Unless your business plan includes making your mark on the development community with a custom-build content management system, chances are you’re going to be building your sites in an established one. While CMS platforms make the job of the developer easier, most are not going to include all the tools you need to deliver the user experience most modern clients are looking for. Fortunately, the developers of those CMS platforms and pioneers in their use often extend their functionality in little modules of code called “plug-ins”.
Here are 10 ways to extend the functionality of your sites using plug-ins, with examples from perhaps one of the most ubiquitous CMS platforms available today: WordPress.
Spam Prevention
First and foremost, one must realize that not every visitor to a new site is going to be a person directly interested in the site’s services or content, if they’re a person at all. Comments intended as nothing more than shallow advertisements are going to happen. A good first plug-in is one designed to concern itself with preventing as much of this unwanted clutter as possible. Akismet is a plug-in for WordPress that keeps an electronic eye out for the most common conventions of spammers and automatically relegates their comments to a bin in the admin area for the site’s administrator to peruse or empty at any time.
Multiple Users
It goes without saying that not every person to whom you want to give access to your site should have full control over it. Some may only be adding particular forms of content while other may be logging in to write new articles. There are some instances where you’ll want to allow access to premium content to external users for a price, but prevent them from actually altering any of it. You’ll want an easy way to define what a certain level of user can or cannot touch, and in WordPress, User Role Editor is a quick and painless way of doing just that.
Styled Login
In keeping with the previous functionality, someone logging into the site in question may not necessarily require access to the administration area. In some cases, they’re only logging in to access premium content and thus have no need to see “under the hood.” You’ll want to use the login functionality but not necessarily take users away from the style and layout of your site. Fortunately there are ways to do this, and Ajax-Login for WordPress is one of them.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Outside of direct traffic and your links getting picked up in the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of others, perhaps the best way of driving traffic to your site is optimizing your pages for search engines. This means making sure they have descriptions, targeted keywords and alternative text tags for any images. SEO All-In-One is an example of how extensions can make this work easier, providing a quick way to bring in more visitors with a minimum amount of effort.
Caching
The time it takes for your site to load can make or break it. If your pages take too long to load or cram the amount of space a user is paying for, they may take their browsers and business elsewhere. The solution is to do as much as one can on the server’s side of the connection to regulate load times. W3 Total Cache is one of the most effective ways of doing this for a WordPress site. Such extensions are especially useful in a shared hosting environment, where bandwidth and load times are just as valuable to the owner of the site as its visitors.
Feedback Forms
The information superhighway is not a one-way street. The power of social media comes from the ability users have to interact with one another. From feedback on the site’s content to requests for more information or to purchase items, forms that are easy to use and fit into the style of your website add a similar power to your brand. Contact Form 7 is exemplary in this capacity for sites built on WordPress.
In-line Code
Believe it or not, there’s only so much you can do with text, links and images in a Content Management System. Every now and again you need to directly insert a function from the code structure of your website into what would normally be a content area. Thankfully, most programming languages on the Web are flexible enough that a simple plug-in bridges the gap between the normally invisible lines of code and the sleek, easy to use administrative area. Two such plug-ins for WordPress are Executable PHP Widget & Exec-PHP which respectively add a sidebar widget that executes PHP snippets and allows those snippets to work within content areas as well as they do in the normally untouchable areas of the site.
Fancy Layouts
Let’s say you have a staff of twenty employees, and you want to feature each of them on your website, with photos or explanations of their duties all on the same page. Many themes for CMS platforms have stylistic elements that allow you to display or hide information with the click of a mouse. And if the theme doesn’t include this functionality, a plug-in can add it for you. WordPress Tabs Slides adds exactly what it describes to your site – tabs and slides that condense the initial appearance of your pages without reducing the amount of content they can hold.
Friendly Popups
There was a time when many commercial sites on the Internet did their advertising with pop-up windows, and many current browsers include the means of blocking them. Pop-ups, however, do have positive uses. If you’re showing photo thumbnails in your pages but want the full image to be shown on demand, or if you want to feature the content of another site or other documents without taking visitors away from your site, there are functions in the jQuery library and others like it that can facilitate this. Plug-ins like Lightbox & Thickbox bring this into the platform you’re using and make slick features like this a snap to implement.
Even in this greener, more environmentally aware time, people will be printing out parts of websites. It could be to have an offline copy of instructions, a flyer to take into a meeting or a variety of other reasons. It’s still a good idea to include print stylesheets that strip the more graphically intense aspects from a site. However, there may be instances where a user will only want to print a portion of the post or page, and like the expanding sections and friendly pop-ups we just covered, users will want to do it without leaving the page they’re on. A plug-in like WordPress Print This Section makes this possible, providing the means to set aside a portion of your content that, when a button is clicked, goes directly to your visitor’s printer.