Best plugins? Took a break, now out of the loop!

Hi guys,

I took a break from Minecraft and server hosting right around the 1.0 release of Minecraft.

I'm trying to get stuff going again, but plugin development is so rapid and things come and go so quickly that I don't know what the "best" plugins are anymore.

It'd be nice if the site could list plugins by popularity, but until then what are your favorites?

 

asking for "best" plugins is can trigger a flame war, so be careful
i prefer to use essentials + groupmanager myself, along with the active protection plugin (logblock or coreprotect)

 

Best as in "what are the most common and liked plugins?", not "my dad can beat up your dad"

 

Go Here http://www.curse.com/server-mods/minecraft/downloads

 

I'm partial to this one: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/vitals-plugin/

Disclaimer: it's mine . It's designed to supplement essentials with a ton of super-awesome additional features.