Whether you’re using WordPress as a CMS, a blog or somewhere between the two, as a portfolio site, making sure your site runs quickly is absolutely paramount in this day and age. This article and screencast combo takes you through how to use a variety of tips, tricks and techniques in order to make your WordPress powered site load faster.

Contents

• Introduction
• Premium Themes Vs Custom Themes
• Optimising Images
• The 30%, 30kb Rule
• Using CSS Sprites
• Removing Database Heavy Plugins
• Caching Plugins Compared
• Setting Up W3 Total Cache
• Using a CDN
• Setting Up WordPress To Utilise A CDN
• Wrapping Up

Introduction

Since last year, page load speed has been included in Google’s ranking algorithm. Thus, it’s become absolutely vital that your site, regardless of its usage, loads as fast as possible.

The first thing we’re going to do is test load speeds to see what point we’re starting from. I’ve taken two sites — my fairly heavily optimised WPShout and my friend Marco’s blog, which runs a normal premium theme from ThemeForest.

We’ll be using a tool called Pingdom throughout this article in order to test the speed of our site.

To start with, we’ll compare the two sites — the fairly heavily optimised WPShout and Marco’s blog, a normal WordPress blog running a premium theme.

• Clearly, WPShout loads far faster than Marco’s blog and there are a number of reasons for this:
• Fewer files: WPShout loads with only a handful of CSS, Javascript and image files whereas Marco’s blog has a lot of CSS, Javascript and then a load more images added on top. We’ll cover optimising images later
• Faster files: WPShout is using a Content Delivery Network, or CDN in order to deliver the files faster. More on this, later.
• Cached files: you’ll note that images don’t show up as being downloaded again. This is because files which aren’t changed regularly are stored locally and so don’t need to be downloaded again. We get to caching later.
• Custom theme: WPShout runs a custom theme, whereas Marco’s blog runs an out-the-box premium theme. The pros and cons of each method are weighed up in the next section.

Premium Themes vs. Custom Themes

It’s obvious, but I’ll say it regardless: an out-the-box theme, free or paid, won’t get anywhere near the performance of a well made custom theme. Even premium themes from some of the largest marketplaces have horrendous performance.

However, help is at hand!

We can using something called a caching plugin in order to save a copy of your site and then show that when people visit, thus circumnavigating the problem of out-the-box themes using up a lot of resources.

Imagine you had a written document and wanted to give copies to everyone who visited. At the moment, you have to write it all out by hand, but if you use a photocopier, you just need to do the work once and give out copies!

A caching plugin is like the photocopier — it loads the page once and then distributes copies of the page to visitors, meaning the page loads faster as visitors don’t have to wait for the server to load the page — or for you to write out the document.

There are a number of caching plugins available and we’ll visit them later.

Optimising Images

• Images are likely to be the single biggest factor that slow down your site so are well worth taking the time to optimise!

If you’re running a blog or magazine style layout, unoptimised images are likely to be your downfall. A couple of years ago when I used my first WordPress powered magazine theme, I remember being astounded at how slowly the site loaded. The culprit, of course, was having huge file sizes for images.

The following screencast runs through ways of optimising your images.

The 30%, 30kb Rule

I use something we’ll call the 30%, 30kb rule. Images should be at 30% quality and/or no more than 30kb large. Whilst images containing text might need to be larger, as a general rule it works well in keeping file sizes down. Of course, you also need to make sure images are no wider than your post’s content area.

Using CSS Sprites

• CSS Sprites let you combine what would have otherwise been multiple images — and multiple downloads — into a single file.

We can also use image sprites in order to combine multiple images into a single file. Chris Coyier has an excellent post on CSS-Tricks explaining “what they are, why they’re cool and how to use them”.

The graphic above shows the image that forms the CSS Sprite for WPShout. The top row is icons and social media buttons and the two rows below are the logo and hover state for the logo which show up on the coloured background on the site (I’ve added in a background here but on the site the sprite is a transparent PNG). Instead of five files at 100kb, I’ve got one file at just under 20kb. The savings are obvious so there’s no reason not to try out sprites on your site.

A great tool for quickly making a sprite is “SpriteMe”, a bookmarklet you can just click and it does all the work for you! This is a great way of avoiding getting stuck into CSS if you’re not too confident with them.

Further Image Optimisation

You can go further with your image optimisation, though. Yahoo has a service called “Smush.it” which takes your images and optimises them, keeping the same quality but lowering the filesize.

It would be a pain to individually optimise each image so thankfully there’s an excellent free plugin called “WP Smush.it” which automatically runs all your images through Smush.it when you add them to a post or page.

Remove Database Heavy Plugins

• Lots of plugins dosn’t necessarily mean your blog will load slowly, but one may lead to the other.
• Plugins which make lots of database queries aren’t a problem if you use a caching plugin.

It’s a common myth that having lots of plugins = your site loads slowly. One doesn’t necessarily imply the other, but often the two are linked, hence the myth.

It is true, though, that having a lot of plugins can both be a security risk and just a pain when upgrading to new versions of WordPress (you’ll have to check they’re all compatible with the latest version). It’s easy to get carried away installing plugins that do jobs you think you might need, but it’s considered good practice to keep the number below ten.

Jeff Starr ran a very interesting poll on Digging into WordPress a couple of years ago which is still relevant today. Just about two thirds of respondents used up to ten plugins, with only ten percent using more than twenty. Those who used a lot of plugins ran with the argument that their plugins didn’t hinder their site’s performance so using them was fine. Whilst this is true in the majority of cases, this isn’t necessarily always true.

