Partly, this page is simply for me to keep track of the plugins I am using. These are also some of the best I have found out there so far
Akismet for spam. Comes with, so, no need for a link.
Bad Behavior is a necessity, works well with Akismet (up to 2.0.10 now. Much faster, particularly for commenting and posting)
Bunny’s Technorati Tags. Goes with the Journalized Theme, when I have it live.
Custom Smileys: great plugin which allows you to add whatever smilies you want. I have a post that I am going to post one day about it.
Get Recent Comments. Nice for showing that last however many you want comments and trackbacks in the sidebar.
Inline Pingbacks and Trackbacks. Will show pb’s and tb’s on the front page below posts.
Live. This is a cool plugin, which gives you a digg stlye look at incoming referrals.
Peter’s Custom Anti Spam. Another great plugin to stop spam. Check out this post on it.
Sideblog. Allows you to have miniposts in the sidebar, for those things you do not want to write a full post on. Info on it here.
Stick Post. For keeping posts at the top. This is the only one that works well with WP 2.0 and higher. All the others make the "go to next page" tags disappear.
Subscribe To Comments. Obvious.
Theme Switcher. I like this one the best. If you have more themes then you want to show, you can turn them off. Only issue, you must turn the plugin off when you want to edit the themes through WP admin panel.
Trackping Separator. Separates tackbacks/pingbacks from comments in the individual posts. Also, can remove trackbacks/pingbacks from popup comments box.
Wordpress.com Stats. It’s OK, nothing special. But, can give you some internal stats without using any of your bandwith or storage, since hosted at Wordpress.com.
Wordpress Database Backup. Umm, yeah, this one is kinda vital, and should be used every week. Should come with WP now.
Wordpress PDA. More and more people are cruising with PDA’s, Smartphones, and Blackberry’s. This plugin is perfect for those cases. If you have one, check out the way my blog looks in that browser. Post about it here. (PS: it doesn’t work when you have Google Analytics code in the footer)
WP Extreme Video. This is the video plugin I prefer. Gives you some customizability for when you do not want to just use the embed codes.
WP Slimstat-Ex. This one replaces Slim Stats, and I find it to be much better. Especially since it doesn’t crash the admin page in Wp 2.2
Xinha4WP. This plugin replaces the basic WYSIWYG plugin, which tends to go wonky in 2.0 and higher, and disappear, so I am told. It did for me. I have a post that goes with the Custom Smilies that will be posted at some point. Works well with embeding video’s, too.
If your WYSIWYG hasn’t crashed, and you use a widescreen, you can also try this plugin, which gives a little more flexibility then the standard. Also, this one from Mudbomb is a good middle ground, though you do have to turn it off to post vids, and it doesn’t like the embed code at times.
Adding another: Tried two different plugins that can do a show/hide of individual posts on the main index page, and while both are pretty easy, one of them may have contributed to causing Google issues, ie, Google not crawling my site and losing all data. The one I decided to go with is MoreLink. A little hint: open the "collapsible_more_link" file in the plugins directory with a text editor, change the text align to left. You can also change what the text will say within the same file. Look in the read me for the code, which will be !-inline-more- with < and > at each end. At the webpage, it is missing two -’s.
New additions: Ajax Comments. Some of you are already aware of how this works, some have heard of it, but no idea. Basically, what it does is update the comment within the page, rather then having the whole page refresh. Leave a test comment here or over there and give it a whirl. FYI, I have heard that it does not like some plugins. Live does not play well with it, and older Bad Behavior slows the commenting down too much for it to work properly.
Also up is AutoMeta. This is an automated meta-tag generator. You can still add them manually, but, why bother? Meta tags are placed in the head to create better searches for the engines. If you understand how to look in the source files (in the View portion of the task bar), you can see how they are put in there for an individual post.