WordPress is pretty great out-of-the-box, but sometimes you just need a little more. This is a quick list of my 10 favorite WordPress 2.7 plugins. I have used all of these and I can’t live without most of them.
- WP-Cache – A nice little caching plugin, avoid outages from the ‘Digg effect’ a.k.a. the Slashdot effect.
- WPtouch iPhone Theme – A nice little iPhone theme that enhances performance and navigation on the iPhone and iTouch.
- WP-Syntax – Syntax Highlighting for most popular languages.
- Ultimate Google Analytics – A plugin that places the Google Analytics code on your blog and removes the code when logged-in users are above a certain level.
- Disqus Commenting System – Disqus is the hottest new commenting system on the block, its developers and staff are very friendly. Lots of other pluses – check it out.
- WordPress.com Stats – At a glance statistics. This one isn’t perfect and the Google plugin is much more accurate, I enjoy this mostly because I can see the traffic numbers from inside the WordPress admin screen.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – Feedburner rocks! It gives you nice statistics about who is consuming your feed and they have to pay for the bandwidth.
- Akismet – Spam protection that works, if you aren’t using Disqus, this is a must (and it comes with WordPress)
- WP E-commerce – This is a great plugin that allows you to stand up e-commerce on your blog in minutes. It has support for Google Checkout, as well as PayPal and other payment options.
- Google XML Sitemap – Just like it sounds, creates a sitemap and notifies the major search engines.
Update: My eleventh favorite plugin is ‘Recently on Last.fm’. It shows your recently played items. Check it out, it’s over on the right side of this page.
Have I left anything out? I can think of a few more that are worth considering – tell me what I might have missed
