Our Favourite WordPress Plugins: Dale Mugford, BraveNewCode Co-Founder

As one half of BraveNewCode’s founding partnership, you may have encountered Dale online providing insights on the BraveNewCode blog, forums and social media channels or in person at WordPress meetups and seminars. Dale started BraveNewCode along with software engineer, Duane Story, in 2008. He has been designing and developing web projects since 1994 including, of course, BraveNewCode’s plugins and website.

This week we asked Dale to share some of his thoughts on WordPress and his favourite plugins.

Why do you work with WordPress?

I’ve been working with WordPress since 1.0 because it was the most flexible publishing tool I’d found that allowed me to deliver what I wanted for websites. Its flexibility, ease of use and amazing community made it an easy choice for me to build our business around it, whether we were crafting client sites or making plugins.

Favourite WordPress Plugins

Gravity Forms by Rocket Genius
It’s an amazing plugin for several reasons. Well-written, well-executed and a joy to use. It makes building forms actually *fun*, which is no easy task from a developer’s stand point! It has the right mix of ease-of-use and power-tools to extend and build forms on websites from simple contact forms to full-fledged conditional multi-page forms. The guys at Rocket Genius do a great job updating and adding carefully to the product, while maintaining its stability and quality. Easily my favourite WordPress plugin that’s not made by us.

Maintenance Mode by Michael Wöhrer
We’ve used this plugin for years, and it’s an extremely handy plugin for WordPress admins to quickly shut off access to a site while changes are being made. Sometimes we have to make website changes and test in the live environment. When we do this we activate Maintenance Mode and it allows us to show a custom webpage explaining the outage, meanwhile we can access the site and view things exactly as they are w/o it activated. A handy plugin that’s always been in our tool belt because it’s simply done and works as advertised.

Theme My Login by Jeff Farthing
Way more than just theming the login page, this plugin allows you to do some nifty stuff for user accounts and WordPress, including easily moderating new accounts. It’s also handy for crafting specific URLs to redirect users upon login/logout. We use this tool to add extra capabilities for our plugin customers, and prevent users from accessing and viewing certain areas of the site.