Well, it is about time to update my list of the best Wordpress plugins. In fact, I received a comment saying that my list needed some updating (I heard you, Elaine!). So, here it is! Again, I scoured the web looking for some new stuff, but making sure to hold on to some of the good old boys. And again, I downloaded and installed many a blog crashing plugin, but hopefully I weeded all of those bad apples out. Now, scroll down and download the good stuff.

The Essentials

• Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.
• flickrRSS: Allows you to display Flickr photos on your weblog.
• Feedburner Plugin: Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner.
• Popularity Contest: This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular and give you a way to display them.
• Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• Subcscribe to Comments: Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.
• Ultimate Tagging Warrior: It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like).
• Wordpress Database Backup: Exactly what it sounds like…
• Adsense Deluxe: Advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
• Meta Tag Generator: Creates meta tags for posts and pages, if none are set, the plugin wil use a default set, the index page will always show the defaults.
• CDC CLean Archives: Great archive generating plugin, with neat effects.

For The Truly Anal

• Counterize II: Counterize II is a small Statistics-Plugin for WordPress, which saves IP, timestamp, visited URl, referring URl and browserinformation in the database and displays total hits, unique hits and other statistics in WordPress webpages.
• Digg This: A plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.
• Related Posts: Displays posts related to the one currently being read.
• Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.
• Heat Map: Provides you with two new template tags for displaying a heat map (aka weighted list) of your categories and your monthly archives.
• WWW Redirect Plugin: This plugin makes sure that Google ranks and indexes only one version of your site.

Pretty Extras

• Lightbox 2: Easy way to add the famous lightbox effect to images on your website.
• Video Plugin: Easy way to embed video, especially if you haven’t updated your wordpress.
• Google Maps Plugin: This software will let you easily render Google Maps anywhere on your blog as a web service.
• e-Commerce Lite: Sell useless crap on your site!
• Gravatars2: Displays a commentor’s gravatar (based off of Skippy’s work).
• Post Ratings: Gives you an ajaxy star rating system for your posts.
• Sphere Related Content: Add an AJAXified link for contextual related posts to your Wordpress blog from Sphere.

Admin Interface

• SpotMilk Admin: Black and shiny theme for you admin.
• Tiger Admin: Slick theme reminiscent of a mac, but still unique.
• Admin Drop Down Menu: Replaces admin menu and submenu with a 2 level horizontal CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks!