1. Twitter Avatar

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-avatar/
Allows a User to enter their Twitter username when posting a comment on your blog and a link to their Twitter page will appear next to their comment. This plugin will also replace the avatar on the comment with their picture on Twitter, both on the front-end and the Admin of the Blog.

2. Twitoaster – Twitter Conversations

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitoaster/
Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies to your Blog’s Posts. These Twitter Replies are handled like Posts Comments, using WP built-in comment system. This way you can leverage the conversations on Twitter on your blog.

3. IntenseDebate Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/intensedebate/
IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

4. Thank Me Later

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thank-me-later/
Thank Me Later (TML) will automatically send an e-mail to those who leave a comment at your blog. Use this plugin to say ‘Thanks’ to your visitors, and prompt them to further engage with your blog. This will keep your best commentators coming back.

5. Ozh’ Absolute Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ozh-absolute-comments/
A comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first. Replying to comments within your blog is critical to keeping the conversation going. This plugin will help you do that faster.

6. WP-Ajaxify-Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ajaxify-comments/
The WP-Ajaxify-Comments WordPress plugin hooks into any WordPress theme and adds AJAX functionality to the comment form: When the comment form is submitted, the plugin sends the data to the WordPress backend without reloading the entire page. In case of an error, the plugin shows a popup overlay containing the error message. If the comment was posted successfully, the plugin adds the (new) comment to the list of existing comments without leaving the page and shows an info overlay popup.

7. 140follow

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/140follow/
140follow removes NOFOLLOW from author link if the comment has more than XXX characters. The character count can be adjusted at the admin pannel. So basically, if someone leaves a comment at your desired length, the NOFOLLOW attribute will be added to their link. An incentive for people to leave longer, more insightful comments.

8. CommentTwitter

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentwitter/
Commentwitter is a WordPress plugin that gives commenters the option of Tweeting their comment with a link to your post. This is nice for those big Twitter users who like to post on Twitter often. They can kill two birds with one stone when you have this plugin activated.

9. CommentLuv

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/
This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. Show your commentators some love!

10. Disqus Comment System

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/
Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

11. wp-AuthorComment

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-authorcomment/
From the authors of wp-Typography comes wp-AuthorComment, allowing you to uniquely style post author’s comments. This way you as the author have your comments stand out, visually displaying your presence in the conversation.

12. BackType Connect

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backtype-connect/
The BackType Connect WordPress plugin finds conversations related to your content and allows you to display the associated comments inline with your own. Existing conversations about your content taking place across the web can now be displayed right on your blog for your visitors to read and respond to. It works on top of your existing WordPress comments, both threaded and non-threaded.

13. Top Commentators Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/top-commentators-widget/
The Top Commentators Widget is a sidebar widget that shows the top commentators in your WP site. This gives your readers a certain feeling of ownership within your blog. They feel that they are being recognized for their large contributions to the site. Very important!

1. WP-PageNavi

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. This is called ‘pagination’ in the development world. The navigation will direct your readers to older posts. The navigation looks very similar to that of Google’s.

2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/
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. An example of this is what you see below the bottom of this article.

3. Popularity Contest

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/
Which of your posts/pages are most popular? Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. You can then use the sidebar widget that comes with this plugin in your sidebar, to show off a certain amount of your most popular blog posts. See my sidebar to the right for an example of this.

4. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multi-level-navigation-plugin/
Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin produces W3C valid XHTML and CSS. When you have a blog that has lots of pages, this can be super helpful. The drop down nav simply gives you more room to list pages.

5. Redirection

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. You never know how many 404 error pages you have out there. Might as well direct that traffic to some of your good content.

6. Yoast Breadcrumbs

http://yoast.com/wordpress/breadcrumbs/
This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Not only does this provide SEO benefits, it is also helpful for readers to find their way to parent pages and categories that list more of what they are reading.

7. Search Everything

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search. The plugin will search every tag, category, title, and comment to help your readers find what they are looking for.

8. WP-Sticky

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-sticky/
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. What this means is that you can keep a blog post at the top of your ‘loop’ for an exteneded period of time, even above other articles that you write after.

