My Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins

At last night’s Beer and Blog gathering, Chris O’Rourke bugged me (in a nice way) about getting him a list of four or five WordPress plugins which are on my “must have” list. I’ve probably installed WordPress at least 20 times, and here’s what gets installed right away:

• Akismet - yes, it’s installed (but not activated) by default, but this one is a no-brainer. I just hopped over to my administrative area on this site and see that Akismet has blocked 391,341 comment spam messages. Dealing with those manually would be a nightmare.
• WP-OpenID - This is the best plugin for integrating OpenID with a WordPress blog. I use it so folks can leave comments with OpenID, but it can also be used for site account login.
• Better Comments Manager - A great plugin for managing a bunch of comments including inline replies.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Manage your feed with FeedBurner using yourdomain.com/feed/ as the public feed URL.
• Related Entries - used to automatically display a list of posts which are likely related to the current entry

I’m curious to see what Chris puts together; my understanding is that he’s pinging several folks and aggregating the responses.