Download - Getting Started With Word Press Plugins
Getting Started with WordPress PluginsPart of the genius and magic of WordPress is the plugin system. These plugins extend and enhance what WordPress
is able to do in very specific ways. Anyone is able to write a plugin for WordPress, and even include it in the official
plugin library, otherwise known as the WordPress Plugin Repository.Let’s explore some essential information for
getting started with plugins.
Installing and Activating PluginsAmong the WordPress files on your server, there is a special directory, /wp-content/plugins/, that contains all of your
site’s plugins. The tried-and-true method for installing a plugin is to download it to your computer, and then upload it
to your server into the plugins directory. After that, the plugin will appear in the Admin area on the “Plugins” page. By
default, new plugins are inactive, so you will need to manually activate them before they take any effect.You can, at
any time, deactivate a plugin in this same way. Do be aware, however, that plugins have serious power. Any time you
activate or deactivate a plugin, you should do some thorough investigating of your site to make sure everything
is looking and functioning as expected.Plugins can also be searched for and installed directly from the Admin area of
your site. Just go toPlugins > Add New. The plugins available here are exactly the same as those available at the
WordPress Plugin Repository. In order to take advantage of this direct web installation, your plugins directory must be
“writeable” by the server. In a perfect world, giving write permissions to a directory would be absolutely safe, but in
the hostile environment of today’s Web, you should definitely consider carefully whether or not such permission is
truly necessary.The bonus of downloading plugins from the WordPress.org directory is that you can be sure that the
plugin isn’t malicious in any way. There are certainly ways you can get yourself into trouble with plugins, but plugins
obtained from the Repository are unlikely to damage your site or harrass your visitors. There are plugins “out in the
wild” available for download as well, but there are no guarantees as to what you will get, so be very conscious of the
source when installing such plugins.
Difference Between Disabling and UninstallingDisabling a once-active plugin prevents it from functioning, but does not physically remove the plugin from your
plugins directory. You could have a thousand disabled plugins doing nothing except for taking up space in your plugin
folder. By actually uninstalling a plugin, you remove all files associated with it, and if possible also reverse any
changes that the plugin might have made to the database. In the process of installation and operation, many plugins
will automatically insert content into your WordPress database. Such plugins may add new tables or fields, modify
existing data, and store information required for usage. Once made, these types of changes will persist even after the
actual plugin files are deleted from your server. Well-built plugins will provide a complete uninstall option that does
the work of cleaning up its database changes for you. Plugins that do not provide such convenience must be cleaned
up manually. If this is the case for a plugin that you would like to completely uninstall, make sure that you really know
what you are doing before making any changes to your database. And don’t forget to make a backup just in case
something goes awry.
Recommended PluginsThe nature of plugins is that they provide WordPress with supplemental functionality that may not be needed
by every site. Rather than try to squeeze a million features into the WordPress core, application-specific functionality
is left to the awesome developers within the thriving WordPress community. Developers see a need (or an
opportunity), create a plugin, and release it to users. If the plugin is popular enough, and makes sense to integrate
into the WordPress core, the wizards behind the curtain will see that it happens. Even so, there remain a number of
top-notch plugins that, for whatever reason, have yet to be swallowed up by the core. Here are some of the best that
we find useful for virtually any type of WordPress-powered site:
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google-compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress-
generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major
search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like Google, MSN/Bing, Yahoo! and Ask.com, are notified about the
update. This is a super easy activate-it-and-forget-it plugin that can help you by making sure search engines find
every last corner of your site.
IImage Browser
The built-in WordPress media gallery is getting better over time. There are some nice parts about it, such as how you
can query for attachments to particular posts and whatnot, but it has more than its fair share of problems. For one
thing, inserting images uploaded in this way adds a bunch of additional class names into your image tags that you
may not want. This plugin is dead-ugly (and ancient! 2004!) to look at, but it makes uploading and displaying images
for your site dead-easy and far less prone to failure.
Art Direction
This plugin allows you to insert extra code (typically CSS or JavaScript, but could be anything) into
specific Posts/Pages. The custom code can be inserted anywhere the Post appears, or only when viewing that Post
alone (single view) Who says every one of your Posts has to have the same styling? Nobody, that’s who. Does every
article in a magazine look exactly the same? No, not only because that would be boring but because each article is
unique and should be designed as such. Having complete stylistic and functional control over every Post and Page of
your site is very powerful and opens up some awesome design possibilities.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
The point of using FeedBurner is to get some statistics on how many people subscribe to your site. But what point are
statistics unless they are accurate? This plugin will redirect anyone trying to access your WordPress feed directly to
your FeedBurner feed address. Set-it-and-forget-it.
Subscribe To Comments
There have been various services in the past that have tried to consolidate all of your commenting activity in the web-
o-sphere into one place, but so far none of them have really sank their teeth in as being the “go-to” choice. Even so,
when you comment on a blog an anticipate a reply, generally you want to know about it. This plugin makes it easy to
stay current with the conversation by clicking a checkbox next to the comment form. After checking the box and
submitting a comment, you will receive an email whenever a new reply is posted on the thread. Best of all, you can
unsubscribe at any time by clicking a link in any one of the email notifications.
WP-DBManager
There is nothing more important and vital to your WordPress-powered site than the mysterious database that lives on
your server. If your entire server was destroyed, but you had a recent backup of your database, you would be OK.
Among other useful features like on-demand backups and database optimization, you can have this plugin email you
your database at set intervals.
Posts Per Page
There is only one setting in WordPress to display how many Posts to show on a page (located under Settings >
Reading). But what if it made sense to display only one post at a time on your blog’s homepage? That would mean
that your search page would also display only one post, which is dumb. This plugin allows you more fine-grained
control over how many Posts are displayed for each type of page, in-cluding search pages, category pages, archive
pages, and everything else.
Post Editor Buttons
There is a user-setting for turning off the visual editor. When you do that, instead of the rich-text editor you see when
creating posts, you just get a few buttons and see the raw HTML in the content box. The full control over formatting
that this editing mode provides is nice, but the buttons you get are fairly limited. The good news is that the Post
Editor Buttons plugin allows you to create your own buttons on the fly, which potentially could be useful for any type
of site.
All in One SEO Pack
The #1 selling point of the All-in-One SEO Pack is that it automatically generates an appropriate meta description tag
for each Posts and Pages based on their contents. These automatically generated meta descriptions control what
shows up as the descriptive text in the search-engine results.As you can imagine, these descriptions are greatly
important because they help users decide which link to click. In addition to providing this automated functionality, the
AiOSEO Pack also enables you to override the default settings and individually control the meta description, post title,
and keywords for every Post and Page on your site.As if that weren’t enough, this plugin also takes care of some
duplicate content issues by automatically formatting your page titles and implementing meta-tag canonicalization.
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