Google Sitemap 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. If you have any intention of using the webmaster tools – you should get this plugin so you can keep your sitemaps current & prevent any hold ups from your site not being current with current tags/etc…

Digg-Digg
This is another program that gives your blog visitor’s the opportunity to make it accessible to share a post in a network that can potentially drive more traffic to your site. The integrate “Digg Button” , “Reddit Me Button” , “Dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” Into WordPress Content. Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons.

Awesomepixgallery
Let’s face it… there isn’t a perfect gallery out there. If it looks good, it’s slow – if it’s ugly is fast and no one wants it anyway. APG is a good compromise between all the features out there. APG does have a superior intergration interface (after you upload pics you have quite a bit of control immediately to place/shape the image).

Email-Users
A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users. Users can send personal emails to each other. Power users can email groups of users and even notify group of users of posts. The best part about this plugin is that you can specify mailing by group, so you only hit the publishers, subscribers/etc…

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ I keep going back between this and the headspace2 plugin, both have their advantages. Even though I’m currently on headspace, this is still worth checking out.

Simpler-Contact-Page
Are you tired of all the “bells and whistles” of most WordPress contact forms? Are you exhausted from modifying CSS for hours just to get a contact plugin to display with your theme?
WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to, supposedly, less than a millisecond.
Google Analytic Plugin

• Google Analyticator supports the following features:
• Standard Google Analytics tracking support
• Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Download link tracking
• Support for hiding Administrator visits without effecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Easily installable only requiring the user knows their UID
• Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Socialble Bookmarking Plugin
Social bookmarking sites allow your blog visitors to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find on your website. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts – making each post as accessible as possible. I’m currently using Digg Digg, but it doesn’t hurt to stay familiar with updates to the social networking sites. Sometimes what one plugin misses – the other will catch.

*Edited on 01October 2010:

A must see plugin for WordPress:

After the Deadline, you will wonder how you’ve lived without it (seriously)… it’s not just a real-time spell checker, it checks language specific usage, grammer and language syntax (comparative dynamics).

Don’t believe me? Give it a try now!

Related Posts:

• About Us
• Geo Caching For Fun & Profit (a.k.a How to find your arse with a funnel script)
• The Top 10 Best FREE Image Editors On The Web
• Best Of The Rest Opensource Image Gallery Software (Part 1?)
• How To Fix Your Sucky Website With Minimal Effort

Here are my picks for the most versatile PHP gallery scripts.  You may be surprised at the findings here as my values are different than the average person who wants to share their pictures. My value is based more-so on the flexibility and adaptability of a gallery script rather than being locked out from customizing it.  Gallery scripts are a good asset if you want to show items in a pre-established website/web application and do not want to have to write from scratch.  Reusing this code can help deliver an application expediently, but being able to have it resemble the host site is critical – it must be flexible if it is going to be used as “part of another website”.

Server Test Environment: These were tested these on  Ubuntu Server (LAMP install) – latest version. Approach to install:  Every click and drool wizard feature was attempted – no manual configurations were attempted to ensure the ‘as advertised’ feature would be accurate.

Flexible and adaptable come at a price. Sometimes the only method to add a photo is to ftp it up to the folder (that’s raw/flexible),  but it is considered flexible because a script can be written for exisisting application to control how/where a photo is uploaded.  So while reading these, keep this in mind.  So look for “stand-alone” if having an upload mechnism is a must for you.

You’ll find that most gallery scripts will boast of these features – comments will be limited to the most noticable of these features for each source in this post:

Features:

• On-the-fly Thumbnail/Low resolution picture generation
• Unlimited Categories and Sub-categories (it uses directories)
• Integrated fast text database mode (MySQL also supported if prefered)
• Users comments
• Rating system
• Web/FTP picture upload
• Top Rated/Last Commented/Last added pictures pages
• Slideshow mode
• User level support to protect pictures/directories from unwanted people
• EXIF/IPTC metadata support (hot!) (Only found in phpGraphy)
• Multilingual support (See TranslatorPage for complete list and status)
• Web interface management
• Lossless jpeg rotation support (via exiftran/jpegtran)
• Video, sound and text files support
• Layout/Text very easy to change
• Highly configurable (Themes/Templates)
• Installation Wizard

phpGraphy

http://www.phpgraphy.org/demo/index.php

phpGraphy did everything it boasted of, and was a snap to setup.  This will be one that will be kept around to help the next person that asks for a “quick gallery” install.  It’s lightweight, easy to modify (theme/css) – logic was easy to follow, and painless (which is a key feature).

———————————————————————-

Plogger

http://www.plogger.org/demo/

Looks great, hard to integrate into an exisisting site, and install was less than bulletproof, but it worked after the 2nd try. Theme’s were not easy, but for a stand-alone, it’s useful.

———————————————————————-

Simple Picture Gallery Manager

http://spgm.sourceforge.net/spgm/index.php?

As most do, it generates it own thumbnails and has a stripped down – very modern look.  Makes this script easy to include into another project if a sub-folder install will work for your circumstance.  Ironically, it’s more full-featured than it appears to be (looking at the demo had me believing that this was going to be a very light script).  Even has a few themes made specifically for the application available through the SPGM website making it intended to be a stand-alone gallery script.

———————————————————————-

Qdig

http://qdig.sourceforge.net/qdig/qdig-demo2/index-Dark.php

It’s a one-pager script, but it’s quite details for being one page.  I’m always leary when a script says, “it will adapt to any server environment, but some settings….  http://qdig.sourceforge.net/Qdig/AboutQdig (details of setup).  In my case, setup was a breeze, and it shows well – easily themed, and the flash-like thumbnailing across the bottom made it appear to be more of an application.  Regardless, it worked well as promised.

———————————————————————-

bolGallery

http://bolgallery.free.fr/

With some hesitation this was added, but there are just times you need this.  If you need something that you can just put a pile of jpeg’s into a folder, and send someone a link – this is the ticket….  There are many times where this is the perfect tool.  Want to show someone 340 proofs that you have to individually upload? (No one does!) .   Integration was quite easy, but I probably wouldn’t use this as an end user application, but the concept is great for the times you just need to show someone images quickly.

The quantity of findings were unending while searching for opensource gallery scripts.  Going through all of these gallery scripts will take time, and the task will be split up into parts.  These 5, that I felt were worth mentioning,  were the result of going through 50 scripts.  Please comment on any other projects you would like to suggest.  Part 2 will be coming in the near future.

Related Posts:

• The Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins Quick Start Updated October 2010
• First Release of Drupal Carbon Upcoming
• Free WYSIWYG Editors
• What Makes a Successful Blog
• Getting started with Etomite – Installing