Here is a list of the plugins that I have used for the site so far and what they do for me.

Akismet - spam comment stopping
Broken Link Checker - exactly what it says
Calendar - By Kieran O'Shea - a calendar that fit my needs perfectly. Also generates a list of upcoming events in a widget.
Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook - a plugin that creates a special feed for facebook and leaves your normal feed intact. I think I liked this feed more because it included more tags automatically into posts replicated onto facebook, forcing people to actually come visit the site to read the whole articles.
Google Analytics for Wordpress - This helps establish the link to google analytics for tracking visitors and traffic to the site.
Google XML Sitemaps - Generates a sitemap that helps search engines index the blog.
PixoPoint Menu Plugin - For manipulating the menu that is at the top of the site. I currently have select pages and categories being listed there.
RB Internal Links - Gives you a quick method for adding a link to another page on your site. Useful for people that find that they are linking other work that they have done quite often.
Regenerate Thumbnails - For the arras theme thumbnails. Haven't had to use it yet but we shall see.
Register Plus - Since I have an attached forum, I needed a method by which people could sign up securely and reliably. I found that this was the best plugin for that, offering a lot of customization of the registration process.
Sexy Bookmarks - Offering a very nice looking way to list various social media and bookmarking sites at the bottom of posts.
Simple:Press Forum - a very big and impressive forum plugin. I find the integration with the rest of my content to be very impressive. The options available are also very broad. This plugin can be found at http://simple-press.com/ since it is not in the plugin repository.
Table of Contents Generator - a plugin I found at http://scott.yang.id.au/code/toc-generator/ which lets me generate a very nice floating table of contents automatically from a set of correctly-used headings in my documents. I have found this to be a tremendous time saver since so many of my articles are fairly long.
Widget Logic - a plugin for making widgets appear where you want them to. This uses flags such as is_home() to determine the logic of where widgets will be shown. Very powerful, my use so far has been minimal but I can tell that it is very useful.
WP-Filebase - My site is soon to offer downloadable files. This will allow me to attach them to posts.
WP-Footnotes - A footnoting plugin. Seems to work very well. My site will be very reference-heavy soon, so this will come in very handy.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - This plugin generates a list of related posts at the bottom of each post. I find that it works very well and comes with some customizable features.

Hope this helps some people out. Again if you want to see what I have done with these things you can check out the site at  www.visionofearth.org

Last edited by Ben.Harack (2010-09-07 08:40:57)

Is it entirely redundant? That is, I like pixopoint's system and wondering if the new wordpress one is as good. I haven't tried the new menu system since I have things working as I would like them.

The new WP feature lets you add anthing you want.