Most useful WordPress Plugins?

[RavenManiac]

As a Genesis user, what plugins do find are the most useful? I'm looking for plugins whose absent would make your life infinitely harder. Please post them here in order of importance. Thanks!

[Summer]

Useful only relates to what you need to do on your website, so could you narrow down the parameters a bit? 🙂

Are you talking about additions to users, mods in content structure or display, navigation enhancements, social media sharing, or something else?

I'm actually working on a list of plugins, in two separate designations... the "must have" for my needs, and the "must play" for testing out the cool factor. Nowhere near ready yet, since I'm still testing a few.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[RavenManiac]

Hmmm. You have some very good and valid points. I guess I was just referring to general, everyday use for a typical Genesis website. For example, as a relatively new WordPress developer, the plugins I tend to always install are as follows:

Akismet
Ninja Forms
Word fence Security
WordPress Importer
WP Migrate Pro

These of course are in alphabetical order. I'm sure personal preferences will vary, but these tend to be the most useful to me. 🙂

[Summer]

For general plugins, a lot depends on if it's a site of mine or a client's site, and what that site will be used for, so this will be a starting reference, rather than a complete list.

For brand new installations, I always delete Hello Dolly and Akismet immediately, and never install Jetpack 🙂

I'll install either Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms, depending on site needs, and for spam protection I'll go with either WP-Spamshield or Zero Spam.

Regenerate Thumbnails is always a must, and 75% of the time so is Dynamic Widgets.

If I'm not going to always be working on a staging site for the main site, I don't install WP Migrate DB... for backups, depending on the client's hosting situation, I'll use Updraft Plus.

I like WP Recent Comments with Avatars (with my own special customization), and I like Nextscripts Social Network Auto-Poster for auto-posting to Twitter (it can also do G+ and Facebook).

For sites where I will have contributors who don't need their own full user accounts, I create guest user profiles instead of accounts to still give them bylines and author pages, and sometimes I use Avatar Manager to give them custom avatars (since they aren't likely to have Gravatar accounts). I used to use Simple Local Avatars for that, but I've since switched. And with those, comes Genesis Simple Edits and Genesis Simple Share.

I really need to finish writing up my tutorials on setting up user profiles, and finish figuring out the code to fix the author box on guest author pages problem. 🙂

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

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