Wordpress is a great tool, one of the best to come from the open-source arena and it has a great third-party following that continue to extend it’s functionality with ever increasing functionality. I’ve used a ton of plugins but here are a few that I’d consider “must haves”.

Adsense-Deluxe - The defacto standard in Adsense injection tools. There are many that try to do what this one does but not actually compare to it. While support for the plugin seems to have fallen by the wayside it’s still compatible with the latest versions of Wordpress and still get the job done effectively.

Akismet - Packaged with Wordpress it’s the anti-spam service of choice. If your troubled by comment spam make sure you’ve activated this one.

Comment Relish - Is a plugin that will make your blog seem more personable by sending an email message to new commentators.

Feedburner Feedsmith - This plugin detects all the ways someone can access your Wordpress feeds and converts them to your Feedburner feed so you can track all off your subscribers.

Full Text Feed - This plugin stops Wordpress from from adding a more link to your feed post allowing readers to see the full feed.

Google (XML) Sitemaps - This plugin manages the tedious task of maintaining your blogs sitemaps and submitting them to Google and Yahoo whenever your blog is updated.

In Series - This is a neat plugin that allows you to place posts into groups and it automatically places links to other posts in the series in each post.

Live - Another neat plugin that allows you to watch the activity of your blog in realtime. It works great if you have little or no traffic but if your blog is really busy it can slow things down a bunch.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form - I recent switched over to this contact form plugin. It seems to work pretty well and adds anti-spam and anti-exploit features to your contact form.

SEO Title Tag - This plugin will help your blogs SEO by optimizing the title based on what page is loaded. It has many options and works with Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Show Top Commentators - This is the plugin everyone uses to add the top commentator block on their blogs. It removes the “no follow” directive and gives an incentive for people to leave comments on your blog.

Subscribe to Comments - This plugin does exactly what it says, allows readers to subscribe to just the comments of a particular post.

Top Posts By Category - Allows you to organize your top posts in various formats to highlight the ones that are important to you and popular with your readers.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - It’s the best tagging plugin out there.

Viper’s Video Quicktags - need to embed YouTube, Google, Metacafe and local video in your blog posts? This is the plugin for it. Real simple and easy to use.

Wordpress.com Stats - Allows Wordpress.com to track your blogs stats and provide a dashboard interface to their tacking system It’s pretty neat and works well for extremely busy blogs.

WWW Redirect - This plugin is supposed to help consolidate your page rank and stop page rank leakage.

What other plugins do you use that aren’t on this list. Why and what’s their benefit?

Wordpress just released version 2.2 a few days ago. This still isn’t the major upgrade that’s been talked about but it does offer a number of enhancements that bloggers might like. Adding things like Widgets and full Atom support (who uses that anyway), a new Blogger importer and what’s called an “infinite comment stream”. There’s also a new option to deactivate all plugins at once, this will help with future upgrades, plus a number of speed optimizations. All in all there’s over 200 bug fixes and enhancements that have been implemented.

Never one to fear “pushing the button” I’ve upgraded here. No major problems that I’ve noticed. Compared to the move to 2.1 this was rather painless.

You can download the new version of Wordpress 2.2 here.

Preview Post Navigation is another simple plugin that was requested by Lorelle for this type of enhancement and one that Matt Cutts also blogged about after his upgrade to 2.1.x. The plugin restores the “preview” and “edit” links that were removed from the Wordpress 2.1x series. There seems to be enough people talking about the removal of this functionality and wanting it back that this plugin might become obsolete at some point if it’s added back into the core. Until then, I hope this helps ease the pain some of you are feeling.

Download
You can download the plugin here.

Requirements

This is a Wordpress 2.1.x plugin, there is no need for it in previous versions. It’s been tested with Firefox 2.0.0.3 and IE6.

Installation:

Upload the plugin to your “blog/wp-contents/plugins” directory
Go to the “Plugins” main menu and find “Preview Post Nav”, then click “Activate”

That’s all there is to it. The links will appear when you edit an existing post or once you save/save & edit a new post since there was no preview pane in the new post screen in 2.1.x.

Please leave feedback or if you have an issue using it, leave a comment in this post and I’ll do my best to help you out. If your feeling especially generous a quick link to RealityWired(http://www.realitywired.com) or ItsOnMyTV (http://www.itsonmytv.com) would be greatly appreciated.

WP Social Bookmarks is a plugin that will allow you to insert links to social bookmark sites in your Wordpress posts. The plugin is designed around my specific needs at the moment so unlike other social bookmarking plugins it doesn’t cover every possible site out there. At present it targets the specific ones I use most frequently and if there is enough interest in this I’ll consider expanding it.

What I was looking for was to accomplish two things. First I wanted the links to be text links and not images, plus I wanted to get the counts for Digg and del.icio.us because I think that’s kind of neat. Actually the whole thing came about because I liked how John Chow has his bookmark links implemented but I couldn’t find a single plugin that performed in that manner. Most use the Digg api and simply pull back the graphical button which I think is novelty and ultimately detracts from a site. Not to mention it’s difficult to implement into a layout sometimes.

So I proceeded to put this together. It will pull back the Digg count and del.icio.us bookmark count if you choose and you can style the links pretty much anyway you want via css.

Example:

Download the plugin:

You can download the plugin here.

Requirements:

This is a Wordpress 2.1x plugin but it should work in previous versions without much of an issue.

Installation:

Upload the plugin to your “blog/wp-contents/plugins” directory
You should end up with this path (”blog/wp-contents/plugins/wp-social-bookmarks/”)
Go to the “Plugins” main menu and find “WP Social Bookmarks”, then click “Activate”

Add the following code snippet to your templates where you want the links to appear:

<?php if (function_exists('wp_social_bookmarks')) { wp_social_bookmarks(); } ?>

The links themselves can be styled via css using (id# wpsb_bookmarks)

That’s it, pretty simple. You can leave feedback or if you have an issue using it, leave a comment in this post and I’ll do my best to help you out.