The first plugins to reconsider using are ones which add Javascript. Load your homepage and then view source. In the section, look for Javascript and see if you can find any plugins. If you can, it’s time to reconsider whether you really need that plugin as it’s adding to the load time of every single page.

However, the big culprits are plugins which use the database a lot. Joost De Valk has a post, explaining how you can use the Debug Queries plugin in order to work out which plugins are causing your server a lot of work. In Joost’s case, it was the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that was causing the problems. I’m using the same plugin on WPShout but decided to keep it as it’s so powerful and so any performance lost can be justified by extra user experience gained. Speed shouldn’t be the only factor you consider when deciding whether to keep plugins or not.

There is hope, though. You can create a cache using a caching plugin in order to save a copy of your page — and thus database queries.

Caching Plugins Compared

And now for the big one: caching plugins! These will give you by far the biggest performance boost but there are lots of plugins to choose from so it’s vital some time is spent comparing the performance of each on your site.

Whilst there are a good number of plugins available, there are a couple of main ones:

• W3 Total Cache
• WP-Cache
• WP Super Cache
• Hyper Cache
• DB Cache

I switched to W3 Total Cache from WP Super Cache about a year ago after testing out various options and it’s been absolutely fantastic. That said, it’s not necessarily fastest on your site so it’s important you try out a couple and compare the results. Tutorial9 has a really good post comparing the different plugins available, but I must stress it varies from site to site which ones work best. However, I’ve found W3 Total Cache to be consistently fast on various set-ups so we’ll explore how to use it here.

Setting Up W3 Total Cache

Installing such a complicated plugin is surprisingly easy. Total Cache installs like most other plugins — under the plugins tab, do a search for W3 Total Cache and it’ll show up as the first result. Click “install now” and then activate the plugin.

However, the plugin isn’t set up yet! You’ll see a new tab on your admin bar “Performance”. Open this up.

Total Cache does some impressive detective work and gives you some recommend settings. It’s now just a case of going through all the settings, activating each one and seeing what performance boost each option gives you. Some may decrease performance so it’s vital you test.

Total Cache has some excellent documentation built in — select the various options under the Help tab. The FAQ is brilliant at going through more or less every single question you could possible have and answering it clearly.

However, there may be some extra set up required. You might get some messages popping up at the top of the page telling you you need to add some code to a file called .htaccess. .htaccess is a file which allows you to locally configure your Apache settings, and thus is impressively powerful. To access it you’ll need to log into your site’s FTP and then navigate to the root. If you then can’t see it, show hidden files.

Download it (again, show hidden files), make a copy as a backup and then load it in your text editor. Add the lines of code to the bottom of the file, upload again and you’re done! Make sure you try loading your site immediately to check it still works. If it doesn’t, check you’ve copied all the code exactly and you haven’t deleted any other code in the file.

And you’re done! Total Cache is set up!

Using a CDN

“A CDN can increase a website’s performance by serving items from the closest possible location to the visitor.

For example, let’s say that you have a web server in Los Angeles. A visitor from the United Kingdom wouldn’t get the best possible performance, because images and other content would go through many “hops” and a lot of distance to get across the USA and the Atlantic Ocean.

With CDN, those items would be served from a location much closer to the visitor, e.g., Amsterdam. The web server would still provide the pages, but images and other larger items would be served from the CDN.”

Mark Bailey, WPCDN

Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

CDNs used to be for the elite, but in the last 18 months have become available to the masses and are now something I thoroughly recommend to anyone and everyone. The first thing you need to do is to find a CDN provider!
CDNs to consider

I use WPCDN on my sites and I’ve been very pleased with it, but by no means are they the only CDN providers! There are a fair few, but these are ones I’ve been personally recommended by others or use myself:

• Akamai
• Free CDN (this is, obviously, free, but I’ve had no experience with it; you may very well get what you pay for)
• Google! You can let Google host your jQuery/Javascript libraries for you on their CDN
• MaxCDN
• WPCDN

It’s certainly worth looking and shopping around to get the best deal, and most importantly, test out various provider’s speeds!

Once you’ve chosen a provider, setting it up is blissfully easy.

Setting Up WordPress to Run a CDN

If, as I suggested, you’re running W3 Total Cache, setting up your site to utilise a CDN is really easy. Go to the CDN tab and then tick the boxes you want and simply fill out the Configuration section with details provided by your CDN provider.

If you’re not running W3 Total Cache, a plugin such as My CDN will also do the trick.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this article has been valuable in giving you some tips on how to run your WordPress site faster. I can’t stress enough how important a fast loading site is in this day and age. If your site hasn’t loaded within three seconds, a good chunk of your search engine traffic will have left and gone onto the next search result. Not only will having a faster site get you more visitors, but it’ll also help you rank higher as Google now takes site speed into account in its search algorithm.

(rb)

  

Blog-O-Folio is a free 2 column WordPress Theme suitable for any and all of your corporate, portfolio or personal blog needs. With a wide variety of tunable theme options and functionality to merge your portfolio with the blog, it is now ultra easy to maintain your blog and portfolio at the same time.

Blog-O-Folio Theme was coded and designed by MOin, supported by SloDive and featured by SmashingMagazine.

Download the Theme for Free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• Live Demo
• Large Preview (1.19Mb)
• Download the .zip-package (.zip, 2.18 MB, includes instructions files)

Features

Here are some of the features of the theme:

• Simple, elegant & modern look
• Fast loading structure
• Supports comments threading and paging
• Fixed width
• 2 Columns
• Many tunable options
• Portfolio Integration
• Custom write panels
• 125 x 125 Sidebar Ads section
• Social icons integrated
• Email subscription form
• Qtips for subscribe icons
• Twitter integrated
• Theme Requirements: WordPress 2.9.1+

Installation:

In order to make Portfolio work like it should you need to rename two files in your Blog-O-Folio theme directory. Don’t worry its dead simple!

