As a new user of WordPress I spent some time studing and customizing it. I’ve seen some really nice resources along the way that I want to promote and be able to find easier later on. For this reason I am writing up this post with links to stuff that I liked. Hopefully it will also be useful to other people trying out WordPress.
- Themes. There are plenty themes for WordPress. Lots of them actually. Firstly, I came across a really nice compilation of 270+ themes for WordPress 1.5. Than I saw even more resources mentioned at Codex::Using_Themes. After much trying and testing I chose Wuhan.
- Plugins. Once again – lots and lots to see, read about, download, and try. Mostly good stuff. And again, the best listing of resources at Codex::Plugins. I am still in process of studing all of these, but here is the list of what I found useful so far.
- RumMovie – essential for anyone writing about movies. This plugin allows one to quickly insert infromation from IMDB into the post. Formatting can be easily tweaked with the template. Pluging provides a search functionality and movie image retrieval. This plugin alone saved me a lot of time and will continue do so in the future. Writing movie reviews is a bliss now.
- Singular – takes care of permalinks. See, if you have a bunch of posts with the same title (like I have with “Picture of the day”) and if you use the title in the permalink, than, by default, WordPress would add a unique number to the permalinked title, like picture-of-the-day-1 and picture-of-the-day-2. I don’t need such behaviour since my permalinks include a date and I never have a post with the same title and the same date. Singular plugin takes care of this problem by removing the annoying number.
- WP-ContactForm – provides an easy way to create a contact form. Need I say more?
- Database Manager – optimizations, backups, and restores of the database. Essential after you’ve wrote your third post or so.
- del.ico.us Smart Tagging – automatically create links from posts to del.ico.us tags.
- Text Replace – automatic replacement of text, like frequent links, names, etc.
- Documentation. WordPress has an excellent set of documentation, as well as broad support by community. Codex is the primary site for any documentation references. WordPress support forums are excellent too. WordPress itself, as well as themes and plugins, is getting a lot of coverage at Blogging Pro. Yet another good resource is How To Blog. And, of course, Weblog Tools Collection.
I’ll be updating this post with any new resources that I find on my way. Meanwhile I think I gave you enough to occupy yourselves for some time now.