when a new version is available.

AJAX Edit Comments

Spiffy comment editing, approving, spamming, and deleting for our admins.

WPhone

Dan has an iPhone so he uses this plugin to iPhoneitize the WordPress admin during those rare times he ventures away from his desk.

WP-PageNavi

Adds the pagination bar to the bottom of the archives.

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16 Responses to Plugins We Use

  1. yamaniac says:

    Most people dont give out wht plugins they use on their site. But you have…. Thanks for sharin! :)

  2. Thanks for pointing out Lighter Menus, makes navigation and speed so much better.

    Carry on.

    James

  3. @James: You’re welcome! Lighter Menus has recently become one of my favorite plugins. It really does make navigating through the admin a whole lot easier.

  4. I’ve updated this post with almost 15 plugins we’ve installed since launch. It’s amazing how many there are out there and how much the functionality of WP can be expanded.

  5. Rebecca says:

    What an awesome list – I’m going to try out a few. Do you have any recommendations for your favorite photo gallery plugin? Is the content extractor a good replacement for the excerpt reloaded plugin? One other plugin you didn’t mention but that I’ve come to love is the Ozh absolute comments plugin that lets you reply to comments from the admin area.

  6. Dere Otu says:

    oww! great theme.i want to this theme.im downloading now. thanks…

  7. Great lists of pluggins. will def use some of them on our site. Appreciate this list, really helpful.

  8. Nimroy says:

    WPhone an WP-Pagenavi have the same URL.

  9. I have a similar page at my website showing my installed plugins.

    http://www.gahlon.se/plugins

  10. TheFrosty says:

    ooh, we use a lot of the same plugins, cool!

  11. [...] http://wpcandy.com/plugins/plugins-we-use.html This entry was written by Kegan Ball, posted on November 22, 2008 at 1:17 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback. « previous post [...]

  12. Shaun says:

    Is the Pre-Publish Reminders plugin discontinued? I can’t seem to find it on the link provided?

  13. Patrick says:

    Very cool. I need to check a few of these out. Here are some of the plugins I’m using, myself: http://enterventure.com/blog/resources/.

  14. great plugins. I need to check them out for sure.

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