We polled some of our best bloggers to find out what plugins they considered essential for Word Press. All of the plugins listed here work in Word Press 2.3. The plugins that made the list should work in Word Press 2.5; however, not all of them have been tested yet. If we know for sure one works in Word Press 2.5 we’ll put a note to that effect next to the plugin name.

Here is a list of plugins that made the cut and what they do (in no particular order):
AddMySite (AMS): (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
AddMySite offers an easy way to insert a full link list or drop down menu into your side bar which allows people to add your home page to a variety of bookmarking and review sites. It currently offers nearly 50 sites from well known heavy hitters like Digg to brand new sites. AMS is updated every few months to add more bookmarking sites to the roster.

Social Bookmarks: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
Fantastic little plug in that places favicons from the major bookmarking and review sites at the end of each post. You can pick and choose which sites to include. Picking up the slack from AMS’s whole site bookmark tool, it allows people to share your individual posts easily. The buttons look attractive with most blog designs, and you can customize the number of rows showing and other attributes.

Simple Recent Comments: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
This one line piece of code and plug in adds the 10 most recent comments to your sidebar. It banks on the fact that people love to be noticed and does wonders for returning traffic to your blog. Can be used in conjunction with Comment Luv to give your commenters even more exposure.

CommentLuv: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
This plug in gives your readers a chance to pull in an automatic link to the last post they wrote on their blog, driving more traffic to their site. It’s a nice way to say “Thank you” for taking the time to comment.

Gravatar: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 now includes it in functions as a feature)
A fun little plug in that allows any reader who has a Gravatar avatar to have it show up on your blog in the comments next to their link. Another way to keep commenters coming back.

Triple Spam Blocking Action of Comment Timeout, BadBehavior (not yet WP 2.5 compatible) and Askimet:
Since installing these three plug ins on my blog family, I haven’t had to handle a single spam comment. The few that get through go directly to Askimet’s spam folder. Before I installed these three plug ins I was handling hundreds of spam comments a month. Now I may see 10 posts in the Askimet folder once in a while, if that, and no spam comments ever get through to the blog. Currently, BadBehavior is being updated – check their blog for the next version.

Digital Fingerprint: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
Easily track your blog entries and find out when and where splogs and plagiarism occur. This helps you put a stop to people stealing your content, faster.

Feedburner Feedsmith: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
This turns any feed on your blog into a Feedburner redirect. It saves you the time of doing the changes by hand, and makes your Feedburner stats more accurate and consistent.

Google Site Maps: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
Create a Google complaint site map of your blog to make sure you are getting indexed by the search engines.

Word Press Mobile Edition: (WP 2.3, WP 2.5 compatible)
Creates a mobile theme for your Word Press blog automatically. The theme will appear for anyone viewing your blog on a mobile device.

Related Posts: (WP 2.3)
Show posts on your blog that are related in topic or theme to the post currently being read. Draws traffic deeper into your site.

Democracy: (WP 2.3)
Poll generator that also allows users to add poll choices to make the poll more fun and interactive. Some people prefer this over WP-Polls, though WP-Polls is tested to work on WP 2.3 and WP 2.5 already.
NextGen Gallery: (WP 2.3)
NextGen Gallery lives up to it’s name as truly being next generation. Forget any other gallery plugin for Wordpress, as this one takes the cake. NextGen comes complete with a surprisingly simplistic back-end interface for creating galleries within albums, all of which are assigned a special tag to link or display the images in your post. In addition, NextGEN offers a “related images” function which matches tags between your pictures and your posts, automatically adding a gallery of relevant images. The “manage gallery” feature in NextGEN allows you to quickly delete or resize selected images, create thumbnails, or add a custom watermark to the images in your gallery. NextGEN gets even better with its elegant front-end interface, offering visitors to your website a visually delightful array of thumbnails to quickly browse and display images without navigating away from the content. With the click of a thumbnail, the page is greyed out while the full size image fades into the foreground in a true Web 2.0 fashion.

AddSig: (WP 2.3)
Put custom signatures at the bottom of each post. Handy for stat tracking on multi author blog networks and other uses.

Wp-Cache: (WP 2.3)
This plugin generates static HTML pages for each page of your blog, then caches them. It then serves those pages instead of the dynamic PHP to make load times faster.

Redirection: (WP 2.3)
Handle all of your 301 redirections, 404 errors and other loose ends from one plug in.

Those are some of our favorites. What plugins can you not live without? Do you have a plugin that changed your blogging life? Let us know in the comments!

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:46 pm under Hacking, Tutorials.

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