Essential Wordpress Plugins
WordPress is one of the most popular PHP applications to create a blog. The plugins available for WordPress transform the blogging tool into a full CMS that can be used in many ways. Plugins give WordPress a ton of flexibility, but which plugins you install depends completely on what you are trying to do with WordPress. Most people will use WordPress for just a Blog, like this blog, which runs on WordPress 2.0.4. The following list below is an overview of the essential plugins one should have for a blog use of WordPress.
WordPress is also used as a CMS to create powerful websites that are not blogs. For example, WordMingle is a website I have created using WordPress that is not a blog. For a complete directory of all WordPress plugins you should visit the following official and unofficial website. Also, definitly check out ToolSoup’s links to wordpress plugins.
FUNCTIONALITY
Subscribe To Comments lets readers recieve email notifications of new comments that are made to a post.
Simple Recent Comments shows a list of who has made recent comments with a link to their comments.
WP-ContactForm is an easy-to-use and easy to modify contact form for visitors to quickly send you messages.
ImageManager provides an interface for browsing and uploading image files on/to your server. The Editor allows for some basic image manipulations such as, cropping, rotation, flip, and scaling.
Search Meter keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. That helps you keep your blog focused on what your visitors want to read.
Sociable automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. This increasing your potential audience.
Corrector utilizes Google spell checker and Aspell to provide spell checking functionality to WordPress.
Search Everything enables the searching of Pages, Comments and more.
WP-Translate is a simple drop in way for users to view your blog in their language. Its easy for any most users to add this functionality to their site.
Maintenance Mode is a WordPress plugin allows you to make your blog temporarily unavailable to your visitors with a custom message. It is still accessible by the administrators and logged in users.
ADVERTISING
Adsense-Deluxe places Google AdSense ads in your posts or as part of your template. It offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
DESIGN
Gravatar2 shows the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries.
Extended Live Archive implements a dynamic, AJAXified way of digging into the archives of a blog.
flickrRSS enables you to easily input your Flickrstream into your blog and enjoy the added convenience of caching images.
LightBox2 is a WordPress plugin that turns linked images into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
SparkStats is a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform that uses the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library to generate word-like graphs that represent the posting and commenting activity on your blog over a period of days, weeks, or months.
SPEED
CSS Compress reduces the file sizes of stylesheets big time.
WP-Cache 2 caches your WordPress blog and immediately speeds it up.
WordPress Cache Inspect helps you analyse the behaviour of the cache builtin to WordPress. It provides the administrator with a quick overview of how the cache is performming and allows the cache to be cleared manually from an admin page.
SEO
Jeromes Keywords is a plugin that lets you ad keywords to your posts which is useful for various reasons and helps with SEO.
Related Posts is based on Jeromes Keywords and it shows a list of related posts to a given post based on keywords.
Optimal Title moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the title tag for an entry. A very good SEO mod for WordPress. Another good title SEO plugin is the SEO Title Tag.
Google Sitemap Generator is essential if you are interested in having your site indexed frequently by Google and if you want to help facilitate Google’s spiderbot by giving it a custom XML based sitemap to your site. The plugin gives you custom controls too, so you can add static pages from your site that exist outside of WordPress. You can also use the Sitemap Generator Plugin for Wordpress.
xfish meta is a plugin for meta tags where you can easily insert META information into your posts and pages.
STATS
Google Analytics and Feedburner Overview allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area. If you want to track stats on your blog the best thing to use is Google Analytics and this plugin adds a top-level Reports tab to Admin area in WordPress. When you click on it, you’ll get a quick 7 day overview of what’s going on with your site (pageviews, visits, referrers, etc). You’ll have to login to Google Analytics or Feedburner directly if you want more detailed stats.
Click Counter adds a click counter to links in your posts, so you can see how many times visistors click on your links in your blog.
SPAM
Spam Karma 2 is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code. You can also try the new Bad Behavior 2.
Trackback Validator eliminates spam trackbacks.
AUDIO/VIDEO
Audio Player is an alternative to podPress. It uses flash and makes it easy to add mp3 files to your Blog.
PodPress is everything you need for podcasting in WordPress.
Kimili Flash Embed is used if you need to embed Flash in FLV format to your WordPress blog.
DATABASE
WP-phpMyAdmin provides phpMyAdmin access from the WordPress admin console, without you having to separately log in to your server.
WordPress Database Backup is a plugin that comes with WordPress and can do one-click backups via download, server directory, or email, all straight from your WordPress administration interface. WP-Cron allows automatic backups where you can schedule backups of your database to be made every 24 hours.
RSS
Feedburner Plugin gives you more control over your RSS feed by forwarding all RSS feed traffic to a feed you set up at Feedburner.
Feed List is used for adding other people’s RSS feeds to your WordPress site.
Popularity: 40%
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Comments
If you are referring to WordPress.com, a hosted WordPress Blog, as opposed to WordPress.org, than I am not sure how the hosted solution works. I have only dealt with the software from wordpress.org
I just found this contact form which is really nice.
How can we upload the plugins to a normal WP account? I mean to a blog which is hosted on WP server rather than a different server.