The wordpress plugins that i’m about to show you are mandatory for me and they ease my job and make my blog more interactive.

Akismet

To be honest i have no idea what would i do without the latest version of Akismet. Here’s an example to make my point:

Akismet has protected your site from 200,930 spam comments already, and there are 129 comments in your spam queue right now.

In my opinion Akismet is the best spam filter for wordpress, as i tested it it works better than Dave’s spam karma.

All in One SEO Pack

This is yet an other plugin that i would never deactivate. It increased significantly my SERP rankings. It is like hiring a SEO master to work on your blog.

Don’t believe me? Download and install it and see the difference.

Sexy Comments

Initially i wanted to use Brian’s threaded comments, but eventually went with Sexy Comments which has some great features like digg alike system (if Comment Karma is integrated) , mybloglog/gravatar integration, post preview and post quote.

Feedburner Feedsmith

The feedburner integration plugin which redirects your feeds to the your feedburner feeds page. Feedburner offers advanced feed usage statistics(hits/subscribers/etc).

Google XML Sitemaps

This cool plugin generates a sitemap and updates it every time i make content changes to my blog(for example when i write a new post or a a page).

You can view my sitemap at http://www.thaslayer.com/sitemap.xml

My Video

My Video wordpress plugin allows me to embed youtube/google video/metacafe videos on the fly, just by using a simple tagging system which looks just like bbcode @ forums.

No Ping wait & No self pings plugins

These are 2 great plugins. No Ping wait speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php, while No self Pings keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

Wp Lightbox JS

Even though this is a really lightweight plugin Wp Lightbox JS really helps me give a better aspect to the previews of the themes in my portfolio, and the images that are posted on my blog.

Wordpress Download Monitor

For a while now i link all downloads to this download manager which counts the number of downloads, using this plugin i can stop some users from leeching.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

Me being a web designer and a blog owner i need to have a contact form which can allow my customers/readers to contact me. This handy plugin offers an advanced configurable contact form.

You can check out my customized contact form at http://www.thaslayer.com/contact-me/

ShareThis

At first i used sociable plugin, but when i switched to the new theme i decided that there’s no need for so many icons that link to social bookmarking websites, so i implemented Sharethis which can allow the user to submit to social bookmarking websites or to mail the page.

OIOpublisher Direct Pro

Last,but not least the most recent plugin that i installed is the OIO Publisher Direct PRO plugin for which i paid 37$ i think, and to be honest it’s worth the price and hopefully i will get back my investment soon :).

That’s it, 13 plugins aligned which work side-by side and add a few extra queries to the database, but what the heck, as long as the load time of my blog is okay there’s nothing to worry about