Top 20 Useful Plugins for WordPress Multi-Site Networks

Maintaining a WordPress Multisite network can be time consuming, but when you have the right plugins at your disposal you can easily safe some time managing your network. I thought it was time to write an updated post with some new plugins for your multisite toolbox, most of which have been released within the past couple of months.

Whether you’re new to running WordPress Multisite or have been hosting your own network for some time, you’re sure to find many of these plugins useful for managing your sites. Grab a cup of coffee and start installing your favorites.

Hide Welcome Panel for Multisite

WordPress 3.3 comes with a fancy new welcome panel to guide users who are being introduced to WordPress for the first time. Ordinarily it shows when new sites are created. This plugin keeps the panel from showing for owners and users of new sites on your WordPress Multisite network.

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WP Recent Network Posts

This plugin gives you a widget that lets you display recent posts from multiple blogs within your network, as well as choose how many posts you want to display and change style easily. You can also optionally show thumbnails and blog titles with the recent posts.

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Network Plugin Auditor

The Network Plugin Auditor lets you track which plugins were used on which sites. It adds columns to your network admin to show which sites are using each plugin, saving you the trouble of having to visit every dashboard to find out.

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Organizational Message Notifier

If you need a way to communicate announcements to blog admins across your network, this is the plugin for you. It enables you to post notifications for blog admins that will be shown until they mark all messages as read. Network super admins can view who has not read which message yet and can delete notifications manually.

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Multisite Plugin Manager

The Multisite Plugin Manager is pretty much a must-have plugin for any multisite network. Previously known as WPMU Plugin Manager, it lets you change plugin permissions for sites across your network in one centralized dashboard panel. One of the best features of this plugin is the ability to mass activate or deactivate a plugin on all sites in your network – something that will save you quite a bit of time from having to do it manually.

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Network Latest Posts

This is another plugin for showing the latest posts across your network. You can display the list using the built-in widget or a shortcode that you can add to any page or post. You can select the number of posts, the days to limit, and the option to show titles only.

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Hide Inactive Sites

This is a very useful plugin that will check for inactive sites on your network, according to the criteria that you set, and will automatically hide them for you. After you set the parameters for the routine checks, WP_Cron will kick in to update and hide the inactive sites.

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WPMS Site Maintenance

This is a maintenance mode plugin written specifically for use with WordPress networks. It allows a super admin to put his entire network, main site, or subsites into maintenance mode while displaying a cusotmizable maintenance page.

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Multisite Dashboard Switcher

Multisite Dashboard Switcher lets multisite admins quickly switch between dashboards while navigating around the network. It makes managing settings across sites more convenient with fewer clicks required for getting from one site to another.

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New Blog Templates

New Blog Templates will simplify your life if you find yourself frequently setting up new sites on your network. It gives you the ability to create a template, or multiple templates, and then duplicate every single setting (content, theme, categories etc.) for every new blog that is created, saving you a ton of time.

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Multisite Plugin Stats

This is a simple plugin that shows plugin activations across all your sites. It is particularly useful for checking to see which plugins are not being used at all so that you can deactivate those as needed. You can also find out which are the most popularly used plugins on your network.

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Ada WPMS Sitewide Feed

This plugin creates four separate RSS 2.0 feeds from posts, comments, pages, and one combined [posts & pages] across all blogs on your site. It will exclude the first comment and page of a blog, as well as private, spam, mature and deleted blogs.

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Avatar Privacy

Avatar Privacy gives you more options when working with Gravatars on your site. It lets users and commenters opt in or out of using Gravatars and it doesn’t publish encrypted E-Mail addresses for non-members of gravatar.com. You also have the option to use default avatar images hosted on your server rather than gravatar.com.

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Multisite User Registration Manager

This plugin puts in place process for registration moderation. Potential new site owners can request registration through a form embedded via a shortcode. Then they must be granted access by the blog admin and then the super admin before receiving login information.

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RPS Sitemap Generator

This plugin provides a lightweight XML sitemap generator with an easy-to-use interface. It works perfectly with WordPress multisite, giving each blog in the network its own unique sitemap.

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Visual Editor Biography

Visual Editor Biography adds a TinyMCE visual editor to the “Biographical Info” profile field. This helps blog authors to more easily enter information about themselves with the ability to easily add links, paragraphs, etc.

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Hyper Admins

Hyper Admins simplifies administration tasks for super-admins. Specifically, it makes two things more convenient: view any theme on any site without enabling it and
access any site through Admin Bar -> My Sites, without having a role on it.

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Add User Autocomplete

This is a super useful plugin for adding new existing to blogs. It adds autocomplete to Dashboard > Users > Add New > Add Existing User, which makes this process a breeze.

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Superadmin Helper

This plugin makes use of the WordPress Logging Service to log basic events in the network, including user profile update, emails sent by WordPress, logging in, password resets, activated blogs, and much more.

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Force User Login Multisite

This is a simple plugin that makes your WordPress blog private unless the user is logged in. You can also set a minium user level.

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Sitewide Recent Images

This is a cool widget that lets multisite blogs feature recent images from all the blogs on the network. It was written to be highly optimized for performance and scalable for large networks. The plugin grabs images attached to posts and excludes blogs that have privacy options enabled.

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User Switching

User Switching is for blog admins. It lets you quickly switch between user accounts in WordPress at the click of a button. This is very useful for when you are performing tests and have to log in and out with different accounts. This plugin handles the user switch instantly. It’s secure and even works with BuddyPress.

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For more useful WordPress Plugin, Please visit WHDB WordPress Plugins Collection