When building custom WordPress powered websites, many developers have a “bucket list” of plugins that usually get installed first and foremost in order to achieve the right combination of CMS capabilities. Feel free to share yours.

Sticky Post Order – “AStickyPostOrderER”

AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists.

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages. The plugin also installs a replacement widget that exposes all the options of the wp_list_pages template function.

Contact Form 7

A very simple but flexible contact form plugin featuring a sleek backend interface. Allows you to create forms with multiple field types such as:

• Text field
• Email field
• Text area
• Drop-down menu
• Checkboxes
• Radio buttons
• Acceptance
• Quiz
• CAPTCHA
• File upload
• Submit button

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin has a great combination of the base SEO features you want from any CMS. All In One SEO gives you the ability to edit on a post/page basis the Document Title, Heading Title, Menu Title, META descriptions, Menu item anchor link titles, and duplicate content prevention tools.

Idealien Category Enhancements

This plugin makes category templates be selectable by drop-down list from the manage > categories screen of the admin console. It makes the selection / use of category and post templates as easy as page templates. It also includes configuration options that allow you to configure whether sub-categories inherit templates from their parent if none are specified.

Single Post Template

This plugin can be easily implemented into your theme by adding the snippet below into your theme’s functions.php file. Essentially, this allows you to display a customized template for single posts based on category id. So if you have a category ID of 4, you could copy single.php, name it single-4.php and customize it to work with your content model of that particular category.

/*
Snippet: WordPress Single Post Templates
http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/wordpress-single-post-templates/
*/
add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat ) { if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") ) return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php"; } return $t;' ));
automatic_feed_links();

WP No Category Base

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – YARPP

YARPP gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include An advanced and versatile algorithm, Templating, Caching, Related posts in RSS feeds, Disallowing certain tags or categories, Related posts and pages.

Yoast Breadcrumbs

This plugin allows you to easily add breadcrumb navigation to your theme.

WP-PageNavi

WP-Page Navi adds nicer page navigation and styling options to your theme.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.