Best Plugins for Wordpress

Let’s consider this subject an ongoing and expanding list of good plugins for Wordpress that deliver valuable and useful features for bloggers.  Plugins are a big reason for choosing the Wordpress blog platform.  For example, the ShareThis at the end of this post is a plugin.  Subscribe (in the center column under Pages) is a plugin. And, there are many plugins that run behind-the-scenes that I will detail.

1. ShareThis.  Developed by Alex King, this is perhaps my favorite plugin for Wordpress because it permits readers to email and to share your posts.
2. Popularity Context.  Another neat plugin from Alex that ranks the popularity of posts on a blog.  See it in action at BoomerCafé.
3. Jerome’s Keywords.  This plugin creates a box to the post editing screen for entering or editing keywords.  Those keywords make it easy for search engines to track your blog.
4. Global-Translator.  When I first installed this on the site I created for the Baha’i Community of Arlington, I was amazed how a simple plugin could provide such valuable, free and accurate language translation.
5. WP-Contact-Form.  Every blog needs a professional-looking contact form to enable visitors to send you a message and to create interactivity.  This is the best contact form I’ve found.  Many thanks to Douglas Karr for creating it.
6. Google Analytics for Wordpress.  This plugin falls into my essential category.  Developed by Joost de Valk, the plugin enhances the accuracy of Google Analytics to track traffic to a blog.