10+ WordPress plugins for developers

by Jean-Baptiste Jung. 69 Comments -

One of the good points of WordPress is its community: There are a million of WordPress plugins dedicated to achieve almost tasks. For this article, I focus on 10 plugins that is really useful to create a developer blog.

Preserve Code Formatting


Have you ever tried to display code snippets in WordPress? If your answer was “yes”, I’m pretty sure you had trouble to do so, at least during your first tries. Why? Because of html entities and WordPress formatting.
By using the “Preserve Code Formating” WordPress plugin, you can say a definitive goodbye to all that kind of problems.
A definitive life saver for developer’s blogs.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/preserve-code-formatting/

Wp Advanced Code Editor


WP Advanced Code Editor integrates the EasyArea advanced code editor into WordPress. This adds real time syntax highlighting, line numbering, full screen editing, and more to the code editor in the “Add New Post” and “Add New Page” screens.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-advanced-code-editor/

runPHP


If you’re a developer, you may sometimes find a bit frustrating the fact that WordPress do not allow you to run PHP code in the editor or in Text widgets.
The “Run PHP” plugin solves this problem. The permissions to run some PHP are handled by user roles and capabilities. Note that this plugin will also work on PHP 4 servers.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/runphp/

Vim Color Improved


Highly inspired by the Drupal module of the same name, “Vimcolor” highlights your code in many different formats. VIM is a common programmers text editor for (usually) unix based systems. Out of the box VIM can color the syntax of 200+ languages including PHP, Perl, C, HTML, Fortran, Haskell, Java, etc.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vim-color-improved/

SQL Executionner


While working with a database-driven website, as such as WordPress, you may often need to directly look inside the database for some info, or execute a few queries to update or delete entries.
Sure, PhpMyAdmin do that job perfectly, but why connecting to another software when you can do it inside WordPress, suing the SQL Executionner plugin?
» Source : http://justinsomnia.org/2008/02/the-wordpress-sql-executioner/

Google Syntax Highlighter


The Google Syntax Highlighter plugin easily integrate Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighting code into your WordPress blog. Just install the plugin and you’ll be able to automatically color the code snippets you posted on your blog.
The Google Syntax Highlighter plugin is 100% Javascript based, so it will not contribute to your server load.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-syntax-highlighter/

Wp Development Utilities


Once you have installed this plugin, you’ll be able to use a full set of functions designed to help your find and debug your WordPress themes or plugins. Among other things, you can retrieve user capabilities, web server name, get the ID of a permalink…
» Source : http://www.blogdev.info/bd/wordpress/plugins/wp-development-utilities.htm

WP Developer Assistant


WP Developer Assistant is a complete toolkit for all WordPress developers. It allows you to see all WordPress predefined constants, easy access and modify the options table, view actions and hooks, and a lot more.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-developer-assistant

Anti Internet Explorer 6


You probably already know that I hate IE6. This is the reason why I can’t resist to list this plugin on here. It purpose is pretty simple: Once installed, it will detect the loser’s browser and will deny it access to your blog.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/anti-internet-explorer-6/

Hosting monitor


A website can’t be great with a good and reliable host. In order to alays keep an eye on your server, you should definitely install the “Hosting Monitor”, a monitoring WordPress plugin created by WebHostingSearch.
Lots of info can be retrieved and displayed: Memory usage, server load, uptime…
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-phpsysinfo-widget/

Wp-Debug


Ever wished to be able to display information about GET/POST requests, session variables, server info from the php.ini, or included files? The Wp-Debug plugin allow you to see what’s going on the inside.
A very good tool to learn more about WordPress.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-debug/

WordPress Console


The WordPress Console is definitely the kind of plugin any WordPress developer should have installed. It provide an interactive console that loads the WordPress environement.
You can then test any PHP code. A great way to learn the WordPress API! Note that a screencast and a detailed tutorial are availables.
» Source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-console/

Even more WordPress developement resources

  • WpRecipes is another blog of mine, where I enjoy sharing lots of WordPress hacks with my readers.
  • WordPress Help Sheet : Created by WpCandy.com, this help sheet will always be there to remind you about template files, functions and useful code snippets.
  • WordPress TextMate Bundle is an extension or the popular TextMate editor. A must have for all WordPress developers!
  • Nettut’s WordPress Cheat Sheet is another compilation of useful resources as such as the loop, theme structure or template tags.
  • WordPress Codex is the most well known resource for all WordPress developers. You’ll find pretty much anything there.

Comments (69) - Leave yours

  1. Mihai Secasiu said:

    Nice colection of plugins. I didn’t know about wp-console and developer assistant and they seem really useful. I also found Debug queries to be very useful when I needed to optimized wordpress ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-queries/ )

  3. Jeff said:

    Thanks for this article. There’s some very interesting plugins listed, but I can’t help but notice that some of them haven’t been updated since 2005 or 2007, using WP 2.5 or earlier.

    Can anyone comment if they’re still relevant for current versions and developers?

  14. Eric B. said:

    Nice list of plugins!

    I just noticed that some of these plugins are for older versions of WordPress. Do they still work fine in WordPress 2.8?

  24. Matt Dunlap said:

    Nice finds, I’m familiar with wp-syntax, but had a tough time using it. Had to edit the kses.php file for the pre tags to work. Looks like the other code plugins are promising

  26. James said:

    This is a very informative and useful list of plugins.
    I’ve been looking for the functionality from a couple of these for a while (especially that IE6 one).

    Thanks for putting this list together.

  30. Chandan said:

    Nice collection of plugins. I liked the Preserved Code Formatting plugin most. I was getting a lots of problem because wordpress ignore tag.

    Thanks for sharing :-)

  38. James Murdoch said:

    hey thanks for this list buddy, also thanks for introducing to Advance code editor, i am also going to update my theme to newest version, hope those plug-gins are supported under latest version.

  39. Stefan said:

    I got a bit tempted by Google Syntax Highlighter since i have seen a lot of sites using it. Have you tried it out, and if yes, have you noticed any difference in bounce rate, time spent on site, etc.?

  43. Lori Corset said:

    Some of the WP is soo over my head! Arg!!

    I have noticed that some of the themes have great dashboads / user interfaces… Yet some of the “cooler” themes are just not all that useful (to me) because of the difficulty to really tweak them for what I like to do…

    Which one has the most user friendly ??
    Thanks
    Lori…

  54. Matthew said:

    Thanks for list, it’s pretty useful most especially to those people who are developing a WordPress type of CMS, I really like Anti Internet Explorer 6 plugin.

  57. Kurt said:

    Hosting Monitor is great. Specially for high traffic sites. I was recently looking for something like this but could not find any. Thanks for mentioning this.

  58. Jeff Johnson said:

    Great list of resources. Among my favorites are the advanced code editor and runPHP – potentially very useful. I have to comment on the Anti Internet Explorer 6! What a good idea – it annoys me how many people still use that browser – it breaks almost everything!!

  67. Tim Davis said:

    I came across your post by accident but thank you for a very useful list of plugins and resources. By no means a WordPress stalwort and wasn’t aware of the sql executioner. Many thanks for the insight.

  69. Erica Mueller said:

    One of my favorites is Plugin Notes. Because I end up modifying alot of the plugins I and my clients use, it’s nice to be able to add notes and warnings not to upgrade certain plugins!

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