Top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009

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Back in February I did a top 5 WordPress plugins. Now, I think it is probably time I updated it a little, so I’m going to do another top 5 plugins. I use these plugins quite actively on GEEK! so I feel the creators of these plugins deserve a little thanks from me.

So, here are my top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009:

  1. Executable PHP Widget: Sometimes it can be really annoying that sidebars in WordPress don’t support PHP code. Maybe you want to have a login/logout link to your blog in the sidebar. Sadly, the standard “Text” widget in WordPress only supports text and HTML, but not PHP. This plugin sorts that problem for you. Activate the plugin and then select the “PHP code” widget from the “Widgets” section of the WordPress dashboard. The new widget will accept text and HTML, as well as PHP, so it can be really helpful.
  2. Clean Archives Reloaded (external): This plugin lets you create an archive page for your posts really easily. It does all the work for you. You simply install the plugin and it does the rest. Simply create a page that you want to have the archive on, insert the code for the plugin, and the job is done.
  3. Full Comments on Dashboard (external): Find it annoying when WordPress doesn’t show full comments on the WordPress dashboard? I do, so I installed this plugin, and the problem was solved. There’s no configuration for this plugin – you just install it, activate it, and it starts working straight away.
  4. Lock Out: Need to do maintenance to your WordPress website or blog? This is a really simple plugin that locks all users out of your website, except yourself of course. You can set a customized message to let your viewers know that the site is offline for maintenance. It’s a very handy little plugin. Oh, a word of warning – the WordPress plugin site claims it only works to WordPress 2.5. However, I’m on WordPress 2.8.2 (at the time of writing) and the plugin works absolutely fine.
  5. Google XML Sitemaps (external): This is a great plugin that handles all of your sitemaps for you. It creates your sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file for you. It then hands over all the information to search engines such as Google, Ask Search and MSN Search (or Bing – whatever they call it now!).

Those are my top 5 plugins for now. I’ve used all of them for several weeks (some for months) and they’ve all been really helpful and easy to use.

I’ll do another top 5 in a couple of months, but for now – the above are my favourites! Enjoy.