What are WordPress Plugins good for?

Links from this post about WordPress plugins

• Search for available plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory
• Begin learning to create new plugins with WordPress Developer Documentation

Transcript for “What are WordPress Plugins good for?”

Hi, this is Paul Kaiser for WordPressCity.com. Today I’m going to give you some clue about Plugins for your WordPress website.

What is a Plugin?

What exactly is a Plugin? Well, in broad terms, a Plugin adds functionality to your site. I know that seems kind of vague, but plugins might add a ton of features, or they might add just a few small features — that all depends on what you need. The point is, a Plugin adds more functionality than what the core WordPress installation gives you.

Manage Plugins page

Here we are on the ‘Manage Plugins’ page of cusnews.com — the site we’ve been using for most of these screencasts. It’s listing the Plugins that are currently installed and whether or not they are activated. But first, I want to give you an example of a few powerful Plugins that are available to you.

Examples of useful Plugins

Here’s a great one: ‘Google Analyticator.’ This Plugin helps you track your website usage with Google Analytics. It’s a really great tool to find out what’s going on with your website.

I’ve got another example here. ‘Publish to Facebook.’ This one makes it really easy to publish a link to your new Posts right on Facebook — right out of your blog. You don’t have to go visit Facebook to make that happen.

‘All in One SEO Pack.’ That helps you make your site ‘Search Engine Optimized.’ That can be really handy for getting your site found.

‘Search Unleashed.’ This helps greatly improve the search funcionality on your WordPress website.

Example of enhancing a site with a Plugin

How about — let’s show an example — let’s get back to the Paul’s website. Let’s show an example. Here, I don’t have any special Plugins activated for images, and I have this ‘Good Food News’ Post right here, it’s kind of fake, but those images look yummy.

Well, that looks nice, and if I click on a picture — okay, this is the standard functionality — I see a bigger version of the picture on the page. But I’ve seen some sites that have a lot fancier functionality than that.

So I went and I installed ‘Lightbox Plus,’ which is a Plugin that enhances the way images are shown. Okay, so I hit ‘Activate.’ Under ‘Appearance,’ you’ll see — a lot of Plugins will have an ‘Options’ panel. Here it is for ‘Lightbox Plus.’ I’m not going to go through that — we’ll do that later, but I want to show you what happens.

Now, ‘Lightbox Plus’ has added new functions. I’m going to reload the page. Well now, if I click on an image — look what happens! I have this nice shadowbox that came up here, and I can actually scroll through it, kind of like a little image gallery — all the images that are in this post. So that’s one example of what some Plugins can do for you.

Where to find Plugins

Well, now you might be thinking, ‘Great, I want to check out some of these Plugins that are available, so where do I find them?’ Well, the first place to check is on wordpress.org/extend/plugins. This is where a ton of Plugins are available — freely available, I might add — for you to install. If they are on here, there will be ratings for them, they’re going to be easy to download and install — it’s really a good place to start.

Not all Plugins are free

Now, I have to let you know that some developers make Plugins and they sell them. You’re not going to find those here in this Plugin directory. These Plugins are all free, open source versions of Plugins.

Making your own plugins

Okay — can you make your own Plugins? You can. I can tell you it is not for the faint of heart. Or, if you don’t know PHP or MySQL you will have a lot to learn, but right here, again on codex.wordpress.org there is some really good Plugin development guidelines — places to get started if you wanted to develop your own Plugin.

Installing Plugins

How do I install Plugins? Well, we’ll get in to that later in a different tutorial. I hope this has helped you understand what Plugins are for with your WordPress website.