Must have WP Plugins

[NickM]

That is an awesome plugin DD. Never seen it before, but this search info could/should be used to create writing topics. Incredible information to have access to.

edit: I was using Homepage Excerpts, but omfg WP Limit Posts is ssooooooo much better.

Thank you Cheryle!!!!!

[sipka]

Didn't see this mentioned - Search Meter - see what your users are searching for. If you have a search engine on your page this is so must-have.

Google Analytics has this kind of feature too (I don't really know Search Meter though), it is called "Site Search" under Content section.

Great plugin list anyways

[Fuller]

Couple of my favorites...

Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu - convert admin vertical navigation to a horizontal navigation. The lazy and the productive will love it : all admin links available in a neat CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on "Manage" then "Pages" to edit pages, go to any admin page from any admin page. Plus, it maximizes your work space.

Contact Form 7 - easily setup and customize multiple web contact forms, mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

[MPC]

Advance Permalinks - I use this puppy to setup a unique "base category" url for each category item as opposed to one base category for all of them. Gives you a bit more control and could have a big impact SEO wise.

I am using this to artifically link a category with a page, which you can't normally do. For example, if I have a page called "poker videos", and 3 categories called "insane rivers, poker brawls, caught cheating", I can change the base url of each of these to read "/poker-videos/%category%/%postname%/" so it appears as if they are linked to my "poker videos" page.

Then if I have 2 other categories related to my page "poker rakeback", I can modify each of those base categories to "/poker-rakeback/%category%/%postname%/"

And so on... It allows to generate a "fake" directory structure based URLs

[Ozpoker]

Psychic Search : Psychic Search
Clean Options : Scripting
Stumble For Wordpress : Stumble! for WordPress | Making the Web
WP Crontrol : WP-Crontrol scompt.com
WP Auto Suggest : Elie El Khoury WP AutoSuggest WordPress Plugin for Search ★

[THPKR]

wow thanks for this man

[Marcelo]

Excellent list. I like top commentators too (didn't find the link right now).

It is good to keep people talking.

[denharsh]

nice post... Also include yet another related post plugin

Nofollow link plugin
and
SEO friendly image plugin

[OPC]

A place I can jump right into... Very nice!

I recently migrated from Blogger to Wordpress (painful experience, I might add). Half the blog is still in transition, due to issues on the Blogger end...

Anyway, I absolutely LOVE how much one can do with wordpress, as opposed to blogger...

That being said, the plug-ins that haven't yet been listed, which I've found most valuable:

(in no particular order)

1. Broken Links Checker - identifies broken links throughout the blog, allows you to remove them from the control panel, as opposed to searching, editing x 1 million...

2. Ontopic - anyone hitting the blog via search phrase - (i.e. - "tips on winning poker tournaments) will see in the sidebar some related posts of interest to them. The plug-in can be set to use tags or categories to recommend posts. Great way to keep your readers interested.

3. Social Bookmarking reloaded - allows you to use the social marks of choice, and toss the rest out with the bathwater.

4. Automatic SEO Links - not that anyone uses automatically generating links... however, this is a nice tool to link certain phrases or keywords to pages across the board...

[OPC]

Platinum SEO is essentially a repackaged all in one seo platform, with redirects enabled - apparently this handles redirects when one changes their permalinks - which I just did. I was having issues with redirection, as it didnt want to work on my blog for some reason