Currently the WordPress community provides 2200+ plugins for WordPress users to install. Most plugins are easy to install while some require you to do some simple PHP coding afterwards.

To install a typical plugin, download the plugin and extract it into the wp-content/plugins folder of the WordPress root folder. In the Dashboard, click on the "Plugins" link and the "Activate" link to activate your plugin.

Plugins which I installed

Broken Link Checker: This plugin is will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

This requires the CURL library to be installed for PHP, otherwise an error will occur: Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init().

To install CURL library for Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-curl

Link Summarizer: This plugin produces a list of all the links you referred to in a posting. You can exclude links from the summary by specifying regular expressions for links that shouldn't show up. For example, the regular expression I used to ignore links to the images of my blogs:

^http:\/\/.*\.vincentkong\.com\/.*\.(gif|png|jpg)$

Wordbook: This plugin allows you to cross-post your blogs to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Your Facebook profile will also show your most recent blog posts. This works similar to importing your blog's RSS feed with Facebook Notes, but with some advantages as described in the Wordbook FAQ.

WP-ShortStat: WP-ShortStat is a litte statistics plugin for WordPress.

WP-Table: This plugin creates and manages tables for WordPress.