WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform. Aside from its functionalities out of the box, it allows you to add extensions (called plugins) to extend its default functionalities. Plugins are really fun to code, and you can achieve incredible things with the power of the underlying platform. Below is a list of the plugins I use on this site, I think they’re worth checking out. Keep in mind though that being a coder at heart, most of them have been modified to suit my own personal needs. Being a fellow WordPress plugin developer, I wanted to give the people who made these plugins some love.

• Akismet by Matt Mullenweg: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• AskApache Google 404 by AskApache: Displays unbeatable information to site visitors arriving at a non-existant page (from a bad link). Major SEO with Google AJAX, Google 404 Helper, Related Posts, Recent Posts, etc..
• Fluency Admin by Dean Robinson: The all-new version of the popular Fluency Admin plugin, which builds upon the much improved default WP2.7 admin interface.
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu: All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate!
• Google Ajax Search by http://dancameron.org: Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site.
• Google Analyticator by Spiral Web Consulting: Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics.
• Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• MCEComments by mk: A simple hack to enable WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE on the comment field.
• OpenID by DiSo Development Team: Allows the use of OpenID for account registration, authentication, and commenting. Also includes an OpenID provider which can turn WordPress author URLs into OpenIDs.
• Paginated Comments by James Maurer: Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin developed with SEO in mind that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of pages
• Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk: Show the tweets about your posts and pages as comments on your blog!
• Widget Logic by Alan Trewartha: Control widgets with WP’s conditional tags is_home etc
• WP-prettyPhoto by Pier-Luc Petitclerc: WP-prettyPhoto allows you to use prettyPhoto by Stéphane Caron, a jQuery-powered Lightbox clone with WordPress.
• WPtouch iPhone Theme by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey: A plugin which reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewing with an Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, Google Android or Blackberry Storm touch mobile device.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin by Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine: Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

You can browse WordPress’ plugin repository on WordPress Extend.