5 Plugins to Enhance Your Site’s Form and Function

Virtually every WordPress site out there uses at least 1 plugin with most of us using more than a dozen. Here are a few that I’ve uncovered recently that will help your site in form or function.

• • Background Control: This is a handy plugin that enables you to change the background image and color of your site. I uncovered this plugin because I was considering making one myself, but this one already had the features I thought users would want. It includes a built in file uploader, the ability to select the image properties (repeat, fixed, and position) plus color. If the only thing you don’t like about your theme is the background appearance, then this is all you need to change it. Download it here.
  • Cute Profiles: This stylish plugin allows you to easily add links to your various social media pages right into your WordPress site. There are several existing plugins that do this so what sets Cute Profiles apart? For starters it is very easy to set up. To include a profile, all you have to do is enter the corresponding URL and the icon link will appear automatically. Some other plugins require you to uncheck lots of boxes unless you want 50 little icons on your site. There are styling and placement options, plus all the images are contained in an image sprite. This allows the browser to load only one image instead of several individual ones which will make your site much faster. You can download Cute Profiles here.
  • Tweet Blender: I’ve been a Twitter Tools user for some time now and it servers my needs quite well, but it isn’t the best fit for every situation though. Tweet Blender gives you the chance to show tweets from multiple people or hash tags and place them into one stream. So say you have a company site, you can list all your employees tweets in the stream and display them along with their Twitter avatars. Or if you are hosting an event that people will be tweeting about, you can set it to display a common hash tag so someone can easily follow the conversation via your site. You can find Tweet Blender here.
  • Ultimate Automatic WordPress Translation Plugin: Obviously the internet is global so shouldn’t your site be too? There are other translation plugins out there–WPML.org has a great plugin for you to translate your site, but you have to do the translating yourself. The Ultimate Automatic WordPress Translation Plugin uses Google Translate and language detection to automatically deliver a version of your site to an international visitor. So say your site is in English and someone from France visits. The plugin can detect the location of the visitor’s IP address or the language settings on their computer to direct them to the French version of your site. You have the ability to control which pages and posts are translated as well as which languages to include. It’s rather easy for the user, and while Google Translate isn’t perfect, it’s better than having a site that is impossible to read. This plugin is available for purchase for $9.95 from here (website has been taken down).
  • My Snippets: This is a simple plugin with a great idea behind it that will soon grace Organized Themes. It allows you to display custom snippets in any widgetized area of your site on a post-by-post basis. Here’s how I’m going to use it. I’m adding instructional videos to all my themes, but I can’t complete them all at once. I’d like the videos to appear in my sidebar on theme posts below the price, demo and purchase links. I can hard code this into the theme and use conditional logic and custom fields to make them display when I have a video, but now I don’t have to. I can use the My Snippets plugin to handle this for me. I just paste the code into the snippet box and now my video is present. Simple and effective like all the best plugins are. You can find it here.

What other undiscovered plugins have you found recently that are useful to you?