Pro Blog Design

Wordpress plugins are a great way to enhance and optimize your blog. In addition to adding more features to your actual blog, there are also a lot of plugins that can give you more control and power over the wordpress admin area.

Using these plugins you can do everything from hiding unnecessary elements to customizing the look of your admin area.

1. Admin Management Extended:

Traditionally, you would have to open a page/post to edit any properties. This plugin adds certain icons to the Manage post/page view so you can make changes without having to open the edit screen. You can change post/page title, edit post slug and change publication date with a neat pop-out calendar.

This plugin also allows you to toggle post/page visibility, toggle comment status open/close, changing page order with drag and drop, inline category and tag management, hiding draft posts and a lot of other functions that would otherwise need you to go through a number of hierarchical clicks.

Download this plugin here.

2. Pop Menus For WP Admin:

How would you like pop-up menus for all the Wordpress admin features? You can get them with this plugin and speed up your admin area navigation. It adds a pop-up sub-menu to the main WP menu items in your left sidebar and works even when the menu is collapsed. So, no need to collapse or hide the menu items anymore to save space since the plugin takes care of that automatically.

This plugin is based on jQuery and CSS and can be downloaded here.

3. Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu:

This plugin makes you super productive by bringing all the admin links to a neat drop down menu. No need to go through multiple hierarchies any more, now you can jump to any admin page by selecting it from a CSS driven drop down menu.

In addition to smoother navigation, this plugin also saves you a lot of screen real state and makes your admin area simpler. You can further customize this plugin by switching on/off the header, choosing a color scheme,  display/hide icons in the drop down menus and a number of other tweaks that would let you create a compact admin area.

Download this plugin here.

4. Simply Tags:

Get more out of tags with this plugin. It allows you to mass edit tags for a large number of posts, offers an auto-completion feature for entering tags and displays quick tags that you can click to select. The plugin also offers an auto-tagging feature where some tags are automatically entered based on the keywords in your post.

This plugin is specially useful if you want to add, rename or delete tags from a large number of posts. Imagine renaming a tag in hundreds of posts without this plugin, it would literally take hours. Whereas, with Simple Tags it takes less than a minute.

Download it here.

5. Pre-publish Reminders:

A simple plugin that displays reminder items you should consider before publishing. You can put a check-box against each item and check it off as you complete. These reminders are displayed on the write post page. Specially useful if you are running a multi-author blog and people tend to forget one thing or another. Moreover, you can also customize the text color and background to make the reminders more prominent. All these settings can be handled from an administration panel under the Manage Posts section.

Download this plugin here.

6. Wordpress Tweaks Plugin:

A simple yet powerful plugin to control the admin area of your blog. Offers various tweaks including turning off auto-complete for tags, disabling flash uploader, disabling self-pinging , disabling the dashboard and setting various SEO and security options to further optimize your blog . You can also use the plugin to control the nofollow options for your blog.

Download this plugin here.

7. Adminimize:

Adminize lets you get more out of the admin area by visually compressing and hiding many items. You can hide unnecessary items from the main menu, the sub menu and even the dashboard. You can move the dashboard to the menu or even remove it completely from the back-end. Different settings can be selected for different users based on the requirements. All input fields can be scrolled so you don’t need to make them bigger. The plugin also offers various features for tweaking the write page, the media, links and even the plugins.

It is probably one of the most comprehensive admin area plugins that give you complete control over your blog settings.

You can download this plugin here.

8. Wordpress Admin Bar:

Gives you an admin bar similar to Wordpress.com. You can access the admin features of your blog without going to the dashboard. Simply access the desired feature from any page of your blog, as long as you are logged in as the admin. You can display or hide any of the menu options to make it more productive.

You can get the Admin Bar plugin here.

9. Easy Admin Color Schemes:

Customize the colors of your admin interface with this plugin. You can switch between various color schemes without editing a single line of CSS. You can even add or import your own color schemes and the plugin would generate a stylesheet for it. These color schemes can also be previewed, copied and exported to use with a different blog.

While creating a color scheme, all you have to do is choose 4 primary colors from a color chart and the CSS would be edited accordingly. If you like an existing scheme but want to change a couple of colors, you can do so by editing the scheme and choosing new colors.

Download this plugin here.

10. Wordpress Admin Quick Menu:

This plugin adds quick menu items to your wordpress sidebar. Using this, you can access external pages like analytics and shopping carts from within your admin area. It works by adding a new menu to the left side of your control panel where you can add links to various internal and external pages.

To add new item, you simply need to provide the URL of the webpage and give it a menu title. You can also adjust the security level of each menu option for different user-roles.

Download it here.

11. Admin Expert Mode:

Are you tired of the inline documentation included on the admin pages? If you have been blogging for a while you no longer need paragraphs explaining to you what are Excerpts or TrackBacks. If you are familiar with all the different features of wordpress, this plugin can remove the verbose description and text included with different fields.

For example, this is how the write post area usually looks, with inline descriptions for various features.

However, using this plugin has removed all the descriptions and cleaned up the space.

It does NOT remove field labels, section headers or anything containing actual data. Moreover, after you have activated this plugin, every user must go to their profile to enable expert mode.

Download this plugin here.

12. Wordpress Admin Notepad:

This plugin creates a simple notepad in your admin area that you can use to save notes. You can hide/show the notepad with a single button and have different permission settings for each user role. It is a good tool to have if you often jot down things related to your blog.

Download the notepad plugin here.

13. Admin Trim Interface:

This plugin allows you to trim the interface by removing certain elements. You can remove different elements including the visit site button, the dashboard link, the “howdy” greeting, the wordpress version from the footer e.t.c. Each element has to be selected manually in order to be removed. However, all these changes are global and would effect all users.

Download this plugin here.

Have you used any plugins on your admin area? What about any of the above?