Wordpress Database Back-up

This one can be a lifesaver. It can do a automatic or manual back up of your Wordpress database just in case your database becomes corrupted or is lost all together.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one provided by Wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the Wordpress upgrade instructions. I didn’t use this the last time I upgraded and I regretted it. If you ever plan on upgrading this is the way to go.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plug-in generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. There are a lot of other great features of this plug-in I recommend you check out as well.

Samsarin PHP Widget

There are many versions like this plug-in but I found this one to be the easiest to use. It allows you to place a text widget in one of your sidebars which can read and execute PHP. The normal text widget only allows text and html.

All in One SEO Pack

This plug-in makes it quite easy to optimize you site for search engines. Add tags, header and description with ease.

Akismet

Akismet is a great plug-in for blocking comment and trackback spam. If your site starts to get a lot of visits you’ll definitely want to get this one.

Simple Archive Generator

Simple archives makes a really great index or archive page for your site. You can view my index page here http://stateofaffairs.info/index

Grunion Contact Form

This plug-in Adds a contact form to any post or page by inserting
[contact-form]
in the post. All emails will be sent to the post’s author. Your email address is never shown, and the sender never learns it (unless you reply to the email). I tried Cforms but found it to be buggy and overly complex for just a simple contact form.

Related post

This plug-in will output a series of “related” entries on the bottom of your post based on keyword matching. I personnel don’t use this plug-in but I may implement it in the future.

Ad Wrap

This plug-in will mark the key parts of a blog post so that context based ad services can identify the post content and comments for the best ad matching (thus avoiding the static content that is irrelevant for context ad matching).Supported by:

1. Google Adsense
2. Amazon.com Context Links
3. Kontera ContextLink
4. MediaText

Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button

Helps readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest. Works great at the end of all of your post.

iflickr

iFlickr is a Wordpress plug-in that allows you to easily find free creative commons images on flickr and insert them into your blog post while automatically putting the attribution link underneath.

Subscribe To Comments

This plug-in places a check box at the bottom of your post allowing commentators to subscribe to your comments so they will receive a email when someone else comments. It’s a great way to entice visitors to come back to your blog so they can participate in the discussions.

Register Plus

Ditch the default registration page on Wordpress. This plug-in allows you to enhance your registration page. Add a custom logo, password field, invitation codes, disclaimer, captcha validation, email validation, user moderation, profile fields and more.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This plug-in detects all ways to access your original Wordpress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

SEO Friendly Images

Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SimpleTags

SimpleTags will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. All you have to do is insert code as such [tags]Word Press, Technorati, SimpleTags[/tags]. You can also do individual words with the [tag] [/tag] syntax.

SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plug-in removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. It turns “/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings” into “/immediately-higher-rankings”. Great for anybody looking to improve their SEO.

Kimili Flash Embed

Kimili Flash Embed is a Wordpress plug-in that allows you to easily place a flash movie onto your site. Once installed the syntax is really easy to adjust. The syntax is [kml_flashembed movie="filename.swf" height="250" width="400" /].

Audio player

Once installed, this plug-in allows you to insert mp3 audio files into your posts and pages. Use the following syntax:

[audio:name_of_mp3_file.mp3]

This code will insert a flash player and will load the file named name_of_mp3_file.mp3 located in your audio files folder.