I am now a fan of WordPress. It is not that it is the best for myself or my customers but it is the penetration into the market and how well it gets along with its friends like Google, Facebook and so many other web services. There are more plugins that do the same thing, there is surely one out there that meet your needs.

Integrating and customizing themes is quite easy once you understand the file structure as well. Overall it is effective and therefore inexpensive to have running. I first learned it from a good friend who shared what he knew at geekinc.ca which rocketed me from an intense Joomla knowledge into the next wave of content management systems. As I use it, my customers ask questions etc., I narrowed it down to this list.

Standard Plugins I would recommend any site to employ would be…

• Add link to Facebook
• Captcha seems to work quite well although I made some changes so it uses images – the company that made it, doesn’t want to update it, so I only updated it so far. When the spam continues, I will finish it. Seems to have stopped spam so if you want it, it works for now.
• [optional] My Twitter Widget does what it claims – puts your tweets on the side of your website. No I am not using it because I don’t tweet (yet). With a little CSS magic it cleans up just the way you require.
• [depreciated in my use – see Hupso] WP to Twitter Widget works well
• Hupso Share Buttons for Twitter, Facebook & Google+  I am using this instead of WP to Twitter because I can just click these buttons to self-tweet and self-post to facebook AND MUCH MORE! These are all the little icons under my posts
• Akismet – you get what you pay for – this one works well to stop spam. I am not using it because I am too cheap – but it does what it claims for my customers
• Exclude Pages from Navigation
• FD Feedburner Plugin
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps
• [optional] Login with Ajax
• [optional] podPress
• WordPress SEO– the one by Yoast
• [optional] Contact Us This one is good and very configurable to make a contact us form. I am using Dropifi as it is free to set up an account.
• [optional] Dropifi – see the ContactUs flyout on my site … enough said.
• Image Paste – you can just simply “paste” images in – too cool. The only drawback is that the images are embedded in the blog most – not the media directory. If your editor is having a bad day. .. not good – no more pics
• [optional for coding geeks] SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
• Insert Html Snippet just install this – why? Because if you have paypal buttons or any other HTML that needs to be “just-so” then your text editor will not format it incorrectly since it is an abstraction. You will need it at some point, so just insert it and learn how to use it.
• [optional] Smart Youtube If you have a youtube account or post videos – just paste your link and change http to httpv and … by magic – the video just is there and looks great. How simple is that?