Favorite Wordpress Plugins

[alex]

I started another blog recently, and that always includes having to install plug-ins. This time, I thought I'd be more selective and choose just the ones I know I need. Here's what I find very useful:

All in One SEO Pack: I used to use a combination of plug-ins to handle what All in One can do.

Cforms: I use it for a simple contact form, but it's very powerful.

FLV Embed: Self-explanatory. I chose this one over the others because of the many customization options and ease of use.

WP-DB Backup: For on-demand and/or scheduled backups.

Wordpress.com Stats: A way to monitor just the blog stats. I also use Google's and AWStats, and am not sure this is a good enough stats package to use exclusively, but it's nice to have it in the Dashboard for convenience.

Akismet: I don't actually accept comments, so I don't need it. Still, it's good to remember I have it, in case I decide to open comments later.

What plug-ins do you use and recommend?

[alex]

I'm using http://www.mac-dev.net/blog/ for the FLV embedding now. Both are great though.

[Marion]

My favorite plugin is the Simple Forum plugin.
But in all reality, I love all the plugins since they make my life so much easier using WordPress. My total plugin list is a mile long. I am just pointing to this particular plugin since it saved my sanity trying to incorporate other forums that are not plugins but stand alone forums.
Marion

[Greg]

WP-cache makes WP blogs super fast.

Share This is useful for giving readers a quick way to Digg/reddit/email your post.

Popularity Contest for showing readers (and you) which posts are hitting a chord with readers.

[hermione]

A few more that I've installed and simply can't do without:

• Adsense Manager - I just installed this last night and it's a godsend. Before I installed it, every time I went to edit a post (didn't matter what kind of edit - text, All-in-one SEO, any part of it) my adsense code got screwed up and the ads wouldn't show up (they just left a big tall, wide blank space) unless I re-pasted it each time before saving the post.

• Evermore - Lets you set how you want each post to appear on the home and archive pages: you can use a default excerpt setting, or special tags to choose where you want it to cut off, or show the whole post. The excerpts retain your html and formatting (i.e. bullets) unlike some other plugins.

• AStickyPostOrder - Lets you "sticky" certain posts that you want to always appear at the top of a category and order posts in any way you like.

• My Category Order - Lets you choose the order in which you want your categories and subcategories to be displayed

• RB Internal Links - Lets you easily link to other posts without having to know the post id or the url. This one is a little buggy in that it may not work when you first install it, but after a few log-ins and/or a few hours, the tinymce button will appear in your WYSIWYG editor and should work just fine.

• Flexi Pages Widget - Lets you configure how you want your pages to display in the navigation. I mostly installed this one because I wanted a "home" link under "Pages", but it's got other great features like excluding certain pages you don't want displayed, if you want to display sub-pages or not, etc.

• No Self Pings - Ignores pingbacks from your own internal links to posts/pages on your site.

• Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically updates your sitemaps and pings Google to alert them when you make changes.

And a couple of others that are quite nice:

• Posts by Author - Displays x number of post titles by the same author at the end of the post. Nice for if you have more than one author writing for your sit.

• AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (drop-down) - I really like this one because it's a small thin bookmark button, but when you mouseover it, it displays a whole array of all the popular sites including StumbleUpon, Google, Del.icio.us, facebook, Digg, Window Live, Yahoo, Reddit, etc.

• Configurable Tag Cloud - Gives you more flexibility in regards to tag cloud properties - color, size, number of tags, include categories, etc.

OK, that was more than just a few, but they are all great. And even better, they don't seem to interfere with each other despite the number of plugins I have installed. (With Zen Cart, installing contributions can sometimes be a major headache because they can be incompatible and break something else.)

[mbhunter]

Spam Karma rocks my blog.

I also like Top Commenters and WWSGD.