No doubt that WordPress is the bread and butter of blogging platforms. But really, bread and butter is just toast without the plugins.

Here’s some jelly.

I have compiled a list of the ultimate WordPress plugins (71 total plugins) that will make blogging easier, more productive, and visitor interactive.

If I have left out a plug-in you find useful, be sure to drop me a note and let me know.

Admin (15 Plugins)

WordPress Database Backup: I have said many times that backing up your website is important. Now you can streamline this process using this plugin.

WP-Cache: Efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive.

Batch Categories: Lets you batch edit your posts: assign multiple posts to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop.

PodPress: A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.

Blog Voyeur: Using the cookie left by WordPress when a person leaves a comment on a blog they can be tracked when they come back.

TinyMCE Advanced: This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

Exec PHP: The Exec-PHP plugin executes code in your posts, pages and text widgets.

WordPress Reports: View Google analytics and Feedburner reports in your admin area.

WordPress.com Stats: Tracks views, page views, clicks, and search phrases in your admin panel. (Requires API key).

WordPress Instant Upgrade: Fully automatic upgrades of your WordPress!

Maintenance Mode: Adds a splash page to your site for site upgrades while only allowing editors and admins to access your site.

Theme Test Drive: Test out your latest theme on your blog while visitors still see your default theme!

WP Tiget Administration: Manipulates the default style of your WP admin area to create easier navigation.

WYSIWYG Editor: Replaces the default Wordpress WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor with a more advanced version.

Time Zone: Automatically set the weblog time offset based on the time zone of the server, or using an explicit TZ value.

Navigation (12 Plugins)

Related Entires: Outputs a series of “related” entries based on keyword matching.

Evermore: Displays short previews of your posts on your home page.

Random Redirect: Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

Lightbox JS: Overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.

WordPress Mobile Edition: Shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.

Popularity Contest: Keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.

Landing Sites: Referred visitors to your site automatically get shown a list of related posts based on search engine keywords that brought them to you.

Feed Lists: Post a feed from another site on your site.

Extend Live Archive: Implements a dynamic archive with many features.

Sticky: Create a sticky posts that stays at the top of your site.

Permalinks Migration: Safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.

Top Categories: Tell it how many of your most frequently posted to categories you want it to show and it will display an unordered list of those categories.

Better Blogroll: The Better Blogroll widget for WordPress allows you to display a configurable number of random links from your Wordpress blogroll.

Posts (9 Plugins)

Share This: Easy way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail.

WP-Notable: Displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.

WP-EMail: Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

This Day: After every post, this plugin will list other posts on the same day from previous years.

WP-PostRatings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

No Ping Wait: Prevent waiting time for all of the update services to respond to new post pings.

Simple Tags: Easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries.

Twitter Updater: Automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.

Ultimate Tag Warrior: Add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like).

RSS Feeds (4 Plugins)

Feedburner FeedSmith: Redirects WordPress’ feed to your FeedBurner feed.

Full Text Feed: Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed.

Simple Feed Copyright: Add a simple copyright notice at end of full text articles in your feed.

RSS Signature: Allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the wordpress generated RSS feeds.

Comments (16 Plugins)

DoFollow: Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments.

Subscribe to Comments: Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.

WP Ajax Edit Comments: Allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post.

Extended Comment Options: Switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.

Recent Comments: Displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.

CommentLuv: Place a link to a commentators last post under their comment on your blog.

Close Old Posts: Closes comments on old posts on the fly, without any database queries.

Paged Comments: Useful for those popular blog entries receiving many comments, or a simple guestbook page within WordPress.

NicEdit: Content editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser.

Live Comment Preview: Simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.

Moojax Comment Posting: Allows comments to be posted without refreshing the page.

Show Top Commentators: Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.

WordPress Gravatars: Outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.

MyBlogLog Avatars: Displays MyBlogLog avatars next to comments.

Brian’s Threaded Comments: Creates a “reply to this comment” link to comments.

Comment Relish: Sends a thank you e-mail to first time commentators.

SPAM (6 Plugins)

Akismet: Blogs comment SPAM. (Requires API key).

Word Verify: Asks visitors to enter a specific word along with their comment.

Math Comment Spam Protection: Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question.

SPAM Karma: Stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. (Heavy on mail servers).

WP Contact Form w/Spam Protection: Creates a contact form for your blog that includes spam protection.

Defensio: An alternative to Akismet, stand-alone SPM plugin.

SEO (9 Plugins)

All In One SEO Pack: Streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. (I love this one the most).

Google XML Sitemaps Generator: Generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Permalink Redirect: Replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink.

Head META Description: Provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog.

SEO Title Tag: Dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.

Enforce WWW Preference: Preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference.

Add META Tags: Adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog.

Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.

Quick META Keywords: Automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post.

UPDATED 1.13.08 : 3 to Admin, 1 to Navigation, 1 to SPAM
UPDATED 2.22.08 : 2 to Navigation,

This post was written by I’m Blogging That’s former owner, Katy Castro who can now be found blogging at Unedited Life.