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One of the beautiful things about the WordPress platform is that it is open source. Being open source allows third party developers to provide features and add ons to the platform in the form of plugins. Over time some of the most popular plugins (such as Gravatars) become worked into the base code. This wouldn’t happen if there was not wide usage of the plugin or community support for it.

While there are a lot of plugins to choose from, not all of them would be a good fit for personal bloggers on their blogs. Here is a basic list of 15 must have WordPress plugins for personal bloggers:

Comments

Subscribe To Comments - undoubtedly the most important plugin to have, this allows your readers and commenters to follow along with the conversation after they have already left their comment.

Get Recent Comments - Puts a list of your most recent comments in your sidebar. This is a great plugin to let readers visiting your blog know where the conversation is.

WP Ajax Edit Comments - This plugin is more of a courtesy for your readers. This allows them to edit their comment within a certain amount of time that you set. This way if after re-reading their comment they catch a misspelling, had accidentally hit the ENTER key submitting the comment, or feel something they wrote sounds not in line with their thinking then there is time for it to be corrected.

WordPress Thread Comment - Interaction amongst those who leave you comments is a commonplace occurrence as communication remains open. This plugin allows commentators to reply to each other, and threads the conversation so that they can easily be followed while other discussions happen around them.

Custom Smilies 2.0 - One of the thing that happens quite often is that a developer may stop supporting a plugin as WordPress continues its updates, and then another developer may pick it up. Thus is the case with Custom Smilies, one of the simplest smiley plugins out there. Hopefully Crazy Loong will continue the updates.

Commentluv - I feel this plugin is probably one of the most important plugins for personal bloggers to have, and I can only hope that it gets included into the source code sometime soon. What Commentluv does is search for the RSS feed of the blog entered into the URL field and link to the latest article at the time of comment from that feed. There is nothing like a link back to their own blog writing to show your commentators some appreciation and luv.

Posts

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - Produce a list of related posts that your readers may be interested in. This uses a full text and keyword search while allowing threshold limits that you set. The results are better than most other plugins are at serving related posts as opposed to some related, and some not so related.

Organize Series - This is a very powerful plugin that I think most personal bloggers underestimate its usefulness. The plugin allows you to link posts together in a “series”. This will allow you to organize your posts without needing to expand on your categories. For example, instead of having a different category for Vacation 2006, Vacation 2007, and Vacation 2008 you can have one category called Vacation and make every year a series. The plugin works out of the box and does not require any template editing, so its ease of use is a plus too!

Sidebar

Show Top Commentators Plugin and Top Commentators Widget - This shows a list of your top commentators in your sidebar by either adding code to your sidebar or using a widget. What benefit does this offer? It certainly rewards those who comment frequently by showing their name with a link to their blog from yours. While there is the possibility of abuse, the plugin does offer a number of options to easily curb those fanatic commentators.

Events Calendar - This plugin replaces the typical WordPress Archive Calendar with a calendar that will show events of your choosing. This is available as both a regular plugin and as a widget.

Other Service Integration

Twitter Tools - This is the all inclusive Twitter plugin by the notoriously popular developer Alex King. The plugin will not only place your Twitter status in the sidebar, but can also create posts from your tweets as well as create a tweet whenever you make a blog post.

FlickrRss - Want to share Flickr photos easily? FlickrRss allows you to share photos by user, set, favorite, group, and community photostreams utilizing RSS feeds.

Last.Fm - This plugin shows your most recent listens according to your Last.Fm account and shows the CD Cover for the album.

Before considering this last plugin, be sure to read our article about Creating Your Online Identity and contemplate exactly how much you want out here.

Lifestream - This is by far the ultimate plugin for personal bloggers who want it ALL out there. This plugin will record and display activity from the feeds inserted into your “lifestream”. Supported feeds include Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Jaiku, Reddit, and Flickr to name a few.

So if you run a personal blog using a self-hosted WordPress install, you should definitely consider integrating these plugins with your personal blog.