More on WordPress Plugins

Someone sent me an email thanking me for this list of “recommended plugins”.

I’m not sure I’d call these “recommended” plugins, per se, unless they fit a need you have.

Rather, just a bunch I’ve found in my travels that nobody really seems to discuss. They mainly focus on working with Pages, as well as a few heavy-weight ones that people don’t know about.

WP has two ways of posting things: As a “post” and as a “Page”.

Like most social media these days, the posts all go on a single Page in the order they were created. That’s what your “blog” is.

But you can create any number of Pages. Oddly, you cannot put posts on pages other than the default one, which doesn’t even have a name.

Plugins give you the ability to reorganize things somewhat. Like, you can assign categories to posts, but not Pages. But one of those plugins lets you assign categories to Pages as well. Others will let you create a list of pages. By default, Pages show up in your main menu, like across the top below the header. If you’ve got more than a small handful of them, there will be too many to fit.

It’s all about organization.

The problem I’m running into right now that hasn’t been solved yet is that I have a group of Pages I want to display in a widget, but only if someone is logged in and only on certain Pages. The way to do stuff like that has always been to “customize” your theme. The notion of “widgets” evolved to make it unnecessary to do that, but now there are widgets that only work with other widgets of a certain “era”. For instance, some new widget hooks were introduced in V2.8, and while I’ve found two widgets that let you display a list of Pages, they don’t conform to V2.8 hooks. The one that hides widgets requires V2.8 hooks to work.

Waiting for people to update their widgets can take quite a while. In the mean time, it’s more likely that someone else will introduce a totally new widget that does the trick.

So it pays to spend some time now and then going through that humongous list of plugins looking for things that might be helpful. Especially b/c people tend to get creative with their plugin names and not bother to use obvious tags. So they can be very difficult to find using regular search facilities.