The beauty of using open-sourced WordPress is that it has such a large user-community who write numerous free plugins and themes. It is therefore easy to overlook some really good plugins that would make your blogging life so much easier. Two such plugins are Lighter Menus Plugin and TinyMCE Advanced Plugin.

Lighter Menus allow you to have dropdown menus of all admin functions to enable easy navigation and cut down the steps to each task. This is explained on the plugin page:

Lighter Menus creates Drop Down Menus instead of the regular Admin menus for WordPress, so that you can browse items with one click. Fast to load, adaptable to color schemes, Lighter Menus comes with silk icons, a option page, and a design that fits within the Wordpress interface taking the less room possible.

Download Lighter Menus

TinyMCE Advanced adds a multitude of extra text editing buttons to WrdPress, allowing users a wider choice of editing tools. From the plugin page:

This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

Download TinyMCE Advanced

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