TechMonkey and I gave several sessions at PodCamp MidWest this weekend and one covered advanced functionality of WordPress. Below are links and summaries to the plugins that we discussed as well as a few that we didn’t have time for but really like.

Plugins from PodCamp session:

PodPress: Plugin to help you run a podcast with WordPress

Akismet: Defensive measures against spammers

All-in-one SEO: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines

WP-Cache - WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive

WordPress Database Backup - creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

WordPress 2.3 Related Posts - will generate a related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags, and add the related posts to feed.

Ultimate Google Analytics - Install necessary code to you WordPress theme for Google Analytics

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator - This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Twitter Poster - Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Sociable - Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully. (see an example of it in action on this post!)

WordPress.com Stats - Automattic’s own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. You can install this on any WordPress install but must have a WordPress.com account to use it.

Additional must have plugins:

Duplicate Content Cure - Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

WordPress Mobile Edition - A PDA friendly interface for your blog. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser.

Simple Trackback Validation - performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

OpenID for WordPress - plugin for Wordpress that enables visitors to use their OpenID if they want to post a comment instead of a registering yet another local Wordpress account or typing their credentials over and again.

iWPhone Plugin and Theme - The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. (view this site on an iPhone or iPod Touch to see it in action)

Extended Comment Options - Extended Comment Options allows you to close comments or pings (or both) on all your posts, a batch of posts, single specific post, or posts in general after a certain time period.