After searching and visiting many blogs, analyzing them and doing some interviews with WordPress members, finally we found and make the list the most popular plugins of WordPress:
The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.
Search Pages - This plugin ties the built in search function in wordpress to the pages. The default installation only searches blog posts. This is an absolute neccesity if you are using wordpress as a CMS and not a blogging tool.
Search Meter - Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong on your site.
Static Homepage - If you want to use wordpres as a CMS instead of a blog this plugin makes the homepage magic happen.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.
Feedburner Replacement Plugin - Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.
Objection Redirection - This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.
Visitor IP Logger is a simple module that lets you see all IPs that visit your website. It uses a password-protected page to display the data that is collected automatically, once the module is activated.
Adsense Deluxe - A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog.
Adsense Injection - Another Dax special that randomly inserts Adsense somewhere in each posting. Not advisable for the control freaks, definitely advisable for sites with lots of returning readers who don’t normally click on Adsense.
Bunny’s Technorati Tags - A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.
AddThis Social Bookmarking will help your visitor promote your website or blog. Put the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, so any visitor can easily bookmark it. The widget works with all popular bookmarking services.
Amazon Links Pro is a plugin for adding relevant and contextual links to Amazon.com products. It generates code automatically and allows full customization of how and when contextual links appear within your content.
Kontera plugin adds the Kontera script to the bottom of the page. Also it is possible to customize your Kontera ads even further through the Options page. It is very easy not to set the color, and heading filtering of the ads. More options will come in the future. Furthermore the plugin restricts the Kontera ads to your blog content, and not outside of it. This optimizes the number of clicks the ads receive. Finally you can choose which posts to omit from targeting. This is very useful when you use PayPerPost, or other services that require you to remove anything that overlaps the content in your post.
Adhesive - Allows you to stick a posting to the top overriding the standard chronological order of things.
Bread Crumb Trail Generator - A little tricky to configure but very useful once you do. Especially nice when used on a static website.
Feed Copyrighter - Let’s you add copyright info to your feed. Makes it easy to track and follow scrapers.
Moderate Trackbacks - Not used as much as it once was Akismet catches most of the spam, but I keep it around as a backup.
Postie - A very powerful tool if you do remote posting via email. Takes a little tinkering to get it set up right but once you do it’s hands off. Combine with cronless postie for regular automated checking.
Related Posts - Automagically creates a list of related posts.
Recent Posts and Recent Comments - Shockingly these two plugins give you a list of recent posts and recent comments, go figure.
Flickr Photosets - If you are doing anything with flickr this plugin kicks ass letting you tie it into your wordpress bog. Especially nice if you’ve upgraded to flickr pro and have multiple albums, see an example.
Top 10 Posts - gives you the top 10 posts by views, very hackable see my top 100 posts for an example.
WP Cron - Makes all sorts of wordpress housekeeping features happen automagically. Just be sure to activate the main plugin first before any of the others or things may not work properly.
WP - Admin Bar - Puts a really nice navigation bar up for users who are logged in.
WP Contact Form - A very simple no frills contact form.
