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The beauty of WordPress is that it's open source and always being improved by its community. The ability to add third party plugins makes it that much more powerful. I've created a list of "must have" plugins that I typically install immediately with any new installation. What are your essential WordPress plugins?

Here are some of my top picks:

admin-management-xtended: gives you an ajax interface for managing pages and their attributes
all-in-one-seo-pack: helps you modify the meta tags or setup automation to create meta tags for better optimization of each page
contact-form-7: ez contact form to add to your site
google-analytics-for-wordpress: a must have for adding the google analytics code snippet to every page of your site
google-sitemap-generator: creates a compliant site map of your website and updates it as you create new posts
nextgen-gallery: beautiful photo gallery plugin which is compatible with other plugins like HighSlide, Imageflow, FlashViewer, etc.
ozh-admin-drop-down-menu : creates drop downs for the menus to speed up productivity
wp-sifr: Replace your standard fonts with pretty flash fonts

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Replies to This Discussion

Is there a JPEG 2000 plug-in for WordPress?
I'm not sure. I did a quick search and it looks like JPG2000 requires a browser plug-in to support it in the first place. What are you looking to do, convert all your images to JPG2000 and display them?
My essentials:

Akismet - superb at clearing up spam.
FeedBurner FeedSmith - Makes sure everything uses my feedburner feed rather than direct on the site.
PingPressFM - Any time I post a blog it updates my Facebook status and Twitter feed with title and start of first line. Great for getting additional readers.

wp-cache - from benchmarks I've seen it's by far the best caching module. Very little reason not to have caching installed and enabled on a site. Your hosts will thank you for having it should you get slashdotted or similar!
Ryan,
Thanks for the tip on the Admin Xtended!! What a great plugin!!!

I definately agree about:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Contact Form 7
- Google Analytics for WordPress
- Google XML Sitemaps

I also recommend:
- Permalink Redirect (for SEO assistance)
- Widget Logic & Yank Widget (for multiple content areas on a single page)
- WordPress.com Stats (nice dashboard stats pulling from the WordPress API)
- WP-SWFObject (Uses the SWFObject for embedding Flash objects, very easy to install)
- WP e-Commerce (Have been testing this one out, seems pretty good so far)
- WP Testimonials (very easy to use testimonial rotation)
Wordpress code frameworks like :

Chris Pearson's Thesis: http://bit.ly/thesis-wp1
Studio Press' Genesis: http://bit.ly/spress11

... are great for developing foundations for great sites.

I prefer cufon plugin for font replacement. It does not use flash, hence better for SEO: http://bit.ly/cufon2

Any bigger site must check out W3 Total Cache from Fredrick Towns: http://bit.ly/w3totcache

Forms is like Gravity Forms (although paid, worth it) http://bit.ly/gravity-forms1

Aloha

Ever since WordPress 3 came out I've been using these three plugins. They're all related to each other, as you might guess. Very nice for turning WordPress into a fully fledged CMS.

Great idea for a thread.  Here are a few we used for the TEDx Honolulu site:

 

WPtouch - The future is in mobile, but designing a website for smartphones can be a nightmare.  Really fragmented market with different operating systems and screen sizes.  This plugin took care of most of the work.  There's a free and paid version.  Main reason to get the paid version is if you want your site to launch like a mobile app.

 

Social Web Links - Easy way to add social media icons to link to Facebook, Twitter, and other profiles you have.  Our theme didn't include these icons by default, so we had to install them with this plugin.

 

MailChimp List Subscribe Form - E-mail is still alive and kicking.  This plugin allows you to link your WordPress site with your MailChimp account.  It gives you a sidebar widget to add an opt-in box for e-mail subscribers.

 

I was wondering, what plugins would you guys recommend for security, backups, and things like that?

I've grown a little partial to W3 Total Cache, which is quite a flexible caching plug in that can allow you to control what you cache, how (including memcached which is advised for multi-server blog architecture) and even allow you to automatically take advantage of any CDNs or cloud storage, such as Amazon's S3 or Rackspace's Cloud Files.

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