What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
- PodPress - makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
- Popularity Contest - offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
- Google Sitemaps Generator - creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
- Akismet - you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
- Adhesive - gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
- EmailShroud - an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
- Transpose Email - another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
- WP-EMail - “Email this post to a friend” functionality
- WP-Print - Printer-friendly version of posts
- Subscribe2 - let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
- In-Series - link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
- Permalink Redirect - fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
- Gravatars - puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
- Subscribe to Comments - a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
- WP-Notable - places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
- A Different Monthly Archive - a pretty way to display links to archives by month
- Related Posts - link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
- Related Posts for your 404 - your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!
What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?
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