10 WordPress Plugins I’m Digging!

Now that I’m officially using a WordPress Platform, I thought I’d share my favorite Plugins. I’ve installed and tried approx 40 Plugins and have loved some and ended up deactivating those that didn’t appeal to me.

1. Top 10 – I love this Plugin! It tracks and displays the top posts, based on visits for each day. It’s a widget that displays the top posts for each day, listing the top viewed first and number of views in parenthesis. You can also view the statistics directly from the Dashboard.

2. G-Lock Double-In Manager - Gives a simple form to allow readers to subscribe to your mailing list, shows subscription stats on your dashboard and setup your RSS Feeds into newsletters that are automatically sent out as you specify. You can design and customize all aspects.

3. Possibility Related Posts Widget - I’ve tried to use several different plugins that displayed related posts at the bottom of each of my posts, but this widget was the one for me. It uses “filter on_content” to automatically select related posts.

4. Sociable - Another very useful plugin. Adds social networking and bookmarking icons to the end of your posts. You can specify the sites you want to display. It allows readers to submit your content to Stumbled Upon, Digg, Mixx, Reddit or any of the other sites you specify.

5. WP Greetbox – This is one of the most useful Plugins I found. I instantly fell in love with the capabilities it provides. It works by adding a greeting to your visitors, based on their referral link. If they get to your site via Digg, it greets them and asks them to Digg the post. You can set up several different greetings and options. Here’s an example;

6. WPTouch – This handy plugin transforms your site into a mobile site for iPhones and iPod Touches. Any time you access Eazy Cheezy from your iPhone or iPod Touch, it will look similiar to what you see below. Each post offers an arrow to read more content on the screen. It optimizes your site for mobile access. This does not work with Blackberries.

7. ThemeTweaker – So you have your theme, but want to make some changes to it. Rather than digging through coding, this plugin lets you make color changes.

8. Broken Link Checker - This Plugin came in handy after transitioning from Blogger to WordPress. It searches through and finds broken links, then displays the number of broken links in your dashboard. From the same window, you can see the list of broken links and modify them without ever leaving the page.

9. XML Sitemap - The purpose of this Plugin is to give you the ability to simply create an XML Sitemap, with little to no effort. Just setup the options you want and let it do it’s magic. Sitemaps are very valuable, since they help communicate your updates and content to Search Engine. This Plugin indexes your site with Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo, then automatically notifies them via ping each time a change is made.

10. Ozh’ Admin DropDown Menu – This works from your dashboard. It takes less clicks to get to certain administrative controls and I like how it’s displayed at the top, rather than on the side, as WordPress 2.7 displays.

This is just 10 of the Plugins I’m digging the most. There are a few more great ones I’m enjoying, such as All In-On SEO Pack, Akismet, diggZ-Et, Google Friend Connect and a few others. I’m still searching for other great Plugins and it’s almost addicting! There’s just so many Plugins for all sorts of different purposes. Do you have any Plugins you’d recommend?