While I know that there are other lists of Twitter plugins out there – I wanted to publish my take on the issue of WordPress plugins for twitter because I have actually tried a large number of WordPress Twitter plugins and have experienced the excellent, passable, and just plain bad.

While I will spare the creators of the just plain bad plugins, I did want to share a simple list of good to great Twitter WordPress plugins:

• TweetSuite
  I suggest you start here if you use WordPress and Twitter. It features: TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack, A digg-like Tweet-This Button, Automatic Tweeting of new posts, and a half a dozen more features without javascript or remote calls.
• Ping.fm Custom URL
  This is a feature rich wordpress plugin that works with Ping.fm’s Custom URL feature to collect blog entries, microblog entries, and status updates and post them to your blog.
• Twitturls
  On the other end of the spectrum there is the very simple Twitturls, a WordPress Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted.
• Social Profiles WordPress Plugin
  This plugin is a bit more specialized but great if you run a multi author blog. Social Profiles allows you to add social network profile links to the comments of your registered users as specified by the user on their profile page
• Twitpress
  Twitpress is a wordpress plugin that accomplishes 1 popular task well, it submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog.
• Tweet Tweet
  Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that polls Twitter and archives your tweets and the tweets of those you follow so those insightful conversations you have at 1am are never lost.

So there you go, JTk’s favorite Twitter related WordPress plugins. Each accomplishes a slightly different task and comes at making the integration of your WordPress powered site and Twitter more effective from a different angle.

ilfilosofo’s WordPress Database Backup Plugin is very cool – you can schedule WordPress to email your database to you, save it to your server, or download it to your computer. I know that you can backup your database yourself but you have to remember to do it – this plugin relieves you of that responsibility.

I used to use ilfilosofo homepage plugin before WordPress decided to make that a core function, but I missed this plugin, which makes me wonder, what other great WordPress plugins are out there that I have overlooked…

Anarchy Media Player 2.0 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.

I am not sure how I overlooked this plugin for so long, but it seems to be damn good – and – it works with WordPress MU, and there is a stand alone javascript version for you WordPress impaired people. Yes, it is hacked together, but it is hacked together well…

One common demoninator in all of the blogs that I develop is that they all use plugins. That’s the way that WordPress was designed – to have a small core that can be easily expanded with plugins for specific needs. This list is my personal list of plugins that I trust and use every day.

• TubePress
  TubePress is a free, highly configurable WordPress plugin that displays YouTube videos in an embedded gallery in your posts and/or pages.
• Counterize II
  Simple counter-plugin with no external libs – saves IP, timestamp, visited URl, referring URl and browserinformation in database, and can display total hits, unique hits and other statistics in WordPress webpages. Admin-interface available with detailed information
• Google (XML) Sitemaps
  This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported By Google, MSN Search and YAHOO
• Breadcrumb Navigation XT
  Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.
• Related Posts
  Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches
• Role Manager
  Role Management for registered users of WordPress 2.0.
• Spam Karma 2
  Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.
• WP e-Commerce Lite
  The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
• SRG Clean Archives
  A nice clean way to dislay your archives.