• First find your portfolio category ID. (Visit this link if you don’t know: Link.)
• After finding out your Portfolio category ID replace 00 in category-00.php & single-00.php files with your category ID.

What Can You Adjust From Admin Theme Options?

• Sidebar 125 x 125 ads: You can tune sidebar ads from inside your theme options just enter banner URLs and enter link for them.
• Sidebar buttons settings : Adjust RSS feed link, Twitter name and your Facebook profile/fan page/group link.
• Header logo settings: Tune your header image, enter image link and select either show image only, text only or both.
• Welcome Message Setting: Adjust welcome box from this menu, you can edit text to show in welcome box enter image link to show in welcome box.
• Google Analytics setting: Enter your Google Analytics code to track visitors.
• Misc Settings: From this menu you can tune variety of options such as Favicon, Portfolio category, Amount of portfolio entries to show, Exclude pages from navigation, Show or hide social media icons on posts.

Where Can You Adjust E-mail Subscription Form:

Blog-O-Folio comes with a built-in jQuery-powered email subscription form that will work with your FeedBurner account. Follow these simple instructions to set it up:

• Get your feed burner Feed Name e.g http://feeds.feedburner.com/Noupe here / Noupe is what you need.
• In Blog-O-Folio theme directory look for subscribe.html and edit it with any text editor.
• On line 4 & 6 put your feed name where it says FeedName.
• You are done, make sure you enabled Email Feeds from your feedburner dashboard.

(rb)

  

Most bloggers would love to see more of a sense of community among the regular visitors to their blog. Sure, discussions sometimes take place in the comments of various posts, but it all seems a bit disorganized and they never really get off the ground. There has to be a better way to create a real sense of community on a WordPress blog.

The good news is that there are plenty of great plugins out there that can help you get your visitors more involved in your blog. Some are simple: they let your users submit content they think is useful, or make it easier to have a real discussion in comments. Others are more complex, on par with full-featured social networks like Facebook. All of them can help you create a community surrounding your blog and your content.

Encourage User-Generated Content

Even if you post on your blog every day, sometimes it would be nice to have some help. So why not ask your regular visitors to submit content they think your other visitors might find useful? Of course, they can do this already by emailing you or adding a link in the comments, but then you still have to do most of the work. The plugins below will simplify getting these user submissions to a publishable state on your blog.

Community Submitted News

Community Submitted News lets any visitor to your blog submit content. All content is sent to a moderation panel and nothing is made public until it has been approved by an administrator (which prevents spam postings from being made live). It’s a great idea if you have an active community surrounding your blog but don’t always have time to write original content. It also gives your blog’s readers a more active role in content creation.

WordPress Wiki

WordPress Wiki was created by the same developers who created the WP e-Commerce plugin. It’s a full-featured wiki plugin for WP that lets you specify certain posts or pages as editable as wiki pages, while leaving other pages or posts in their traditional, un-editable format.

FV Community News

FV Community News is another plugin that lets users submit posts from other blogs to your site for inclusion. It includes a moderation panel and works within a widget on your site. It also has built-in spam protection and give administrators the ability to edit submissions.

TDO Mini Forms

The TDO Mini Forms plugin lets your subscribers or even non-registered users submit or edit posts and pages. Submissions are kept in “draft” form until approved by an administrator. The same can be done with edits. It can even be configured to work with Akismet to filter out spam submissions.

Encourage Interaction

Even if you’re not interested in setting up a social network surrounding your blog, wouldnt’ it be nice to see your visitors able to better interact with each other, and for you to be able to interact with them more easily? Whether this means setting up a forum or just making it easier for discussions to take place in your comments, the plugins below will help.

Gigya Socialize

The Gigya Socialize plugin lets you incorporate social APIs (like Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and MySpace ID) to your site and let your visitors become more engaged. Visitors can invite friends from their preferred social network. It also lets you publish status and newsfeed updates directly to your social networks.

WP-Forum

Adding a forum to your blog is an easy way to increase interaction among your visitors. WP-Forum is a simple discussion forum plugin. It can be used with a single WP blog or with WordPress MU.

Threaded Comments

Adding Threaded Comments to you WP blog lets you turn the comments section on every post into a discussion, where users can reply directly to other users and have their response appear directly under the original comment (rather than just in chronological order). It’s a great option for encouraging your visitors to engage not just with you, but with each other as well.

Comment Per Paragraph

Comment Per Paragraph is actually a WP theme, but it has some valuable features that can really add to the interaction on your blog. Basically, this theme lets your visitors comment on each paragraph within a post, rather than just at the end of the post. It makes commenting or discussions on specific points within your post much easier and more user-friendly.

Digress.it

Digress.it is a plugin that lets your visitors add notes in the “margins” of a blog post, much the same as one would in a book. The difference here is that these notes are visible to everyone, and anyone can add a note. It can be used in an educational setting, to annotate a post, or even to offer criticism.

Feedback by Paragraph

Feedback by Paragraph is another plugin that lets users leave comments on individual paragraphs within a post. Comments are shown in a Thickbox pop-up. Comments here respect settings of individual posts as far as who is allowed to post, and moderation policies are also honored. The fact that paragraph-level comments are kept separate from the main content is a nice feature that makes it easy to implement without requiring any kind of redesign.

