I just wanted to put together a little list for WordPress junkies (and newbies) of the plugins and addons that I’ve started integrating into this site. Before you do anything else though, go over and check out the WordPress Wiki’s plugin page for a really good sort of “master list.” Should cover anything you need (plus a lot of stuff you don’t). And the WordPress support forums are not only really excellent but a necessary resource for dealing with the variety of problems you’re sure to run into. Anyway, here are my picks, in no particular order:

1. WP-ContactForm: Nice little plugin that allows you to insert a contact form onto any page/post using quicktags. I have an example of it operating at my Story-Systems site. For some reason when I set it up here though, it interfered with my list of pages displayed. I’ll sort that out at some point though.
2. EzStatic: When I decided I wanted to move my archive, category list and search onto separate pages (rather than the default sidebar setting), I quickly realized that WordPress won’t automatically execute PHP in either pages or posts. EzStatic is a simple plugin that takes care of that though, and offers you a check box under any post which lets you execute PHP contained within. If I was running a blog with multiple members though, I’d likely turn this off to prevent accidental/malicious use.
3. Related Entries Plugin: Great little plugin script which seems to analyze keywords in your post and serve up a customizable list of other posts which may (or may not be related). You can view this in action on any individual post page, just above the comments form. (Also from that site is a random quote plugin that I plan to integrate soon.)
4. Auto Shutoff Comments: I’ve yet to see if this works, but this plugin automatically turns off commenting for posts older than a specified number of days. I set up my pages to archive posts after 5 days, at which point the comments will be deactivated as well. I’ve never really found much benefit from getting comments on much older stuff, and it hopefully will make policing for spam easier when it happens (knock on wood).
5. WP-Print: This is an addon rather than a plugin which means it doesn’t just go into your plugin folder. After much trial and error, I achieved success when I dropped the file into the root folder of the WordPress install, in this case “/journal/“. What this addon does is give the option to have a simplified version of the page content available for print. If you click onto the permalink for any article, you’ll see the “Print Version” option listed on the left. Pretty sweet. To prevent search engines from crawling those pages and creating duplicate article results (but with the two different layouts), I coded in the rel="nofollow" attribute into those links. Problem solved. I also plan to install this guys WP-Email addon, which gives people the option to email a particular article to a friend’s email address.
6. Popular Posts: This is a plugin which serves up the most accessed files. It seems to include both posts and pages. It actually requires another plugin/program to work: StatTraq. If you’re running WordPress 1.5, don’t bother with the files on the official StatTraq site. They need to be patched to run in 1.5. Instead, go here and grab the file labelled “complete download.” Even if you’re not too concerned about stats, this “most popular” feature is pretty cool, I think.

Anyway, that’s all of them for right now. There’s a handful of other features I want to install as well, but I think these ones make for a great start. If anybody knows any other useful ones, drop me a line.