Having worked quite a bit with WordPress over the past several years I feel that I have had a chance to experiment with a pretty good chunk of the plugins available to the WP community. Some of them good, some of them great and some of them just downright ugly. Over that time I have come to settle on a pretty standard set of plugins for my personal WordPress Installations and thus would call them my favorite.

Every once in a while someone says “hey I noticed you had ‘blank’ on your blog, how do you do that, is there a plugin?” So I thought it might be useful to some of you if I just went ahead and shared the whole lot. Nothing to fancy here just some well coded plugins that do wonders to extend the functionality of my WordPress installation.

The Plugins

The first one on the list is actually a set of plugins that I find myself using pretty regularly. They have been a part of this blog for some time now and I don’t imagine they will being going anywhere in the near future. The use is pretty obvious given the self explanatory titles.

Plugins which require the Post Plugin Library
a. Recent Posts
b. Popular Posts
c. Recent Comments

WP-Syntax – this allows me to share a bit of code from time to team. Keeps it nice and presentable for my readers.

All In One SEO – Extremely powerful SEO plugin that allows you to manipulate tags, titles, descriptions and even eliminate duplicate content typically found in WP.

SEO Title Tag – Gotta love this plugin, it let’s you re-title pages and posts from one admin panel, giving you a chance to experiment with page titles for SEO purposes.

Twitter Tools – Twitter functionality on your blog can go over looked no longer, this tool has a pretty amazing range of features creating “complete integration” between twitter and your wordpress blog. It is hands down my favorite twitter plugin.

Socialble – I have use this one here for quite awhile. It appends social networking icons to the end of your post for easy sharing. On the back end it is pretty easily stylable and you have about 80 social networks to choose from. (My suggestion – just because they are there does not mean you need to use them.)

Feedburner Feedsmith – With the click of a button you have redirected all of your feeds to your Feedburner feed, enough said.

Google XML Sitemaps – If any of you have ever looked at creating a sitemap from scratch you know what a pain it can be with a site full of content. Drop this plugin in and with a short bit of configuration it’s all taken care of.

Flickr RSS – I post a lot of my miscellaneous work to flickr these days and this plugin gives me an easy way to pull them into my blog and show them off.

Subscirbe to Comments – It’s hard to keep up with all of the articles you are following when life gets busy so for all my readers I have added an easy subscribe to comments plugin as well as a comments RSS feed. Now your readers can click subscribe and be notified when a follow up comment is posted.

Comment Luv – A great plugin that gives your involved reader a little extra luv, not currently installed here but definitely worth checking out. Basically what it does is combs your commenters website and returns their most recent post. It’s a nice way to get your readers traffic to their own site and it can be looked at as a way to encourage them comments.

For more plugin goodness visit the WordPress plugin repository or put google to work. If you have any questions about a plugin or just simply wonder if there is a plugin out there for a particular function, drop it in the comments below and I will do my best to help you out.

Have a suggestion for a post or see something that we could improve, please let us know!