From the Desk of Janet Barclay

One of the many things I love about WordPress is the fact that there are plug-ins for practically anything you can imagine – and then some.

Some plug-ins are so popular that nearly everyone with a WordPress site uses them, or is at least familiar with them, such as Google Analytics for WordPress, Contact Form 7, All in One SEO Pack, and of course Akismet, which comes pre-installed with WordPress. I won’t take any time or screen space explaining those, but if you’re not familiar with them, I suggest you click on the links to learn what they do.

I’m much more fascinated by the lesser known plugins, which often serve functions that aren’t even needed in most cases. Here are a few I’ve installed recently.

By default, WordPress displays categories in alphabetical order, and that works well in most cases; however, I had a client who wanted the categories displayed in a specific order. Not wanting to disappoint my client, I went to the WordPress Plugin Directory where I discovered My Category Order, which allows you to simply drag and drop the categories into the desired order.

Another client had spent hours entering tags on all her posts, only to find that the search feature on her blog still only brought up posts that included the search term in the title or body. I felt terrible, because I was the one who recommended that she enter the tags. Fortunately, I was able to find, install, and configure the Search Everything Plugin very quickly, and now things are working just the way she wants.

It’s not uncommon to place affiliate ads in the sidebar. After all, affiliate earnings is often the only income generated by a blog, but if you have too many ads, your sidebar can look cluttered and even a little cheesy. You can offer up a variety of ads without sidebar clutter by using the Datafeedr Random Ads Plugin. In addition to the plugin files, you copy the html code for the ads you wish to rotate into a text file which you upload to your server, following the instructions provided. Each time the page displays, a different ad will be displayed. You can see this in action on my other blog, Your Organizing Business. Take a look at the ads for OnlineOrganizing and FranklinCovey, then refresh the page – you’ll see different ads appear.

Whenever a client asks me to do something on their WordPress site and my initial reaction is “that can’t be done,” I always go to the WordPress Plugin Directory, and it hasn’t let me down yet!