Here are some WordPress plugins you will likely find useful…

My Page Order – Easy drag and drop ordering of your pages – Access under Pages > Page Order

Cleaner Gallery – Makes it easy to integrate the Worpress built in photo gallery feature with Shadowbox (or other lightbox scripts) – or just simply removes the styles that wordpress injects natively, so you can use your own more easily

ShadowboxJS - Activates overlay lightbox-style effects for your Image links.  Also works with Iframes, HTML content, Videos, SWF, etc.  Super frikkin cool!  Check out what it can do at:http://mjijackson.com/shadowbox – The wordpress plugin install will give you immediate access to all the functionality.

WP-SIFR – Change Page titles (h1,h2, etc) into Flash-Rendered Text, using the SIFR font of your choice (find em on google) – Degrades gracefully and doesn’t affect accessibility at all

CFORMSII – get the latest version – Stop coding forms, auto-verification, Captcha support etc.  YEAH!

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Also, for front end Javascript fancy FX – Check out JQuery http://jquery.com/

There are frameworks (prototype, mootools) but I like Jquery so far – the syntax is easy, and there are lots of plugins around.  Downside, sometimes can get heavy on load times if you get too many plugins involved.

AND, Jquery is already bundled in WordPress which makes the install easy as pie!

To activate and use the core in your WordPress theme, just do the following:

In your theme’s functions.php file, include the following function call:

That will load the Jquery 1.2.6 base file in your wp_head, and put the script into your page’s head section automagically.

Then, copy the following into your template’s header.php file,  AFTER <?php wp_head(); ?> and after all your stylesheets and CSS:

There, with the snippet above you will see that an alert pops up on page load, showing that Jquery is up and working.

Have fun!!!!
T

Related posts:

1. Create WordPress Plugins with OOP Techniques
2. Wanted – JQuery/CSS Ninja
3. What you Should be Excited About in jQuery UI 1.9