1. Akismet – Every WordPress site’s best friend.  Akismet is the first line of defense between your blog and an endless stream of comments attempting to sell you Viagra. It stops what it detects to be spam comments , and holds them in a special moderation qeue separate from your other comments. You can then review and delete them at your convenience. As your blog gets more popular, the number of spam comments you receive will increase, and Akismet will save you a significant amount of time in terms of catching and deleting each spam comment as it’s left on your blog.
2. All in One SEO Pack -A popular plugin with SEO folks, its All in One SEO Pack lets you insert meta tags, helps you with duplicate content, optimizing titles and more.
3. Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time.  This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something.  Just the other day I installed this on a clients WordPress site and found 102 broken links!
4. Google Analyticator – Google Analytics is a popular way of tracking your site visitors.  This plugin allows you to enter your code, and it will take care of making sure it gets to the right place in all of your themes.  However, this is a plugin that I can do without because I can manually put analytics code in footer.php but if the client needs to edit the code they can do it on their own.
5. Google XML Sitemap – Helps you generate XML enabled sitemap to help with indexing by search engines like Google, MSN, Ask and more.
6. No Self Pings – A nice little plugin that keeps pingbacks from showing up in your comments section when you link back to your own blog entries.
7. WordPress.com Stats – A stats system that helps you reduce the load on your server by using the WordPress.com servers to keep track of your stats for you.
8. WP Super Cache – Caches your pages as static HTML files as opposed to PHP files, which can take longer to process and display on your site.
9. Share This – This plug-in allows readers to add your blog posts to social bookmarking sites through an icon that appears at the end of each of your blog posts. Readers click the icon to select the social bookmarking site they prefer in order to save and share your post.
10. WordPress Database Backup – What would happen if something happened to your blog and all of your content was lost? You can avoid that possible tragedy by installing a WordPress backup plug-in. This plug-in backs up the core information in your blog (the main tables). There are also more sophisticated WordPress backup plug-ins such as the WP-DBManager plug-in that will allow you to further customize your backups.

Highlights

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

• 2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is now available.
• 2.7.1 fixes 68 tickets. You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools->Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually.

Consult the list of fixed tickets and the full set of changes between 2.7 and 2.7.1 for details.

I was going to highlight some of the changes here, but really there aren’t any major things worth pointing out. And as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a Good Thing!” The fact that the bugfixes are all so minor simply reflects the overall quality of the initial 2.7 release.  Good job, dev team! If you’re curious enough, you can view the list of closed tickets for WP 2.7.1.

Today, WordPress powers everything from huge sites like CNN’s Political Tracker to thousands of personal blogs. Thanks to an easy step up process and the widespread availability of web hosts offering one-click WordPress installs, you can start blogging with WordPress in a snap.

In this tutorial, we’ll assume your web host doesn’t have a one-click installer. Maybe you’ve got a bare-bones host, you’ve decided to host your own site, or you’re simply setting up a local installation to see what WordPress can do. At any rate, fear not — getting WordPress working on your server only takes a few minutes. Of course, you’ll need a few skills in the bag first, like a knowledge of PHP and a comfortable working relationship with MySQL databases.

Once your blog is up and running, we’ll take a look at different ways you can customize and extend your blog.

Installation

Much of WordPress’s popularity stems from its famously dead simple installation process. All you need to get started with WordPress is a web server, a MySQL database for WordPress to talk to and of course the WordPress software itself.

Unzip the WordPress download and rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

Drop that file in your favorite text editor and fill in the details about your database so WordPress can connect to it properly.

Now you just need to upload WordPress using an FTP program. Upload all the files to where ever you’d like you new blog to live. For instance, if you want your blog to be the root of your domain, upload all the files to your root web directory. If you want your blog to be at, say, mysite.com/blog, just upload all the WordPress files to a “blog” directory within the website’s root directory.

Now you just need to run the install script by pointing your browser to:

http://mysite.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

Just adjust that URL to fit wherever you placed WordPress.

The install script will walk you through naming your blog and creating a username and password for accessing the administration panel.

Once that’s done, log in to WordPress and you’re ready to roll. If you run into any problems, have a look at the official WordPress installation guide, which covers most of the common installation issues.

Digging In

When you log in to WordPress for the first time, you’ll encounter what’s known as the Dashboard. The Dashboard tracks your recent activity and lets you know about and manage comments your visitors have left and tracks any incoming links from other sites.

In order to have some content for when we start customizing our installation, go ahead and click the “Write a new Post” link and, well, write a quick post or two. Once you have a couple of posts done, click the “Write a new page” button.

Now what’s the difference between a “page” and a “post,” you ask? Well, a post is an entry on your blog, whereas a page represents something static like a contact page or an “About me” page. Go ahead and create a couple of pages so you can see how they work in the next section.

The other section that might catch your eye is “Links.” Older versions of WordPress referred to this section as the Blogroll, but the name change reflects the more general purpose usefulness of Links. While you can still use Links to generate a blogroll linking to your friends’ sites, you can also do other things like create an entire site navigation system for your sidebar.

If you click the “visit site” button from any of the Admin pages, WordPress will dump you onto your live site so you can see what your changes look like.

Customize WordPress

The default look for WordPress is a blue header above a two column layout — you’ll probably recognize it since many sites don’t bother to customize the plain installation. It’s OK for a default layout, but if you want to personalize your WordPress site a bit, read on.

Themes

Customizing WordPress’s look happens through “themes.” If you log in to your WordPress dashboard and select the Design tab, you’ll see the main themes panel. Also check out the Header Image and Color tab which features a very nice inline theme editor, complete with color pickers and other tools that make it easy to customize the default theme.

But frankly, one of the advantages of WordPress is the number and variety of custom themes that members of the community have created. The official repository of themes is the WordPress Theme Viewer, so browser through that list, find something you like and download it.

Then just unzip and upload the theme to the wp-content/themes directory provided by WordPress. Then, just head over to the Design tab inside the WordPress admin interface and select your new theme.

From there, you can customize and tweak the theme to fit your whims. Different themes offer different levels of customization so what you can and cannot do will depend on the theme you’re working with. In general, you should be able to change the header image, layout options and colors on any theme.

Also note that themes don’t have to be site-wide. If you happen to blog about both cupcakes and software, you can assign your archive pages for cupcakes to use one theme and the software posts to use another.

If you’d like to create your own theme, it isn’t too difficult. The best place to start is to open up an existing theme and study how it works.

You’ll notice it’s more complex than just throwing together some HTML and CSS in a template. It helps to have a decent knowledge of PHP, and if you need help getting up to speed, Webmonkey has you covered. Read our PHP Tutorial for Beginners

Plugins

One of the chief appeals to powering your blog with WordPress rather than building your own system is that you can take advantage all of the cool tools that other people have developed. The WordPress plugin universe offers something for everyone, whether you just want to add some photos or turn your blog into a proto-social network using the plugins from the DiSo project.

To get you started, here’s a few of our favorites:

• WP-Cache – Caches your pages for much faster loads. An absolute must, this should be part of WordPress by default. It works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. Your site will thank you when Digg and Slashdot readers start pouring in.

• WordPress Flickr Manager – post images from your Flickrstream with ease.

• Google Analytics for WordPress – track stats and more using Google Analytics.

• Twitter Tools enable you to integrate your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

• WordPress Database Backup – creates backups of your core WordPress database tables. Backups are a must.

• EasyTube – post YouTube videos using just the URL. This plugin takes the URL and uses it to embed the actual video.