I have written all my plugins primarily to scratch an itch, mine. So I love them all unquestionably and use them in my blogs –
Referrer Bouncer – bounce back referrer spammers causing them to spam themselves,
Plugin for Permanent Redirection of Posts,
Feed Copyrighter to add copyright messages to your feeds,
No NoFollow Plugin to eliminate nofollow from comments,
Unavailable Plugin to make your blog temporarily unavailable for maintenance,
Translator Plugin to provide translation of your blog in eight languages,
AdRotator Plugin- Ad Rotating Solution for your Ads (including AdSense),
Admin Dashboard Hack to make it leaner and faster.
There are few other essential plugins I use but haven’t published yet on advertising, intelligent related entries, intelligent most discussed list, yahoo related entries within blog etc.
I also rely on several external high quality plugins. I will mention the top five off the top of my head, in no particular order:
Paged Comment Editing – Good for managing blacklisted comments, and in general managing comments. Its cousin, Enhanced Post List created by the same cold forging technique is also recommended.
Search Hilite – Highlights your search keywords; wish there was a way to turn it off by end-user.
Google Sitemaps – Creates Google SiteMap. However I use a significantly enhanced version.
Hashcash – Comment Spam prevention plugin
Wp-Cache 2 – Speeds up WordPress by caching responses. Has some caveats but it is a Gem.
