Continuing with our guest blogging series, I’d like to share with you today two of my favorite WordPress plugins for increasing productivity. Plugins not only enhance your site’s functionality, they can also enhance your ability to build relationships online. There are thousands upon thousands of plugins to choose from in the WordPress directory. Take care as you don’t want to use too many plugins as they can slow down your site and in some cases even interfere with your blog being displayed properly.
WordPress Editorial Calendar
If you blog regularly and like to schedule your posts in advance, you are going to love this plugin. You can easily verify that you have a certain number of posts going out each day or each week. This plugin provides a user friendly interface for scheduling and editing your posts.
You can drag and drop your posts to the date you’d like to schedule them for. You can also quickly edit posts right in the calendar.
Do you feature guest bloggers? Do you try to feature certain content on specific days of the week? The editorial calendar will make scheduling a breeze.
Features
- See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted.
- Drag and drop to change your post dates.
- Quick edit post titles, contents, and times.
- Easily see the status of your posts.
You are going to love this plugin!
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/editorial-calendar
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Exclude Pages From Navigation
Of all of the thousands of plugins available for WordPress blogs, if I had to pick only five, included in that list would be the Exclude Pages from Navigation plugin. If you exclude a page from navigation, that means a link to that page will not show up in the navigation bar of your blog. This plugin adds so much versatility and flexibility to your blog.
When you are in the post editing menu of your dashboard, you will find a checkbox in the right sidebar that when unchecked will exclude that page from your navigation menu. The default setting includes a checkmark in that box. When you uncheck that box, then not only will that page not show up in the navigation bar, any related child pages will also not show up. You will be able to access those pages via the page url, but no one will be able to access them from your site’s navigation bar.
You can:
- Create unlimited number of pages that are accessible only to someone who has the exact url
- Create pages for your membership site that you don’t want to show up on the navigation bar
- Create private, password protected pages
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages
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Powerful Plugins
Being that I am such a raving fan of WordPress and of WordPress plugins, I am always researching and discovering useful and powerful plugins.
Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin that you use and highly recommend? Are you looking for a WordPress plugin to accomplish a specific task? Share your comments below and let’s learn from one another.
Please note that as part of the Blog Tour, there is a Commenting and Tweeting contest. You get points for each comment and each tweet about this post – using the hashtag  #blogworldtour . Visit the Blog Tour site (link below) for full contest details.
All the best,
Dvorah
D’vorah Lansky
Relationship Marketing Wizard  |  Author  |  Speaker  |  Educator
www.BlogWorldTour.com/blog
Thank you so much for the kind words about my plugin. It is always great to hear from bloggers that the plugin helps. We are hard at work on version 1.0 which should be out any day now.
If there are any features you’d like to see in the future please let us know. We always love feedback.
Cheers,
Zack
You are quite welcome Zack! Please let us a little bit more about your plugin. The editorial calendar is amazing and such a valuable tool for bloggers.
We’d love to hear what the blogging world is like from the eyes of a developer.
Warmest regards,
D’vorah
There is actually a long and detailed article about why I wrote the calendar and how it works.
http://www.zackgrossbart.com/hackito/edcal/
The short answer is that I wrote the editorial calendar because I needed it. I serialized my entire book on my blog over 18 months. I used the calendar to schedule posts until November 2011.
I write software for a living. I made the calendar open source because I like helping other bloggers and writing software like this makes me better at my job.
I’m not sure what to say about the world of blogging from the eyes of a developer. I think it looks a lot like it does from the eyes of everyone else. I’m always trying to improve my writing, expand my audience, and help as many people as I can.