Top-notch Wordpress plugins and hacks.

A run down of some of our favourite Wordpress plugins, hacks and functionality.

Hench ♥ Wordpress.

At Hench we’re massive fans of Wordpress. In fact, the majority of our client sites are built on the Wordpress platform. Why? Well for one thing Wordpress is free, so the saving is passed directly on to our client.

But we don’t use it just because it’s free.

Wordpress is a brilliant CMS backbone for any small-medium sized website in it’s own right. It has an intuitive user interface, it’s easy to implement, and you can pretty much build anything imaginable thanks to the extensible nature of the platform. On that note, let us introduce you to a few of our favourite Wordpress customisations and plugins.

More Fields

› http://labs.dagensskiva.com/plugins/more-fields/

This is probably the most important plugin on this list when it comes to building client sites.

More Fields allows you to add extra boxes of user-editable content to the Wordpress “Post” and “Page” interface.

Realisitcally, it does nothing more than to style the manner in which Custom Fields are shown in the Wordpress interface, but in doing so it allows you to create much more complex websites without confusing you client with the mumbo-jumbo that is the standard Custom Field dialogue.

This is further improved by the ability to include things like checkboxes, select lists and WYSIWYG panels, making More Fields greater than the sum of its parts.

This functionality is something which I feel should be added to the Wordpress core – when adding a Custom Field you should be able to define the Label for that field, and where it appears in the interface. Add it to your wish-list, too, and let’s see if we can get it into WP 3.0.

FLIR for Wordpress

› http://www.23systems.net/plugins/facelift-image-replacement-flir/

FLIR is a server-side image-replacement technology that allows you to render text in any typeface of your choosing. It uses the PHP GD library to replace any element you define with a custom font, much the same as Cufon and SiFR, but directly through the Wordpress interface.

It is not without its flaws, and should only be used sparingly for things like dynamic page headings, but it is a powerful solution to the problem of custom fonts on the web.

The most important thing to note when working with FLIR is that the appearance of your text will depend on the GD version running on your server, so be sure to test thoroughly on your live server rather than your dev server, as the results can differ quite widely.

One thing that you may need to do is to edit your chosen typeface in order to adjust the spacing around each character, as FLIR has a habit of cutting off parts of letters if the following letter overlaps. This can be a bit tricky at times – other times it all works right out of the box. It really depends on the typeface.

Wordpress Lite

› http://mahalkita.nanogeex.com/wplite/

Wordpress Lite is a great little app that allows you to tidy up the Wordpress backend by removing sidebar links such as “Appearance”, “Settings” etc. This is great if you’re building a site for a client and you don’t want to overwhelm them.

There are currently a few problems with the latest version of WP Lite and WP 2.9, so we’ll have to wait and see if there is an updated version to fix this – a shame, because it really is a useful tool.

Platinum SEO

› http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/

It used to be that the All-in-One SEO Pack ruled the roost, but recently Platinum SEO has stolen it’s thunder a little.

This is a straightforward plugin that dynamically generates Meta tags, generally using the_excerpt as a basis for descriptions and categories for keywords, but which can be customised for every single post and page.

It also allows you to set noarchive and nofollow tags where required, which can be useful in certain circumstances.

On top of this, it will automatically generate 301 redirects when you’ve changed a post permalink, saving you problems with dead links and search engine placement.

Custom WP the_excerpt Hack

› http://pastebin.com/8TGtyzWM

This hack allows you to customise the appearance of the_excerpt in your theme. I’ll break down the important points.

The following changes the way in which Wordpress strips tags from the_excerpt, preventing it from removing the listed tags. You can add to this in order to include things like links by including <a>. The benefit here is that your excerpt can retain paragraph breaks and other formating:

$text = strip_tags($text, ‘<p>,<strong>,<br />’);

This line controls the number of words you’d like to appear in your excerpt:

$excerpt_length = 35;

A second function customises the appearance of the “Read More” link, which is usually nothing more than an ellipses (&hellip;):

return ‘&hellip; <p><a href=”‘. get_permalink($post->ID) . ‘”>’ . ‘Read more&hellip;’ . ‘</a></p>’;

This can be really handy for magazine-style themes, or anywhere where you want to control the amount of space used listing blog posts.

Check if a User is logged in

› http://pastebin.com/Umk8qE34

One of the most basic loops, but very useful in many situations.

This allows you to check if the current visitor is logged in and, if they are, to display something specific, such as tools they can use or certain information.

It allows you to use the Wordpress user levels to define exactly what is seen by different user groups, with 10 being the highest level (Administrators) and 0 the lowest (everyone). See the Codex for more information on User Levels: http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

Customised Hello Dolly

We also like to run a customised version of the infamous “Hello Dolly” plugin that is provided with Wordpress, filled with inspirational and ridiculous quotes such as “You walk middle, sooner or later SQUISH! Just-a-like-a-grape”, and “Fight to the end ’cause your life could depend on the strength that you have inside you.”. They’re not all from The Karate Kid. Honestly.

Final Thoughts

This has been just a brief run-through of some of the most useful plugins and hacks we use regularly for Wordpress, but there are many, many more – and that’s what makes Wordpress such a fantastic platform – the community and the ever-expanding capabilities of the software. I hope you’ve found something useful here, and let us know of any tools you think are essential to theme development.