Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. Here is a collection of best, popular and useful WordPress plugins.

1. WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin : WhyDoWork Adsense is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. More then that, you can set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then X days (x is the number of days you decide).
2. Akismet : Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
3. Google AdSense Widget : Monetizing your blog with Google AdSense has never been easier. Color, size, and title are all customizable from widget preferences. No coding or template modification required!
4. Exec-PHP : With Exec-PHP you can execute PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages (in the following called articles) as also as in text widgets. To execute code, just type in the PHP code as you usually would, encapsulated in <?php ?> tags.
5. All in One SEO Pack : Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
6. WordPress.com Stats : provide statistics about your visitors. You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.
7. NextGEN Gallery : NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.
8. cformsII - contact form : cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!
9. Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button : Helps readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest.
10. Wordpress Automatic upgrade : Wordpress automatic upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one.
11. WP-Polls : Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
12. WP-DB-Backup : On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
13. ShareThis : ShareThis plugin allows users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.
14. AdSense Manager : AdSense Manager simplifies managing AdSense and other Ads Networks on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with widgets.
15. Popularity Contest Plugin : Popularity Contest is a WordPress plugin that uses page views and feedback (comments, trackbacks, etc.) to determine how popular each of your posts are (in relation to each other). The values given to each type of view and feedback are configurable and popularity for all posts is recalculated whenever they are changed.
16. Showoff Rankings : This widget provides a simple and elegant representation of your site’s rankings. Currently supported rankings are: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, Compete Snapshot Rank, Technorati Rank.
17. WP-EMail : Allows people to recommand/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
18. wpSLEEP : wpSLEEP allows you to create posts in advance have them automatically publish when you’d like. You can then set when different parts of a post are viewable.
19. WP Super Cache : This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
20. .html Wordpress permalink on PAGES : Appends .html to the URL of PAGES when using permalinks.
21. Download Counter : Keeps track of the amount of downloads of a certain file.Keeps track of the last download time. Allows you to reset the counter.Allows you to add counters to both internal and external urls etc.
22. KeywordLuv : Reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.
23. SmoothGallery : This plugin embeds JonDesign’s SmoothGallery into your posts and pages.
24. Yet another Ajax paged comments : This plugin provide Ajax enabled comments system with paging,posting and form validation to your WordPress blog.
25. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator : This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

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