One of my favourite things about WordPress is its extendibility. It's very easy to add new functionality with the plugin system, and it makes for a really powerful application. Here are a few of my favourite WordPress plugins:
- Akismet – If it wasn't for Akismet, I would have turned comments off a long time ago. I've been running it on this blog for about three weeks, and it's caught nearly 400 spam comments. That's a lot of spam for a small blog like this, and it was a major time consumer before I installed Akismet.
- WP-PageNavi – This manages the navigation between pages at the bottom of each page. I find it a lot easier to navigate sites that use this as opposed to the default WordPress "Next Page / Previous Page" setup.
- Related Posts – Shows the related posts at the bottom of each page. It's almost essential for any blog that has more than a handful of posts, as it allows readers to find a lot of older posts that may have remained hidden to them.
- Smart Archives – Used in conjunction with "Exec-PHP", it produces the archives I use on this blog. It's another "must have" for anyone with more than a few posts.
- StatTraq – Shows me where people are visiting from, and what they're reading. It's not particularly heavy duty, but it gives a good overview of what's happening.
You can find plenty more plugins at http://wp-plugins.net/.