I’ve read many articles like the one i’ve published here on what the best wordpress are.
I guess it comes down to personal preference and how you want your site to function. I’ve been using wordpress on and off for over a year and in my experience there are some plugins that every site should have.
I know you’ll all have your own preferences (post a comment with your favourite ones) but the following is my list based on the wordpress sites I’ve worked on so far:
Akismet – Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
All in one SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines. Also gives you the ability to tweak all relevant meta data for each page or blog post.
EG Archive - provides a widget (and a template tag) to display archives in yearly mode, AND monthly, according a specified pivot date. Extremely useful especially if you blog often and dont want your archive listed in months but in year format instead.
Revision Control – Allows finer control over the Post Revision system included with WordPress
That’s it! This is by no means an ultimate list, but it’s definately the ones that every site should have as soon as wordpress is installed.
There’s lots of other really good plugins that I can recommend but not applicable for this post as they aren’t compulsory/useful for every site. That’s for another blog post.