At LUBUS we have been fortunate enough to work on different kind of projects which has helped us learn & explore WordPress. We try our best to avoid using plugins for every other requirement which can be simply implemented with few lines of code. But there are scenarios when plugins come in handy. For us, these plugins are tools & utilities which help us perform tasks during development. These plugins have been helping us a lot on our various projects. We are sharing them in series of articles covering 5 plugins in each post along with scenarios when we used them.

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Note:

These plugins are to be used during development on your dev servers. Don’t keep them when you move to production.

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Updating URL’s

Moving WordPress website from development to production or migrating website between servers is quite common. But with this, broken images is a common issue. Updating URL in SQL dump is not the best solution as it doesn’t work well with serialized data. “Velvet Blues Update URLs” plugins comes in handy in those cases.

Regenerating Thumbnails

Often we work on revamping projects which involve changing the size of thumbnails even during development its common tweaking thumbnails. These changes do not apply to older images. To apply the same to existing images  “Force Regenerate Thumbnails” plugin comes to rescue as it helps in deleting and regenerating new images as per new size registered.

Generating Post Thumbnail From Post Image

When working on revamping of old design or migration from another system we are left with the post without post thumbnails. We can add functionality to use the first images of the post. But we found “Auto Post Thumbnail“, it automatically generates the Post Thumbnail (Featured Thumbnail) from the first image in the post or any custom post type only if Post Thumbnail is not set.

Converting Post Type

You might bump into client project where everything is dumped into post and categories and for revamping it makes sense separating them into custom post types. To enable this “Convert Post Types” plugins is a perfect utility for converting lots of posts or pages to a custom post type (or vice versa). You can also assign new taxonomy terms which will be added to the posts’ existing terms.

Switching Post Type

Above helps you with the bulk conversion of the post but there are situations where we need to convert specific post we encountered same with one of client project & “Post Type Switcher” plugin simply helped us do that. This plugin adds a simple post-type drop-down to the post editor interface, allowing you to reassign any post to a new post type while editing your post.

Keep following this series for discovering more helpful plugins. Have fun! 🙂