10 Great WordPress Plugins

Since the redesign of Programming Designs, I’ve been looking at several ways to enhance the blog in whatever way possible. Along the way I’ve picked up some extremely useful plugins that I suggest others should take a look at. Without further ado, the list:

1. Advanced Excerpt – This plugin contains features that provide several advantages over the default WordPress excerpt function, including: ability to choose which HTML markup you want to keep/exclude, choosing an excerpt length based on character count/word count, the option to override custom excerpts, and fixing HTML errors that may be caused from post trimming.
2. All in one SEO Pack – This is a great plugin to optimize your website for search engines. It automatically generates titles, meta tags, helps prevent duplicate content, allows you to override/set any meta descriptions/keywords, and best of all, works great out-of-box using default settings.
3. cforms – cforms allows you to easily create/manage forms on your blog. It features built in templates, custom templates, a great/easy interface, spam protection, database tracking, and a lot more. Definitely one of the most thorough plugins out there.
4. Google XML Sitemaps – The Google XML Sitemaps plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. This plugin is great for being more search engine optimized.
5. Theme Test Drive – This is an amazing plugin to use if you are ever trying to fine-tune your theme. Work and preview your theme while your visitors are using the default one.
6. WordPress.com Stats – This plugin provides great information about your blog, including # of pageviews, which posts and pages are most popular, where traffic is coming from, what people click on when they leave, and more.
7. Wordpress Thread Comment – Get threaded comments in your WordPress blog with this plugin. This one is definitely one of my favorites as it encourages readers to reply to one another. Highly recommended. Makes me wonder why WP hasn’t implemented this feature by default.
8. WP PageNavi – This plugin provides more advanced page navigation for your blog. You can view the demo here (scroll to bottom to see customized pagination).
9. WP Super Cache – If you’ve ever suffered the digg effect before, you’ll know it sucks when there are tons of people trying to access your site without being sent to a “site not responding” screen. This plugin solves that issue by “generating html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts”. WP Super Cache is also very customizable for what it does.
10. SocioFluid – This plugin makes it easy for your visitors to add your blog to various social networks, including Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Technorati, and more (a lot more).

I hope you’ve found this list useful — and if you have any other plugin suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.