My Wordpress Plugin Picks

Plugins are one of the things that makes Wordpress so great as a CMS, or just a blogging platform in general. They take it way beyond simply writing posts here and there, and give you lots of different options to connect with your readers and personalize your site to your tastes.

Here is a short list of the plugins I use all the time, and think are some of the best (in no particular order):

Akismet ~ checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a have a WordPress.com API key to use it.

All in One SEO Pack ~ Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization) by: generating and letting you define your META tags, automatically optimizing your titles and letting you specify your own , which helps you avoid the duplicate content issue.

cForms ~ cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful contact form plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management; you can even have multiple forms on the same page! Takes a bit of concentration to figure out, but once you do it has lots of options.

Future Posts Calendar Widget ~ It adds a simple month-by-month calendar that shows all the months you have future posts for (as well as the current month), highlights the days you have posts for, and as an added bonus if you click a day, the Post Timestamp boxes change to that day, month and year (although it doesn’t check the edit timestamp box to avoid accidental changes).

Google Analytics ~ connects with your Google Analytics account to adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This way you can avoid needing to edit your theme’s template code.

Google Sitemaps ~ This plugin will create a google sitemaps-compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. This just increases the already search-engine friendliness of blogs!

MaxBlogPress ~ Allows you to avoid “overpinging” services whenever you make simple changes (can anyone say typos?), or double pinging a post when you future date it.

NextGen Gallery ~ Great photo gallery plugin for those that like to use multiple images in their posts (portfolios, real estate galleries, etc). Offers watermarks, slideshows, javascript effects, multiple-CSS stylesheet, etc.

Podpress ~ The podPress plugin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting. Simply the best podcasting plugin, if you ask me.

Popularity Contest ~ This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity. This helps visitors reach some of your best posts that they may otherwise miss.

What Would Seth Godin Do? ~ New visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

WP Email & WP Print ~ Gives you a neat little link at the bottom of each post that allows you to email the post (or page) to a friend, or print.

WP e-Commerce ~ A plugin that provides a Wordpress Shopping Cart. I’m playing with this one now, and so far am really liking the simplicity of it. When you offer services (not stock), many of the shopping cart systems out there are just more than you need. They make it easy for service providers, but it would still work for businesses that have some stock as well.

WP Polls ~ WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

[tags]Rebecca Zwar, Wordpress plugins[/tags]