Turn WordPress Into a Social Network

If you want to go all in and create a social network on your WordPress-powered site, the plugins below are the place to start. They range from very simple plugins that basically just let you set up user profiles to full social networking packages that let your users do almost everything they can do on mainstream social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is a powerful set of social networking plugins for WordPress. It’s quick to install and set up, and can be as complicated or simple as you want. One of the nice features about BuddyPress is that you can turn on or off specific features whenever you want, making it as powerful or simple as you need.

Mingle

Mingle is a simple social networking plugin for WordPress. It works with most WP themes, and lets you set up profile pages, friend lists, profile page posts (like status updates), profile activities, social comments, and email notifications. It’s not as full-featured as BuddyPress, but it’s also simpler to set up and works with a wider range of themes.

Customize Your Community

The Customize Your Community plugin lets you not only change your WP login page, but also makes it so subscribers to your site are redirected to a profile editing page rather than the WP backend. It changes the way your registration, login/logout, and lost password pages look so they no longer contain any WP branding information. Users with roles set to anything other than “subscriber” will still see the traditional WP backend, though login/logout pages, etc. will show the customized design.

Community Blogs for BuddyPress

This plugin lets you create group or community blogs with multiple authors within BuddyPress. Administrators on a BuddyPress site can use the plugin to give a member registered user status to any blog they choose within the site (or multiple blogs). It’s a great option for extending the collaboration features of a BuddyPress site.

Profiler

Profiler creates user profiles for every registered user on your blog, including Gravatar images. It also creates a members directory and can be used with the User Photo plugin and the Whisper plugin.

Conclusion

Think through the kinds of social interactions you’d like to take place on your blog and then find a plugin that will help you foster those interactions. The above list isn’t exhaustive, so if you know of other great WP plugins for building community around your content, please add them in the comments below!

Further Resources

• 20+ WordPress Plugins for your Membership or Community Site – A great roundup of plugins useful specifically to membership sites (including paid membership sites).
• 10 WordPress Plugins to Help Build Community – A collection of plugins that can help build a sense of community on your blog.
• Creating a Social Network Using WordPress MU – A tutorial for setting up your own social networking site from Holdfire.
• How To Build a Social Networking Site Using WordPress – A great article from MakeUseOf.com on using BuddyPress to create a social network.

  

Many designers enjoy creating WordPress themes. And creating a theme isn’t that difficult if you have a basic grasp of CSS and can follow directions (WordPress’s Codex has extensive documentation). But that doesn’t mean that every designer out there who can create a theme has created a good theme. In fact, really poor themes abound.

But what exactly makes a WordPress theme great? How does one go about creating a quality theme? In fact, it’s not that difficult. You can do a few simple things while developing your theme—from the planning stage right through coding—to make it stand out from the legions of average (and below-average) themes out there.

1. Complies With Standards

Whether you plan to customize it, use it straight out of the box or build your own, getting a theme that’s standards-compliant is important. Standards-compliance ensures that your theme will appear as it’s supposed to across most modern browsers.

Standards-compliance also makes future maintenance and modification easier. If your code is written to Web standards, it also less likely to break when you modify it later on. It also makes for a better foundation on which to create new themes, based either in whole or in part on the existing one (and saving you a lot of time and effort).

Example: Intaglio Theme

The Intaglio theme is XHTML and CSS standards-compliant.
Demo | Download

2. Helpful Comments

When creating a theme, add comments to your code so that the people who use it can figure out how or why you did a particular thing. Quality comments need not be long but are often most helpful if you provide structural clues to your CSS and HTML. In many themes, we see comments in the CSS files that distinguish between styles for the header, footer, sidebars and content. You might also see commenting in the HTML files of some themes, especially if some of the coding is uncommon.

If you’re looking to customize a theme, make sure the code is commented well enough so that you can understand it. This will save you many headaches down the road, especially if you want to do extensive modifications.

Example: Thematic Theme

The Thematic theme framework is fully commented in both the CSS and HTML files, making it much easier to customize and modify.
Demo | Download

3. Optimized Graphics

Graphics in themes should be optimized for Web use. This includes using proper file types and compression levels as well as avoiding graphics where they’re unnecessary. Combining graphics where possible is also a good idea, because it reduces the number of HTTP requests for the page.

If you’re creating a theme, make sure to save all of your graphics at appropriate quality levels and in appropriate file formats. Educate yourself on what various file and image types are good for.

Example: Royalle

The Royalle theme has a number of images but keeps the file sizes small.
Demo | Download ($70 and up)

4. Minimal Required Plug-Ins

If a theme requires certain functionality, coding the functionality right into the theme rather than relying on plug-ins is usually best. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, if the theme is applied to an existing website, a required plug-in could conflict with another plug-in that’s already in use.

The second reason is that relying on third-party plug-ins will likely cause headaches down the road. If you decide to change the functionality of your plug-ins down the road, that could end up breaking your theme. Is that really something you want to deal with?

Rather than rely on plug-ins, code the required functionality directly into your theme. This will save you and your theme’s users trouble down the road and will likely make the theme easier to maintain.

Example: Atlantica

The Atlantica theme has a number of extended functions coded right into it.
Demo | Download ($32)

5. Easily Customizable

I’m not talking here making the code easily customizable. I’m talking about making customizations in the admin area of WordPress easy to do. Options for customizing things like the color scheme and header image are often looked upon favorably by people in the market for a theme.

