Need Some Functionality? WordPress Plugins Bring Life to Your Content

So we’ve talked about how to choose your blog, install it and make it pretty. Today, we’ll dig into how to make it sparkle. Having an attractive blog with compelling content is the battle, now win the war with some thoughtful choices in functional plugins.

Plugins are mini-applications that enable you to quickly and easily add functionality to your WordPress blog. You can add things like calendars, statistical tracking, search, Flickr feeds, Twitter feeds, etc.

Installing plugins is very similar to installing themes. They are just uploaded into a different directory.

• Find the plugins that you want and download them to your local drive. Themes are typically pre-packaged as a zip file.
• Unzip the file.
• Connect to your web server via the FTP connection that you set-up when you installed WordPress.
• Navigate to the folder www\wp-content\plugins on the web server.
• Upload the entire unzipped theme folder to this directory on the web server.
• Login to WordPress. Click “Plugins”. You should see the available plugins within this window.
• Click the “Activate” link to activate the plugins that you want to use.
• If you don’t like a plugin, you can always deactivate it later.
• Plugins should come with instructions for configuring the settings. Be sure to consult these to set-up your plugins correctly.
• Some plugins can also be viewed as “widgets” in the sidebar of your blog pages. To use your widgets, login to WordPress and click “Appearance” then “Widgets”. Choose the sidebar that you want to maintain from the drop-down and then drag and drop the widgets to the area on the right. Once you save, you should see them appear on your live blog.

There are thousands of cool plugins to choose from. While you don’t want to add them all, I have a selection that I always include as a basis for all blogs that I install. Here’s my list. Feel free to add to it.

• StatPress and Google Analytics – I use both of these plugins to help me track my traffic statistics. I like StatPress because I can see a snapshot of my traffic on the fly. Google Analytics gives me more detailed stats. Google Analyticator enables the addition of the GA JavaScript code to your blog posts.
• Twitter Tools – This handy tools allows you to auto-post your blog posts to your Twitter account. It also enables you to feed your Twitter posts into your blog sidebar.
• Broken Link Checker – Allows you to quickly check for broken links within blog posts and maintain them.
• All-in-One SEO Pack - Enables you to easily optimize your blog posts for search engine optimization.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a dynamic sitemap that is easily indexed by Google and other search engines.
• No Self Pings – Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own website.
• ShareThis – There are many social bookmarking plugins available. I prefer ShareThis as it gives the reader the option to post to many different communities.
• wp-cache – Quick caching application that makes your blog faster and more responsive.

Here are a few other plugins that you might find handy, although I don’t think they are necessary for an effective blog.

• Events Calendar
  
• Google Calendar Plugin – If you want to add your Google calendar to your blog.
• WP-Polls – Down and dirty app for adding polls to your posts.
• WordPress Flickr Manager – Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts.
• Flickr Photo Album – This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts.
• flickrRSS – Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the week with moving from a WordPress.com blog to WordPress.org and upgrading!

Tagged as: wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress widgets