hi all im new to wordpress, can anyone give me a few tips on the best plugins to use and outline what they do thanks in advance
Best Plugins about what? Seo,Slider,Video,Rating? There are 24,170 plugins on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
A must is Akismet. Before installing that I had loads of spam comments posted on a daily basis, however as soon as it I installed and configured the plugin they dropped down to zero.
yeah you really need to narrow this down. But by default I always activate or install: Akismet WordPress SEO by Yoast Disqus (optional) Note that WordPress SEO by Yoast can handle Sitemaps. No need to install another plugin for it.
Perhaps I'm a statistical outlier, but I cringe when visiting a site that uses Disqus. Of the 20 or so blog sites that I visit daily, only one uses Disqus. There were others, but the user unfriendliness of Disqus caused me to quit them. WP has plenty of comment methods, all of which, that I've seen in use, are better than Disqus from the user perspective. Disqus may have benefits to the site owner, but if you don't put the visitors' desires first, you're just screwing yourself over. cheers, gary
Here's a quick list off the top of my head of some of my favorites. Akismet - Anti Spam (free) SEO by Yoast - Search Engine Optimization (free) White Label CMS - Brand the admin panel (free) W3 Total Cache - Cache tools for speeding up the site (free) Digg Digg - Social sharing (free) Types - Custom post types and fields (free) Gravity Forms - Amazing form builder (paid) Fancy Gallery - Great gallery system (paid) Styles with Shortcodes - Adds a massive amount of shortcodes, but generates one w3c error (paid) Unoslider - Awesome slider that can be installed in custom sites (paid) uSquare - Great for team pages (paid)
that depend about your wordpress blog and its need.. but you can check this useful article : Best Must Have Wordpress Plugins
I've been really impressed with the mingle forum plugin I'm trying out right now. I would suggest it for an easy to integrate forum.