In many cases, it’s not that difficult to make the header image or color scheme customizable (for example, by letting users change the post’s heading color or providing a variety of pre-set color schemes). While these options aren’t necessarily vital to a good theme, they’re a nice touch and can set a great theme apart from good ones. Just make sure your design still holds up when someone opts for a hideous shade of puce or an ugly header image.

Example: Blixed

The Blixed theme allows users to upload a custom header image in the WordPress admin area.
Demo | Download

6. Semantic Mark-Up

Semantic mark-up has a few positive effects on a WordPress theme. First, it makes it easier for those who didn’t design the theme to decipher the code. If elements in the design are named logically, figuring out which elements in the code correspond to which elements in the design becomes faster and easier.

Secondly, semantic code improves search engine optimization. Heading and other standard tags tell search engine spiders what parts of your pages are most important. Combined with good keyword usage, this could greatly influence your website’s ranking.

Yet another reason to use semantic code is that it makes websites more accessible to people who require special browsers (such as the visually impaired). These browsers have a hard time wading through code, but semantic code makes it easier and improves the experience of these visitors.

Example: Stakers

Starkers is a completely “naked” starter theme upon which other themes are built, but one whose mark-up is fully semantic.
Demo | Download

7. Well Supported

The best themes are well supported by their creators. When WordPress issues an update, they make sure that their themes still work properly, both aesthetically and functionally. If administrators find a security hole in the code, they fix it. Basically, they’re there to resolve any problems that may arise.

Premium (paid) themes are the most supported, though some designers also support their free themes, at least partly. If you pay more than $10 or $15 for a theme, you should expect at least basic continued support (but check the terms of use). Support may even include free help if you’re customizing a theme or having problems implementing it. Some theme creators have dedicated forums where you can get help, either from the designers themselves or from other users.

Example: Delegate

Delegate was created by WooThemes, which supports all of its themes via its support forum, and it provides free updates.
Demo | Download (starting at $70)

8. Purposeful

The best themes were made for a specific purpose. The purpose could be as simple as being for text-heavy websites, where readability is key, or for image-heavy websites—or it could even be more specific, such as for children’s writers, car enthusiasts or artists.

The reason that a purposeful theme is superior to a generic theme is that it does not try to be all things to all people. It excel where necessary and puts secondary functions on the back-burner. This usually results in a theme that does one or two things very well, and other things adequately.

Premium themes usually excel at this specialization. But plenty of free themes out there have clear purposes. Photo-blog themes, video-blog themes and themes for particular professions are most common.

Example: AutoFocus

The AutoFocus theme is very good for showcasing photos and places, with little emphasis on text.
Demo | Download

9. Uses As Few CSS And JavaScript Files As Possible

Sometimes there’s a valid reason why a theme would have more than one CSS file or JavaScript file. But usually these separate files only confuse the person looking to customize or tweak the theme. Nothing’s worse than having to look through four different CSS files just to find where to change the link colors or line height. And multiple JavaScript and CSS files add to your website’s loading time and increase the number of HTTP requests.

Unless you have a specific technical reason for using more than one style sheet or JavaScript file, condense your files into one. Many designers include multiple files because they reuse bits and pieces of code from one theme to the next. Take the extra five minutes to combine your files into one. It will save headaches down the road for anyone who customizes your theme (including yourself, if you come back to the code after months of not looking at it).

Example: Simplicity

Simplicity is available in light and dark versions and has a single style sheet for each.
Demo | Download

10. Well Structured

By well structured, I’m not just talking about the visual appearance of your theme. It’s also important to make sure that your theme’s files load in the proper order. Ideally, your header should load first, followed by your content, and then the sidebars and footer. This structure gives more weight to the content of your website in the eyes of search engine spiders, which generally results in better rankings.

Of course, front-end structure is important, too. Make sure your sidebar(s), header, footer and content areas are laid out well on the page and that none of the elements break if the length or type of content they contain changes substantially (for example, very short content or very long sidebars shouldn’t create issues with the placement of the footer).

Example: Cutline

The code for the Cutline theme is structured so that the main content loads immediately after the header.
Demo and download

11. Works Well In The Test Run

The Test Run area of WordPress.org’s theme directory can put a lot of strain on a theme. WordPress showcases free themes by basically throwing a variety of elements at them, including headers, images, lists (both ordered and unordered), long post titles and combinations of all of the above.

Make sure your theme looks as good in this test run area as it does in your own environment. Because many users find themes through WordPress.org, this is more important than many designers realize. Of course, depending on how varied your own sample content is, making your theme work properly in the directory could be easier said than done. Hint: make your sample content mimic the content on WordPress.org’s theme directory so that you don’t get any nasty surprises later.

Example: Pixel

Pixel performs very well in the test area of WordPress.org.
Demo | Download

12. Makes Good Use Of Existing Template Files

WordPress can use a variety of template files to display different types of content differently. These template files include home.php, index.php, single.php (for posts), custom templates (which must be assigned to the page in the admin area), page-slug.php, page-id.php, page.php, category-slug.php, category-id.php, category.php, archive.php, tag-slug.php, tag-id.php, tag.php, author.php, date.php, search.php, 404.php and attachment.php, among others. Some page templates are only available for WordPress 2.9 and later.

These page templates let you completely customize the way your template behaves. For example, you could have a custom “About” page template that’s entirely different than other pages. You could have a customized contact page or store page or any other kind of page you can imagine.

Setting up individual template pages is no more difficult than setting up your index.php file; it just takes a bit more time. But it’s well worth it if it sets your theme apart from competitors.

