Comment Spam Protection

1. Akismet is still the king of comment spam protection. It stops almost all spam comments on my blogs.

2. WP-reCAPTCHA plugs whatever Akisment fails to stop. This prevents comment spam bots from filling up your form. Once the bots see a word verification field, they won’t be able to submit a comment to your blog unless they enter the “captcha” code. After they have successfully submitted a comment, they still need to go through Akismet’s filters. Tough luck comment spammers!

Comments

1. Comment Relish automatically sends an email to a first-time comment poster of your blog. Here’s my example of how I use Comment Relish.

2. Lucia’s Linky Love encourages comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. You may set the minimum number of comments before the “dofollow” links are turned on and many other settings. Check out my example of how I use Lucia’s Linky Love.

3. Subscribe to Comments allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This plugin may not be useful once WordPress 2.7 is released. I read something about a similar feature that will be integrated in WordPress 2.7 or beyond.

4. Recent Comments displays a list of the most recent comments on your blog. Heaven knows why WordPress does not have default functions to do this. I highly recommend all of Rob Marsh’s plugins on posts and comments. Top notch stuff!

5. FreePress Top Commenters Widget adds a list of the most frequent commenters posting to your blog. It does not work well out of the box. Try my Top Commenters Plugin Hack if you plan to use this plugin.

6. WP-Gravatar is the best comment avatar plugin I have tried so far. This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments.

Trackbacks

1. Simple Trackback Validation performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

Posts

1. Recent Posts displays a list of the most recent posts.

2. Similar Posts displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post.

3. Popular Posts displays a list of the posts from your blog which have been viewed the most.

4. Most Commented displays a list of the posts with the most comments. Try my Most Commented hack to make this plugin display only posts with 1 or more comments.

5. the_excerpt Reloaded automatically creates an excerpt of every post according to your desired settings. This saves you time and effort from adding the “more” tags to your posts.

Pages

1. Filosofo Home-Page Control is better than the default features of WordPress because it allows you to have your blog in a virtual folder like “/blog”.

2. My Page Order lets you update the order of your WordPress pages by letting you easily set an explicit order without entering numbers.

RSS Feeds

1. Feed Control lets you include WordPress pages into your blog’s RSS feed.

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Search Engine Optimization

1. All in One SEO Pack is the best SEO plugin I have used. It allows you to manage the titles of all your posts and pages. With this plugin, it is possible to have a different title in the title tag from the post title.

2. Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

* Google to Yahoo Sitemap Converter – This is not actually a plugin but a normal PHP script, which needs to be run on a regular basis via a cron job. It will be obsolete soon once Yahoo and MSN adopt Google’s sitemap standards.

Contact Form

1. Contact Form 7 is a really easy to use and powerful contact form for WordPress. I like the “captcha” field because it stops email spam.

Gallery

1. NextGen is the best gallery plugin I have found for WordPress. It is highly customizable with a modern web 2.0 look.

Archives

1. Clean Archives Reloaded creates a list of all of the posts that you’ve made to your blog.

Blogging

1. Zemanta contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging much much easier.

2. Photo Dropper lets you add free Flickr photos to your posts.

Code Markup

1. WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

Multimedia

1. wordTube makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages.

Social Networking

1. ShareThis provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.

Search

1. Search Everything enhances your search box to search for literally anything on your WordPress site instead of just WordPress posts.

Backup

1. WordPress Database Backup is bundled with WordPress by default. It now has a scheduled backup feature that I think will be very useful for a lot of bloggers.