With the addition of the Plugin Update Notification into WordPress 2.3, it is now more important than ever before that plugin authors maintain and update their plugins on a regular basis. Failure to do so may see their plugin dropped from wordpress.org while user's migrate to other more up-to-date plugins.

Some of the most popular WordPress plugins have already been tested and listed as WordPress 2.3 compatible plugins. Sadly many will never be compatible as their authors have given up development.

Developing a successful and popular blog or website is made easier by using WordPress, even more so now that canonical redirection and update notifications are included by default. Bloggers wishing to grow their site, increase traffic, manage content, and monetize their pages will however need to install some of the excellent plugins available. Here's a short list of must have plugins:

"Akismet v2.02", without this many bloggers quickly become bogged down in dealing with spam. The Akismet plugin sends a query to the Akismet servers with every comment posted and checks the users email address and their comment for spam. Akismet will automatically reject spam giving webmasters peace of mind and restoring 'blogging innocence'.

"Backup WordPress", the easiest and quickest way to backup your entire WordPress install, including database, themes, uploads, in fact even the entire site with core files. We all know operating a popular site requires time and effort, and when a site goes down its good to know you have a backup.

"No follow case by case", for webmasters who really don't want comment authors getting any link juice from their hard won efforts to build their PR. Linking to potentially bad neighborhoods or sites that aren't in your niche can damage our site's SERPs, luckily the no follow tag is honored by most major search engines. No follow case by case allows you to select any comment link that shouldn't be followed, or leave the default setting which automatically applies the no follow tag to all comment links.

"Google Sitemaps Generator", designed to work with Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN Search, this plugin will generate your sitemap in plain text and compressed format, then ping Google, Ask.com and Yahoo when you update your site. The generated sitemap will also include a priority rating for each entry based on the number of comments received.

"Mint Popular Posts" utilizes Mint, one of the best tracking packages for complete analysis of your website traffic. Find out which pages your visitors are reading, which links they're clicking, which ad's they're clicking, and more.

Did I miss important plugins? Yes, what about Advertising plugins? for plugins which support AdSense, there are 2 plugins that are listed in the plugin compatibility list at the time this article written, they are "AdSense Deluxe" and "AdSense Manager", but here is another new plugin but it's not free (although it's pretty cheap), "DynamicAds", it's compatible with WordPress 2.3 and one of the the plugin's features allows you to control how you want to rotate your ads in various locations on your site.

Those are the essential plugins that need to be firstly installed to your WordPress website.