WordPress and Plugins, the two go together like peas and carrots. Well, that depends on your opinion of peas and carrots, but you get the idea. Plugins are an essential part of wordpress. There isn’t a single person I know that doesn’t use at least one per installation, if not tens of them. I have yet to use a theme or create one without the use of a separate plugin.

Listing their use of plugins is a post often found on blogs, but I want to expound on that a little. I’m going to list our plugins used, and then tell you why and to what extent they are taken advantage of.

Akismet
Anyone that uses WordPress knows that Akismet is a near requirement. It cuts down on spam comments by filtering them out as they are submitting, and will automatically delete spam comments on older posts.

The Why
Because we all hate spam! Except for those making a living from it.

Category Posts Widget
One problem with some themes in WordPress is how the category structure is setup. The theme may be designed to work a certain way, but with your alterations and edits you need to only display posts within a specific category and none from the others. You can do this by editing your WordPress theme and adding in a loop with the proper arguments, but with this plugin, the work is done for you.

The Why
Yes, we use a pre-made WordPress theme. Yes, we are ashamed. However, it is a wonderful theme and quite functional. But we needed to implement some limitations, and expand on other functions to get it the way we needed it to be. On our home page, and independent blog pages, we needed to only list posts from our blog. Hence, the Category Posts Widget.

Contact Form 7
Probably the second most popular contact form plugin aside from cformsII. Generate simple or complex forms in seconds, and include them in any post or page. If you are a control freak, then cformsII is the better choice, but if you would just like to generate custom forms without all the room for error, this ones for you.

The Why
Although the complete customization of plugins like cformsII is nice, we didn’t need all of that. If you can do without, then great. In my opinion neither plugin is better, it’s just a matter of what you need and how much work you would like to put in to customization. We decided to keep it as simple as possible without sacrificing functionality.

Do Follow Plugin
WARNING: CONTROVERSIAL MATERIAL! I may get some hate mail or extra spam for endorsing this, but that’s part of the game I suppose. I will not delve in the world of nofollow and dofollow on my blog just yet, but will provide a link so you can check it out for yourself. It’s well worth the read. Click here to learn more about nofollow and dofollow.

The Why
Simply put, I use this plugin to remove all of the nofollow tags from my links, which while helping my traffic, also helps those that I link to, by making that link traceable and able to be archived as a outbound/inbound link by search engines. Essentially, adding this plugin allows you to network through routine blogging activities. Although it can attract more spam to your site, that is what Akismet and comment moderation is for.

Maintenance Mode Plugin
This plugin makes it easy, informative, and professional when it comes to performing maintenance on your blog without leaving your visitors left out of the loop. Easy to install, wasy to use, and easy to customize.

The Why
Occasionally our past blogs have had severe issues that needed to be addressed, and although the content would still be viewable by visitors, seeing the blog in such disarray is not something we would want to be seen. It’s like your room being messy. It’s still functional, but you don’t want your friends seeing it.

Sociable
The social network is large and ever growing. With Sociable you can pick and choose which social bookmarking/networking sites you would like to make available for people to submit your post to. It’s simple, functional, and has almost no bloat to it.

The Why
Although we try to post relevant information on our blog, which should to some extent attract visitors. We want to make it easy for people to share this information. With a social bookmarking plugin such as sociable, this increases the chance of your blog’s information being shared across the net.

WordPress Download Monitor
Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. Pretty self explanatory, eh?

The Why
For managing downloads of course! I have tried out many different download managing plugins, and this is by far the best. It’s stable, customizable, and has good features. I could just post a link to downloads, but then I couldn’t easily track how many times the file had been downloaded and by whom. A great plugin if you offer any downloads on your blog.

What plugins do you use? Any suggestions for ones I should try out?