We all use lot of plugins to customize and enhance the front end of the blog. But have you ever thought about your blogs backend, the place where you spend most of your time? After some time you may get bored with your admin panel and wish to have some changes. This post shares 10 WordPress plugins that will enhance your admin panel and improves productivity.

1. Fluency Admin Plugin

Are you still using that boring default WordPress admin screen? It may be simple but it is grey, grey and more grey; too much grey everywhere. After sometime you will get bored to work in this colorless environment.

Another problem is that we need to click the top menu item to reveal the menu section. Fluency Admin is a cool plugin that give the WordPress admin interface a whole new elegant look, with a new style and some cool features.

Once activated the admin interference will have a stylish look and you just need to hover your mouse pointer to reveal the menu items. You can switch between full menu view and icon view and also can assign hot keys for fast menu access. Another cool feature is ‘Just Write’ which hides all the distractions while writing a post (it is heard that the next official WordPress update will include this feature). Fluency admin will give a new look to your login page too. You can easily replace the default WordPress logo with your logo in the login page and admin page (another way of branding for multi author blogs). In short unless you are a diehard fan of simplicity, this is a plugin you must give a try.

2. TinyMCE Advanced Plugin

TinyMCE is a must have plugin every blog should have. TinyMCE converts your default WYSIWYG editor in to an advanced visual editor that enables the user to edit HTML content in a more user friendly way. One of the most important features of TinyMCE is the ability to create tables very easily, something which default editor lacks. There are also options for changing font size and font family selection (that is feature which I really loves; I hate the paragraph, heading1, heading 2 type arrangement in default editor). There are also options for advanced spell check, find and replacement, advance link and image management etc. In total it will add more than 40 new buttons to your WYSIWYG editor.

3. Admin Management Xtended

Admin Management Xtended is an AJAX driven plugin which will help you to save a lot of time. This plugin enables you to edit posts or pages quickly without having to open each post or page in a new tab or window. This plugin puts the ability to edit details and manage your posts right from the post summary screen without having to open the post. You can change the author and edit the category without opening the post. You can easily add tags, hide or unhide (publish or unpublish) the post, you can change the post date, all from the summary page. This makes managing your posts more quickly and efficiently.

4. Theme Test Drive

Have you ever wondered how to test a new WordPress theme without activating it? Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparent and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.

Download the plugin from WordPress repository, upload and activate. From the Appearance menu in the left pane, click Theme Test Drive. Under usage, select the theme that you want to test-drive.

5. After the Deadline

Even if you are an expert in language you can still make errors. After The Deadline is a service that uses artificial intelligence to find writing errors and offer smart suggestions. This service is maintained by Automattic, the smart guys behind WordPress. Once the plugin is installed, you’ll see the spell check icon in the visual editor change to show ABC plus a green checkmark. Clicking on this icon will initiate the ATD check. The check consists of grammar (Green Underline), misused words (Red Underline), and style (Blue Underline). The ATD check is not available in the HTML version of the editor.

6. Editorial Calendar

Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

7. AG Custom Admin

AG Custom Admin is a useful plugin which helps you to customize your admin panel. If you are the only author of your blog then you may not find much use with this plugin. But if you run a multi author blog or if you are using WordPress as a CMS in which many people register and enter the admin panel, customizing the admin screen will help you a lot in branding. With this plugin you can hide or change unwanted items in admin and login pages (like admin bar or footer text, remove Screen options, Help options or Favorites dropdown menu etc). You can also completely change or hide buttons from admin menu, or add new customized buttons. With Colorizer you can completely customize background and text colors in admin and login page.

8. Search Regex

If you have ever done a blog migration then you may encountered the painful process of changing URL paths and fixing things. Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress that go beyond the standard searching capabilities, with full regex support. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal. Search Regex perform searches in post & page content, excerpt, titles, URL, and meta-data, as well as comment content and author data. It also supports the WordPress user roles. You can only search and replace in posts you have access to.

9. Mini Mail Dashboard

If you are so busy that you can’t get out of the admin panel for even checking the mails then this plugin may come useful for you. This plugin enables you to send and receive e-mail messages on the administration panel and optionally receive SMS messages containing the sender, subject and (part of) the text when new messages or comments arrive. All e-mail is text based (HTML will be converted to text). However, it is possible to view HTML messages and to download attachments. Mail can be received by POP3 or IMAP and sent by PHP mail or SMTP. Attaching files is possible. There is a simple address book for both e-mail addresses and phone numbers, which can optionally be populated with your WordPress users. I am not using this plugin in my dashboard, but it is worth trying.

10. Peter’s Post Notes

If you are working on a multi author blog there may be situations where you need to post a note so that the other author should notice. Peter’s Post Notes is a plugin that allows posting quick private notes to go with posts. It is thus a very handy collaboration tool as an editor can suggest a quick fix, the contributor can report a status or ask for the advice and the whole conversation is forever saved with the post for you to refer to it whenever you need to.

This plugin adds a panel to the sidebar of add and edit post / page screens so that users can add notes for themselves or others and keep track of these notes. Whenever you save a post, you can type a note to be displayed along with the post in the edit view. On the dashboard, there’s also a summary of the most recent notes. By default this shows notes by all people on relevant posts / pages. There is also a general and private notes system.

These are some of the plugins that will enhance your blogs admin area and improves the productivity. If you know any other plugin then please share as comments.

PS: There is another great plugin that will enhance your admin panel and keeps you inspired. The plugin is called Success Quotes. Once activated it will show a random success quote at the top of the admin page and thus keep you motivated for your blogging success.

But please don’t ask me about the author of the plugin, because it is written by me . Actually it was an attempt from my part to learn plugin coding (coding was very boring for me; I think I will quit soon). Fortunately the plugin worked without any problems and already nearing 100 downloads (may God save them and their blogs ). Anyway if you want to check it you can find it in the WordPress plugin directory.

I did a complete redesign of my blog, I hope you like the new look.

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