WordPress is fun and blogging can, at some point, turn from a weekends hobby to a full time business online. Sounds familiar? But if you do consider making your blog a business, or at least taking it to a professional level, you will need to enhance your platform with some plugins. galleries to showcase your work, easy to manage contact form, and finally, ads management — plugins make the life so much easier, adverts will be removed automatically once expired and images will automatically be resized to optimize your blog for faster loading — that means YOU save a great deal of time and can us this free time to make more content or work offline. Here is a list of 100 Best plugins that you absolutely must have in order to smoothly run a creative, professionally looking WordPress blog. However, the great thing about the new wordpress version is that you can add these plugins even if you do not host your blog on a paid web hosting, i.e. WordPress.com hosted blogs can benefit just as well.

1. YouTube Videobox Widget

With Youtube Video Box Plugin you can add unlimited number of sidebar widgets to display Youtube videos in XHTML valid format.

This plugin also allows you to easily customize width and height of the videos directly in your widget panel. Optional function that enhances this plugin gives you the ability to chose colors in YouTube and enable or disable them in your widget panel. This plugin is ideal for those of you who wish to display several videos in easy-to-manage widgets, yet maintain a XHTML valid, SEO friendly website code.

Compatible with any java / ajax powered plugin, doesn’t affect the loading time and thanks to its’ lite structure, will not crash your site.

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2. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

akismet-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

3. WP Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

ajax-edit-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

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4. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.

openid-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

5. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.

gdrating-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

6. Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently.

rating-comment-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

7. Clicky

While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

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8. Twitter Avatars In Comments

Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

twittar-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

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9. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.

captcha-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

10. Old Post Promoter

Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed.  Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.

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11. TinyMCEComments

This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.

tiny-mce-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

12. CommentLuv

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

commentluv-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

13. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

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seo-smartlinks-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

14. Theme Options

This plugin manages theme customization. Everything is managed in the WordPress Backend. Code snippets can be activated, copied, created, deactivated, deleted, edited, and uploaded. For comments you can highlight different comments based who wrote them and where they are, also nice feature to automatically add “about author” section.

theme-options-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

15. WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. Starting in version 1.1, WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate post comments!

wp-paginate-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

16. @ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

@reply-helpful-wordpress-comment-plugin

17. IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!