9. Featured Page Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-page-widget/
Allows you to feature pages on your sidebar using an excerpt of the page and a text or image link to the page. You may want to feature a specific page of content that you wrote recently because it carries a certain amount of significance.

10. Category Posts Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-posts/
Category Posts Widget is a light widget designed to do one thing and do it well: display the most recent posts from a certain category. For example, you could highlight a specific category every week or so in your sidebar. And with this widget you could display the most recent 3 or so posts from that featured category. Very helpful.

11. Instant Weekly Roundup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/instant-weekly-roundup/
Instant Weekly Roundup is a free WordPress Plugin which will help you create the weekly or monthly or any span roundups of your blog posts in a few mouse clicks. It will help you to write, order, design and post a roundup post in no time.

12. SEO Smart Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. This will help you link to other articles within your posts on a mass scale.

What if you want a forum on your blog? Well there are plenty of open source forum systems available. But what about integrating your blog cms with your new forum? There are some effective WordPress plugins to help you accomplish this. But choosing the right one is critical. There are many plugins to help you accomplish this, but I found 5 that actually do what they say they do!

1. bbPress – Far & Away The BEST Option

http://bbpress.org/
Pound for pound bbPress is your best option for integrating a full fledged forum into your blog. bbPress has a very simple interface which makes it very popular amongst it’s users. The templates are easy to customize. In fact they are just as easy to customize as WordPress templates. And the plugin actually integrates the forum database with your WordPress database, that way the integration is seamless.

2. Forum Server

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/forum-server/
Forum Server is a plugin for WordPress that is a more advanced and up-to-date plugin of the original WP-Forum plugin. It will integrate with your WordPress Users database table so that users who are registered with your blog will also be registered with the forum. The plugin is a little bit more complex to use than bbPress, but you will find a few different characteristics of this forum that you might like and choose over bbPress.

3. Simple: Press Forum

http://simplepressforum.com/
If you like lots of icons in your forums than you will enjoy this plugin. Again this one is not as easy to use as bbPress. But for those who are accustomed to more traditional looking and functioning forums than this will be a great choice for you. This plugin can too integrate with WordPress user registrations and logins. This forum appears to have the most overall features than any of the other WordPress forum plugins. If it is a more advanced forum you are after, then go with Press Forum.

4. phpBB Recent Topics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/
There may be a situation where it’s best to install your forum with an open source application, separate from the blog entirely. phpBB is by far the most popular and notable of the open source forum apps. This plugin for WordPress called phpBB Recent Topics will allow you to include in your blog (anywhere of your choice) a list of the most recent threads or topics from your phpBB forum! This is the quickest and least painful way of integrating a forum with your blog.

5. Wp2BB

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp2bb/
Wp2BB provides another way for you to integrate your phpBB forum with your WordPress blog. What this plugin does is that it automatically creates new topics in your phpBB forum for every new post that you write in your WordPress blog. It can also coexist with the WordPress comments system or replace it completely. In a nutshell this plugin would increase the conversation in your forum rather than where normally takes place in your blog posts comment threads.

Tip: Use BBPress and the Coda Theme

BBpress has the ability to integrate well with any WordPress theme both pre-built and custom. One theme that BBpress integrates really well with is the Coda theme from WooThemes. This is a premium theme that costs about $70. After you download and install you are literally looking sharp in seconds. Here is a screenshot of what the theme looks like…

The Coda theme contains a wide (960px) width that allows the perfect amount of space for having a BBpress forum. This theme comes with 10 different styles to help you quickly customize the look and feel/color scheme to match your needs. You can click here for more details on this theme.

When it comes to WordPress plugins the most important thing is that they are updated to work with the most recent version of WordPress. Otherwise you’re stuck depending on a plugin that is not advancing with WordPress. There are tons of video plugins for WordPress that give WordPress all sorts of video type functionality, but finding those that actually worked was a chore! I’ve listed 9 of what I feel are the best video plugins for WordPress right now. Not only do these plugins have awesome features, they also work!

1. Smart YouTube

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-youtube/
A plugin from Vladimir Prelovac that allows you to easily insert YouTube videos and playlists into your blog posts, comments, and RSS feeds.The problem with some of the other WordPress plugins that accomplish this such as the Video Quicktags plugin, is that they don’t embed the video properly which would make it so the video wouldn’t show up on the RSS feed. This plugin takes care of all that for you.

