1. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN is a great plugin that provides a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums. It allows for multiple slideshow transitions since it’s based on the JW Image Rotator
2. Akismet
This provides great spam comment protection and comes already installed on every WordPress install. The trick is to activate it and to grab an API Key. Instruction for that are here. If you think you won’t get spam comments, you’re kidding yourself. One website I administer has had 6,000+ spam comments in the last four months (all caught by Akismet).
3. Twitpress
If you use Twitter and would like to have WordPress automatically tweet the title and URL to your blog posts as you publish them, then this plugin is for you.
4. Twitter for WordPress
This plugin gives you a way to display your latest tweets on your blog, and you can style it any way you want. To see an example of this, look at the left column of this blog. I chose to display my latest tweet only, but I could set it to display 5, 10, 20, or even 1,000 of my latest tweets.
5. WP-PageNavi
Looking for a great way to paginate your blog posts? Tired of that default ‘next’ and ‘previous’ posts at the bottom of your blog? This plugin paginates your posts similar to how a search engine paginates search results. You can see this in action on the bottom of this blog.
6. Contact Form 7
This plugin has saved me hours of work. It allows me to generate contact forms quickly. It even allows for file upload if you would like. You can configure CAPTCHA as well.
7. Role Manager
If you are creating a website for a client and want to give them editing rights, you can use this plugin to define exactly what they can do when they login. This provides a way to better define the default roles WordPress comes with.
8. PS Disable Auto Formatting
Am I the only one who gets frustrated when I try to add <br /> or <p> in the HTML of a page or post and it gets removed when publishing the page? This plugin allows the use of <br /> and <p>. I just wish it also allowed for adding in your own DIV tags. Currently it will remove or jumble the nesting of your DIV’s. The work around to this is to write the code for a tables instead.
9. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
If you want to encourage readers to share your posts or pages, then use this plugin. An example of this can be found on a website I recently did » iconnect.atsu.edu
10. Gigpress
If you are creating a band website and want to easily allow for the client to add new tour dates and events to their tour page, then use this plugin. An example can be seen on Railroad Earth’s website (check out their music as well)
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