These WordPress plugins are some of the best ones I’ve found, and I find them totally essential for this blog, despite their simplicity. Some are so obvious that their features should be built-in to WordPress.
- Subscribe to Comments – Give your readers the ability to get email updates of new comments.
- Share This – Don’t clutter your blog with 37 icons for social bookmarking sites! Share This puts a single “universal” link that allows you to save the post to a plethora of sites.
- Chunk URLs – Are your users posting long URLs in your comments, stretching your layout funny? Chunk URLs truncates the visible URLs.
- Contact Form II
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – Feedburner users tend to run into a problem: When you burn your feed, the original remains accessible to your readers. The FeedSmith plugin redirects them to your Feedburner feed if they try to access the original.
- Full Text Feed – Current WordPress versions cut-off feed content wherever a <!–More–> tag is placed. Full Text Feed fixes this problem, putting your entire post in the feed.
- Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress 2.x
- Optimal Title – You can technically do this without a plugin, but it simplifies things a bit. With Optimal Title your post’s title is shown before your site name up in the browser’s title bar (which Google likes).
- Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam – One of the best CAPTCHA plugins I’ve found.
- Popularity Contest – What are your top posts? Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin allows you to show-off your most-viewed posts easily.
- Related Posts – The link is dead, as of publication. I haven’t tried it, but a lot of people recommend the similar (pun unintended) Similar Posts.
- WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allow your users to edit their comments (time limit option available).
