What are plugins? How do they work? Where can I find plugins for WordPress? Must have plugins. What they are good for and how they work.

Chapter 1: What are plugins?

Chapter 2: How do they work?
2.1 How to install plugins
2.2 How to activate plugins
2.3 How to use them
2.4 How to update a plugin

Chapter 3: Plugin sources

Chapter 4: Must have plugins and how they work
4.1 Raw HTML
4.2 WP post columns
4.3 WP eStore
4.4 Add post footer
4.5 Redirection
4.6 Plugins against spam comments

Chapter 1: What are plugins?

Plugins are add-ons which extend the capabilities of a basic application (ex. WordPress). They allow you to add features and easily make things with your WordPress which aren’t possible or are much more complicated without the plugin. Most of these extensions are developed by users of WordPress.

The good thing about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for almost everything. However this can also be a bad thing. There are thousands of plugins and sometimes 10 or 20 plugins to perform the same action. This makes it pretty hard to find a plugin which does what you’re looking for or find out which of those 10 or 20 plugins does the best job at what you want to do. Sometimes to me it’s better and easier to use good old fashioned coding instead of plugins.

Chapter 2: How do they work?

That’s really easy. No need to know any coding or other stuff.

2.1 How to install plugins

There are basically two ways to install Plugins.

The first way (the easiest) is to:
1. Login to your administration panel
2. Go to Plugins, Add New
3. In the searchfield type a keyword of what you want to do (ex. Columns) and hit “Search plugins”
4. Choose a plugin and on the right side you see “Install”, click it
5. A window will popup with informations. There hit “Install Now”
6. To activate the plugin hit “Activate plugin”

The other way is:
1. Search for a Plugin on the web
2. Download it and uncompress the .zip file
3. Upload the resulting file or folder to the
YourWordPress/wp-content/plugins/
folder.

2.2 How to activate plugins

To activate plugins login to your admin area
Go to Plugins, Installed and activate the plugin you want

2.3 How to use them

Most plugins have tags to call certain functions.
Raw HTML for example has [*RAW][/RAW*] (without *) and you need to post the codes between them and then they work.
Which tags you need to use is usually described on the plugin’s official page.

Other plugins add a page to your admin panel.
For example Add post footer adds a page under “Settings” called “Post footer” and there you need to set all the preferences you want.
Other plugins add pages under “Appearance” or “Tools”.

Other plugins work in other ways. Check the plugin’s official page to know how they work.

2.4 How to update a plugin

When a new version of a plugin is available a red dot with a number in it will show up near “Plugins” on your administration area.

Once you hit the button and get redirected to the page with the list of all your plugins you see which plugin needs to be updated since there will be a message displaying.

Hit “upgrade automatically” and WordPress will install the new version of the plugin.

You’re done.

Chapter 3: Plugin sources

The biggest source of Plugins certainly is

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

or Plugins, Add New on your site’s admin.

However not all the plugins appear there so it’s a good idea to search Google for a plugin to do what you want to do.

Chapter 4: Must have plugins. What they are good for and how they work.

There are a few plugins which everyone using WordPress should have because they are needed to achieve basic things. Here’s a list of Plugins I found to be extremely needed:

4.1 Raw HTML

I think this is the most needed plugin ever. This plugin allows you to post any HTML code into your WordPress pots. Whenever on my website you come across this message at the top of the page

For this page you will need the Raw HTML plugin.
Visit the Plugins FAQ for more informations.

you will need to have this plugin installed and you need to post all the HTML codes you find on the page between

tags. Hence:

(without *) and you’re done.

4.2 WP post columns

As the title says it allows you to write a post in multiple columns.
All you need to do is add the following code

(without *) of course you can change the heading

to whatever you want or delete it if not needed and add more columns (more info on the plugin’s official page).

4.3 WP eStore

The WP eStore plugin allows you to sell digital and non-digital contents on your WordPress site. You will find more informations about this plugin and how it works on my E-Commerce and business solutions FAQ

4.4 Add post footer

This plugin allows you to add a general footer to all your posts.
Settings are made in you admin panel under “Settings” and “Post Footer”.
Add your codes and text to the “Optional text” text box.

Note that this adds the footer to all the posts not to the whole WordPress as Add to footer.

4.5 Redirection

Say you have a page which gets a lot of visitors with links linking to it from all over the web and want to change its address. Then you could use the Redirection plugin to redirect people from the old URL to the new one. Another idea is linking back and forth between various blogs using a page with a redirect on it as a link.

Once you installed the plugin go to Tools, Redirection and you will see this:



Replace http://oldurl.com with the old URL, type the new URL you want people to get redirected to instead of http://newurl.com and hit “Add Redirection”. That’s it.

4.6 Plugins against spam comments

There are two plugins to use to keep spam from your website's comments:
- Akismet
- WP-reCAPTCHA
best is to use them both together. More info about these plugins in my WordPressFAQ.org E-Book.