I know what you are thinking! Oh no! Not another list of Must Have, The Best, Top 20, etc. list of WordPress plugins. Well I am afraid you are right, but then let me make myself clear at the outset. I am only going to be listing plugins that I use on this site and also plugins that I can categorize as life saving, must have, essential etc. and also you can expect this list to populate and change on a regular basis as I keep fiddling and changing the appearance and functionality of my WordPress blog and do keep in mind that updates will be coming along hopefully regularly.

Here is my list of plugins that I use with WordPress for this site and yes I do find them indispensable, amazing, life saving, and an absolute must for my blog at least. Hopefully you will get to try them out and find out they are useful to you too!

AdSense Manager – AdSense Manager is a WordPress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets by Martin Fitzpatrick.

Makes it very easy to manage your Google AdSense account and place ads on the website.

Advanced-Admin-Menus – Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels by Andy Staines.

Puts the Admin Menu in a drop down based menu system for easy mouse navigation and you can access any function in two mouse clicks.

Advanced Tag Entry – Adds more advanced tag management to the post edit screen by Jennifer Hodgdon, Poplar ProductivityWare.

This one is a lifesaver. Tags once added cannot be changed or edited in anyway in WordPress, so if I tagged it as mel gibson then it remained so no matter what. Only Advanced Tag Entry came to the rescue and let me edit mel gibson to Mel Gibson. This one is a keeper for sure. It also lets you add tags and remove tags and also insert tags into a post and remove tags from a post.

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments”, by Matt Mullenweg.

Protects your comments section from unwanted spam. Works very well. Also gives you the option of tagging comments as not spam in case they have been wrongly termed spam.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog by Uberdose.

All in One SEO Pack does exactly what it’s called. You can work on SEO using this plugin for each individual post.

cformsII – cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more by Oliver Seidel.

Lets you put up contact forms where visitors can leave their details for you to get back in touch with them. Totally customizable.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber by FeedBurner.

Lets you redirect your WordPress RSS feeds to FeedBurner so you can track and organize your feeds via FeedBurner.

Filosofo Comments Preview – Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them by Austin Matzko.

Lets visitors preview their comments before posting them.

Flexo Archives – Displays archives as a list of years that expand when clicked by Heath Harrelson.

Organizes all your old posts in terms of year and month that expands when clicked on.

Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar by Krischan Jodies.

Lets you display the most recent comments and also the recent trackbacks in the sidebar, widget enabled and customizable.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo by Arne Brachhold.

Single and smart solution to generate sitemaps and submit to major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Of course you will need to register and submit with Google Webmaster Tools in case you want data and records to go through about the visitors on your blog.

Homepage Excerpts – A WordPress plugin that gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage by http://www.dailyblogtips.com.

A truly amazing plugin that will only show 1 or as many as you specify complete posts on your homepage and truncate the remaining posts with the option of continue reading which when selected will redirect to the post page directly. This is very useful if you have a dynamic page that shows the latest posts and you want to give your blog visitors a bird’s eye view of the contents on the site.

NoFollow Free – Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc. Supports multilingual and a Top Commentators sidebar Widget by Michele Marcucci.

Plugin that removes the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments, offers other customization options too along with a Top Commentator’s widget that can be put on the sidebar.

Related Posts РThis WordPress plugin provides tag cloud that shows the related posts of a post, and can replace a keyword within a post to a list of related posts by Ren̩ Ade.

Very good plugin that will display related posts based on the tags when reading a post, however it completely disappears when on the home page or when there are no related posts.

ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites by ShareThis and Crowd Favorite.

Plugin that lets you or visitors to your site post and submit directly to many social networking sites like reddit, digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Propeller, blinklist, Mixx, newsvine, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! My Web, Windows Live, Tailrank, Blogmarks, Furl, and ma.gnolia among others and also gives the option of mailing out a post via email. Truly a remarkable social networking plugin.

StatPress – Real time stats for your blog by Daniele Lippi.

Provides a humongous amount of statistics about visitors to your site. Much better than the default WordPress stats plugin.

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess by Mark Jaquith.

This plugin lets users check a box so that they will be notified of any further comments on the blog after their comment and they can check back and participate in a discussion or post further replies.

Technorati Tags – Returns a list of technorati tags associated to the post (http://www.technorati.com/tag/). Follows the same convention of listing tags native to WordPress 2.3. the function the_techtags(); must be used within the loop by Will Garcia.

This plugin will convert all your tags into Technorati Tags and post them right below the post thus saving any addition trouble of coding or putting out Technorati Tags.

Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin. By Lorna Timbah.

This plugin lets you put up the Top Commentators along with the timeframe chosen by you on the sidebar.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database by Austin Matzko.

Absolutely essential plugin that will create a backup of your database when you specify and also automatically at a preset date and time and also with the option of mailing out the backup to an email ID specified by you.

Wp-cache – Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system by Ricardo Galli Granada.

A plugin that caches your WordPress database and makes for faster browsing and a much faster and responsive website.

WP-OpenID – Allows the use of OpenID for account registration, authentication, and commenting by Alan Castonguay and Will Norris.

A plugin that will let visitors sign in and register with their OpenID.

WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allows you and your users to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments by Ronald Huereca.

A useful plugin that lets you edit comments left by visitors and also lets you mark spam.

WP Super Edit – Get some control over the visual/WYSIWYG editor and add some functionality without modifying the WordPress source code. By Jesse Planck.

Adds a lot of functionality to the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor and makes editing and hyperlinking a much easier task.

Amazing, Life Saving, Indispensable Plugins for WordPress! These Are an Absolute Must for Any Blog! is a post from: Rajiv's Blog!