Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Finding Plug-Ins
The process of finding worthwhile plug-ins for your blog is very similar to finding the right theme
for your blog, but the thinking that goes into your choice can be radically different. Themes are
mostly about presenting a face to the world; selecting a theme is the way to define a look for your
online presence.
Plug-ins are all about functionality and automation; selecting a plug-in or set of plug-ins goes a long
way to defining what you want to do with your online presence. Basically, you need to decide how
much time and energy you want to spend on your blog site. What blog-related tasks do you enjoy
doing, and what would you rather not think about? Do you want to have control over every aspect
of your site, tweaking settings every day until the system works exactly the way you want it? Do
you prefer having a system that takes care of all the administrative tasks behind the scenes, mak-
ing it as easy as possible for you focus on creating blog content? What is the next cool thing you
can add to make visitors become readers, and readers become a community? When you have
answers to these questions, you can start looking for plug-ins to help you realize that part of the
vision.
In this section, we'll walk through the process of finding the plug-ins you need, once you've
decided what to look for.
Finding and Installing Plug-Ins from the Directory
As with themes, the easiest way to find and install WordPress plug-ins is through the Add New
page in the Administration page Plug-ins section of your WordPress blog. This page integrates the
WordPress Plugin Directory into your WordPress installation.
As of this writing, the Plugin Directory hosts over 7,000 plug-
ins. From the Dashboard, click Plug-ins and then click Add
New. The screen offers many ways of discovering plug-ins (as
shown in Figure 13.1):
note
Find the Plugin Directory on the
web at http://wordpress.org/
extend/plugins.
Standard search, by Term (keyword), Author, or Tag
Click an item in the tag cloud below the Search window to see plug-ins tagged with the term.
As with the Tag Cloud sidebar widget, the bigger the text, the more frequent the appearance.
Thus, in Figure 13.2, the Post and Widget tags have the most available plug-ins.
Browse among the Featured, Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plug-ins in the directory by
using the links at the top of the screen.
Unlike the Free Themes Directory, the Featured and Popular plug-ins do not track each other quite
so consistently. This, perhaps, reflects a possible divide between the development team and the
users over which plug-ins are the most valuable, but more likely that users better know what they
want. Defining a valuable theme is a much more subjective process than looking for software that
can help you reach your goals.
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