I have a love / hate relationship with WordPress plugins. I love how they can do exactly what I ask of them, but I Abhor how bloated they are. I have my favorite plugins of course, Google XML sitemaps, akismet and WordPress Stats. But I tend to stay away from plugins for the most part. I look inside plugins all of the time to see how they did things, but I rarely enable them.
So far the plugins I have installed are:
Google XML Sitemaps – added 04/25/2011
WordPress.com Stats – added 04/25/2011
Simple Comment Spam Stopper – added 05/08/2011
I will update this list as the site goes long. Everything else at the moment is just template editing. It is a child theme of twenty ten, some custom page templates and some custom post types. I am going to try my hardest and not use akismet, I doubt this site will get very many hits to where I will need it. But we will see.