Plugins?

The best plugins for wordpress. I love these kinds of questions. I use:

akismet for spam
ozh admin menu
all in one seo
one click updater
auto hyperlink
statpress
cross linker
google sitemaps

But if you are looking for something specific to do with your wordpress install, let me know, I use wordpress everyday, so I have a lot of experience choosing plugins.

There are no "Best" plug ins.

Pick your theme first. If you buy a premium theme they will usually come with the plug ins required to make that theme work. Free themes usually have no plug ins.

Then decide what you need/want your site to do.

Are you doing Ebay? Then PHPBay is a great plug in

Do you want to give people the ability to bookmark your site.. get a social bookmarking plug in

Everyone wants to block spam ... well usually... I like WP Spam Free... also includes a contact form code snippet


All in One SEO is a good plug in... just make sure you take the time to read through all the options.

Google Sitemaps might be a good idea, and Google Analytics.

Plugins for Contextual Ad Managment.

Best thing to do is sit down and figure out what you want your site to do. The go to Wordpress.org and read about plug ins that do what you want, and read the reviews. Then try them.

Try not to go overboard, because over time the more you have the more you will have to manage. Get to reliant on something then find out it doesn't work and you have to jump ship later.

Here's the list of plugins I generally use on new WP blogs:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...press-plugins/

Depending on the topic of your blog you may need to drop some of these or find others.

Plugins add overhad to your site - so only use plugins that bring you a real benefit!

Cheers,

Martin.