Bradley J. Shively

My Wordpress Ritual: Plug-Ins Edition

// February 22nd, 2010 // design

Over the past few years, I’ve done more than my fair share of tinkering with Wordpress. Early on in my college career, I became involved with the student government at Penn State, as well as the student government for my college. The result of being “plugged in” and making it known that you have some knowledge regarding web design and technology in general has been numerous e-mails and phone calls out of the blue from old contacts for help with random software, gadgets, and the all-too-often “I need a website…”

It hasn’t been all bad, though; I’ve learned some valuable skills through my endeavoring for others. It has even yielded a couple of paying gigs, which I hope to gradually turn into a more steady stream of client work in the next few months. However, it’s gotten my thinking about what exactly I do when I setup a Wordpress installation, and how much of it could be streamlined for productivity’s sake.

While I really enjoy the plug-in installer built directly into the Wordpress dashboard, it isn’t terribly efficient. It requires that I manually search for each plug-in, and then click two or three boxes to download, install, and activate each that I select. There isn’t even any sort of queuing feature (which would be awesome), where I can compile a list of 5+ plug-ins that I want to install, and apply bulk actions to them. There may be some sort of plug-in that provides this functionality (irony), but I like the out-of-the-box features because I can rely on them not to break when I update the WP core.

So, since I plan on seeking out and working with more clients in the future, it makes sense to come up with a streamlined process for my Wordpress work. If I’m flat quoting projects, the less time I spend doing menial tasks, the more money I’m making per hour, and the more money I can reasonably dedicate to making a client’s site awesome rather than just functional. Therefore, I think I’m going to take a new approach starting now.

Certain plug-ins are present by default when I setup a Wordpress page. For example, Google XML Sitemaps improves the ability of search engines to map content on your page. What’s the point of publishing for the web if no one can find your work? This goes in every single site, every single time. Similarly, All-in-one SEO Pack gets installed on all but the most rushed of jobs, for its ability to give control over tags, meta data, page titles, and so on. For anything I build for myself, I always install Google Analyticator to track traffic sources, number of hits, most popular content, and so on.

The point is, rather than selecting all of these individually through the Wordpress interface, it seems to me that it would be much better to keep local folders based on broad categories. These categories might include “essential”, “SEO”, “comments”, and so on, with each housing plug-ins specific to that type of functionality. This would allow me to do mass uploads of my most important plug-ins using an FTP client. While I would occasionally have to update these local copies with the newest versions, I think it would be much more efficient and I would waste far fewer clicks this way.

What are your must-haves on a fresh Wordpress install, other than a spiffy theme that aligns with the message of your site?