Matt Mullenweg, our fearless leader has officially dubbed today, January 28th as Thank A Plugin Developer day. We would be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to other plugin developers we love for their fine work.

Here’s a short list of some of our favourites:

• Akismet is a comment filter that uses a karma-type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. Does a killer transparent job at handling the nasties.
• Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
• WordPress Database Backup: You gotta gotta gotta backup your DB, folks. This makes it easy, and you can schedule them to be sent to your inbox daily/weeky/monthly too!
• WP-Cache is a caching program which takes the weight off your database, and helps with Dugg posts significantly, or if you’re like us and on Media Temple, keeping those GPU’s low low low.
• All-In-One SEO Take your search engine optimization seriously, kids. This plugin will help you take the pain out of painstaking SEO for your site.

There’s just too many great plugins available for WordPress, so head over to the plugins directory and poke around to check some out for yourself if you haven’t done so for awhile. If you like to find the plugins we’re behind, visit our downloads page.