It wouldn’t hurt to share with you some of the plugins I have installed on this wordpress blog. Maybe I can save you some time in researching must have plugins.
Make sure your theme supports widgets and is bug free
First and foremost, download a wordpress blog theme that supports widgets and works well with the latest version of wordpress. There are thousands of themes available for download – free! But you need to be careful to check them out, some of them will have bugs like comments not showing, or sidebars not defined properly. You lose the advantage of using widgets and plugins with a them that’s not updated. So spend some time and look around.
Akismet
This comes bundled with wordpress software so you need not worry about downloading this one. It basically protects you from spammers. Cool deal. You will need to activate / get an API key from wordress.org – just a few minutes of your time.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
This plugin is very useful if you want to get yourself out there. It gives your user a chance to either bookmark your site or share it to the world. Definitely a must have in my book since more and more users are now using these services.
AdSense Manager simply makes your life easier. If you plan to earn a little money (never hurts anyone) from blogging, you will need this plugin. It basically creates widgets for your ads so you can just drag and drop them to your sidebars. You also see a droplist of your ads from the WYSIWYG of your write post page. Here’s an ad that only took me 2 clicks to put here:
Anyway, it supports most of the major ad affiliate publisher programs like google’s adsense.
I rarely use this but when I do – it helps make my posts easily found by Search Engines. So if you’re a serious blogger who wants to share to a wider audience, you’ll need this.
Another good find. WordPress gives you an easy to use interface for uploading images, but with flexible upload – you have more control on your uploads. You can resize, crop, and even add your watermark – sweet deal.
Don’t argue, just install it to please the world of google. Besides, it won’t hurt and it only takes a few minutes. This increases your chances in showing up in google search results.
This was the first gallery I installed and never really felt the need to look for a new one afterwards. I guess that’s a good thing. It comes with its own widget for displaying thumbnails or a slideshow on your side bar. I just wished you could have more widgets so you can post more photos from different albums on your side bar. Overall, not bad – takes a few minutes to get your head around the interface, but after that – smooth sailing.
Oh yes, you’ll need this if you like videos from sites like YouTube. This plugin let’s you embed videos quickly – its not like wordpress won’t allow you too, its just simpler if you have this tool installed. Just put in the link of the video, and the plugin takes care of it.
This let’s your readers rate your post – see the stars under the title of this article? That’s it. It comes with nifty widgets that adds value to your sidebar.
If you’re reading this then you’re like me – I find peace knowing and seeing that people are finding and hopefully reading my blog. Stats help you sleep at night. Its a good thing 
There you go – I have a few other widgets but I’ll post that in another entry. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be adding more plugins, but for now… I’m happy with this setup.
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