One of the joys of using discovering WordPress is finding a good combination of plugins to enhance the site. This list reflects both the plugins that I’m currently using and some others which I’ve not yet implemented but feel are worth investigating.

1. Akismet – Spam catcher for blog comments, it does an excellent job.
2. All in One SEO Pack – This plugin takes care of ensuring that your posts have keyword and description meta-tags and includes loads of features for tweaking your site to be as serach engine friendly as possible.
3. Broken Link Checker – A handy little tool which regularly checks all of the links on your blog and warns you of any broken ones. Includes a handy interface to change or unlink broken links without editing the full post or page. It does struggle with some redirected links but that’s not really the fault of the plugin.
4. Comment Approved Notifier – Very simply, if you are using comment moderation, this plugin will send an email to a commenter when you approve their comment.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – Since all of the major search engines agreed to support the XML sitemaps protocol, this plugin does everything you need to make sure that your content gets indexed as efficiently as possible.
6. Post-Plugin Library – This does nothing by itself but provides the common codebase for the following two plugins plus a couple of others.
7. Popular Posts – Using the Post-Plugin Library, this plugin will generate a list of popular posts on your blog, it features option such as matching the current post category and excluding the current post or excluding posts of a certain age.
8. Similar Posts – Displays a list of related posts for any post. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. A useful way to let readers know about other content you have on the topic that they are reading.
9. ShareThis – Adds a discrete but highly functional sharing button to your posts allowing easy sharing and bookmarking for a large number of services.
10. Smart 404 – This plugin will attempt to find the best matching post if a requested page cannot be found. You can also use it to suggest a list of possible posts if no match is found. I use this to catch broken links which exist following the switch to WP.
11. Tagaroo – As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags and images for the things and events you’re writing about. Powered by the Thompson Reuters Calais service
12. WordPress Database Backup – A useful tool to use just in case of technical failures. This will take a complete backup of your WordPress Database and either store it on the server or email it to you.
13. WordPress Reports – This is a great tool for monitoring blog performance, it provides a seven day overview of visitor stats and subscriber counts if you are using Google Analytics and Feedburner.
14. WP-Cumulus – A nice visualisation plugin which provides an alternative to traditional tag clouds, see the amazing tag-o-sphere on this site.
15. cforms – Use this to deploy contact forms on your wordpress site. Lots of options and features make this a flexible helper.
16. WP Super Cache – Speed up the site with this plugin which generates static pages to reduce the amount of database usage required.
17. NextGEN Gallery – An advanced plugin for organising and displaying image galleries.
18. UMapper – A plugin which provides a wealth of options for including maps in your blog posts, handy if you post on location specific things such as events.
19. podPress – tons of features for turning Wordpress into an ideal podcasting platform, iTunes optimisation, download stats and many others.
20. Wordpress Thread Comment – Make your comments sections threadable, individual comments can be replied to and the threads displayed accordingly.
21. WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. Also includes plenty of other features.
22. Category Icons – Assign icons to post categories for display next to post titles.
23. WP More Feeds – Generate RSS feeds for category and tag archive pages.