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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