The emphasis put on WordPress Plugins for web design, development, and functionality is often overrated. While I'm the first and biggest fan girl of WordPress Plugins, I'm also the one fixing broken sites because of too many or conflicting WordPress Plugins. How many contact form WordPress Plugins do you need to create a single contact form on a site? One client had 6. I wish I was kidding.

WordPress comes with plenty of power under the hood, if the right developer knows how to hook into it. Jetpack WordPress Plugin adds a tremendous amount of functionality including forms, galleries, site monitoring, and social media integration. Do you need more?

You need more only if the feature you are adding requires the additional programming code. Add WordPress Plugins like spice to food. Too much or too little and you've spoiled the dish.

As for favorites, I owe a few lifetimes of gratitude to Akismet and Bad Behavior WordPress Plugins. They give me back life that would be spent cleaning out comment spam. Before them, I'd spent 10-60 minutes a day clearing spam. Akismet blocks thousands - I mean THOUSANDS - of comment spams on just a single site, leaving me to deal with 10-25 a day. Akismet learns and we all benefit from the community of Akismet users, especially WordPress.com users, marking spam as spam. Bad Behavior blocks the time wasters before they land on the site, checking them at the gate.

The greatest need in WordPress Plugins is security. Bad Behavior does only so much, and Wordfence, Bulletproof, Sucuri, and others are stepping things up, but there are things that should be applied at the server level, where the hackers are now targeting seriously, areas beyond the control of a WordPress site. The site owner and developer can only do so much, but much more is needed. I feel like I'm watching a frat party out of control, where the monitors are standing there helpless as uninvited guests destroy the house along with the party. We need more cooperation between web hosts and users to protect all our sites.

I haven't yet found an ecommerce Plugin that is 1) easy to use, 2) manages products and service content well, 3) integrates with payment systems simply and easily, and 4) I could recommend. I'm still looking. Until then, I've poked and prodded a variety and have not been happy with any of them, though some have listened and are improving their usability and integration.

SEO is best done offsite for monitoring and evaluating traffic and visitor actions through Google Analytics or other tools, many of which have WordPress Plugins for integration. I have worked with Yoast's SEO Plugin for a long time and I love it for some sites, but it still requires client training as the clients think this will fix their SEO. It won't. It starts long before the power of the Plugin kicks in. You have to teach the client SEO first, what it really means and how to make it work for them, and how to integrate it into their workflow before you teach them about a Plugin that helps.

CAPTCHAs are dead. Never worked, still don't work. However, there is comment spam and registration spam. These are different but related issues. CAPTCHAs and human torture tests (quizzes, questions) don't work for comments. They actually work against as many people will not comment if they see a CAPTCHA. Registration spam is another useless attempt to hammer and hack a site. This is prevented by Bad Behavior and a variety of other WordPress Plugins that block such attacks at the gate. Human spammers and hackers will bypass these easily, but there are other steps you can do to prevent registration spam, a discussion beyond the scope of this article.

As for the rest, it's the right tool for the job. Need to add a community to your site, BuddyPress is brilliant. A forum? The improvements in bbPress, a robust forum used by WordPress.org and WordPress.com for 11 years now, make it the perfect choice. Need to display stock exchange data? Consider the Stock Tools WordPress Plugin to help you display the stock information in a post or page, including the symbol and chart image. Participating in NaNoWriMo in November this year? You can use the National Novel Writing Month NaNo Stats WordPress Plugin that hooks into the National Novel Writing Month API data to display your NaNoWriMo stats on posts, Pages, and sidebar widgets. Want to display a chessboard featuring a chess move? Embed Chessboard WordPress Plugin might save your site and rock your world. It's the right tool for the job that makes or breaks a site with the right WordPress Plugin.

TIP: Make sure you check out A Month of WordPress Plugins, by Lorelle, featuring over 30 posts spread across a month in 2007 exploring all the different types and kinds of WordPress Plugins. Many of the Plugins Lorelle features are still around - amazing!