Wordpress has many plugins, but the variety and selection can be daunting. I have selected three that I think should be standard with every distribution of Wordpress, as they seem so trivial and are no-brainers to have. To me, at least. These aren’t some huge add-ons or fancy embellishments that would apply only to certain kinds of blogs. I chose plugins which all blogs would find helpful in some way. They’re all third-party and should work with all recent versions of Wordpress (>2.2)

Get Custom Field Values

As the name suggests, Get Custom Field Values allows you to get the values of any custom fields, in or out of the “loop”. In other words, you can even display them outside the code that displays your posts. It has great flexibility in how these fields are displayed, and also allows you to add contextual content along with the custom fields. With this feature, it to possibly emulate other plugins. This eliminates the need to download plugins for displaying things such as moods, what you’re currently listening, or what you’re reviewing. I’ve used it before to list my DVD collection and display it with relevant info, so each post looks more like an entry to a DVD catalog. Get Custom Field Values makes it easy to format your custom information no matter how you want to use it.

Customizable Comment Settings

Another plugin from Coffee2Code, Customizable Comment Settings lets you and your visitors know who has been commenting on your blog recently. This is a great boon for attracting more readers to interact and leave comments, because it’s one of those indicators that your blog has a lot of activity. You can list however many recent comments you want, and the plugin lets you format the comment notices in any way you want. There are so many parameters to group your blog’s comments by, such as the date of the original post and number of pingbacks.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This is quite a simple plugin, but if you are using FeedBurner to track your RSS viewing stats (and you should) FeedSmith might help take off some of the guesswork in synching your feeds with FeedBurner. It tracks down every possible way to look at your feed and redirects them to FeedBurner in order to get every possible reader and subscriber. Optimizing your feed traffic has never got easier.