5 Unbeatable WordPress Admin Plugins

Welcome to the new & improved design.mivox.com. I honestly do intend to update the blog regularly, so go ahead and grab the RSS feed, or get the feed by email. Hell, I'm so damn hip, you can even follow me on Twitter! Enjoy the site ...

There are so many WordPress plugins available, it’s actually pretty hard to sort through them all and figure out what the absolute must haves really are. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are often half a dozen (or more) plugins available that claim to do exactly what you need …

One of the areas with the most room for usability improvement is in the WordPress admin area. Every time you want to do something, you have to click at least twice (once on the main section header, and once on the sub-menu header to get to what you actually want to do). To do anything with a comment, you have to either load the whole post (to delete or reply to it), or got to an entirely separate admin-area page (to edit it). The tag system, while excellent in actual function, has very limited administration options. Upgrading involves uploading a whole hell of a lot of individual files via a separate interface (unless your host offers a server-side upgrade system). And what about comment trolls? Akismet has no function for banning specific visitors, and neither does WordPress itself.

Here are five must-have WordPress admin plugins that will solve all of these shortcomings:

• Admin Drop-Down Menu This single plugin will save half the time you spend waiting for your WordPress admin area to load … if you have a slow internet connection, that can be a lot of time! All the admin area navigation menus are collapsed into a single menu bar with drop down lists of all the sub-pages in each section. To configure a plugin, for example, isntead of clicking “Settings,” waiting for the General Settings page to load, and then clicking the plugin link in the sub-menu, you just mouse over “Settings” and select the plugin you want from the drop-down list that appears. I wouldn’t think of setting up a WP site without this plugin.
• Absolute Comments Manager From the same site that brings you the Admin Drop-Down Menu, Absolute Comments is another huge time-saver. With this plugin, you can approve/unapprove, spam, delete, edit, reply to, and view all comments on a given post … all without leaving the main comments admin page. That’s right: You don’t have to load a whole post just to reply to your most recent comment! A reply form pops up on top of the Comments page. You can also go straight to the edit window from the Comments page, without having to load the post to get to the “edit” link. Much like the Admin Drop-Down Menu, this plugin makes me wonder why WordPress didn’t set up the admin interface this way in the first place.
• Simple Tags Simple to use, this plugin may be … but it’s feature set is anything but. Not only does it handle basic “click to add tags” and autocompletion features (which is all I was looking for), you can also choose whether to display each posts tags on the page (and make them visible or not), there is a tag cloud option with many more options than the default WordPress tag cloud (which you can use as a widget, or use the template tag to place it in different places on different page types), it will automatically add related posts links to the bottom of the current post (there’s also a related tag feature), it will suggest tags based on searches from Yahoo (and other sites), allow you to batch edit your existing tage … and more. Yup, it does even more than that. Sold yet?
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade This plugin just might be the biggest time-saver of them all. It does exactly what it says. I’ve used it to upgrade four WordPress sites from various 2.2-2.3 versions to 2.5 with no problems, and then catching them all up to 2.5.1 not too long ago. No more procrastinating your WordPress update because you don’t want to deal with the hassle!
• Bannage And Bannage might just be the biggest aggravation-saver of them all. WordPress doesn’t have any native way to ban trolls and Akismet-ducking spammers from your site comments. Enter bannage … it bans by name, email or IP. Now, granted, a really dedicated troll could get around these restrictions, but it’s been sufficient to get rid of everyone I’ve ever banned from a blog. Now, if you cater to a really tech-savvy crowd, you might need something more industrial-strength … but for most blogs, Bannage should work just fine.