It’s only fitting that WordPress has it’s own series of holidays. After all, just about everyone and (everything) else has holidays. Today, January 28th has officially been declared by Matt Mullenweg “Thank a Plugin Developer”. Asides from paying homeage to plugin authors, Matt also lets us know that the plugin repository is called home by over 4,000 different plugins. Another little tidbit is that the average number of plugins installed per self hosted blog is five!

Considering the occasion, I’ll do a little thank you by displaying which plugins that are activated on this blog and believe it or not, I’ll even use a plugin just for that purpose. It’s called PluginsUsed written by my favorite plugin author, Lester ‘Gamerz‘ Chan. I highly encourage you to either thank a plugin author by donating some cash their way via PayPal or at the very least, provide them some link love. Plugin authors love exposure and some would argue they don’t get enough of it. The PluginsUse plugin makes this a very easy process.

Without further adieu, here are the plugins I use on WPTavern.com and vouch for.

There are 36 plugins used: 32 active plugins and 4 inactive plugins.

Active Plugins

Akismet
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

commentluv
» Andy Bailey (url)
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. Will parse a feed from most sites that have a feed location specified in its head html. See the Settings Page for styling and text output options.

Comment Quicktags -Reloaded
» Owen Winkler (url)
Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. WP 2.2 support by Ibrahim Faour

Contact Form 7
» Takayuki Miyoshi (url)
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
» Simon Wheatley (url)
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Executable PHP widget
» Otto (url)
Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Heavily derived from the Text widget code in WordPress.

Filosofo Comments Preview
» Austin Matzko (url)
Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them.

Form to Post
» Michael Torbert (url)
Allows users to post a post.

Google XML Sitemaps
» Arne Brachhold (url)
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page

Highlight Author Comments
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author.

Insights
» Vladimir Prelovac (url)
Insights allows you to quickly search and insert information (links, images, videos, maps, news..) into your blog posts.

KB Advanced RSS Widget
» Adam R. Brown (url)
Gives user complete control over how feeds are displayed.

KG Archives
» Kates Gasis (url)
Yet another sortable archives from katesgasis.com.

No Self Pings
» Michael D. Adams (url)
Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
» Simon Emery (url)
Control your Ad Space with OIOpublisher.

Post Template
» Vincent Prat (url)
A plugin that allows you to create post templates in order to save time writing posts having the same structure. This plugin makes use of the excellent other plugin “Manage Pages Custom Columns” by Edward Dale.

Really Simple CAPTCHA
» Takayuki Miyoshi (url)
Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.

Short Comment Filter
» Will Anderson (url)
Automatically Spams or Deletes comments that don’t meet a specified length criterion.

Subscribe To Comments
» Mark Jaquith (url)
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess

The Excerpt re-reloaded
» Luca Biagini (url)
This plugin does something more than the built-in excerpt function. It lets choose exceprt length, allowed html tags, the link text to full post and the html container of the excerpt (,, or plain text).

Thumbnail Viewer
» Tyler Longren (url)
Thumbnail Viewer is a simple plugin for showing larger images of your thumbnails. It’s very similar to Lightbox, only much smaller. Add the rel=”thumbnail” attribute to any link tag to activate the thumbnail viewer. It’s based the wp-lightbox plugin and on the Image Thumbnail Viewer from Dynamic Drive.

Widget Logic
» Alan Trewartha (url)
Control widgets with WP’s conditional tags is_home etc

Woopra
» Elie El Khoury (url)
This plugin adds Woopra’s real-time analytics to any WordPress installation. Simply sign up at Woopra.com, then activate the plugin and configure your site ID in the Woopra settings.

WP-PageNavi
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

WP-PluginsUsed
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

WP-Polls
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

WP-PostViews
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Modified by David Potter to include options for when and where to display view counts.

WP-PostViews Widget
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Adds a PostViews Widget to display most viewed posts and/or pages on your sidebar. You will need to activate WP-PostViews first.

WP-Stats
» Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (url)
Display your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general total statistics, some of my plugins statistics and top 10 statistics.

WP-Syntax
» Ryan McGeary (url)
Syntax highlighting using GeSHi supporting a wide range of popular languages. Wrap code blocks with <pre lang=”LANGUAGE” line=”1″> and </pre> where LANGUAGE is a geshi supported language syntax. The line attribute is optional.

WP Ajax Edit Comments
» Ajay D’Souza (url)
Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
» mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) (url)
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.