Example: Ashford

Ashford makes use of custom page templates as well as standard WordPress templates.
Demo | Download

Conclusion

Creating a quality WordPress theme isn’t that difficult, and there’s no reason why any theme designer out there couldn’t create a theme that follows the guidelines above. All it takes is a little extra planning and effort, but the results are well worth it.

Further Resources

• 11 Principles to Design a Great WordPress Theme
  A great post from Daily Blog Tips that lists guidelines for creating a WordPress theme.
• Theme Development General Guidelins
  Part of WordPress’ theming documentation, which covers a few best practices for creating themes.
• Designing Themes for Public Release
  Another guide from the WordPress Codex on designing themes for public distribution.
• W3C
  The World Wide Web Consortium’s website, which has information on Web standards and semantic mark-up.

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As a web developer, you can broaden your potential client base and add value for existing clients by listing ‘WordPress’ as an area of expertise. WordPress is incredibly versatile, it can be tweaked to add many non traditional features to run a more effective blog.

Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on 10 WordPress Theme ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing your WordPress website to enhance your blog and give it the quality it deserves.

1. How to disable scripts and styles

Many plugins and themes add JavaScript and CSS files to your site. While this alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing, using several plugins that do this can bog down your site with loads of requests for these files.

In this tutorial Justin Tadlock describes a smart solution to disable scripts and styles of your plugins by looking for wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() in your plugin file and then disable it in your theme’s functions.php. He chosen two popular plugins: Contact Form 7 and WP-PageNavi.

Disabling JavaScript

Doing a search for wp_enqueue_script will turn up the following bit of code:

wp_enqueue_script( 'contact-form-7', wpcf7_plugin_url( 'contact-form-7.js' ), array('jquery', 'jquery-form'), WPCF7_VERSION, $in_footer );

Now, open your theme’s functions.php file and add this PHP code:

add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'my_deregister_javascript', 100 );

function my_deregister_javascript() {
	wp_deregister_script( 'contact-form-7' );
}

Disabling Styles

Now, let’s repeat the previous step but this time we will search for wp_enqueue_style in the plugin file and the following bit of code will be returned:

wp_enqueue_style('wp-pagenavi', get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/pagenavi-css.css', false, '2.50', 'all');

Again to disable the style of this plugin, you will open your theme’s functions.php file and add this PHP code:

add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );

function my_deregister_styles() {
	wp_deregister_style( 'wp-pagenavi' );
}

By doing the above 2 steps, you’ll disable the stylesheet and the script for this plugin. Feel free to deregister as many styles as you want within this function.

Source: How to disable scripts and styles

2. Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in WordPress

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to increase page views by adding thumbnails to related posts using the popular YARPP plugin and WordPress custom fields.

Source: Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in WordPress

3. A Custom Read More

In this post you’ll learn how to create a custom “Read More” messages on a per-post basis using custom fields in WordPress.

All you need to do is replace your usual the_content template tag with this code. Then when you write a post, create a new custom field with the key of custom_more.

<?php $custommore = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'custom_more', true); ?>
<?php if (!$custommore) { $custommore = 'Read More &raquo;'; } ?>
<?php the_content($custommore); ?>

Source: A Custom Read More

4. Get the first image from the post automatically and display it

Most WordPress users including me are using custom fields to display thumbs on their blog homepage but i recently stumbled across a simple php function that allows you to grab the first image from the post automatically, and display it on your home page without the need to add any custom field to the post.

All you need to do is paste the following function on your theme’s functions.php file.

function catch_that_image() {
  global $post, $posts;
  $first_img = '';
  ob_start();
  ob_end_clean();
  $output = preg_match_all('/<img. src=[\'"]([^\'"] )[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
  $first_img = $matches [1] [0];

  if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image
    $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
  }
  return $first_img;
}

After that you need to open your theme’s index.php and paste the following code where you want to display the first image in each post.

<?php echo catch_that_image() ?>

Source: Get the first image from the post and display it

5. How to Highlight Search Terms with jQuery

Spice up your WordPress search page by highlighting search terms within your search results. The solution described in this tutorial will highlight both the title and post content and is a drop-in modification for WordPress.

Now you need to paste the following code in your theme’s functions.php file.

function hls_set_query() {
  $query  = attribute_escape(get_search_query());
  if(strlen($query) > 0){
    echo '
      <script type="text/javascript">
        var hls_query  = "'.$query.'";
      </script>
    ';
  }
}
function hls_init_jquery() {
  wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}
add_action('init', 'hls_init_jquery');
add_action('wp_print_scripts', 'hls_set_query');

After that you need to open your theme’s header.php and paste the following code (just before the </head> tag)

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
  .hls { background: #D3E18A; } /* <- Change the CSS style of */
                                /*    highlighted texts here. */
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.fn.extend({
  highlight: function(search, insensitive, hls_class){
    var regex = new RegExp("(<[^>]*>)|(\\b"  search.replace(/([-.* ?^${}()|[\]\/\\])/g,"\\$1")  ")", insensitive ? "ig" : "g");
    return this.html(this.html().replace(regex, function(a, b, c){
      return (a.charAt(0) == "<") ? a : "<strong class=\""  hsl_class  "\">"   c   "</strong>";
    }));
  }
});
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
  if(typeof(hls_query) != 'undefined'){
    $("#post-area").highlight(hls_query, 1, "hls"); // <- Change 'post-area' to ID of HTML tag you
                                                    //    want to highlight search terms in.
  }
});
</script>

Source: How to Highlight Search Terms with jQuery

6. Display Latest Posts by Category Archive

This tutorial will help you build a ‘Latest Posts by Category Archive‘ easily, this can be used to set up custom blog homepages, 404 pages, landing pages or even a special archive page. If you are looking for a plugin to generate such an archive, please check out: WP Plugin: Latest Posts by Category Archive.

