There are far too many Wordpress plugins to keep up with so here's a list of plugins that I can't live without. The list content was generated by Wordpress except for where I've annotated caveats and recommendations in red.
| Plugin | Description |
|---|---|
| WordPress Database Backup | On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Austin Matzko. This bad boy will also email backups to you on a "set it and forget it" schedule. Make this the first plugin you install. |
| Akismet | Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg. Without this open blog comments would be impossible. |
| Comment Timeout | Automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time. It has options which allow you to keep the discussion open for longer on older posts which have had recent comments accepted, or to place a fixed limit on the total number of comments in the discussion. By James McKay. |
| Embedify | Embed YouTube videos in your WordPress blog by just pasting the URI of the video from your browser By Mark Ghosh. Be careful with this. Wordpress mangles YouTube embeds by default so if you've embedded them in the past with the "non rich editor" it might kill previously working embeds. |
| FeedBurner FeedSmith | Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner. |
| Flexible upload | Resize picture at upload and make thumbnail creation configurable (like WP1.5), optionally include a watermark to your uploaded images. By Antoine Choppin. |
| Google Reader widget | Adds a sidebar widget to show your latest shared stories. By James Wilson. |
| inlineRSS | Allows inline RSS feeds from any source in any format (hopefully). Click here to edit the sources and here to edit the xslt file. Usage in templates: inlineRSS('feedname'); Usage in posts / pages !inlineRSS:feedname. This flavour uses multiple processing engines. By Cal Demaine. I don't actually use this anymore since Wordpress has default RSS sidebar widgets that you can use to display info from delicious feeds or whatever. It's just here for reference. |
| Search Widget With Title | This search widget comes with an optional h3 widget title and allows you to control the search button text. By Chris Carson. |
| Subscribe To Comments | Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith. This will help your commenters keep those flame wars raging :) But seriously, your commenters are your lifeblood. Help them help you. |
| TIL Technorati Incoming Links | In Wordpress 2.3 the Technorati Incoming Links has been replaced with Google Blog Search, now you can add it again with this plugin. By Michele Marcucci. |
| Wordbook | Cross-post your blog updates to your Facebook account. By Robert Tsai. |