Every WordPress site I work on uses a specific set of plugins that add essential features and remove potential problems. Here are three.
Theme Test Drive
When you’re looking to switch themes, you need to see how the new design affects your current content and features. Even if you’re working on a development site, things will be different on the live site — and you’ll need to see what.
Since you don’t want to turn on a new theme that may need editing, Theme Test Drive will let you see the new theme on your site, but not any of your visitors. You can set permissions so that only administrators, contributors, etc. can see the new theme.
Unfancy Quote
All too often, when content is imported from Microsoft Word other rich text editors, single quotes and double quotes (‘ and “) will be turned into fancy quotes — with the little curved bottom pointing in the correct direction.
The problem, however, is that these fancy quotes don’t always appear correctly in browsers — sometimes they show up as funky ASCII text, and other times as weird characters. Unfancy Quote turns every quote into a plain text quote, and it works.
No Self Pings
When your site has internal links — links from one page on your site to another — WordPress likes to think the pages are part of a conversation, and shows pingbacks in the comments section. If you tend to link a lot, these pingback links can take up a big part of your comments section.
No Self Pings tells WordPress not to show internal links as pingbacks, and frees up your comments section.