7 Top WordPress Plugins by John Jacoby
John James Jacoby describes himself as a “Web Developer. Business Owner. Do-gooder.” and his work in WordPress plugin development certainly attests to this. He is key to the WordPress community and some of the plugins he designed have revolutionised how people use and see WordPress as a platform. Those wishing to keep up to date with his thoughts about WordPress and other things can do so via his Twitter and his blog. To pay tribute to one of the WordPress world’s best and brightest, here’s a list from us at WP Carers of the 7 Top WordPress Plugins by John Jacoby.
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1. Jet Pack – Top WordPress Plugins
Jet Pack ingeniously enables users to get the options available to WordPress.com users on their WordPress.org site. Features of Jet Pack include customization, mobile theme, content tools, visitor engagement, site performance and security. With over 18 million downloads of the plugin to date, you know that Jet Pack has the vote of the majority of the WordPress community!
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2. BuddyPress – WordPress Social Media Plugin
This plugin allows you to turn your WordPress site into your own social media, creating a place to build a community with your audience. Features of this WordPress social media plugin include member profiles, activity streams, user groups and messaging. To date, BuddyPress has been downloaded an incredible 3 million times.
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3. bbPress – bbPress Themes
bbPress is a WordPress plugin that enables you to make forums and bulletin boards on your WordPress site. bbPress focuses on integration, ease of use, web standards, speed and has many bbPress themes available to change the style of your forums.
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4. Post Type Switcher – WordPress Plugin Development
This top WordPress plugin provides a simple means to alter the type of your post quickly. Post Type Switcher allows you to switch between any combination of post types, even custom post types. Although not one of John Jacoby’s better known WordPress plugins, it’s efficient and quietly brilliant.
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5. Liveblog – Top WordPress Plugins
Liveblog allows for fast-paced publishing, ideal for covering a live event on your WordPress blog. Features include posting from the front-end of your site, new entries delivered without needing to refresh the browser and authors can drag and drop photos straight into the Liveblog area to insert images. It’s by far the most user-friendly plugin of its kind.
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6. WP Multi Network – WordPress Plugin Development
This plugin enables you to turn your multi-site installation of WordPress into many multi-site networks, centred by one user base. Only those appointed “super admins” can create new networks of sites. Although WP Multi Network is not for the beginner developer, it’s definitely worth the effort and I’d count it amongst my top WordPress plugins.
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7. Notifly
Notifly is a great plugin which sends notification emails of all new posts and comments to everyone on a list. This plugin works especially well for keeping people informed of what’s happening on private blogs. Notifly makes it easy to follow an entire conversation, even if it consists of comments on someone else’s blog posts.