Blog Design Studio

One of the biggest factors for WordPress fame is the amount of development happening around this ever so wonderful content management system. The flexibility it gives to designers and programmers helps them generate inspirational WordPress design. If you would like to learn how to develop WordPress themes and create wonderful designs then you should head over to Small Potato’s ultimate tutorial series on how to create wordpress themes. Apart from that there are various WordPress plugins that’ll help you in WordPress design development, lets check them out -

1. Theme Switch & Preview

Nicolas Kuttler has created various small plugins, however this one is my favorite as it allows you to tweak the template online without breaking stuff for visitors. There is a widget and a shortcode to make switching WordPress design easily. The plugin gives various options and as a developer you’ll surely love them.

2. Maintenance Mode

WordPress design development should be done in such a way or locally [how to install WordPress locally] that it shouldn’t impact the development, however there are times when the site can look weird, while enabling the new theme on live environment. This is where, Maintenance Mode plugin comes in handy. It allows you to create a custom message that’ll be displayed to your visitors while you get to access the blog as normal.

3. User Switching

This is a fantastic plugin that lets you easily switch between the multiple users. In the past there have been few of our clients who allowed various low level user accounts and didn’t want them to see various settings in the dashboard, this is where this plugin can come handy. It allows you to quickly switch between users with the click of a button. It’s up to date and supports older and new versions alike.

4. Get the image

Get the image is a plugin that grabs images for you. You can grab the image and display it around the post using custom fields, WP’s post image feature or you can even extract it from the post itself. If you are playing around with post images, then this plugin can surely help you in easing the task. You can go through its implementation and frequently asked questions over here.

5. Query Posts

This plugin is like a dream come true for those, who aren’t loved by PHP. This plugin creates a widget that lets you display the posts the way you want. This is the widget that keeps users out of the code and gives them the ability to display items on their site how they want. It supports categories, tags, custom taxonomies, author, date, time- and a lot more.

6. NextGEN Gallery

I personally feel that this plugin should become part of WordPress Core. Not only this plugin is a complete CMS in itself for images, it has its own plugins too! I would say that this should become your must install plugin for WordPress, no matter if you are using it for WordPress design development or using it personally! It’s just too good to be true! This plugin powers our WordPress Design Portfolio.

7. YD Network-wide Options

YD Network-wide options plugin lets you easily replicate blog or plugin settings across the network of blogs on WordPress 3.0. It maintains backward compatibility with WordPress MU and is constantly updated by the author. This is a fantastic feature as it allows you to easily maintain the settings and update them regularly across the whole network install in WordPress 3.x.

8. Members

Just like User Switching, members is one plugin that lets you manage the member roles in WordPress. This plugin lets you manage the scope of roles. You can give and take features from roles, create new roles etc. This ensure that members will get only those privileges that you want them to have. A must have plugin if you want to use WordPress as CMS.

9. Custom Post Type UI

Custom Post Type UI plugin gives you easy to use interface for maintaining custom post types and taxonomies. WordPress 3.0 features better support for Custom post types and taxonomies and this plugin improves the interface tremendously. It’s a fantastic plugin and must be in every WordPress designer’s arsenal.

I hope you find these nine plugins useful enough for WordPress design and development. We’ll continue featuring these kind of plugins and various other tips. Please share the posts on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network using the buttons on the left.