Here is my selection of plugins really usefull for WordPress. I must say I will not talk about well known plugins such as All in One SEO Pack or even Google XML Sitemaps, but I will introduce less commonly used plugins but very usefull indeed.

  1. Comment Highlighter is a plugin allowing you to define a CSS class for comments according to the email used. This allow you to highlight the blog author or co-author. It can be set for a specific post or globally.
  2. Different Posts per page will give you the possibility to define the number of posts displayed according to the page viewed. For example you can have 5 articles on your main page, 20 in search results, 10 for categories, and so on…
  3. WordPress Related posts is a plugin dislpaying related posts at the post footer. It will fetch posts with the same categories/tags. This will give your posts more visibility.
  4. Advanced Excerpt will give you more control on the excerpt of posts. Allowing you to define the length of it whether by defining the number of caracters, or words. It will also keep HTML markup inside your extracts.
  5. WP_Pagenavi will add a pagination zone where you want to display it. This pagination is much more evolved than WordPress integrated one.
  6. Wp_Postratings will allow your readers to rate your posts and therefore to give you the opinion of your audience and therefore to focus more on quality and what they like to read.
  7. Wp-Print will simply add a printing facility to your blog. Each post will be printable via a few links.
  8. Featurific if a plugin allowing you to display a headline rotator on top of your main page and highlight the posts you want. There are two things I don’t like about it, its size (5Mb compressed) and the logo that appears in the headline rotator.
  9. ZdMultilang is, in my opinion one of the best translation plugin for WordPress, and that’s not because I wrote it that I say that.est a mon avis. It has support fgor unlimited languages and permits you to translate your posts/tags/categories/pages in any language you defined. It will also change the locale of your blog in order to display anything generated by WordPress in the correct language.
  10. ZdStats is another plugin I made. It gives you statistics of pageviews on your blog, everything is realtime and filters are dynamic, giving you full control of your stats.

All these plugins are fully compatible with latest wordpress release (being 2.5.1 at the time I wrote this post)