2. Lightview Plus

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightview-plus/
A wordpress plugin which implements lightview of Nick Stakenburg. Lightview does the same as lightbox only with this plugin you can do it with Video from YouTube and Vimeo. Creates that nice hover over the page effect with a video. Look very sharp!

3. Simple Flash Video

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-flash-video/
Has the same Lightbox effect with your video like the Lightview plus, only this time it’s using the popular JW FLV player. This comes in perfect when you are wanting to host your own videos. This plugin ads a very slick look to your blog.

4. Viper’s Video Quicktags

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/
Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.

5. VideoPress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/video/
The VideoPress plugin allows blog administrators to upload new videos to their WordPress.com video account and manage existing videos from the convenience of their self-hosted WordPress.org blog’s administrative interface. Authors can add any VideoPress video into a blog post through the use of a simple shortcode and customizations.

6. YouTube With Style

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-with-style/
This is perhaps the plugin that I am most excited about. When you embed youtube videos on your site, instead of using the same old YouTube player skin you have a custom skin that you can brand yourself. The player is very slick and you can place your own logo to show on the top left hand corner.

7. Vodpod Video Gallery

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vodpod-video-gallery/
This plugin is the perfect plugin for creating any kind of Video Gallery where you are wanting to display more than 1 video on a page. Because it uses VodPod services with your free account with them, you can collect multiple videos from multiple locations such as YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion etc. into one gallery displayed in your page/post. Very useful plugin here!

8. WordPress Video Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-video-plugin/
A filter for WordPress that displays videos from many video services. All you have to do is Enter [videosite id] in a post and you will see a video. Supports your typical video services like YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion as well as a bunch of 2nd and 3rd Tier video sites such as CollegeHumor and Blip.tv.

9. ProPlayer

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/proplayer/
Pound for pound probably the best video plugin for WordPress. Just like the YouTube with Style plugin you can have a more custom video look to your videos, even though you are using YouTube embed. You can also use Vimeo, DailyMotion, Google video and many more with this plugin. A must have! This plugin requires Curl. You can read the installation instructions for more detail. I was able to get this plugin working just fine by just installing it on my Dreamhost server.

Using a WordPress Video Theme Is an Option

Some of you may be looking at building an entire video site out of WordPress as opposed to just needing to show a video now and again. If this is the case a theme built specifically for posting videos may work better for you. The WooTube theme from WooThemes is a great video plugin that makes it easy to start a video site in minutes with WordPress. Tons of features and all manageable through the WP admin interface. Check it out:

WooTube is a Premium theme for WordPress that costs $70 for a standard license and $150 for a developer license.

That’s where this plugin comes into play. Download it, place it in your plugins directory, active it from the plugins menu in your admin backend for WordPress then customize your settings for the plugin. You can setup different redirects for specific users and specific role.

The screenshot above shows you what the opions/settings page looks like from the backend of wordpress.  You can see your options. In this case I set it up so that all users with the “Subscriber” role were automatically redirected to the /index.php or front page of my blog upon login!

There are thousands of Widget WordPress Plugins for WordPress to choose from. So many it starts to make your head hurt when you are trying to search for new ones that may benefit your blog. I have compiled a list of 6 Widget Plugins that I find very useful for most WordPress blogs that I put together. I hope you find this list useful.

1. WP-Polls

A simple plugin that adds polls functionality to your blog. It comes with a sidebar widget that displays your most recent poll. Very cool widget for building a community around your blog.

2. Tabbed Widgets

This is a cool widget. Gives you the ability to add javascript tabs to your sidebar. Very useful when you have alot of items you want to display on your sidebar but are running out of room. Not to mention it just looks goods. I typically use this for my Categories, Archives, and Blogroll listings.

3. MiniMeta Widget

This widget gives you some extra features when it comes to users being able to login and register for accounts. You can add in a username and password field as well as a link to register a new account. Great for community type blogs.

4. Video Widget

Perfect plugin for sticking a YouTube or any other type of social video into your sidebar. With this plugin you don’t have to touch any HTML, you just paste in the url of the video and the widget takes care of the rest for you!

