Powerblogging in Wordpress with great plugins

I decided to share a list of my favorite Wordpress plugins for those of you who might be interested, but before anything else, I want to encourage people to use Wordpress instead of Blogger.

There are many well regarded blogging platforms around that I don’t really know well, but I do know well blogger and wordpress and I certainly think that blogger is not nearly a serious platform as Wordpress is.

I won’t extend this subject on this post, you’ll have to trust me on this, but I do want to give three arguments in favor of wordpress.

1. You can either download the software and run it privately on your server or you can open a free wordpress.com account and use it just like blogger (but better)
2. You can attach your domain to your free wordpress.com blog and with this you have all space of the world to make your domain grow and move elsewhere in the future if you want keeping your identity
3. You can extend Wordpress to infinite with plugins. You can build your own, or download them among the hundreds available.

What do you think? Do you know a better platform? Do you like blogger?

And now some of my favorite plugins:

Subscribe2

This plugin that allows you to manage a mailing list for new posts on your blog. It has lots of nice features to control your mailing list and provides the user with automated ways of subscribe and unsubscribe. Additionaly, if the user is a registered user allows him/her for additional options.

Subscribe to comments

This plugin allows a user to subscribe to recieve via mail further replies to posts he/she had commented.

Akismet

Akismet is an essential spam management tool. The soon you install it, the happier you are. Needles to say more.

Popularity Contest

This Plugin rates your posts based on visitation, comments, pingbacks, etc, allowing you to show how popular is a post within the context of your site.

Additionally it allows you to have a “most popular posts” list to feed your users with content your public find more appealing, on a statistic basis.

And even more, you have nice statistics of you posts popularity so you can analize what in your blog appeals users the most.

Related Entries

This Plugin displays a list of posts that are more closely related to the current post. Suggesting readers with interesting material is always a good idea.

Wordpress Database Backup

This Plugin allows you to book periodical backups of your entire blog database and store it wherever you think is good. You can even get your database backup sent via email.

WSR Contact Form

This Plugin allows you to create a contact form for reders to send private email. Simple and useful.

Google Sitemaps

This Plugin creates a sitemap everytime your blog changes and notifies Google about it. One of the best mates you can have for SEO purposes.

[Update - 19/Nov/2007: You might be interested on the Zo’C Subcats plugin, developed by me. A plugin designed to show subcategories.]