Do you want to setup a website for your favorite fan group? Are you thinking about using WordPress, but not sure what extensions to add on (or even if you need extensions)? Well, I am here to help you figure things out. It does not matter if your fan group is a Harry Potter Fan Group or a Everygame casino bonus fan group. The underlying concepts will be similar.
I will state for the record that if you ask 100 people which plugins they like the best, you will get 100 different lists. Many plugin lists will have repeats, but there will always be some differences. It is like asking people for a book list on X topic. Usually you will find repeats, but each list will have its own unique selection.
#1 Admin Columns
Admin Columns is a useful plugin when you want to show items like “post id”, “featured image”, or “series” information, if you installed the series plugin.
#2 Advanced Editor Tools (previously TinyMCE Advanced)
You need the “Classic Editor +” plugin in order to use this plugin. This plugin controls the settings for the TinyMCE editor. The “Classic Editor +” turns off the new editor and sets the TinyMCE editor to be the default editor.
#3 Bulk remove posts from category
This adds an option to the “Bulk Edit” functionality on the Admin Control Panel. In the default Admin Control panel, you can bulk add posts to a category. But even if you unselect a category, it does not remove the post from that category. This plugin allows you to remove the selected categories from the posts. This is very useful, because “uncategorized” is the default category added to most posts. This plugin will allow bulk removal of that category.
#4 Classic Editor +
Do you hate the new WordPress editor? Or their features that you need that are not available in the new WordPress editor? This is the plugin that you need to restore the traditional TinyMCE editor.
#5 Imsanity
High-resolution images are great … when you want to print out your image into a larger than 16″ x 20″ poster. But for a website, that high of resolution is overkill. Imsanity automatically reduces your images to a more website-manageable size.
#6 PublishPress Series
Do you publish article series? For example, your Casino Fan Group is reading as a group the book “Hoyle’s Rules of Games: The Essential Family Guide to Card Games, Board Games, Parlor Games, New Poker Variations, and More“. You want 1 post for each chapter, but you want the reader to keep the same order as the book when they go from one article to the next. This plugin will help you keep this organization with “previous article” and “next article” buttons.
#7 Shortcodes Ultimate
If you like to write your articles using shortcodes, this is the “swiss army knife” of shortcode extensions. Most of the short codes are generic visual items, but most people will find something that they want to use. If you need fancier items like a pricing table, splash screen, testimonial, etc. you may want to purchase the pro version.
#8 Simple add pages or posts
With Plugin #6, we keep a set of posts in a series to indicate they are in a group, previous, next, etc.
But what about the actual adding of the articles? By using this extension, “Simple add pages or posts”, you just create a list of article titles and all of the articles are created. Then you just do a bulk edit to add all of them to the series (#6 PublishPress Series), and if the autonumbering setting has been set, all of your articles will be ordered in the order they were listed when you added them with the #8 Simple add pages or posts.
So instead of having to add 36 individual posts, you just list their titles. The only downside is that you still need to add individually the featured image, even if it is the same for every post in a series. Yes, that sucks. But using the two is still great to get a general idea of how you want your website to be laid out.
#9 Simple Author Box
Create an author box that is pre-styled to look nice. There are a bunch of settings to customize how you want the author boxes to look.
#10 Simple Basic Contact Form
Creates a very basic contact form that can be included in pages and posts with a shortcode.
#11 Simple Blog Stats
Some simple blog stats are displayed on the Dashboard page. There are shortcodes to add this information to any post or page. Stats displayed: number of posts, number of pages, number of drafts, number of comments, number of media files, number of comments in moderation, number of approved comments, number of users, number of categories, number of tags, number of custom post types, list of number of articles in each custom post type, and number of logged in users.
#12 Simple Custom Post Order
This plugin allows you to drag and drop and order pages, posts, and custom pages. The settings (under settings) control which type of articles you want to allow Custom Post Order to manage.
#13 Simple Download Monitor
Simple Download Monitor will allow you to add files that you allow your users to download for either free or a price. The software will also store a count of how many times a document is downloaded.
#14 Simple Link Directory – Lite
Do you have a list of URLs that you want to share with your group? This is a good way to keep them organized. You can assign links to categories. You create a list of links. Then you add your links to a list. When you want to display a list of URLs, you add a shortcode to a page or article. In the free version, the style of the URLs is simple. With the paid version, you get more styles to choose from.
#15 Simple Post Notes
This plugin allows you add notes to a post without that information being displayed on the front end. It can be displayed in the admin columns. For example, let’s say the article is being held, because you have to get final membership fee values from the group treasurer.
#16 Simple Revisions Delete
I do not know about anybody else, but I tend to end up with a lot of revisions that are not needed. After I am “done” with writing an article, I want to be able to purge all of the minor edits and only keep the major edits. For example, I update the “Rules for the group” once a year, so I want to keep the 2022 final version and the 2023 final version, but I do not need to keep the drafts as the group discussed online different versions of the final rules.
#17 Simple WordPress Membership
Do you want some of your content to be free while other content is for paid members? This plugin will allow you to do it.
The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members can view the protected content.
You create unlimited levels of memberships: free, bronze, silver, gold, and it will protect your posts and pages using the membership levels that you create. If you want to protect only part of an article, then you will also need the “Simple Membership Partial Protection”.
#18 Simple Membership Partial Protection
This plugin requires the “Simple Membership” plugin. The advantage of this plugin is that you can partially protect some information in a post. For example, let’s say that you are posting information about an event. The general information about the event, you want anybody to be able to read. But since the meeting will take place in somebody’s home, you want to restrict that information (along with the contact phone number) to be only available to members, for safety reasons. Even if you do not want to charge for this information, you may still want to require membership for somebody to see the info … so you know who exactly is reading that information.
#19 Super Simple Event Calendar
Super Simple Event Calendar is an event calendar for people who just want something simple for events. Other plugins include a Google calendar, but with this plugin, the events are stored locally.
#20 Very Simple Google Maps
Add a Google Map with a simple shortcode. All features are set within the shortcode.
#21 YYDevelopment – Show Pages ID
With Show Pages IDs plugin you will be able to view the pages and posts IDs in the top admin menu bar and in the back-end admin panel as well.Knowing the page ID is important if you use shortcodes. A number of other plugins that, as part of their settings, have the user include the page or post ID instead of the Page or Post title. This is to allow the title of the Page or Post to be updated without breaking the shortcodes. Without this plugin, figuring out what a page or post’s ID is would be difficult.
