Most Recommended WordPress Plugins

Here’s the plugins I use in my various sites, most of which come highly recommended, some of these are the same that millionaire guru’s charge hundreds of dollars to install.

SEO Optimizer

• All-In-One-SEO Pack OR  Thesis Theme …roughly similar features.
• Google Sitemap Generator Google XML Sitemaps helps automate the creation of sitemaps to better digest your blog site in google and other search engines
• Enforce www.preference – provides 301 queries to index.php  (no longer needed, built into WordPress)
• SEO Smart Links helps automate keyword lists and no follow.
• http://code.google.com/p/shortlink/
• Broken Link Checker – google quality score will ding you for broken links, this automates checking them.

Traffic /Web 2.0

• FeedBurner FeedSmith helps you track subscriptions to your RSS
• Auto Tagger – tags are a secondary channel of information to search engines
• Ping Optimizer

Performance

• WP SuperCach  – google cares about speed, it’s actually used in your quality score.

IT

• WordPress Automatic Updates
• Database Backup

Social media

• ShareThis a cool plugin that allows social bookmarking and twittering to just about every service on the planet worth linking to. It’s the cool little green thingy at the end of each post, that expands to a directory of places to link to.  OR Sociable
• Subscribe To Comments allows people to get notified by email when comments are replied to.
• Twitter Tools A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.
• Pretty Link,  a url shortening and tracking service.

Rich media

• pb-embedFlash a quick way to embed FLV and SWF flash from youtube and your own sites using web best practices , basically just a bracketed url to the file you want and some optional parameters for height and width.
• http://kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed/wp  a utility that lets you use flash in any part of the site that uses  SWFObject 2.1 to do the progressive enhancement.

Coding related

ANTI-SPAM / Security

• Cookies for Comments – sets a cookie that must exist for a comment to be allowed through, defeats most bots
• Akismet - a spam filter for comments that make it through and trackbacks.

Content Management (CMS)

• Breadcrumb Navigation  http://mtekk.weblogs.us/code/breadcrumb-navxt/#license
• pageMash easy way to organize the hierarchy and visibility of pages (not posts)
• wiki (allow users to grow/contribute to your content in wikipedia way
• Similar Posts – intralinking
• Popular Posts
• Cross Linker
• FeedWordpress

Membership Site

• MemberLock OR Wishlist Member

Marketing (not plugins but very useful

Tracking (mint, prosper2002, affiliateprophet)

————- No longer used————————–

Wiki plugin

http://wp-wiki.org/community-documentation/

Supports wiki like interlinking. e.g.
[[Main Page|different text]]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.avi video]
[http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]
[mailto:info@example.org email me]

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking#Interwiki_links