Have you ever looked at the amount of plugins available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/? Wow! There seems to be hundreds of thousands (ok, I’m exaggerating slightly!) and if you search for a topic, you’ll find several that seem to do the same thing. So which one do you choose?

I tend to find people using WordPress that I trust and ask them what they use. I’ve been compiling lists of plugins that are recommended to me or that I’ve found useful and will start sharing them here.

While there are probably dozens that are “must-haves” for your WordPress site, I’m going to start off with three of my favorites – that I immediately install on every WordPress site that I create.

Page Link Manager
Can I just say I love this plugin? Page Link Manager is the best way to choose which pages show in your navigation bar. This plugin adds a link in the Tools section of your WordPress Admin site. When you click “Page Links” you are shown a list of all your pages. Just check the boxes next to the ones that you want to display on your site. Simple! And MUCH easier than editing the PHP code!

Flash Video Player
The day I discovered the Flash Video Player plugin I cried. Okay, not really. But it did solve a huge issue for me! To get videos to play on my websites, I was jumping through several hoops to get them to show up… and then was having issues getting them to play. Now I know there are services out there that you can pay for to simplify matters. But I’m a cheapskate! I didn’t want to pay $20 a month or so for the few videos that I use on my site. So I use this plugin to easily display my videos that are stored on Amazon S3. (I’ll post sometime exactly what I do from start to finish to get my videos online.)

Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin
I found Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin to play .mp3 files on the blog we did for my husband when he was in Iraq. I have yet to find a simpler audio file player plugin! The beauty of this plugin is that it takes all .mp3 files that are linked in your site and makes them playable with a small “Play” icon. The audio is also available for download by clicking on the link. It’s set for use with Deli.icio.us, but I’ve never used that part! I’ve tried other audio players and this one is the simplest and most “fix-it-and-forget-it” that I’ve found… and it works!

Obviously this is just a start! I’ll work through my plugin lists and share more with you soon. Start with these three and try them out on your site! Leave me a comment if you’ve used these and what you think about them!

~R