These are the plugins I use or at least have them installed and used them before, and these are recommended for people new to WordPress. A couple of these I am not using such as the Breukie’s Categories Widget but I have used them all before and they won’t break your blog and do what they are supposed to do. I used to use All In One SEO and then Platinum SEO but this new Thesis theme has SEO built into it.
Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put < ?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
Breukie’s Categories Widget: Breukie’s Categories Widget is a WordPress widget, to replace the standard categories widget by Automatic. This widget displays your categories on your sidebar using the wp_list_categories function, utilizes all available parameters for this function like hierarchy, order and exclude categories in your sidebar. You can also set up to 9 instances of this widget in your sidebar(s).
Flexi Pages Widget: A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
Follow My Links: Do not automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute to links in comments by the post author, strip nofollow from links to the post author’s web page.
Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
Jadedcoder Sticky Permalinks: Keeps a history of your permalinks no matter what changes you make on your site, and redirects old links to the new ones.
Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before.
Permalink Converter: Converts standard links to the equivalent permalink.
Search Widget With Title: This search widget comes with an optional h3 widget title and allows you to control the search button text.
Sociable: Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
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