WordPress is a great blog and web site tool right out of the box, but you have to admit that WordPress Plugins add that extra pop and there’s something for everyone when it comes to WP plugins. It’s like finding your dream girl AND finding out her parents have a house on the lake and season tickets to [insert your favorite sports team here]. Here are five WordPress plugins, compatible with WP 2.5.x, that we highly recommend that you deploy on your WordPress web site before you even think of putting up that first post.

All in One SEO Pack

This is the SCUD missile of SEO plugins. It allows you complete control over your tags, meta tags and page titles.

Simple Tags

This handy plugin works with WP versions 2.3 and up. It has a mass tag importer, works with imbedded tags, and is compatible with the popular WYSIWYG editors (e.g., TinyMCE, FCKEditor, etc.). Combine this with the All in One SEO pack above and you are well on your way to having a nicely optimized web site.

QuickPHP

This is an excellent little plugin by David Chait and it’s been around awhile. It lets you put PHP functions right into your WP Pages without having to create a template with the PHP code embedded in it so you can put PHP right there on the page “on the fly.”

Secure and Accessible Contact Form

Not quite as powerful as the popular cForms II, but this contact form does allow you to create complex, custom forms using dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, and more. I think it’s a nice compromise between a drop-in contact form and a full blown forms generator script.

WP Database Backup

There’s simply no excuse not to back up that WP database with this plugin. As you know, the heart and soul of WP lies in its MySQL databse. Lose that and you have lost all your posts, comments, categories, links, and all settings. This makes it easy to backup the MySQL file and download it to your hard drive or have it emailed to you. And you can even schedule the backup to run any time you want. How cool is that?

So these are our recommendations for plugin must-haves. Feel free to drop a comment with your suggestions for can’t-live-without plugins!

Randy Thornton over at MetaMedia is of the opinion that WordPress is not ready to lay claim to being a full fledged CMS just yet. He gives some well-thought out and valid reasons why this is so.

In a nutshell: Plugins. The things that make WordPress able to function as a CMS do not lie within its core, but rather are the result of a very active development community rallying to give WP users and developers what they need to force WP to act as a CMS. And he’s right. Take away a handful of beloved plugins (e.g., cForms, WP Contact Form, various SEO plugins, several Event Calendars, and other plugins that seek to expand WP beyond blogging) and what you have is simply a good blogging application. And face it, with the frenetic upgrade pace lately, a lot of plugin developers lag behind in plugin development and compatibility. Who can blame them?

Randy said it best:

One day, WP will catch up: it always does. But it does so because its community has been there ahead of it.

To be continued…

Like the Frank Zappa album title suggests, ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch, it may be this latest move by SixApart to create a MovableType Open Source project comes too late to recapture lost users or even impress new ones. I find it very intriguing that MovableType feels the need, three years after that licensing gaffe in the spring of 2004, to follow in the footsteps of WordPress. It begs the question how far would WP have come had it not been for this marketing ploy of MT .. which turned out to be the biggest boon to WP’s success! Matt Mullenweg should kiss the ground Mena and Ben walk on for that.

True, blogging has changed a lot from its early days, when the only choices were LiveJournal, Blogger, Greymatter and MovableType, which back in 2002, was the darling of bloggers. I stuck with it through version 2.64. When MT3 came onto the scene, I hightailed it for WordPress country where I’ve been ever since.

But you have to wonder, as do quite a few other folks around the Net, why open source and why now? As Carthik pointed out, the SixApart blog sheds little or no light on the reasoning. Perhaps we’ll just have to meet back here in three years to compare notes. I predict WordPress (or some form of it) will still be the blog application of choice. And meanwhile, I’ll head over to movabletype.org and download the beta version of MT4. Just because I can.