Hi, this is Chris Marciello from VitaminCM.com and today I'm going to talk about using plug ins to extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog. So you go to the dashboard of your of the blog that I'm using to demonstrate this tutorial of the blog that I've been using to demonstrate this series.
Now I need to go over here to the plug in section. If you click on the plug in section you’ll see all the plug ins that came installed with the default Wordpress installation and there's only two. One of them Hello Dolly is pretty much useless, so what I'm going to do is to delete and that will leave me with the only one that comes with the default configuration, that’s Askimet. Askimet is a spam protection plug in. it helps you filter out spam comment on your articles.
So what I wanted to do is activate it, but if you notice here it says it’s almost rendering you need to enter your Wordpress API key. So if I click on these, there's a field to enter it and if you want to get it. you have to go register at wp.com. and if you click the link that I'm hovering over, it will give you the information to get your Wordpress API key. I'm just going to place my name and say update.
So now, this is turned on and I will be able to protect my blog from spam. If it I go back here to plug ins, you’ll see that this plug in is install. If I wanted to deactivate it, I could.
Now if you want to get some more plug ins, if I click here on Add New. It allows me to search on Wordpress site to find different plug ins that I might want. They're group by tag. There's feature popular and things like that. If I click on popular, you’ll see a couple of very popular. There's All in One OCO Pack, Google Site Maps, Askimet, so a whole bunch.
So I'm going to use this All in One OCO Pack. So if I go here and click install. This pop window comes up and just click install now and it will install it on my blog. Now I need to activate it, so if I click activate, it will be activated.
Now, there's some configuration that you need to do where you can go to the Admin page, it’s a special page set up. So if I click that, you’d see different things. so I could put in title of my blog. The descriptions, some extra keywords, decide how my blog post titles to be formatted, things like that.
Really handy, it adds some nice search engine, automization features to your blog. I'm going to go back to my plug ins page and click Add New. The ones that most people use are the WPSuperCash. So search for that, and here it is. And what this does is it caches some of your pages on your site so that you're not constantly clearing the database to render those pages. If you're ever get hit with a heavy load of traffic on your site, this really helps your site to function more quickly under a heavy thrasher.
So I'm going to click install, install now and activate it. now if I go to the blog in Admin page here, I can go turn this on. Send a bunch of other different options and click update status. Now this is working to.
So I want to look at a couple of other plug ins. This plug in that I'm using on my site, VitaminCM.com, its WP Greet Box. This is really handy, what it does is when users come to your site. they come from Google search or from Dig or Delicious or someplace like that. They ask them if they want to subscribe to your blogs. So I'm going to click install, install now.
Once you install WP Greet, it work to help people to sign up for RSS feed or Twitter feed or Facebook feeds or something like that. So you see it work on my site right now, VitaminCM.com. so if I Googled for a particular aid at this, it says welcome Googler. If you find this page, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed or updates on this topic. It knows where you came from and it gives you a little targeted message. Which is pretty helpful.
So this is some of the ways that you can get plug ins installed which are point and click. Now if you had another blog where your using a bunch of plug ins, you can also load them on to your server using FTP. If I go over here to my FTP application, you’ll notice I'm connected to my server and here are a bunch of plug ins that I have on my hard drive. If you went to your Wordpress configurations, it’s in Word WP content, plug ins where all your plug ins go. If I came over here and found one that I wanted to use, so let’s say Google Site Map generator. I can just drag it over here and drop it. and when it finishes, you’ll notice that the folder is here on my server. And if I come over here to my plug ins page and click it, you’ll notice Google XML site maps plug in is available. And one of the really nice things it does, this is an older version, it says that it’s out of date. So I can just click on this and it automatically goes out to the Wordpress server and gets the latest version of plug in.
So that’s it on plug ins.