I had previously written an article, “4 most useful Wordpress plugins I use”, to help those new to the world of blogging get a bit of a head start with their wordpress configuration.  I mean, if you don’t know what is out there, it’s nice to have a place that you can turn to for a little direction.  

After roughly a month of usage and testing I now have 3 more highly useful Wordpress plugins I can recommend to fellow bloggers, and this crop of plugins ranges from simple site maintenance to social bookmarking.  

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress

Not sure what a sitemap is?  How can this help you, you ask? 

Sitemaps allow you, as a site owner, an easy way to inform search engine spiders about the pages on your site that are available for crawling. Basically, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs and corresponding metadata  (when the URL was last updated, how often it usually changes) allowing search engine spider the ability to crawl your site with ease.

The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress plugin takes care of the creation of the XML file and notifies Google, MSN, Ask.com and Yahoo.com that your site has recently changed.  If you want an easier way of placing data into search engines, this is worth your time.

Sociable

This is intended for the social networking site lovers out there.  This plugin adds social media buttons to your posts, which means your readers have the ability to update their choice of networking sites (Digg, Reddit, what have you) with your latest posts.  

As of this writing roughly 96 social networking sites are included with this plugin.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

This is a great plugin for site maintenance.

I have always had a problem upgrading wordpress for some reason – something would end up missing or a plugin would be uninstalled during the process – but the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin does it all for you, and does so with ease.

During the upgrade, the plugin will back up your files and databases, download the latest version of wordpress, and take care of the upgrade for you.

If you do not have this plugin, I strongly suggest you look into it.

So…

Are there some plugins I should be looking at?  Please feel free to send me an email or leave me a comment and I will take a look…

If you use Wordpress as your blogging platform but do not utilize plugins, you are missing out on a whole level of functionality that you never existed. You can update your readers when you post or have real time stats presented to you all due to the extended functionality.

Understand that plugins only work on independent installations of the platform, not on Automattic hosted blogs, as the company sees these as potential security risks.

As independent developers create Wordpress plugins, potential users really need to take a “hit or miss” approach when looking for what extensions they want to use.  Some plugins don’t seem to work or work poorly.  A number of times I’ve installed an item only to see no added functionality, leaving me a bit frustrated.  In order to help you cut through some of the junk, here are some of the most useful Wordpress plugins I utilize.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

This plugin returns related blog entries based on the content of your titles, post bodies, tags, and categories, and the feedback I received from readers on the implementation this plugin is phenomenal.  It makes life so much easier to related information embedded in your post instead of having someone look through categories or tags for others information they may find informative.

Wordpress PDA & iPhone

Want to provide your readers with a better PDA or iPhone viewing experience? Well, here you go.  While the developer still is in “beta” mode for the iPhone implementation, I have experienced no technical difficulties thus far.  

StatsPress Reloaded

I love this plugin as it shows real time views stats about your blog.  Aside from the general “number of visitors”, you can see the most popular pages, posts and categories.  It collects data on spiders, search words, feeds viewed, operating systems and browsers.  

PingPressFM

For the longest time I would have Wordpress update Twitter every time a post was made, and I would do so with Twitter Tools… That was until I found out about a service that notifies all your social networks…  That service is Ping.fm.    The PingPressFM plugin simply send a message off to the Ping.fm service informing them of your update, Ping.fm does the rest. This is a must for any blogger who is serious about propagating information to social networks.

I’m sure there are a number of other top-notch plugins out there; I simply haven’t found them yet.  One I really want to find is a quality Sitemap widget.   I will update you if I find some that are especially impressive, and I hope the information listed above is of some benefit.