Just wanna show you some of my most-using plugins in WordPress as a developer.
Advanced Custom Fields
The most essential plugin for a WordPress developer, IMHO. It adds to ANY post type or ANY taxonomy custom data fields, where you can provide almost any data you want. Those data fields can be text fields, textareas, datetime fields, colour pickers, radio buttons, checkboxes, images, videos etc.
A demo of ACF plugin. Image from https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
So you or your editors can set tons of custom settings and then you as a developer can easily use them in your theme’s code.
The PRO version of ACF plugin also provides some awesome possibilities. For example, repeater fields, so you can create a set of fields and then duplicate it as many times as you need. Also, the PRO version allows you to build custom Gutenberg blocks! I wrote an article about that, so check it out, you’ll love this feature:
How and Why to Build Custom Gutenberg Blocks in WordPress
FacetWP
A super-powerful plugin for making complex posts’ filters in an easy way. And it’s not only for products in WooCommerce, you can filter any post types by any meta fields they have. This means it is fully compatible with ACF, which makes it even cooler.
A demo of the FacetWP plugin
It comes with awesome features like pager, for instance. It allows you to either create a pagination with the filtering results, or show them in an infinite scroll or with a load-more button. With extra addons, you can show results on a map and sort them in geographical order from the user’s location.
Besides, all the filtering is happening with AJAX. And using plugin’s filters and hooks you can modify filter results in any way you need.
Contact Form 7
I’m sure you already know about this plugin, but allow me to explain why I like it so much.
I know, it’s not very user-friendly on the back-end. This is because the form building process is based on shortcodes and users cannot see the final result immediately.
But it’s very powerful for developers! They can write their own HTML code for the forms, manipulate form data on submission (both on a server side and browser side), use dynamic data for the form fields (like current user’s name or variables from the $_GET array) etc. And let’s be honest, building contact forms is not a daily routine for your site’s administrators 😅. So the shortcodes-based back-end can be forgivable for all the features this plugin provides. And it’s 100% free!
WP All Import/Export
I had this task from one of my clients recently to populate WooCommerce products from the Excel table. And not just simple products with name, description, image and price, but with tons of custom fields (hello ACF again).
This is where WP All Import saved me! It allows you to import Excel, XML or CSV files, then create a template for your import and import all your posts at once. And yes, it works with any post types and taxonomies in WordPress.
And the process of creating an import template is very easy — you can simply drag a field from your import file and then drop it into the place it has to be in your post.
Very easy to create an import template. Image from https://www.wpallimport.com/
It’s fully compatible with WooCommerce and ACF (even with ACF repeater fields), although you need to purchase extra addons for them. BTW, they are planning to change away from lifetime licences, but you still have time to purchase it once and for all.
Duplicator
If you need to migrate your site from staging to production server, or from localhost to live — this is the right plugin! What I like the most of it — it migrates the site exactly how it was. That means you won’t need to fix widgets, menus etc.
The PRO version allows you to migrate multisites and work with big site sizes (when you have lots of media for example). But you can simply exclude the uploads folder from the archive (built-in feature of the free version). Just copy your media files manually after migrating the site (a small hack 😉).
What’re your favourite WordPress plugins?
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