More than a couple of times, I’ve been asked to share some WordPress plugins that I would recommend. I do have a number of plugins that I use on all of my WordPress-powered sites, and I consider them essential for any WordPress-based blog, and so I thought that I’d take the opportunity to share these plugins with you, including talking about what they do and why I use them.

Akismet: This one should go without saying. If you have a blog, the comment spammers are going to discover it long before legitimate readers do, and the more popular your blog becomes, the more comment spammers are going to come your way. Just in the last 30 days, I’ve had more than 1200 bits of comment spam hit Webmacster87.info. Because of this spam outbreak, folks have tried to do such things as implement weird CAPTCHA things, which tend to make it more difficult for actual human beings to comment than it does for these automated computers, or completely turning off comments and pingbacks, thus stopping the spam but also stopping any possible discussion on the blog (hint: that was the goal of the spammers in the first place). The way that Akismet works is that it has a massive database of spam-like content that it has learned about, and it analyzes comments to determine whether or not they are spam. If the system makes a mistake (in my experience, this happens only about 1% of the time), you simply mark the mistake as Spam or Not Spam, and the system learns based on that. It’s like a big community effort, pushed along by everyone on the globe using the Akismet service. All you need to do is get a WordPress API key by registering an account on WordPress.com, and you’re all set. By far, this is the MOST IMPORTANT plugin for any blog to have.

WordPress.com Stats: If you’ve used a WordPress.com blog before, you know that it comes with a pretty nice stats system for you to see various stats about your blog. But did you know that non-WordPress.com blogs can tap into this system as well? When you install this plugin, you simply provide the WordPress API key associated with a particular WordPress.com account (which you need to register before using this plugin), and then WordPress.com begins tracking stats for your blog. All the processing happens on WordPress.com’s servers, so it doesn’t use any extra resources on your hosting. There’s a Blog Stats page added to your Dashboard where you can go to see the same exact WordPress.com Stats right on your own admin, and if you’re using WordPress 2.5, you can see a small snippet of your stats right on the Dashboard. The plugin also comes with some added benefits, in that it links your blog to WordPress.com, which means you can see your blog’s stats from your WordPress.com Dashboard, and you can even get to the admin panel or the new post page of your blog from anywhere on WordPress.com, even though your blog is separate of WordPress.com. Plus, this service will not interfere with other stats systems like Google Analytics, so you can still use those if you like. I highly recommend this really nice stats plugin for any WordPress blog.

Customize Your Dashboard: The new Dashboard in WordPress 2.5 is somewhat nicer than what previous versions provided, but it still has a lot of information that I don’t really care about (WordPress Planet, anyone?). Plus, in 2.5, the Dashboard is widgetized and uses widgets to display everything, yet WordPress doesn’t give you an easy way to customize these widgets or add new ones. There are two good plugins out there that let you do this: Viper007Bond’s Dashboard Widget Manager (WP 2.5+ only) and Aaron Harun’s WordPress Dashboard Editor (WP 2.0+, with added features in 2.5+). Whether you simply want to simplify the Dashboard by removing the stuff causing clutter or you want to completely customize the Dashboard to your liking (i.e. perhaps you have a blog with staff and you want to add special instructions to your staff on the Dashboard), these plugins will both do the trick. There’s also a number of Dashboard-specific widgets that you can find on the WordPress Plugins Directory that you can enable with these plugins.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator: If you have a website, sooner or later, Google will find it and it will index it. But you have a blog, which means that you’re going to have dynamic, continually changing content. How are Google’s spiders supposed to know that unless you tell them? One way to help Google (and many other search engines) out is with an XML Sitemap. If you’re interested, you can learn about what these sitemaps do, but the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin is an awesome plugin to get you going. After specifying some fairly easy-to-understand settings, the plugin will generate an XML sitemap for your site (and keep it updated), and it will ping the various search engines to let them know that your sitemap has updated. Plus, if you choose, it can also create a robots.txt to let search engine crawlers know where your sitemap is located. All of this helps make your blog more available to search engines, and is one thing you can do to improve your rankings.

Maintenance Mode: There will be times when you want to change some things or move some things around on your blog, and you want to take the site down in order to it privately to make sure there aren’t any problems. Maintenace Mode allows you to enable an “under construction” type of page that you can customize to your liking. When it’s enabled, any non-admin visitors to your site will see that page. Administrators (like yourself), however, will still be able to browse the blog and the admin panel normally, allowing you to get everything together knowing that you won’t expose anything to the public.

ShareThis: One thing you can do to help boost traffic to your blog is to make it easy for your readers to share your content with others, and the ShareThis plugin is an awesome way to do this. This plugin will add a ShareThis button to the bottom of each your posts and pages. A user who clicks on it will be presented with an in-line pop-up that allows them to share your post on numerous Web 2.0 sites, on their own blog or Twitter, or they can e-mail a friend about your post. All of the nitty-gritty is handled by the ShareThis.com website, so all you have to do is enable the plugin and you’re all set.

SRG Clean Archives: This is the very nice archives plugin that I use for my Archives page. Essentially, it groups all of the posts on your blog by month, and through a bit of AJAX magic, allows a user to browse through the months, going back to see the various posts that you have made on your blog.

Leopard Admin: Although this is certainly not an essential part of your blog, I really like this plugin, which is essentially a theme for your admin panel inspired by Mac OS X Leopard. Personally, I think that this theme is somewhat nicer on the eyes than the WordPress 2.5 admin theme, but you be the judge.

So those are some of my basic recommendations, but of course, there’s lots more to be found in the WordPress Plugins Directory. Enjoy!

Tags: favorites, features, plugins, recommendations, review, WordPress