Wanted to take a minute to congratulate the developers who submitted 52 plugins to the Wordpress plugin competition. Looks like some real promising ones there. Here’s just a small sampling of a few that caught my eye (offered in no particular order):

• Popularity Contest [download .zip] by Alex King
  

  Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post.

• Friendly Code [download .zip] by Alistair Phillips
  

  highlight scripts and code and display the syntax in a nice colour formatted way. Using this you will be able to provide your users with nice code samples on your website.

• Static Jack [download .zip] by JackBorn
  

  This plugin makes it a snap to add static pages to your site and have them automagically woven into your existing WP theme of choice.

• Plugin In Series [download .zip] by Skippy
  

  provides an easy, future-proof way to connect a series of posts.

• Search Reloaded [download .zip] by Denis de Bernardy
  

  a bid to significantly improve the relevance of WordPress’ built-in search engine.