Since I’m already on a roll with the whole making lists of favorite things, I thought I’d post my most favorite of the plugins I use with WordPress. I made the switch to WordPress from Movable Type about a month ago and since then I’ve been using quite a few of the hundreds of plugins out there. While I’m sure there are a whole bunch of great ones I’m missing and there might be better versions of plugins that I’m using, in my limited experience, so far, I’m loving these plugins. Try them out or let me know if you’ve found better.

1. Spam Karma 2: I hate spam. I hate the spammers that send spam. I have been blasted by comment spam for years and have employed various methods and tools to stop them. Spam Karma seems to be the mother of all comment moderators. It works on a scoring system, running each comment through a battery of tests dependent on several factors such as inclusion in RBLs, number of links, IP address and much more. Honestly, since installing WordPress, the spammers that were giving me headaches have gone, but I’m not stupid enough to think they’re not going to come back after their spider finds the new comment system. So the big tests lie in the future, but so far, it’s worked very well and people I know that are using it vouch for it. I’m impressed.
2. Bad Behavior: Prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
3. Google URL Redirector: This plugin strips URLs from your comments and uses the Google “nofollow” redirector to prevent comment spammers from taking advantage of your pagerank. A basic, necessary plugin.
4. Referrer Bouncer: The other half of the blog/spam nightmare is referral spamming. I get slammed by these assholes around the clock. My referral stats are not public, but to check them routinely shows that my top referrers are gambling and loan portals. Fucking scumfucks. It’s tricky stopping this too. Referrer Bouncer is a plugin that helps you edit your .htaccess file to block the bad guys and bounce referrer spammers back to their own sites. . Like I said, it’s a tricky business and nothing works perfectly, but it’s better than nothing.
5. WP-ContactForm: Allows you to ad a customizable contact form to any page or post. It works perfectly and I use it on this site.
6. Backup Restore: Makes backing up your theme and SQL database a simple, one-click procedure.
7. XFish Meta: Allows you to enter per-post meta keywords and descriptions.
8. WP Email Notification: Some people are just resistant to RSS. For those who prefer the old fashioned way to be notified of updates, this plugin manages a mailing list that will email users the site updates automatically.
9. RunPHP: Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it eval()’d.
10. Google Sitemaps: Google has a new service called Sitemaps. Basically, by creating an XML file that functions as an RSS update notification to let Google know when your site has been changed and helps the bot crawling your site to do a better job. This plugin took care of all the work for me.
11. Simple Search and Replace: This lets you search for and replace text sitewide, throughout all of your posts. This came in REALLY handy when I switched to WordPress and was tackling the project of making all the posts on this site valid XHTML.
12. WP-CC: Not like you couldn’t just manually put the Creative Commons license info into the footer yourself, but this plugin does the job for you. Hey, why not? More importantly, it also adds CC info to the headers and to your RSS feeds.

There’s a few other plugins I’m currently using, but have not decided whether they are truly necessary. All the above plugins I feel I have an actual use for. If anyone knows of better versions or a good plugin that I’m missing, let me know and I’ll check it out.