The popularity of Wordpress has surpassed all expectations and has been the CMS of choice for many. I prefer working on Wordpress more often than on Joomla or any other CMS out there. But in order to get the best out of your WP blog, having the right plugins is extremely important. I’ve been running blogs and working on blogs for a while now. I’ve tried a lot of plugins and finally settled down on a few bare essentials.

Akismet – It checks the comments made on yours posts against the Akismet web services to see if they look like spam or not. It is an absolute essential plugin to have. But you will need a Wordpress API Key to use it.

All in One SEO Pack - An excellent SEO plugin for Wordpress. It brings to the WP what is missing in WP like Keywords, Titles, Descriptions, Post Title, Blog Title etc. It allows users to generate META tags automatically and its just super easy to install for both novice and advanced users.

Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

NextGEN Gallery - NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums. You can see an example of the NextGEN Gallery being used on this post.

TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Some of the other features that it adds are 1)Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list. 2) Support for making and editing tables. 3) In-line css styles. 4) Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options. 5) Search and Replace while editing. 6) Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers.

TweetMeme ReTweet Button – The TweetMeme Follow button is a new way to gain extra Twitter Followers, it allows your blog visitors to instantly know if they are already following your Twitter account or not, if not then it allows the visitor to follow you without leaving your site. The button has been designed for simplicity and comes in three styles compact, standard and square.

TweetMem Button – The TweetMeme Retweet button is the defacto standard in retweeting – used by some of the biggest websites in the world including Techcrunch.com, PerezHilton.com, Break.com, CNET.com, Wired, Time Magazine and hundreds of other massive brands, in total it is installed on over 100,000 websites around the globe. It has features like live tweet counter and modifying the source to say whatever your want instead of “RT @tweetmeme”

WP-Google Buzz – Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + admin options + 14 different button images + mouse over effects. Automatically displays Google Buzz button for every post and page. Google Buzz is shaping up to be an interesting new way to share content with your Gmail friends, so why not have a button for sharing blog posts/pages to the service? To make it work, you’ll need to make sure you’ve set up Google Reader and included that in your Connected Sites on Buzz

WP-Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WPtouch iPhone theme – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.

WP-DB Backup – Most people who have experience of Wordpress can understand the delicacy and dependency of connecting databases. Vital data is stored there, fetched every time a post or page is loaded in a web browser. If your databases crash, data closely connected to your website’s content will be gone forever. Backup is important for any site and so even for a Wordpress blog. With WP-DB-Backup you can make database backups to just some or all variables directly from the admin. You can then choose to store the backup on the server or on your own computer.