With those 7 plugins installed, I then install a suite of additional plugins, selecting those plugins that are consistent with the goals of the blog. This customization varies from one blog to another, but when other plugins are needed, these are the ones I turn to.

1. cformsII – contact form : cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

3. WP-Sticky: Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.  When a post is made ’sticky’, it sticks to the top of the page instead of being pushed down by a subsequent post. Beginning with v.2.7, WordPress also offers a sticky-post function in quick-edit mode, but because WP-Sticky differentiates between sticky posts and announcements, it offers a little more functionality.

4. Sociable: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

5. CommentLuv: Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit. Entice them even more with the new info box ajax popup showing their descript, gravatar and other sites they visit.

6. MaxBlogPress Favicon:  With this plugin you can have your very own favicon in less than 10 minutes. Favicons are an excellent branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. They help you create brand awareness by displaying a little favourite icon (favicon) in the title of our blog next to the URL.

7. AdSense Manager is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.

8. Pagemash Pagemanager: Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

9. SEO Slugs: The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. The plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

10. WP Post Ratings: This adds a rating system add the bottom of each post, allowing each user to have there say on how good your post is. It is powered by Ajax, making it very unobtrusive, and to be honest, configured correctly, can be very elegant. You also have (my favourite option) the option to style the ratings star images with you own. You can also show the rating results in the sidebar, this is also done in an elegant way.

Be sure that the plugins you install are compatible with the version of WordPress you’re using. And remember, these are just my recommendations – you may find others more closely suited to your needs.

If you know of a useful plugin, please tell us about it!

Second, because WordPress is ‘open source’, new plugins are continuosly being developed for it. If there’s something new out there with terrific functionality, I want to know about it!

Now, I’m assuming that you know that a plugin is simply a software module that is ‘plugged in’ to a larger application for the purpose of adding or enhancing features and functionality. If you didn’t know before, now you do.

With time and experience, I’ve developed a list of plugins that I consider to be ‘must-haves’. This isn’t to say that they’re the best for everyone, because a lot depends on the goal of your blog. But these are the ones that I install as a baseline on ALL my blogs. While I may later install others, here’s my list of must-have, indispensible plugins:

1. Akismet is a service that checks comments made to your blog to see if they look like spam. These comments will not be posted on your blog unless you specifically allow them. You can review them from your admin panel, and you need a WordPress API key to make it work. Once you have your key, though, you can use it on all your blogs. Akismet comes preinstalled (though not yet activated)  in current versions of WordPress.

2. All-in-One SEO Pack automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for SEO (search engine optimization. Some configuration options are available, but it also works right out of the box.

3. WP-SpamFree is a powerful plugin that dramatically cuts down on comment spam, including that of trackbacks and pingbacks. I use it in conjunction with Akismet.

4. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer prevents your blog from being banned by limiting the number of pings generated per post per specified time period. This is very useful if you edit your blog posts on the fly, as I do.

5. Google Sitemap Generator will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you create or edit a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

6. Google Analytics automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, and more.

7. WP-DBManager allows you to optimize, repair, backup, and restore your database, repair database,  delete the backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. Easy to use, this requires little or no configuration.

There you have it. My top recommendations for must-have WordPress plugins. You’ll find these plugins – and almost 4000 more – at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

While these are the plugins that I consider indispensible, there are many more plugins that add very useful functions and features to one’s blog. I’ll tell you about these in another post very soon.