Akismet
Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the ”Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.
Contact Form 7
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
Exclude Pages from Navigation
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any ”consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
Maintenance Mode
Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Settings → Maintenance Mode to get started.
NextGEN Gallery
A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
SEO Ultimate
This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over title tags, noindex/nofollow, meta tags, rich snippets, slugs, canonical tags, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets, and more.
Simple Page Ordering
Order your pages and hierarchical post types using drag and drop on the built in page list. Also adds a filter for items to show per page. For further instructions, open the ”Help” tab on the Pages screen.
WP Super Cache
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
jQuery
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
prettyPhoto
prettyPhoto is a jQuery lightbox clone. Not only does it support images, it also support for videos, flash, YouTube, iframes. It’s a full blown media lightbox. It is very easy to setup, yet very flexible if you want to customize it a bit. Plus the script is compatible in every major browser, even IE6.