WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Friday, February 13, 2009

WATBlog Update "Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins

I am one among the breed who think that every website should have some Wordpress love. I have seen the WPs ability to move beyond just a blog platform to quite a capable content management system. Now thanks to its growing and mighty talented developer community there are plugins and themes that are slowly taking WP beyond the 2 column restraints of a blog. In this post, I would like to introduce a few plugins that help make your wordpress blog a little bigger than a blog.

WP E-commerce

When I first started using wordpress, its abilities as a CMS were just beginning to be tested. So plugins like WP sticky, and having multiple columns in your blog, etc. were impressive things happening on a blog. And I used to wonder whether it can ever support e-commerce.. after quite a bit of time passed I stumbled on this plugin and e-commerce came to a blog.

Headspace

The mightiest WP plugin to my mind. It just changes the way you manage the blog and its meta data. Headspace 2 was considered the one word solution for everything SEO on wordpress. However, with version 3 its taken customization and management of wp blogs to different level with Per-page themes, Per-page plugins, Custom page titles, RSS titles & description and a lot of other features.

WP Invoice

WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients. The plugin ties into WP's user management database to keep track of your clients and their information. Once an invoice is created from the WP admin section, an email with a brief description and a unique link is sent to your client. Clients follow the link to your blog's special invoice page, view their invoice, and pay their bill using their credit card. How wonderful!

NextGen Gallery

NextGen helps create an image gallery on your website, rather your wordpress blog. It provides a comprehensive interface for managing photos and images through a set of admin pages and helps display quite a nifty image gallery online. fGallery is another interesting plugin to make your own gallery.

WP Contact Form / CForms II

I consider them to be the most underrated wp plugins. Almost all wp blogs use them these days, perhaps the reason they don’t get enough credit. Back in the days when HTML seemed the only thing needed to know to make a website and php was something that would have got you funded, I used to wonder how can people mail me directly from my website. And all I could come up with was the mailto tag on HTML. WP contact form let’s my visitors get in touch with just one line of code in a WP page. I think it is super cool.

With the hundreds of plugins that come up everyday, there are chances that some of you might find this list dissapoitning because none of these are actually very new plugins. However, considering WATblog hasn’t convered WP plugins specifically before, I thought this might be a good starting point for this field. Hopefully, we can talk about a lot more on wordpress plugins and other CMS in the future.