1. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
   This is an absolute lifesaver, after having to upgrade the site a few times manually I really got to grips with how much of a pain it can be, and this plugin really helps to ease that pain. Now I’m not saying that it’s faultless – infact when I installed it to help with the 2.5 upgrade it had a bit of a wobble, but after running the automatic upgrade again everything was fine
2. Google Analyticator
   If you are serious about your WordPress site, you should be serious about your site statistics, and Google Analytics provides great stats without putting extra load on your server. Google Analyticator is a simple and effective plugin to enable Google Analytics. Once you have signed up to Google Analytics you simply paste your UID into the plugin options page, and away you go, statistics will start showing within 24 hours and from there on in you can track visitor patterns, referring sites, search terms etc all via your Google Analytics account.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
   Now this is a great little plugin, we all know how important sitemaps are in the scheme of things don’t we? Well, this little plugin is just what you need. Everytime you create or update a post this plugin will jump into life and regenerate your sitemap.xml – AND it will notify sites such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask so that they can grab your new sitemap and make sure your site listings are up to date – Fantastic.
4. All in One SEO Pack
   This plugin is another one you really shouldn’t do without. Straight out of the box it will optimize your post titles, and automatically create your META tags. It also allows you to manually set your meta keywords and description, plus fine tune just about anything you want – seriously, if you want to get anywhere near good search engine listings and rankings – this is a MUST HAVE.
5. I Love Social Bookmarking
   Now I know that there are lots of plugins which give your readers the ability to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites, but for my money, this is the one that I like the most. It gives you the ability to choose which pages it appears on (Be it the homepage, single posts, single pages, archive pages),change the style of the drop down list, and even whether it appears vertically or horizontally. I’ve now changed to horizontal as you will see at the bottom of this post – personally I think it fits better. If you’re wanting to be socially bookmarked this plugin certainly gives you control over how and where you want to be bookmarked – although I’m sure some of you out there will suggest alternatives which I’ll have to take a look at LoL
6. Akismet
   Now, as standard we all get the Akismet plugin, and every single one of you out there should sign up for your own WordPress API Key so that you too can stop any spam comments from reaching your public postings. It’s not an option, it’s absolutely essential – especially in these days of mass spammings – I mean, who wants huge comments all about Viagra??? LoL
7. Shutter Reloaded
   There are a few plugins around which give you similar functionality to Shutter Reloaded, such as Lightbox, Thickbox etc, but I think that Shutter Reloaded gets it just right, it’s a tiny payload of only 10kb, and allows automatic resizing and viewing of images on any posts without intervention, you can just set it up once and let it go! Fantastic!
8. AdSense Manager
   All of the plugins so far have been very functional, they have extended functionality of your WordPress installation to make your life easier or better in some way, with this one you get something back (Hopefully!) – AdSense Manager allows you to embed adverts within your site. Not only from Google AdSense but also AdBrite, Commission Junction, Yahoo!PN and many more. Done right, adverts should integrate into your site design, not stand out from it. The better they integrate, the more likely some of your readers are to click on the links, and therefore you may earn some beer (Or in my case coffee) money – never a bad thing

Now, theres one plugin which I would find superb, but I haven’t found one that specifies that it works with 2.5 yet, and that is a plugin to allow automatic upgrading of WordPress Plugins – a little self-referencing I know, but upgrading plugins via FTP takes a bit of time every now and again, and to save that little bit of time in a busy life would be great – so if anyone out there can recommend one to me, please let me know

-Roamer.