Avoid plugins. Not that they're evil, but because they hide basic functionnality of vims to new comers.

Using plugins while learning Vim (because yes, you have to LEARN Vim) is counter efficient, because it adds many shortcuts to the default one, wrap functionnalities, delete others (the basic remap of "," to leader pisses me off).

Seriously, use vim WITHOUT any plugin, with a basic config. When you will be used to the default config (I mean, no more mouse, hjkl and almost never in insert mode), continue practicing. If you run into something that vim do not do by default, try to write a function to do that for you (eg, complete current word while pressing <Tab>).

And if you need more than that, check out the available plugins. Do not forget that vim can interact with its environment, with the "!" command.

This and this are great resources for any vim user.

Also, to answer your fisrt question, here is my config:

* ~/.vimrc
* ~/.vim/

I actually use not plugin, cause I've never ran into a problem that plain old vim can't solve. Pretty happy without it :)