
10+ WordPress plugins for developers
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.




57 Comments + Trackbacks
10.5.2009
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/ )
10.5.2009
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?
10.5.2009
LOL @ “Once installed, it will detect the loser’s browser and will deny it access to your blog.”
Made my day
10.5.2009
Thanks for this list, I never knew about the Wp Advanced Code Editor. That is going to make doing quick edits in my browser so much easier.
10.6.2009
@Alison: hehe, have you seen the “Anti IE” article I wrote last week? You’ll probably enjoy it
10.6.2009
helpful plugins for wp developers, thanks for share..
10.6.2009
Very good collection. Thanks.
10.6.2009
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?
10.6.2009
Hahahahaah anti IE6 is very cooool
10.6.2009
this is simply great stuff i did not know about
10.6.2009
Aside from Google Syntax Highlighter and Hosting Monitor, I don’t know that I would use any of those as a developer.
10.6.2009
I’ll try all, except Anti IE…
10.6.2009
Theses are great developer tools, some of which I am seeing for the first time.
I look forward to trying them out.
10.6.2009
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
10.6.2009
Great, only 4 or 5 of these I will not use!
10.7.2009
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.
10.7.2009
Nice post. Actually i don’t know things as of now and i am still studying programming. This is a good reference.
10.7.2009
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
10.7.2009
Thanks! I like the Wp Advanced Code Editor. Think I’ll install that soon.
10.8.2009
Hahah Anti IE 6 looks really cool. Guess I`ll be implementing it to my site in NEAR future lol. Have anyone tried it?
10.10.2009
Brilliant post, these plugins are all well worthy of installing to your blog
10.11.2009
Very kool wordpress plugs I might have to try a couple just to test out the plugs thanks..
10.11.2009
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.
10.12.2009
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.?
10.12.2009
love the Anti IE6. lol . all the other ones are also very helpful. thanks.
10.12.2009
I have made some changes in google syntax highlighter to make it work on WP visual editor. Check on my blog.
10.14.2009
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…
10.20.2009
Great collection, I especially liked Anti Internet Explorer 6… Thanks
10.26.2009
Nice list man… Should try some of these out. I use the ExecPHP plugin instead of RunPHP.
10.27.2009
great list – well worth installing some of these plugins
10.27.2009
Great collections!
Very useful for web developers…
Thank you
11.9.2009
Nice collection, Jean. These are some really good utilities for web developers
11.14.2009
Theses are great developer tools, some of which I am seeing for the first time.
I look forward to trying them out.
11.15.2009
Shouldn’t there be an anti Internet Exploiter. Oops, did I say that?
12.1.2009
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.
12.14.2009
Thanks ^_^
12.21.2009
I’ve been looking for the functionality from a couple of these for a while. Thanks for this list
1.11.2010
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.