WordPress Launches New Plugin Directory

Last week WordPress launched a new Plugin Directory. Plugins are one of the best features of WordPress, allowing you to extend the functionality of your blog in countless ways. Previously these plugins, created by a worldwide community of open source developers, were scattered all over the place without a unifying interface, but now they can all be located in one central location.

Here are the top 5 plugins used on Laughing Squid:

1) Akismet – Absolutely essential. It kills comment spam dead.

2) Flickr Photo Album – Allows you to create a local photo gallery of your Flickr photos using the Flickr API and also it’s a great way to add photos from Flickr to your blog posts. Here’s my previous writeup on Flickr Photo Gallery plugin.

3) flickrRSS – Lets you to add your last batch of Flickr photos to your blog via RSS.

4) Google Sitemaps – A really simple way to create and submit your sitemap to Google.

5) wp-cache – Sets up caching for your blog using static files, which is a great way to improve the speed and performance of your blog, especially under high loads, like when one of your blog posts makes the front page of digg.