Source: Latest Posts by Category Archive

7. Only Show Posts With a Specific Custom Field

Sometimes you only want to show posts that you’ve added a specific custom field to. A typical post loop begins like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Now you just add a simple query_posts function immediately above the loop code. In our scenario it would look like this:

<?php query_posts('meta_key=review_type&meta_value=movie');  ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Source: Only Show Posts With a Specific Custom Field

8. Find Page’s Top Level Parent ID

This post discusses the problem of displaying 2nd and 3d level of navigation in a sidebar no matter what page you are on. First thing you need to create is a new page (subnav.php) in your theme folder that you will be using for displaying side navigation from 2nd level downwards and include it in your theme’s sidebar.php

<?php include("subnav.php"); ?>

Now you just add the following code to your subnav.php:

<?php

if ($post->post_parent)	{
	$ancestors=get_post_ancestors($post->ID);
	$root=count($ancestors)-1;
	$parent = $ancestors[$root];
} else {
	$parent = $post->ID;
}
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=". $parent ."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>
<ul id="subnav">
<?php echo $children; ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>

This code checks if the current page has a parent. If so, that means that we are at least 2 levels deep in the navigation. In that case function get_post_ancestors is called and returns an array of all the ancestors’ IDs up to the top level (root). Once we get the ID of the top level parent we can use it in wp_list_pages function to get its children.

Source: Find Page’s Top Level Parent ID

9. List latest posts from certain category

Currently i am working on Noupe’s new theme, and i wanted to display recent posts from one category. I stumbled across a smart code snippet that will get this job done.

<?php query_posts('category_name=photoshop&showposts=7'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
     <li>
           <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
               <?php the_title(); ?>
           </a>
     </li>
<?php endwhile; ?>

The query_posts code is telling WordPress to locate the latest 7 posts in the Photoshop category. The loop then runs the code to display them.

Source: List Recent Posts from One Category

10. Add Breadcrumbs to WordPress Without a Plugin

Breadcrumbs are a great way to give people a perspective of where they are on your site. You can easily add them via several good plugins. But if you want to build breadcrumbs into a theme without using a plugin, here is what you need to do.

Create a php file called breadcrumbs.php and insert the following code:

<div class="breadcrumbs">
<?php
function breadcrumbs() {
    $theFullUrl = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
    $urlArray=explode("/",$theFullUrl);
    echo %u2018You Are Here: <a href="/">Home</a>%u2019;
    while (list($j,$text) = each($urlArray)) {
        $dir=%u201D;
        if ($j > 1) {
            $i=1;
            while ($i < $j) {
                $dir .= %u2018/%u2019 . $urlArray[$i];
                $text = $urlArray[$i];
                $i  ;
            }
            if($j < count($urlArray)-1) echo %u2018 &raquo; <a href="%u2019.$dir.%u2018">%u2019 . str_replace("-", " ", $text) . %u2018</a>%u2019;
        }
    }
    echo wp_title();
}
breadcrumbs();
?>
</div><!%u2013/breadcrumbs%u2013>

Wherever you want to add the breadcrumbs in your theme files, just add the following line…

<?php include ( TEMPLATEPATH . %u2018/breadcrumbs.php%u2019); ?>

Source: Add Breadcrumbs to WordPress Without a Plugin

  

WordPress is a great blogging platform with a potential of being an easy to use content management system. This is the third article of our three-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”. We are taking a look at 40+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins that will turn a simple WordPress site into a blazing fast dynamic one, with easily managed content, that you and your clients will love to use.

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 1
The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 2

Making Your Content Unbreakable

There is one big drawback to using WordPress as a CMS: the lack of custom content types/groups, an area where developers put restrictions on how clients insert content. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress. Developers must create workarounds to keep the content clean, portable and relatively unbreakable.

1. More Fields Plugin

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

Download Plugin

2. Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter Plugin

Flutter is made precisely for CMS-making, allows you to create custom Write Panel (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. You can create any type of field (File Uploads, Audio, Video, Checkboxes, Dropdowns) to make as simple as possible for your client or yourself to enter content.

Download Plugin

3. Post Templates Plugin

If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. This could be very useful for clients who have no idea how to get started to write a new page or post. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.

Download Plugin

4. WP-CMS Post Control Plugin

This plugin gives you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc… but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and use.

Download Plugin

Managing Users and their Roles

1. User Access Manager Plugin

This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere. Features include:

• User groups
• Set seperate access for readers and editors
• Set access by user groups
• Set access by post categories
• User-defined post/page title (if no access)
• User-defined post/page text (if no access)
• Optional login form (if no access)
• User-defined comment text (if no access)

Download Plugin

2. Role Scoper Plugin

Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for access control in WordPress, giving you CMS-like control of permissions. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

Download Plugin

3. Role Manager Plugin

This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities.

Download Plugin

4. Member Access Plugin

Member Access allows a WordPress administrator to make individual posts and pages accessible only to logged-in members. Member Access allows global configuration so that all posts or pages can be viewable by everyone (the default) or only by members, and it also allows each post and page to override the global setting.

Download Plugin

Better & Smart Navigation

1. WP-PageNavi Plugin

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

Download Plugin

2. WordPress Navigation List Plugin

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers. This plugin has a lot of other great features, you have to check it out.

