Book Image

WordPress Top Plugins

By : Brandon Corbin
Book Image

WordPress Top Plugins

By: Brandon Corbin

Overview of this book

Bloggers, authors, coders, photographers, moms, dads, big companies, small companies, and even kids use WordPress to manifest their personas online. WordPress is used in every market, in every country, and continues to grow everyday. This explosive growth and international open source love affair was ignited the day WordPress announced the simple idea of a 'plugin'A WordPress plugin is a collection of files (PHP, javascript, css) that creates a small feature or modification to your WordPress blog. WordPress Top Plugins will teach you to add these plugins to an already built base WordPress site, and customize them where applicable.This book will walk you through finding and installing the best plugins for generating and sharing content, for building communities and reader base, and for generating real advertising revenue.There is literally a plugin for almost anything you want to achieve in WordPress.This book will show you how plugins work, and more importantly, how to install and activate them on your blog without you having to touch a single line of code, unless of course, you want to.Content is king, and it’s pretty hard to generate. This book will cover some of the best plugins available on WordPress to generate unique and dynamic content.Once you have your blog loaded chock full of juicy content, you will learn how to turn your blog in to an overnight sensation by helping your readers to share it, using tools to retweet, post on Facebook, and so on.This book will teach you how to build a community with one single killer plugin, namely, BuddyPress—the best community building plugin available for WordPress.Once you are through with plugin basics, content, and building a community, this book will show you how to generate revenue! It will cover the top plugins for turning your blog into a money making machine!This book will also cover plugins focused on tweaking and perfecting your blog’s overall look and feel, and functionality.Nothing helps build a powerful online blog brand than a horde of talented writers to contribute their ideas and content – as well as their social network. This book will cover a bunch of plugins that will make working with multiple authors easy, efficient, and effective.Last but not the least, it will cover the best plugins for ensuring that your blog is secure, the database is running optimally, and in the case of an emergency, you have a full backup copy of your blog.While most plugins in this book are focused on a blog’s frontend, this book will also cover some great 'non-public' facing plugins that make our lives so much easier and make your WordPress site a productive powerhouse.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
WordPress Top Plugins
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Manual installation


If you find that the Automatic Install feature isn't compatible with your web-hosting provider, then manual installation is the next best option. In this section, we will cover how to do it on both a Mac and PC.

At the highest level, manually installing a plugin will require you to connect to your web server, locate the WordPress plugins directory, and transfer a plugin that you have downloaded to your computer using either FTP or SFTP. Once you connect to your web server, you will need to locate your WordPress Plugin folder, which will most likely be in wp-content/plugins.

Manually installing a plugin with a Mac

If you do not currently have an FTP/SFTP application on your Mac, then I highly recommend Cyberduck, the best free FTP/SFTP client available for the Mac. You can download a free copy of Cyberduck from http://cyberduck.ch/.

After launching the Open Connection, located in the upper-right hand side of the Applications window, the following screenshot will ask for the specifics on connecting to your website. This information can all be usually found in your web host's control panel or the initial setup e-mail you received when you created your hosting account.

  • Connection Type: FTP, SFTP FTP-SSL. Which connection you should use depends on what your web-hosting provider supports. Almost all web hosts offer the less secure FTP protocol, but if you can, I would suggest connecting with SFTP (Secure FTP).

  • Server: the domain name or IP address of your website.

  • Username: your FTP account username.

  • Password: your FTP account password.

Click Connect.

If everything connects properly, you should see a list of files that exist on your website.

Browse to your plugin directory located at wp-content/plugins. This folder is where we will be putting any new plugin we want to install.

To save time, you can create a bookmark in Cyberduck, and save it on your desktop or Dock so you are only a click away from your plugin folder. To create a bookmark, select New Bookmark from Cyberduck's Action drop-down menu.

Transferring a plugin

Once you have downloaded the plugin to your computer, you will need to move it over to your website. To do this, we will move the plugin (most likely a .ZIP archive) to your website's FTP directory. Using Cyberduck, we will extract the ZIP file on the server. Extracting archives on the server can save significant time, as we are only uploading one file opposed to the hundreds some plugins can contain.

Now that we have the plugin's ZIP archive in the plugins directory, we need to expand it or unzip it. Cyberduck offers a super quick way for us to expand archived files like ZIP, TAR, and Gzip by right-clicking on your plugin and selecting Expand Archive.

Manually installing a plugin on Windows

For Windows users, I suggest the open source application called WinSCP—this great utility will allow you to connect to your server by FTP, SFTP, and FTP-SSL. To download WinSCP, visit http://winscp.net.

Once you have downloaded and installed WinSCP, launch the application, and you will be presented with the following screenshot:

  • Host Name: The domain name or IP address of your website

  • Port number: Leave this field as it is, as it will be set when we select a protocol in the next couple of steps

  • Username: Your FTP account's username

  • Password: Your FTP account's password

Next click Login.

If everything connects properly, you should see the following screenshot, which will contain all of the files that exist on your website, in a similar fashion that Windows Explorer does.

Most website providers keep all of the website files in a specific directory; our goal is to find this folder and proceed to wp-content/plugins. If you do not see wp-content, then look for a folder like htdocs, httpdocs, or www. Once you locate this folder, inside you should find the folders and files that make up your WordPress installation.

Once inside the plugins folder, we want to create a bookmark so that we can access this folder super quickly next time.