Useful WordPress Plugins

This is, apparently, what happens when I hot town the day before a training gig, and it’s a rainy Sunday. I start playing around with some ideas that had been running around in my head about the blog.

The first one, was taking the standard WordPress category page and trying to make it a bit more useful. By default, when you click the drop down list and hit one of the categories. WordPress would take you to a page with all the posts in that category. I wanted something more. I found a plugin called WP Custom Category PagseSocial Netwokring page, which has the latest links at the top, then the posts from this blog. I’m hopeful that will provide more usefulness to anyone who happens upon those pages, a sort of place to start when looking at that subject.

The other plugin I’ve added is Responsive Sticky Slider . This plugin allows me to define a category to be used as a slider of featured posts and then use a shortcode on a post to drop the slider in place. I went ahead and created a category just for that slider, and populated a few of the posts that people have hit the most in the past week or two. I also made that post sticky on the front page so it’ll always be on top. Since I’m using the category, it makes it really easy for me to leave that post up there, and switch out what posts show up there. I’m hoping that will help highlight some good tips and tricks that are sitting way back in the archives of the blog. (I have been doing this for more than 12 years now, there’s a lot back there!)

There’s still more that I want to play around with, on all of my blogs. So I’ll be taking what I have done here and tweaking it going forward, trying out some new things, and maybe cleaning up the layouts. Right now the Photography blog is the one that I love the way it looks, but then again, that one has images for everything, so it would look better. That’s blogs twentyfourteen theme and featured post slider is what got me thinking about doing that with my other sites as well. So, if nothing else, playing around over there is giving me lots to think about. That’s not a bad thing. Sometimes, you have to experiment a little in order to spur some creative thought.

Do you have plugins that you love that help you make your site more useful, or help you highlight some of your older content?

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