Apart from a widget that puts a login form onto a blog sidebar, I am not really on the lookout for WordPress plug-ins but here are two that came to my attention recently. I have found them to be useful; maybe you will too.
The first is WordPress Admin Themer. This allows you to store wp-admin.css in your blog’s theme folder, out of harm’s way from future upgrade cycles. A neater way of otherwise storing your customisations of admin pages – I keep changing the logout destination to the front page of my blogs – would be a bonus but the style plug-in is a good step forward.
One use to which I was going to put WordPress Admin Themer was to hide some elements of the WordPress dashboard page but I happened accross another plug-in that does just this kind of thing: Dashboard Editor. Activating this gets you an extra admin page where you can select the components that you want to see using the tick (check) boxes. You can even take things further by having your very own dashboard instead of what WordPress offers or by activating widgets for using with your dashboard. It’s all good stuff and I have got rid of extraneous pieces such as Planet News and the getting started section (I have using WordPress long enough that I should know my way around by now…).