Here at GA, we love Wordpress (a blog publishing application and content mangement system), and have been working with the open-source platform for some time now. One of the latest projects that we’ve used it on is the highly customized Because Magazine, the digital fashion magazine brought to you by the team at Tank (we’ll tell you more about this project soon). As most people know, one of the best things about the Wordpress platform is the broad range of plugins available. There’s probably a plugin that can achieve any functionality you’re after! But, because we know that, sometimes, a lot of choice can be daunting, we have compiled a list of the top 5 must-have plugins for your wordpress blog. We have also included some handy tips on how to configure them!

Because Magazine, built on Wordpress

1. Google XML Sitemaps – Download
The easy way to automatically generate a sitemap for your blog, this plugin is ready to go, straight out of the box. You might need to create a blank sitemap.xml file on your site root and make it writable (chmod 777). We also recommend only including the Homepage, Posts pages and Static pages in the sitemap, as category/tag/author/archives pages are only duplicating your content.

2. All in One SEO Pack – Download
This is also a must have, as it will enable you to do some basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog. Tick all boxes in the plugin config page (with maybe the exception of “Capitalize Category Titles” and “Log Important Events”), and also add a description for the homepage and some keywords. It’s up to you if you want to use the plugin to rewrite all page titles, although if you don’t have in-depth programming knowledge this is the easiest way to go.

3. WP-PageNavi – Download
This plugin extends the built-in Wordpress navigation by adding a basic numbered paging navigation. The best way of customizing the look and feel of the plugin is to duplicate the pagenavi-css.css file in the plugin directory and copy it to your theme’s directory. The plugin will load the css file automatically and this will ensure that you don’t overwrite your styles when updating to a newer version.

4. Sociable – Download
If you want to make it easy for people to write about your posts on social networks then this plugin is also a must have. Just download and install. The plugin allows you to choose from a very long list of sites, but we’d recommend not including more than 5 to10 sites. We currently add Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Digg, Reddit, Google and Print (the www.printfriendly.com free print optimization service).

5. Scissors – Download
This one is a recent discovery, but it’s quickly found its way into our top 5! Scissors allows you to do some basic image editing from the Wordpress admin interface. We find it most useful for cropping thumbnails.

BONUS 2!  6. WP-DB-BACKUP – Download and 7. Akismet – Download
OK, we’re cheating a bit by adding two more, but the list wouldn’t have been complete otherwise :)

Akismet comes packaged with Wordpress and guards your blog against spam. You need to activate it by getting an API key and entering it at http://www.YOURSITE.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?page=akismet-key-config.

WP-DB-BACKUP doesn’t do anything visual to your blog, but it does perform the very useful task of automatically backing up your database. We recommend configuring the plugin to automatically email a weekly backup up, in order to be able to recover from a server crash or, hopefully not, a hack.