Spam protection
Akismet
Hands down the
best in spam protection for your money (it’s completely
free.)
Search Engine Optimzation (SEO)
All in One SEO
Pack
Update posts with meta data specific to that
post/page. This is invaluable if you want to SEO your blog properly
for rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN et cetera.
Google XML
Sitemaps
Generate your Google XML Sitemap with valid XML
that’s always up to date. This helps tremendously if you want
google to take your blog seriously.
Robots
Meta
Manage your robots.txt
file dynamically
Usability
Multi-page
Toolkit
Write multi-page
articles, tired of using the “kitchen sink”? this plugin will do
all you need.
Aesthetics & Imagery
Lightbox
2
‘Nuff said.
SyntaxHighlighter
If you
write a lot of source code in your articles like I tend to do this
helps a lot. What else are you going to do? Plaintext source code
is extremely “web 1.0″
Social Marketing & Media
DiggZ-et
Put that sexy digg button on your articles/pages.
Manage the icon as well as where to exclude/include it. Very
useful.
ShareThis
On all of my
posts I have a “ShareThis” link at the bottom. I personally hate
reading an article on a blog with 900 buttons to click, this
encompasses more than just social media, you can send to a friend
and various other functions through one javascript
window.
WordPress Specific Plugins
Wordpress
Automatic Upgrade
Upgrade your wordpress to the latest installation
(Note: This plugin will probably be rendered useless in future
releases of wordpress as I’m sure they’ll build this functionality
into the core more effectively, but for now it’s
helpful.)
WordPress Related
Posts
Show posts related to tags in specific
posts.
WP Super
Cache
If you get the digg effect through one of your
articles at random, you don’t want to be caught naked. This will
cache high traffic pages saving your server the beating that digg
undoubtedly would have delivered had you not been the
wiser.
WordPress.com
Popular Posts
Display your most popular posts (related by # of
comments from your wordpress.com stats)
Search & Replace
Sometimes you want to replace every “apple” with an “orange” or
the like. This comes in handy at random times but when you need it,
it really comes in handy. Replace any string
with a string over all your posts pages, or
anything.