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I’ve been using WordPress for over a month now and I’m really enjoying it! Most of my web projects in the past have been large websites with mostly static pages and a news section. Therefore, I usually leaned towards a CMS Made Simple because I’ve just found it makes managing large amounts of pages more simple – pun intended

The thing that really makes a CMS in this modern day is the plugins & add-ons available to enhance and customise it to your own specific needs. I’ve already started to get carried away with the vast amount of add-ons available for WordPress, but here are my current top 5.

1. Akismet

   Within a week of making my blog available to the Internet I’m getting spam comments! This plugin (which as far as I know comes with WordPress as standard now?) helps fight back against spam! It’s a must have for any WordPress bloggers, if I’m getting spam on a blog this new with so few visitors I can’t imagine what it would be like on a popular blog. If you intend to open comments up without moderation this plugin will do you a big favor. FYI, you’ll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith

   I love FeedBurner. Before I started using it feeds just felt like a novelty to me… I know, I know, I was wrong! One of the first things I wanted to do when I got up and running with WordPress was setup the RSS feeds with FeedBurner. FeedBurner FeedSmith is the plugin that Google actually recommend and with good reason. Activate it, enter your FeedBurner feed URLs in to the configuration page and your done. No changes to your WordPress theme needed, it redirects your ‘old’ feed URL to the FeedBurner URL so you can even use this to implement FeedBurner feeds on an already established blog. Magic!

3. Configurable Tag Cloud

   So tagging is the next big thing on the Internet. Everyone is doing it and if your using WordPress I bet you are too! I was quite disappointed with the stock tag cloud widget for WordPress. I was hoping I would atleast be able to configure ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ colour for it, but I found all I could change was the title… bummer. So straight away I hit the WordPress plugins library and found Configurable Tag Cloud (CTC) straight away. It gave me exactly what I wanted straight away, colours! You can also set the maximum number of tags to display, smallest & largest font size, whether to display categories in the cloud, whether to display the post count next to tags and have I said enough? In my opinion this is another must have considering the complete lack of configurability of the stock widget.

4. Sociable

   This little gem allows you to put those little 16×16 icons at the bottom of your wordpress posts to allow users to share & bookmark your posts at their favorite social bookmarking websites. There are 99 different social bookmark sites you can choose from and you can also fine tune where they appear including in your RSS feeds! It’s pretty much ‘plug & play’ in the sense you can install it and use it with minimal configuration. Alternatively, you can also get your hands dirty and customise it with replacement icons and your own CSS. Just a quick note though, there’s a bug in 3.1.1 which means you can’t change the order of the icons, go for version 3.0.6. bug fixed in newest version.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

   Some of you may dispute the importance of an XML sitemap, some of you may swear by them for search engine optimisation. This plugin will generate one for your wordpress blog every time you make a new post, if it’s that easy you might as well have one right? It’s highly customisable and even has options to notify major search engines everytime the sitemap (and ofcourse your blog) is updated.

Those are my top 5 WordPress plugins for now. I’ll probably come up with a completely different top 5 in a few months time as I am continually discovering new plugins and find more and more things I can do with WordPress. If you know of any alternatives to the plugins I’ve mentioned that you think are better please feel free to drop me a comment