J David Macor

This post is now outdated. Please check out my new updated list of the best Wordpress plugins, and download to your hearts content!

This is just a list of what many consider to be some of the best plugins out there. I have perused many a blog and downloaded many a blog crashing plugins, but these have come out on top. Take a look at these plugins and install what you need! But be careful and do them one at a time to make sure that they don’t conflict with each other or a plugin you already have installed.

Necessities

• Adsense-Deluxe: Put your adsense ads wherever you want them, including within your posts.
• Askimet: Checks comments on your website against their lists and determines whether it is just spam or a genuine comment.
• Google Sitemaps: Makes a google compliant sitemap of your blog.
  
• No Ping Wait: Speeds up posting by changing the way wordpress pings your posts.
• Subscribe to Comments: Allows a commentor to be notified if a response has been posted to their comment.
• Related Posts: Shows your reader a list of posts related to the one they are currently viewing.
• WP Database Manager: Create, manage and restore your blogs database.
• Jerome’s Keywords: Adds a list of indexable tags to each of your posts.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior: Another tagging plugin with categories.
• Popularity Contest: Tracks page views, feed views, comments, and trackbacks. Also has the ability to display your stats on your blog.
• Meta-tag Generator: Generates a series of keywords and a description for your blog.
• Search Pages: This forces your run of the mill WP search to query pages as well as posts, instead of only posts.
• Search Everything: Another (Dan might say a better) plugin that adds the ability to search pages and posts.

For the Truly Anal

• SRG Clean Archives: Makes your archives page clean and simple.
• Feed Burner Feed Replacement: Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner, while it creates a random feed for Feedburner to find.
• Get Recent Comments: Displays your most recent comments or trackbacks in your blog’s sidebar.
• Permalink Redirect: Redirects readers from non-permalink adresses to the proper permalink.
• Time Zone: Corrects the issue where your blog does not follow Daylight Savings Time.
• Adhesive: Allows you to designate a post as “sticky.”
• WP-Cron: This allows you to schedule certain functions in the WP admin panel.
• Search and Replace: This plugin searches through all of your posts, titles, excerpts, and comments to find a text string and replace it with whatever you want.
• Email Shroud: Protects your email address from those who would want to do harm to you… not physically of course…
• WP Print: Creates a printer friendly version of all of your posts.
• In-Series: Links together any series of posts that you denote, regardless of tags or categories.
• Related Posts for your 404: Shows a list of related posts whenever a reader has the misfortune of getting to a 404 page.

Pretty Extras

• WP Lightbox 2: Gives the lightbox 2 effect to all of your linked images.
• Gravatars: Add gravatar support to your wordpress blog (like avatars… but with a g…).
• EZ WP Scrobbler: Adds a list of your most recently listened to songs right onto your blog.
• Edit N Place: Allows you to edit any of your posts or whatever inline, without having to go through the admin user interface.
• Moveable Anything: You can set any element in your blog as moveable, and it can be clicked and dragged to wherever the user sees fit.
• WP-PostRatings: This puts a little ratings system using stars on your posts.

Admin Interface

• Spot Milk: Changes the look of you admin pages.
• Tiger Style Administration: Also changes the look for your admin pages to look like tiger.
• Admin Drop Down Menu: In your admin panel, instead of having to navigate to the top-level menu and then to the sub-menu, you can simply move your mouse over the top-level menu and then to the sub-menu function you wish to use.

Social Network

• PXS Mail Form: Creates a feedback form for your visitors, with verification.
• Sociable: Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.