Some addition research into WP plugins have a couple more worth reviewing.
The Redirection plugin will let me redirection the old darkmagic.org and mcgarware.com content to the new blog.mcgarrah.org website content being offered in WordPress. Since I’m importing a bunch of old stuff this would be handy to have setup. A tool for checking the 404 errors on the darkmagic and mcgarware would be helpful as well.
Database cleanup using the WP-Optimize plugin to keep the site database clean and performing well. Backups of the database seems important and WP-DB-Backup looks like a solution worth investigating.
A Print Friendly options exists and is likely to be useful for some readers of the technical content section. Relevanssi plugin replaces the built-in site search which is supposed to be lame in WP.
I might want a better editor for the content production especially for table creation and other more advanced features missing in the default editor. TinyMCE seems like the ticket but more research needed.
If I even wanted a membership or paid section then the Members plugin looks good. Not sure this is important anytime soon but might as well check into it now.
Caching and Performance optimization is a really loaded field. These two seem to lead the pack of plugins:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a pain but probably something I need to review later once I have some content in place for the search engines.
The Jetpack plugin seems like a features list of new thing that are coming. Looks like a bunch of feature requests that didn’t make it into the core product.
This is a beginners list as of July 2014. I’ll likely revisit these lists as I learn more and review them individually.