In this post I’ll be keeping an up-to-date list of all my favorite wordpress blog plugins. I have to confess I’m a bit of a plugins junky but I really feel that the plugins are one of the main reasons wordpress is such a good content management system to use for your websites.

Every time I want to do something with my wordpress blogs that can’t already be done with the base install, pretty much always I can find a free plugin to do it within minutes. If my sites were static html/php sites I would always have to pay to have a scrip made or if it existed buy an existing scrip, which of cause could end up being very expensive and very often not viable.

In time I’ll be grouping my favorite wordpress blog plugins under different categories but to start with I’m just going to list my top 10 for the moment. They are in order of preference started with my favourite. All these plugins are free.

My Favourite WordPress blog plugins

(click links to go to full descriptions & download link)

1. All in one SEO pack Search engine optimize your blog.
2. Akismet Take control of your comment Spam.
3. Google XML Sitemaps Auto create Google XML Sitemaps.
4. MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer Take control of your blogs pinging.
5. WP-DBManager The ultimate WP database management plugin.
6. Global Translator Auto translate your blog into 41 languages.
7. Do Follow Remove the no-follow attribute from comments.
8. Cforms 2 The most diverse forms creation plugin for WordPress.
9. Exec-PHP Use PHP code in your posts/pages.
10. Advanced Excerpt Take full control of WP text Excerpts.

All in one SEO pack

This is an absolute must! The plugin allows you to take total control of your title tags (the title that appears in search results) and your meta description tags and keyword tags for each and every page of your blog.

Akismet

You should already have this installed as it comes with the WordPress installation files, but if you haven’t go and install it right now! It traps spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks and stops them from appearing on your blog. It’s not perfect, but at least 90% of what it traps on my blogs is always spam and you can manually approve the comments that aren’t spam if you want anyway.

Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps help search engines like Google to find all your pages and index them. This plugin automatically creates and updates a XML Sitemap every time you post a new piece of content and then notifies Google, MSN and Yahoo (if you have the Yahoo API) of the new content. Once you set it up you should never have to touch it again so you should definitely install it.

MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer

The WordPress built in Blog Pinging system works but is extremely basic and does not really give you any options as to how you would like it to function nor does it provide you with anyway of knowning whether your pings are actually successful! This plugin expands the wordpress functionality in regards to pinging substantially giving you control. For me it’s a must, however you do have to subscribe to the developers  email list… Read more at my MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer post.

WP-DBManager

If you’re not keeping backups of your blogs database you are asking for a disaster to happen! I have tried several plugins for this but this one is by far the best and the only one I have seen that can fully automate the backup profess so you never have to worry about it again. With it you can Manages your WordPress database in the following ways:

You can optimize your database, repair it, back it up, restore it, delete backups, drop/empty tables and run selected queries as well as run automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of your database with backups sent to your email address totally on autopilot!

Global Translator

This is a great plugin if you would like to offer your blogs content in multiple languages and at the same time create more pages that the search engines can index and subsequently get more traffic to your blog as a result. The plugin uses the free web translation engines out there to translate your blogs content into, at the time of writing 41 different languages. Read more at my Global Translator WordPress Blog Plugin post.

Do Follow

This plugin removes the No Follow tribute on outgoing links in the name field of comments on your blog. This will increase the value of these outgoing links to the commuter’s website and as a result you will probably get more webmasters commenting on your posts. This could also increase spam so you will definitely want to moderate comments, although in truth I think you should always moderate comments anyway. There are more complex plugins for this out there but I like the functionality and simplicity of this one as it does not restrict you in anyway like others do.

Cforms II

This is probably the most complex forms creation plugin for wordpress out there but, it is by far the most flexible I’ve come across and allows you to create all different types of forms for your blog. In the words of the developer “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.”

Exec-PHP

This plugin allows you to use PHP code in your wordpress posts and pages. If you don’t know what PHP is this plugin probably won’t be of use to you just yet, never the less it is very useful for running all kinds of scrips adding even more functionality to your blog. There are several other plugins that do this, but I haven’t tried them. I’ve heard a number of people say this one is their favorite for varies technical reasons and the truth is it works very well for me so I have had no reason to give the others a try.

Advanced Excerpt

This plugin gives you control over how many words or characters are used in excerpts on your blog (like the category pages excerpts for each post). Additionally it allows you to let HTML content also be part of the excerpts meaning that things like images and links that were in your posts can be also visible in your excerpts if you wish. You have total control as you can individually turn on and off different HTML codes depending on what you want to show.

More WordPress blog plugins to be added soon