Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Fantastic Plugins to enhance the functionality of WordPress

Beta Tester and Regenerate Thumbnails

Plugins could be of immense help for websites on WordPress and handy plugins could prove to be helpful in enhancing its capabilities with great functionality without much strain though one would wonder which of these plugins would be useful for their site. It is essential to understand its need for specific site and add them depending on their requirements with the WordPress installation, most of which tend to become very useful on any WP site. Viewers could check on these plugins and opt for the ones most essential in running their website according to their requirements. At times, some of the functions in WordPress are not recommended for usage and the Log Deprecated Notices plugin provides a list of functions in the plugin or theme with suitable alternatives for usage.

Theme Check

Theme Check is one of the essential and most important plugins for WordPress developers which measures against the prevailing WordPress coding standards as well as its practices. While creating the theme, it helps in verifying the code making sure that it meets the review standard of the WordPress themes directory and creates a fresh menu item under the setting of Appearance. Its capabilities are that one can run over 8000 tests on any installed available themes resulting in a list of recommendations, errors and information messages. If the user has the inclination of submitting the theme to WordPress.org repository, the need to eliminate the errors is essential since Theme Check which is active during submission does not proceed any further, even if a single error is detected.

Besides this, Theme Check’s recommendations can also help in providing ideas for the theme with the maximum advantage on its functionality such as post formats and thumbnails and by eliminating all the recommendation the user can benefit with the latest features to turn off the same. If showcasing themes to clients or for colleague’s feedback and testing, the Theme Demo Bar enables a single WordPress installation, presenting more than one theme where these plugins are common on theme market places and theme shops. These are much easier than setting different environment for various themes though it does not have the flexibility of different content for different theme.

Beta Tester and Regenerate Thumbnails

Updating to WordPress Beta, Nightly version or Release Candidate (RC) with Beta Tester enables to test the compatibility of the theme or plugins, with the latest upcoming versions while Regenerate Thumbnails can be useful in setting a new size of image thumbnail which enable the user to regenerate the thumbnail images in the library according to the size of one’s choice with a single click though the process may take its time depending on the number of images especially from a live site.

Debogger

Debogger helps in dealing with debug messages, warnings and notices in WP, helping in showing the debug notices at the bottom of the page with the query counts, page load time and peak memory usage making it easy for performance tuning. It also checks the markup for W3C validity and for its function, one need to run on the server which is accessible by the W3C validation service. Another alternative is the Debug Bar that adds a Debug menu to the admin bar for easy access to cache, queries as well as other useful information. The two useful plugins which are alongside each other are the Debug Bar and Debug Bar Extender where the former give information about memory, request etc. while the later gives a better insight on what is prevailing under the hood, inclusive of cache hits or misses, clear profiler with back trace of all functions as well as SQL queries.

User Switching

One can switch between registered users without the need of repeating the usernames and passwords with the User Switching which, once activated will give a new menu named Switch off in the admin bar and if a plugin to create new role with a set of new capabilities is needed, this plugin would be of great help.

Disable Core Updates

Users often working with plugins and themes and probably testing them in various versions of WP of different set of plugins as well as setup configurations come across new versions available which can cause interruption in their working system. The Disable Core Updates plugin thus helps in turning them off.

Backup to Dropbox

Back up of the content is very vital and offsite backups are essential when one would not have the time to download a backup and reload the same to a cloud storage service. WordPress Backup to Dropbox helps in saving the same to the dropbox account instead of downloading a backup using the OAuth, keeping the details safe with its simple and sleek UI, customizable backup settings and cross browser compatibility.

Better WordPress Security

This plugin provides various WP security features and techniques which are essential for securing a WP site combining them into an easy to use plugin by working in obscuring sensitive information, increasing security of passwords, blocking unauthorized users and detecting attempts in finding vulnerabilities. Moreover it also makes regular backups of the site enabling the user to be online quickly should they face any kind of an attack Mono-live is a great eye opener on some fantastic latest technology information which provides immense insight to the user.

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