Definitely endorse MCPC+ over bukkitforge, it has bugs no doubt but overall it works very well. ChickenChunks can be disabled, there are other chunk loaders available that work as well.
I would also highly endorse 'GriefPrevention', however you will need to make some adjustments to the config to take into account all the mods item/block IDs, also 'Hawkeye Reloaded' is exceptionally useful.
Another one I always liked was 'TimeFold', it allows you to loop days and nights, for example instead of 10 mins of daylight and 7 mins of night, you could have 30 mins (3 day loops) and 14 mins of night (2 night loops) without affecting the dawn/dusk phases, it really slows down the daytime/nighttime rush and makes for better time management.
'PermissionsEX' is also good, especially if your wanting to use 'Essentials'.
'Dynmap' (Bukkit version) for webmap
'Sleep' is another good one, it allows you to set a player % requirement for how many players are required to be in bed to fast forward to morning, for example if you set it to 50% and have 10 players online, only 5 need to jump into a bed for it to trigger, it also has some nice broadcast messages saying how many are in bed/needed in bed.
And finally, 'Weather Restrictions' lets you set a time before it can rain again, it also lets you control what weather triggers (eg you can turn off electric storms) we used it so that instead of raining every 10 mins for 2 mins, it would rain for upto 2 hours but wouldnt rain again for another 6 once it stopped.