Download Plugin

3. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires Javascript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. Check out the demo here. The options page allows you to choose from a range of options including:

• What content will be displayed in the menu
• Animation speed (how fast the dropdowns appear)
• Mouseover delay
• Hide delay
• Add a second menu

Download Plugin

4. Yoast Breadcrumbs Plugin

Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things: a) They allow your users to easily navigate your site. b) They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

5. Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin

This plugin adds a widget into the Widgets dashboard that allows in a simple way, without writing any PHP code on your part, to create custom navigation in any sidebar pre-defined by your WP theme. Features include:

• Flat and multi-level navigation hierarchy for existing pages and custom links.
• Very flexible conditional appearance options.
• Out-of-the-box Suckerfish support.
• Option to add navigation links with custom title, url and target attribute.
• Unlimited number of navigation widgets.
• Optional setting includes blog posts into the navigation selection list (only pages are available by default).
• Support for custom drop-down menus CSS.

Download Plugin

Having a Multilingual Site

Writing multilingual content is already hard enough, so why go extra mile without making sure you already have a good plan to manage translation on your blog. Check out the plugins below that will help you have a fully featured multilingual CMS.

1. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

Turns WordPress sites into a fully featured multilingual content management system (CMS). WPML helps it go the extra mile. Features include: 1) Multilingual content support based on Drupal i18n architecture. 2) CMS navigation allows adding drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation (all wigetized). 3) Creates internal Sticky Links so that they never break. You can read more about the capabilities of this powerful plugin here.

Download Plugin

2. xLanguage Plugin

xLanguage is a full featured plugin allows you to blog in different language, and allows user to select which version to read. It works for blog post, page, tags, categories. The user language preferences will also select the right theme and plugins MO files.

Download Plugin

3. qTranslate Plugin

qTranslate makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language. Here are some features:

• qTranslate Services – Professional human and automated machine translation with two clicks
• One-Click-Switching between the languages – Change the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML
• Language customizations without changing the .mo files – Use Quick-Tags instead for easy localization
• Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you
• Comes with a lot of languages already builtin! – English, German, Simplified Chinese and a lot of others

Download Plugin

Easily Manage Categories, Pages and Posts

1. Idealien Category Enhancements Plugin

Manage category templates as easily as you manage page templates. Select which apply through the post > categories menu using file names that make sense, not category ID numbers. Now any views of the category (or sub-categories) will render the according to the category template selected. Posts in a given category can also use a category-based template.

Download Plugin

2. pageMash > Page Management Plugin

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Download Plugin

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog.

Download Plugin

4. Exclude Pages Plugin

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you un-check it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

Download Plugin

5. WP No Category Base Plugin

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).

Download Plugin

SEO

WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of plugins that can be used to make your blog rank better.

1. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Download Plugin

2. All in One SEO Pack Plugin

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines: page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

Download Plugin

3. Redirection Plugin

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Download Plugin

4. Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin

If you just migrated your WordPress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

Download Plugin

5. SEO Smart Links Plugin

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Download Plugin

6. Platinum SEO Pack Plugin

This is an improvised version of the AllinOne SEO plugin. It does everything that AllinOne was doing and also some extra cool features. It takes care of pretty much everything, a bit more advanced than a basic SEO plugin but easy to use as well.

Download Plugin

Highly customizable Widgets

1. Widgets Reloaded Plugin

Widgets Reloaded replaces many of the default widgets with versions that allow much more control. Widgets come with highly customizable control panels. Each widget can also be used any number of times.

Download Plugin

2. Flexi Pages Widget Plugin

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. Features include:

• Option to display sub-pages only in parent page and related pages.
• Option to select and exclude certain pages from getting displayed in the list. Alternatively, only certain pages can be displayed by using the ‘include’ option.
• Option to include a link to the home page.
• Other options include title, sort column/order, hierarchical/flat format, show date.
• Multiple instances of the widget. Unlimited number of instances of the widget can be added to the sidebar.

Download Plugin

3. SidePosts Widget Plugin

With this widget you select the category you want, and all entries with this category, will be shown on the sidebar instead the main blog. You will have then a small blog on the sidebar for those special entries. For each entry, you have the link to the post page. You can select the number to post to show and if must show only the post excerpt or the full post content (Also excerpt with thumbnails can be shown).

Download Plugin

4. Query Posts Widget Plugin

This widget has everything you’ll ever need to show posts on your site without touching code. It’s like having a WordPress developer ready to do your bidding all wrapped up in a widget. All you need is a theme that’s widgetized.

It lets you displays posts by nearly any criteria you can imagine using the query_posts() function, except you don’t need to know anything about PHP to use it. You can do all kinds of neat things: Posts by tag, Posts by category, Posts by author, Posts by time/date, Posts by custom field key and/or value, Choose any number, Show pages, Show the full post, excerpt, or even order them in a list, and much more…

Download Plugin

Must Check Plugins

1. Search Everything Plugin

Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, options included: Search Every Page, Search Every Tag, Search Every Category, Search non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search Every Custom Field, Exclude Posts from search, Exclude Categories from search and more.

Download Plugin

2. Subscribe2 Plugin

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog. Email Notifications can be sent on a per-post basis or periodically in a Digest email.

Download Plugin

3. Exec-PHP Plugin

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. Features include

• Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages
• Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)
• Write PHP code in familiar syntax, eg.

Download Plugin

4. WP e-Commerce Plugin

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Download Plugin

5. NextGEN Gallery Plugin

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. It can turn a regular blog into a powerful photo-blog while giving you all the tools to manage it efficiently and easily.

Download Plugin

6. Contact Form 7 Plugin

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Download Plugin

7. Viper’s Video Quicktags Plugin

Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more.

Download Plugin