Lantern Festival 08

Adam Hughes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:57:23 +0000

Black and White Abstract

Adam Hughes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:56:35 +0000

Flower by the Sea

Adam Hughes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:55:57 +0000

Sunrise

Adam Hughes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:53:25 +0000

Don’t Screw Up

Adam Hughes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:59:12 +0000

Essential Wordpress widgets

Adam Hughes — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:30:11 +0000

There’s many lists of essential Wordpress widgets on the net and I’ve browsed a few of them. I’ve picked up good tips on quality widgets from these blogs and while I would reccomend anyone to these blogs I feel a lot of them just pick the same widgets. Thats not to say those lists are useless but I feel that their should be a bit more diversity and lists of widgets that meet a certain niche criteria. I myself have been looking at improving the dashboard to make it more of a useful place for my clients.

Anyway here is my list of widgets that I’m using as a base for most of my sites.

Pimp my Dashboard widgets

Dashboard links

Give you a handy links for sites that you frequent right on your dashboard.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Provides a very basic google analytics chart on your dashboard.

Dashboard: Schedule Posts

Shows scheduled posts on your dashboard to help keep track of things.

My Dashboards

Very handy if you have more than one blog. It provides a dropdown list of links to their dashboards.

Dashboard Widget Manager

Now you have all these extra widgets on the dashboard you might need something to manage them better. This allows customisation of what different users see when they log in.

Comments

Disqus

Provides a very good comment system that is styled clean and has integration with Twitter and Facebook among others things.

or IntenseDebate

If you think people will be commenting loads and having heated discussions this comment system would be a good place to start. Allows voting up or down of comments.

A few others

Google Analytics for Wordpress

Essential if you want to have good tracking and reports on you site. I would reccomend this to every site no matter how small.

Breadcrumb NavXT

The best widget I have found to add a breadcrumb trail to your site. Very useful for sites that have a lot of depth.

Elevate Parent Template

Really useful if you have different templates for different categories and want the child categories to mimc their parents style.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This will provide related posts for your readers helping them to stay longer on your site.

That wraps up my ‘go to’ list of plugins and widgets. Plenty of dashboard widgets there. If you have any others that you feel would suit this list please drop the links in the comments.

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