15+ essential plugins for wordpress usability and minimalism

15 plugins for minimalism just doesn’t sound right.

Yes, it does!
Wordpress rules! It really does. There are plugins for every taste and every school.

The problem is that plugins are so cool, you can get hooked up pretty fast. Before you know it, you have frak-o-meter, moon phase and hottaimoijiruna running.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can clutter your blog like hell. Readers will just get lost in all this information, or just play around with your sidebar and forget your content.

And of course your blog will be slow like a turtle walking on honey. Just one digg or stumble will get your site ’suspended’.

Cut it down to the basics

So here are the plugins to keep your blog perfectly functionable, secure and simple.

Tagging

Configurable Tag Cloud: categories are so 80s. Tags are intuitive and this is the simplest tool for tagging.

Simple Tags: Manage all your tags. Fast and easy.

WP Tags to Technorati: Now that you are a real tag-jedi, send them directly to technorati.

Security

Akismet: Spammers leave us alone.

Wordpress Database Backup: Schedule backups, or die.

SEO

All in one SEO Pack: Let someone else do all the SEO dirty work.

No Self Pings : Stop sending trackbacks to yourself, whenever you link to a post of yours.

Google XML Sitemaps: Help google see you.

Promotion

Community Cloud: Thank your active readers with a link to their site.

Popularity Contest: it analyzes several variables (comments, trackbacks, views, etc) to show you which post of yours is most popular. Great combo with the popularity contest widget.

Popularity Contest Widget: Promote your best stuff.

Similar Posts: Promote similar articles. Good to keep readers browsing in your blog.

Subscribe to comments: Instead of having 2 monologues in your blog (your post and the comments), enable a dialogue. Readers subscribe to the post they commented with a simple click and follow the responses.