This has been a great year to be a WordPress developer, designer or user. With the updates to core, community, and paid plugins and themes, it’s been a real smorgasbord of awesomeness.
In the realm of plugin development, it’s been a particularly exciting time with amazing new plugin releases and feature upgrades with existing plugins. I’ve asked some well known folks in the WordPress community for their top picks and present to you the top five mentions here.
You should also check out the other year end plugin roundup posts for more great plugins.
Enjoy!
Gravity Forms
Certainly not a new plugin by any means, Gravity Forms by Rocketgenius continues to be a crowd pleaser among the WordPress professionals I polled. With it’s many addons available from the original developer as well as the repository, it will handle many different scenarios.
For those who remember the earlier contact form plugins available for WordPress, you’ll know the dramatic shift that occurred in the release of Gravity Forms. For those who don’t, just be happy it’s here.
Schema Creator
With the adoption of the Schema structured markup initiative by Google and other search engines, web developers have a new way of organizing and presenting data for the search engines.
The Schema Creator plugin by Raven Internet Marketing Tools and Andrew Norcross facilitates easily adding properly constructed Schema markup to any WordPress post or page. Give the search engines something they can not only chew on, but easily interpret.
FAQ Manager
I think most WordPress developers will agree that the addition of the custom post type was a defining moment for WordPress. Andrew Norcross gets another mention in this list for his custom post type plugin FAQ Manager.
It does what you might expect. Allows non-technical users to easily create and manage a FAQ section on their WordPress website using custom post types and taxonomies. Rock on.
Always Remember Me
Does this sound familiar?
https://twitter.com/curtismchale/status/285810026533253120
Although probably a bit tongue in cheek, the above can be a real frustration for WordPress end users and lazy pressed for time WordPress administrators. 🙂 Seriously though, the Always Remember Me plugin by Ozh Richard eliminates an oft-mentioned annoyance by a lot of WordPress users I’m familiar with. Activate and until you log out (up to a year), you won’t face that pesky login again. Now what about remembering your password in a year?
Regenerate Thumbnails
If you’ve ever switched themes or added new image dimensions to WordPress, you understand the challenge in fitting your old images into their new layout. The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin by Alex Mills eliminates this hassle by automatically regenerating your images for you. No sweat and what a time saver!
Special Thanks
A heartfelt thanks to the following WordPress pros who took time to give their recommendations on their favorite plugins of 2012: Ron Rennick, Katie Benedetto, Kevin Spence, Brian Chappell, Joe Hall, Melanie Phung, Andrew Norcross, Andrea Rennick, John Cornthwait, and Gil Rutkowski.
So, what about you?
3 Comments