This site, like many out there, is running WordPress. I’ve tried others like Mambo, Joomla, TextPattern and a few other CMS solutions–but I always come back to WordPress. One of the nice things about it is how easy it is to modify, whether it’s function with plugins, or appearance with themes and styles. It’s also easy to do minor code tweaks right through the theme editor.

Anything you don’t like about it can usually be cured with a few plug-ins.

These are the main WordPress plug-ins that I usually install:

Spam Karma 2: Helps fight the never-ending flood of comment spam. This works great. It’s rare that any spam gets past it and I’ve yet to have any false positives

WP-ContactForm: Drop a simple contact form into any page or post. Note: This guy seems to have disappeared, but the plug-in still works fine for me.

Captcha!: Requires people to type in a code before posting a comment.

WP-Notable: A social bookmarking plug-in that makes it easier for people to submit your posts to sites like Digg. You can see it in action at the bottom of this post.

WordPress Admin Dropdown Menu: This makes the whole admin area much nicer to work with by lowering the number of clicks it takes to get where you want to go.

WordPress Database Backup: Makes backing up your database an easy task. You can do it manually or set it to automatically email you the backup file at the interval of your choice.

WP-Cache: Caches your pages for better performance instead of dynamically generating them every time. This is pretty much a must-have in shared hosting environments, where you’re more likely to have your account blocked if it’s affecting those you share the server with.

WP-Syntax: This plug-in makes posting code (PHP, C, CSS, etc…) in your posts much nicer by adding syntax highlighting.