I am fully committed to WordPress. In the nearly 18 years that I’ve been designing and developing websites, I’ve explored a number of content management systems and blogging applications. Yes, there are many open-source content management systems out there, but it’s my opinion that WordPress is the most customizable and easiest for my clients to learn and manage.

These are my favorite WordPress plugins (in no particular order):

• Akismet – Protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. (REQUIRED FEE)
• Efficient Related Posts – A related posts plugin that works quickly even with thousands of posts and tags.
• Flickr Tag – Insert Flickr sets, tags, photostreams, group pools or individual photos into your posts using a special WordPress tag.
• 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.
• Gravity Forms – Easily create web forms and manage form entries within the WordPress admin. (REQUIRED FEE)
• Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors.
• SexyBookmarks – Adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.
• TentBlogger SEO Categories – SEO Categories optimizes your permalink structure at the category level to make them as functional (and pretty) as possible for both your users and the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) that index your content.
• Thank Me Later – Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin engages the visitor by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts.
• WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.

This is my short list. I will be sure to add more suggestion in the future. If you have favorites, please share them in the comments below.