10 Great WordPress Plugins

Ten of my favourite WordPress Plugins.

Akismet

Are you another person who hates spam comments, trackbacks or pingbacks? Well this plugin is for you! Akismet scans all your incoming comments and checks to see if they are listed as spam on the main Akismet server. My other site has had more then 15,000 spam comments since Akismet was installed a year ago, approximately 30 spam comments only managed to get past Akismet. When they were found I just marked them as spam.

Current Version: 2.2.1 — Download Link — Author Site: akismet.com

Google XML Sitemaps

Do you want your site to be seen by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo? This handy plugin creates a XML-Sitemap for your WordPress Blog. The Sitemap is regenerated everytime a new post is created and even updates automatically after a post is edited.

Current Version: 3.1.0.1 — Download Link — Author Site: arnebrachhold.de

NextGEN Gallery

What can I say, this is the best gallery plugin for WordPress. NextGEN Gallery basically has everything you need to create full featured photo albums and slideshows. Everything needed can be accessed within your WordPress administration panel. Images can be uploaded one by one or by ZIP file from your desktop. Watermarks can also be put on your images.

Current Version: 0.99.1 — Download LInk — Author Site: alexrabe.boelinger.com

SCF2 Contact Form

This plugin is not just a simple contact form, the part I like the most is that all messages are sent to the WordPress database and comments can be accessed in a new section in your WordPress administration panel. You can even reply to emails from within your administration panel. SCF2 supports spam filters like Akismet and Bad Behaviour. It also has a built in anti-spambot question and answer field.

Current Version: 0.8.5 — Download Link — Author Site: laptoptips.ca

Admin Management Xtended

In my opinion this plugin adds many features that should have been built into the default WordPress management system. Some great features enable you to edit categories, slugs, dates, tags, titles and toggle comments on/off and the list goes on! Going by WordPress 2.7 beta, which is setup on my test server, most of these great features will be built into the final version of 2.7. but until it’s released or if you continue to use WP 2.6.x this is the perfect plugin for managing your content.

Current Version: 1.9 — Download Link — Author Site: schloebe.de

Sociable

Sociable allows your readers to add links from their favourite posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Technorati. All up there’s currently 97 blogging sites to choose from in the Sociable administration panel. If you know some basic PHP you can easily add more sites by editing the sociable.php.

Current Version: 2.9.1 — Download Link — Author Site: yoast.com/

WordPress.com Stats

Great statistics plugin which does not add heavy load to your own server because all the statistics are hosted on WordPress servers. The Stats. plugin can give you detailed information on visitor hits, referrers, top posts & pages. For this plugin to work you will need a valid API Key, if your already using Akismet then you should have one handy.

Current Version: 1.3.2 — Download Link

All in One SEO Pack

This SEO Pack is a great tool for search engine optimization. This plugin allows you to optimise your titles for search engines and create meta tags automatically. The SEO plugin also gives you some great tweaking options within the create post/page sections..

Current Version: 1.4.6.15 — Download Link — Author Site: semperfiwebdesign.com

WP Super Cache

This has to be the ultimate WordPress caching plugin. WP Super Cache is another great plugin that needs to be built into WordPress. If your blog is constantly listed on the front page of Digg you will notice a severe drop in performance because your WordPress blog will be processing many PHP scripts for visitors putting a huge strain on your server. This plugin will generate static html files from your blog which is less work for your server.

Current Version: 0.8.4 — Download Link — Author Site: ocaoimh.ie

Ozh’ Absolute Comments

This plugin is a fantastic addon for managing your comments administration panel. It allows blog admins to reply to comments instantly from within your comments dashboard, comments can be edited, mark them as spam, delete them and even view all comments from a certain post. Once again, this is yet another plugin that will not be needed after WordPress 2.7 comes out. All of these plugin features will be included in 2.7 and are already in the 2.7 beta.

Current Version: 2.2.2 — Download Link — Author Site: planetozh.com