I’ve been using WordPress off and on for a while know and in my time using it I have a few plugins that have proven to be quite useful. Here are just a few of my favorites.

Akismet - Akismet is the best blog comment spam filter. period. You’d be surprised how much blog spam you’ll get and Akismet takes care of it all. In my time using it I haven’t noticed any false positives and it just plain works. This plugin comes with WordPress, all you need to do is activate it with your API key which you get when you sign up for a WordPress.com account.

Creative Commons Configurator - I’m a total Creative Commons nut and I want my content to be free for anyone who wants to use it. So this plugin lets you display proudly on your blog that you support Creative Commons.

Page Redirect - You may have noticed that I have some links to other sites in my sidebar. This is the plugin that lets you do that, otherwise you’d have to enter in the HTML code for a redirect and that isn’t as fast.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin does the work of setting up your burned blog feed on your blog. If you click the RSS link in the sidebar it will bring you to my burned feed. This is a lot easier than entering in the code yourself and it can easily be removed. Feedburner is a great way to monitor your RSS to see who is subscribing, something that might be important to you if you really care about your stats.

FireStats - Speaking of stats, this plugin shows your stats in a nice clean interface. It’s a nice way to see how many people came to your site and where they came from.

iWPhone - This plugin is really cool. Once installed this plugin will active a an iPhone/iPod touch formated theme if it identifies the iPhone/iPod touch user agent.

Live - this plugin is kinda useless, but still pretty cool. It shows you hits to your site in real time. Not much else to say about it :).

Random Redirect - this plugin allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

Search Hilite - This is a pretty cool one too. When someone is referred from a search engine like Google or even the one on the blog itself, the term they searched for will be highlighted.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form - Don’t want spammers to know your email address. I can’t blame you. This plugin lets you make a nice contact form in order to keep you inbox filled with just the stuff you want to see.

SpotMilk - This might be my favorite plugin. It’s a theme for the admin panel of WordPress. It just makes it look a little nicer. Not really important, but if bad design is something that bugs you you might want to check this out (not saying that WordPress default is all that horrible).

Twitter Tools
- Do you twitter every time you make a blog post? Well this plugin will do it for you, as well as let you make new twitters right from the admin panel.

WordPress.com Stats - If FireStats isn’t for you then this might be. users of WordPress.com will be familiar with this because it’s built in there. It’s just another way to check on your stats. Plus this one has cool little graph. It’s just not as in-depth as FireStats.

WP lightbox 2 - This is a plugin you’ll either love or hate. It adds lightboxing to your blog. If you are unfamiliar with lightboxing, it’s a little bit of JavaScript that will bring up a larger version of an image without you having to go to another page. The reason you may hate it is because for some people it is very slow and they find them annoying.

Tags: wordpress, extension, plugin, addon