Posts Tagged ‘plugins’

So – what are “plugins”?

Basically, they add functionality to your WordPress blog or website. There are thousands of them available, all created by elves who love to share their geek creations with the world. (OK – so they’re not elves, but the plugin programmers love that WordPress is open source and add what they can to the collective!). And while they may be free (mostly), if the added functionality is useful for you, it is a good thing to make a donation to that plugins creator, if such an option exists.

The first plugins that you will come across are the Akismet spam filter and Hello Dolly. The first is a welcome standard that we urge you to activate and use, the second is pure frivolity from the WordPress creators and you can either use it or delete!

The way we recommend you approach adding more plugins is to source them from the WordPress.com site (ideally) and to install and activate one at a time. Sometimes plugins can conflict with each other or with a theme – if your WordPress suddenly dies, the first thing we look at is the plugins.

Probably the best way to go about choosing a plugin is to first of all identify what you need, so for this post I have decided I want a cool twitter plugin.

You can review the plugins available on the WordPress website, in which case the first place to go to is WordPress Plugins and search for what you want – in this instance ‘twitter’ and I’ve decided to sort by Highest Rated and after looking at a few I’ve chosen WP to Twitter as it looks pretty interesting.

To add a new plugin, from your Dashboard go to Plugins > Add New – here I am going to search for the specific plugin chosen ‘wp to twitter’ and once the search results come up click on install to the right of the description.

The full description and information will come up but as I’ve already looked into this plugin I am ready to click on Install Now, it shouldn’t take long to install and once done you’ll get a confirmation to show it’s installed and also asking if you want to activate it.

Plugins cannot be used on your WordPress until they are activated – Plugins, Installed and activate (an option under the plugin’s description) - once you have done this you either have to sort out their settings or go to widgets and pop them into the side bar, see WordPress Widgets, What, Why How Post.

Now I’ve activated WP to Twitter I will need to give it more information, as no extra menu appeared in my dashboard sidebar menu I’ve had a look in Settings and it is there at the bottom of that menu. Your plugins options, etc will be available from the Dashboard menu – either within Settings, Tools, or perhaps with a menu item of its own.

So, now I’ve installed the plugin, activated and popped the required information into the settings. That’s it, all done!

While I am in my dashboard I’ve also decided I no longer need some plugins that I had previously installed so time to delete some. To do this simply click on plugins and here you’ll see a list of what you have, if you simply don’t want to use a plugin for now click on deactivate, if you really didn’t get on with that plugin and no longer wish to use it click on delete.

Hopefully having read this you’ll see that there really isn’t much effort or geeky stuff to be done to get a plugin working on your site and if you need help just leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

If you are unsure of what you should have and would like us to give your WordPress a healthcheck click here to book a session with the blogmistress

I’ve never been one for instant messengers and avoided them until a few months ago when I was tempted with a new phone and that was it, love at first skype!

Not a great one for talking on the phone, this suited me down to the ground – free messages from my mobile and also should I feel the need, I can call for free too.  Skype on my computer has been a great success too, right now I have the chat box open with my latest conversation with our blogmistress!

I thought this plugin would be great for anyone who is a skype addict, like me, or if you want your readers/customers to be able to contact you quickly and easily.

The only thing that you have to remember to do after installing, activating and setting it up is go into your skype privacy settings and make sure “Allow my status to be shown on the web” is checked, otherwise you will always appear offline.

I suppose the only downside to this is that you will need to make sure your skype status is up to date, but if you are like me I am always online unless I turn my phone off!

This plugin comes with plenty of display options, the one I am showing you is every option available but you can just have an online/offline button showing.

Here’s the link for more info and download – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/skype-online-status/

Recently I’ve come across a few blogs that use a lot of photos in their posts and to be honest, not too well, so I decided to have a dig around for a cool image viewer for WordPress and Shutter Reloaded is the plugin I think would be invaluable if you have images you want to share.

To try it out I have used the adorable ‘Ladder family’ on my site to show off this lightbox plugin (basically where you do not need to leave the page to view the images), of course you could visit Shutter Reloaded to see it works there!

What’s great about this plugin is that it’s quick and easy to install, there are five display options to suit most sites and it’s all very simple to customise too.

To download visit – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shutter-reloaded/

A friend of mine asked about the TweetMeme button used by a number of active WordPress bloggers.  And indeed I’ve been meaning to install this one myself, so a great reminder – thanks Su.

There are ever more Twitter plugins and something shiny and new almost every day.  But this particular button is nice – simple to set up, you can install it directly from your WordPress dashboard (Plugins, Add New and search for TweetMeme – then Install there and then) and when your readers see something so easy to pass on your brilliant posts, they’re likely to just click the button – perhaps more especially when a few have already done so – I am sure there’s a psychology associated with seeing that others have already deemed your blog worthy and adding their “voice”.

Anyway – even if you don’t use Twitter yourself, your readers may well and if they like what they read will want to share – make it easy for them!

Today I merrily set about the latest upgrade to WordPress – just from 2.8.1 to 2.8.2 – and learned a valuable lesson or two (in good time for the next upgrade to 2.8.3 which was hot on its heels!)

Part way through the upgrade, using the WP-Automatic-Upgrade plugin (which is no longer necessary, but we’ll deal with that later) – everything went white – the screen was blank.  And the website too – the infamous “white wall” that is referred to in such instances.

Now I know that a compatibility issue with the plugins can be the most likely cause of problems – that’s generally the first thing to look at.  So using my trusty FireFTP to connect, I renamed the plugins folder to explugins, creating a new one of the original name, with nothing in it (this is a quick way to disable all plugins if you cannot get to the WP control panel).  Still no joy!  So then I thought I’d see what the server logs might have to say about it all – only to find that I’d used up all of the diskspace! Aha!  Now this is a website that includes a shop, so indeed needs it’s space and I’d been a bit thorough in my server housekeeping, it seems.

The immediate action was to increase the space available, which of course did not resolve the WordPress upgrade issue – that would have been too easy!  What had happened is some of the files had been upgraded/uploaded, and some had not.  The only thing for it was to manually upload the new version of WordPress – downloading, upzipping and then replacing all the files (except those in the wp-content folder, of course – that’s where all the theme stuff is kept and I did not fancy re-doing all of that again!).

Now – all upgrades will include the following as standard, instead of thinking that I am immune from such mini-disasters!

Always, before you action your WordPress upgrade, go to your plugins, select them all, choose the “deactivate” option and Apply.

Then you can upgrade your WordPress, hopefully with no hiccups (that’s a whole other blog post!), and when done you can pop back to your Plugins section and activate each, one by one.

And