Best plugins for Wordpress in 2010

If you installed it today. . .

[Sierra_Dad]

Hi everyone. I know this topic comes up periodically, but

It's relevant to me because I've just installed Wordpress 3.0.1 for the first time. My first project with it is my company site. Probably a few good about me pages, a blog, and maybe sell an informational product/code libraries.

I anticipate some future topic sites, hopefully from the same code base through MU capability.

Here is the list of Plugins on my short list, based on previous posts here:
Thesis Theme
"All in One SEO Pack" or "Ultimate SEO Pack" - there seems to be a lot of choices here.
Other plugins that do any SEO site tasks that the All in one plugin doesn't (which would be nothing if it is truly all in one, right?)
WPTouchPro Theme for Iphone/Android theming.

Anything else I should consider?

About me:
I've spent most of my time on mobile apps, and I would like to continue to do that. So I'd like to have a good framework that I, or some offshore workers, could add content to as needed and not fight the tools too much.

I have an existing site for my product in Drupal 6. Drupal is probably more complexity than I need, and I have fought the tools on occasion. If I like Wordpress, I wouldn't mind migrating this to Wordpress if it is worth the trouble.

I've been unhappy with the capabilities of Drupal for mobile theming (iPhone and Android). Not that there aren't any plugins. I've tried a few and they just don't work. Plus the mobile themes are ugly and designed for Nokia. I haven't seen anything like WPTouchPro that I could just pay for and expect to work. It's embarrassing that my site looks only okay on Android when I'm selling an app for Android.

[Sierra_Dad]

I did find a fairly recent thread on this topic:

[webmasterworld.com ]

From that, I learned:
For SEO, Headspace2 and All In One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO were all mentioned.
WP Super Cache plugin was reccommended for caching.

I forgot to mention:
I'm leaning towards to WP Estore for selling a digital product, or something like it.

[MissSEO]

Would anyone know a Wordpress plugin equivalent to SOBI2, which is available for Joomla?

The starter of this forum post explains it all and had exact same requirements as I do.

[wordpress.org...]

I just cannot for the life of me find anything... Can somebody shed a light?

[ergophobe]

Headspace2 on all sites

Other things, like cForms II when I need it. I've never tried WP e-commerce stuff.

[alika]

I will start with themes that actually have built in SEO features. No need for plugins at all.

One I found is the Genesis framework of Studiopress, which already has an SEO component, thus eliminating any need for SEO plugin. Also runs fast so no need for caching plugin like W3 Cache

[ergophobe]

The theme only has a relatively small effect on performance. It's mostly various sidebar widgets that have a lot of database queries that will be the performance killer if you get slammed with traffic. So if you thinnk you might get hit with significant traffic, caching is always a good idea.

[tigger]

sorry but still playing catch up with blogging ( yes very late starter)

caching is always a good idea.

why?

[ergophobe]

why?

:-) fair question. Are you objecting to the use of the word "always"?

So I should have said "caching is usually a good idea".

Why? Webservers generally speaking are optimized for serving up files and they do so very very quickly. So if you suddenly get linked from a high traffic site or your page goes viral, a cached page that is not hitting the database will get served up in no time.

If, on the other hand, you have to do 20 database queries, some of which might be quite slow, and then crunch all that through PHP, render as HTML and finally serve it up, it will take a lot less traffic to bring a server down. You can easily get 10x performance by caching.

The exceptions: if something really has to be real-time, then you can't cache. But most sites don't need to be real-time up to date and even the ones that do can still cache and just have very short expiry times.

If you have a server setup that can instantly scale to high loads, caching won't matter much, but most people don't. If you're on a typical shared hosting or VPS account, without caching you probalby won't handle a classic "digg" or "slashdot" or getting tweeted by Neil Gaiman.

[milosevic]

I tried out Headspace2 but I found Joost de Valk's Wordpress SEO plugin (in beta) does same thing but with a load of extra functionality.

Highly recommend this plugin.

[eventus]

Cacheing and the All Headline News wordpress plugin.

[ergophobe]

What are some of Joost's extras?

I have great respect for him as a plugin writer, byt the way, so I would expect his plugin to be good.

[rahulsingh]

meta tag manager is also best plug in for SEO point of view

[milosevic]

@ergophobe

With Joost's plugin, you get a SERP preview at the bottom of each post and can manually set a title and meta description as well as the option of using a scheme that's set like in Headspace 2.

But the best stuff is surely the ease of configuration of your robots.txt file so it's simple to exclude archives and prevent indexing of duplicate content, a check that you are pinging the right services on making posts, cleaning up of the garbage Wordpress can include in the <head> of your blog and setting of rel=canonical attributes.

It also includes breadcrumb functionality which is a bonus.

[ergophobe]

I went and looked and saw that it's cleaning up the garbage in <head> - it's ridiculous how much WP throws in there by default. That's pretty cool

FYI - Headspace2 lets you set custom page title and meta description.