A Compilation of 18 Essential WordPress Plugin Recommendations

It's the WP plugins that make Wordpress more vibrant. It's also because of WP Plugins that the open-source nature of Wordpress becomes even more meaningful.

1. **Chinese WordPress Toolbox** - I believe almost all Chinese Wordpress users would use this plugin. It provides a lot of practical functions, such as displaying random articles, latest comments (latest trackbacks), most commented articles, top commenters, and even true article excerpts. Moreover, it offers strong customization options.

2. **©Feed** - There are many similar plugins, which add more content to the end of each article's feed. This one is pretty good in my opinion. You can add general HTML nodes, and also include things like the number of comments or the original article link.

3. **Akismet** - An anti-spam service officially launched by Wordpress. I've tried various other methods before, such as requiring a Chinese character in comments, but Akismet works very well.

4. **All in One SEO Pack** - Makes your blog more appealing to search engines like Google. This plugin is essential. It can automatically generate meta tags for your posts, modify titles, add descriptions, etc.

5. **CVS - Simplified** - For Chinese bloggers, allowing your blog content to freely convert between simplified and traditional Chinese can attract users who prefer traditional characters. With this plugin, you can easily achieve one-click conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese (like the column navigation on Ge Li Xiang's blog). I've also used a plugin called Global Translator before, which uses Google Translate to translate every page of your blog into up to 23 different languages (very powerful). However, since it's machine translation, I don't think it's entirely necessary, and it consumes a lot of server resources.

6. **Favicon Head** - Although you can directly add Favicon meta statements while designing your template, for those unfamiliar with template design, this plugin is small, simple, and very useful.

7. **FeedBurner FeedSmith** - For those using third-party blog feed services, you might be concerned about your blog's subscription status, so you'd want all subscriptions redirected to your custom feed address, such as Feedburner or Feedsky. This plugin can redirect all your blog's feed formats to a customized feed address. For Feedsky users, you need to add "feedsky" to the "/feedburner|" section in the statement "if (!preg_match("/feedburner|feedvalidator/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))" so that your blog can be crawled by Feedsky's spider.