5. WP-Wall

Just like on your MySpace or Facebook pages, you can now have a Wall on your WordPress blog. Add this widget to your sidebar and let people comment to the main blog itself!

6. Add to any Subscribe

Very simple widget that uses the Add To Friend service so that people can easily subscribe to your RSS feed with thier RSS reader of choice. It uses javascript to provide a cool hover over effect to display the different RSS subscribe options.

WP-O-Matic instead of AutoBlogged
WP-O-Matic gives you all the features you need with feed aggregation. Import feeds automatically. Create multiple campaigns. Assign feeds to specific authors and categories etc. Save yourself $97 and use Wp-O-Matic instead.

WP-Ads instead of OIO Publisher
If you need ad management, WP-Ads plugin is flexible enough to give you all that you need. You can create ad zones anywhere in your theme and assign multiple ads to that one ad zone. You can put a “weight” to each ad and you can monitor how many ads are being served.

All in One SEO Pack instead of WP SEO Sniper
This one is a no brainer. The All in One SEO Pack gives your blog all the SEO you really need. Combine that with changing your permalink structure and you will be good to go in SEO. Just focus on writing good quality content after that.

SEO Smart Links, Link Cloaking, & WWW Redirect instead of NinjaAffiliate
SEO Smart links plugin can be used for automatically tagging specific keywords and phrases to specific links, meanwhile link cloaking plugin and WWW redirect can do exactly what they do which is self evident. A combination of which is basically what the NinjaAffiliate plugin gives you.

Vipers Video Quicktags instead of the FLV Plugin
This one is seriously a no brainer. I’m surprised that there is even a plugin that costs $ for this. The Vipers video quicktags plugin will give you the ability not only to easily embed Youtube and other social video into your posts, but also to easily embed your own video using the JW Flash Video Player.

1. Askimet

This is a plugin I use 100% of the time. You simply just get a WordPress.com account and they give you an API key to use it. They filter out all of the spam comments for you, eliminating a huge headache for running your blog.

2. Platinum SEO Pack

I am a huge advocate of Search Engine Optimization. This plugin has greatly benefited all of my blogs including this one. The Platinum SEO Pack allows you to configure your Page Titles and Meta Tags for each post/page on your WordPress blog.

3. Google (XML) Sitemap Generator

This is a cool plugin. It automatically generates a Google compliant XML sitemap for your blog, including all of your posts and pages. Because you generate content so often with a blog, keeping a sitemap up to date would be pain. But not with this plugin.

4. Social Bookmarking Reloaded

This plugin gives you the little icons on the bottom of each post for the main social bookmarking/media websites. I highly recommend this plugin. It has worked wonders for me.

5. Viper’s Video Quicktags

This plugin gives you quick and easy and effective video functionality to your WordPress blog. Quickly add Youtube, Google, Vimeo, and other 3rd party videos to your site. You can also add your own .FLV video files using a streaming video player. Very easy to use plugin.

6. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache helps you speed up the loading time of your blog to your readers by creating cached .html versions of each one of your blog posts and pages. As your traffic gets up in to the 1-2K per day this plugin comes in super handy.

7. Secure WordPress

WordPress blogs on their own are not completely immune to malicious hackers. This is a simple plugin that you can install that will protect your blog from many of the more common attacks used by hackers towards WordPress blogs these days.

8. WP Touch

With the ever increasing rise of mobile web browsing, it’s important to have a mobile version of your blog so that you can provide a pleasant viewing experience for mobile users. This plugin quickly and easily creates a mobile version of your blog so that users using an iPhone/iTouch will see a mobile friendly blog with your content.

9. Google Analytics for WordPress

Quite simply this is a plugin for WordPress that integrates Google Analytics with your WordPress blog. No need for any coding. Just install, activate, and input your Google Analytics information you get from Google and bam…you are tracking data.

10. Fast Secure Contact Form

Everybody needs a contact form of some kind on their site. This is a plugin that will help you get a contact form on any page within your blog with tools built in to prevent spammers from flooding your inbox!

I hope you find my list of WordPress plugins helpful. If you have any plugins that you use often please share yours as well. Thanks.