I’ve been working in WordPress for a few years now and there are many things that I’ve learned along the way. The first thing is that not everything can you say “there’s a plugin for that” but the second is that there are many plugins that are developed that will help you save time and help you cut corners with certain development needs a client desires. Check out a few that I’ve found below:
WPide
Price: Free
WP rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 40,000+
I hate using WordPress’s built in Appearance editor. WordPress editor lacks the ability to edit files outside the theme folders and I can’t work without numbered lines. With WPide you can edit any file in side the content folder. Also WPide color coats html/php elements, has numbered lines, shows syntax errors, find and replace and open multiply files at a time. You can create new directories and files.
Advanced Custom Fields
Price: Free, $25 for Personal, $100 for developers
WP rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 1+ million
Advanced Custom Fields is one of the best plugins created for WordPress by far. ACF allows you to add extra data fields to any WordPress page or post. You can add images, files, page links, wysiwyg, checkbox, radio buttons, and more. The Pro version comes with four add ons (flexible content field, gallery field, repeater field, and options page). The repeater field add on allows you to output fields multiply times within a while loop.
Contact Form 7
Price: Free
WP rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 1+ million
Contact Form 7 is the best free contact form plugin there is. It comes with basic styling and is easy to use. It’s very easy to style the form to match your website. Also comes with a built in easy math question captcha. Lastly, comes with ajax coding for form validation.
Membership 2
Price: Free
WP rating: 3.3 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 10,000+
Developed by WPMU they claim Membership 2 is the best membership plugin around and I believe it. They don’t have as many installs or outstanding rating but this is the best membership plugin I could find. They allow you to have full control over members and what they can see and do. They have outstanding support and heavily documented more then you’ll ever need. You can use Stripe, Authorize.net, and Paypal for payment.
WooCommerce
Price: Free
WP rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 1+ million
Woocommerce is the worlds biggest and best e-commerce plugin it’s free, powerful, and safe. It also has tons of support and documentation. There are hundreds of WooCommerce themes and it’s easy to create / customize your WooTheme. Woocommerce allows you to create an online web store quick and easily. If you want special functionality there is a plugin for that. 30% of all web stores are built with Woocommerce. Woocommerce also accepts most payment gateways.
UpdraftPlus
Price:Free, Premium $70–$145
WP rating:4.9 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 900,000+
UpdraftPlus one of the coolest backup plugins you can find. You can back up your WordPress site to Amazon S3, Google Drive, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, One drive, or SFTP. You can backup your database and files, setup automatic backups, and select which files to backup. Also this plugin can encrypt database backups.
There you have it! 5 plugins that don’t suck all that much. Download those guys and let me know your thoughts! If you have any others that you’d recommend, let us know on twitter.
