WordPress is the most popular blogging platform loaded with tons of features. Most of all, its flexible and you can change it the way you like it. Open Source. It’s an advantage. Though WordPress is loaded with features, it still lacks those features that are essential for a blog. And therefore, the plug-ins originated. WordPress community developers and professional PHP programmers develop plug-ins to extend the features and make the blogging platform function even better.

Definition of WordPress Plug-in: It is a program, or a set of functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that provides specific features to your WordPress blog.

There are about 10,231 plug-ins developed which are hosted on WordPress site and are available for download. Not all 10k plug-ins are essential. That’s crazy to think something like that. So, below is a list of few essential and most important plug-ins your blog will be in need of.

Post Related:

WP-Note: This plugin allows you to create nice «notes» in your WordPress posts or pages. There are five tags namely note, important, tip, warning and help.

WP-Post Views: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.

Yet Another Related Posts: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

WP-Post Ratings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Social Media:

Social Bookmarks: The Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.

Lifestream: Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Twitter Tools: Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Digg Digg: A social plugin that use to add Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz button into WordPress content.

Comment Related:

Thank Me Later: Thank Me Later is a plug-in which will automatically send a thank you email to readers after they post a comment. It can be set to send the message a time after the comment was posted (an hour, day, week, month, etc).

Ajax Comments-Reply: When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.

WP-Spam Free: An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Subscribe to Comments: Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows commenter’s on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.

KeywordLuv: Reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Ad Management:

Who Sees Ads: Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.

Amazon Context Links Ads: Use this plugin to enabled Amazon context ads in your blog start earn money from Amazon affiliate

Ad Coder: Ad Coder is an easy way to spread adserver banner code or other html/js code over your blog or page content

WhyDoWork: WhyDoWork Adsense is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template.

Got Banners: Got Banners is a simple banner rotating plugin for WordPress. Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Developer Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

WP-Ban: Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referrer URL from visiting your WordPress blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referrer URL tries to visit you blog.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator: This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

WordPress.com Stats: Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your page views, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.

Security:

Ask Apache Password Protect: This plugin adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog’s admin directory. It adds a 2nd layer of security to your blog by requiring a username and password to access anything in the /wp-admin/ folder.

Force SSL: This plugin will force HTTPS connections for security purposes. Of course, you will need a web server “equipped” with a proper SSL certificate to use it.

WP Security Scan: Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. Scans Passwords, File Permissions, Database Security,Version Hiding, WordPress admin protection/security, Removes WP Generator META tag from core code

Login Lock Down: Login Lock Down records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.