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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 216
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
WordPress Top Plugins
WordPress Top Plugins
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: September 2010
Production Reference: 1150910
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849511-40-7
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by John Quick ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
Brandon Corbin
Reviewer
M. Liz Allyn
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer
Development Editor
Mayuri Kokate
Technical Editors
Rupal Pravin Joshi
Manasi Poonthottam
Copy Editor
Leonard D’Silva
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Aanchal Kumar
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherjee
Project Coordinator
Vincila Colaco
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Brandon Corbin is an accomplished web enthusiast with a background in advertising, and has used his knowledge of design and marketing to create websites for many of the Fortune 500. For more than a decade, he has applied his passions to several industries—including radio, real estate, pharmaceuticals, recruiting, and e-Commerce—with an obsessive attention to creating a smooth user experience.
I would like to thank my wonderful wife Emily and my awesome children—Maddy and Ethan, all of whom put up with my absence during the writing of this book. You guys mean the world to me.
About the Reviewer
M. Liz Allyn has been interested in computers since her high school days, and minored in Computer Science and Math while finishing her BS in Chemistry. After earning a Master of Science in Analytical Chemistry, she worked as a development scientist, group leader, and senior quality assurance officer. These real jobs in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries taught her that she hated cubicles.
To Liz, the fun part was teaching the technicians and working in the laboratories with the instrumentation. Her most interesting lab project was programming a robot in a pharmaceutical lab to prepare samples for chemical analysis. Sample preparation time was reduced by 75 percent, which allowed the technicians to attend to other tasks.
In between teaching assignments Liz taught herself html, became a certified webmaster, and learned to use PHP and MySQL in developing websites. She has been blogging with WordPress for four years now.
Among a few websites that she keeps active Liz likes to share tips about WordPress and the underlying HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL with her readers at computeraxe.com. When she’s not helping clients deal with their website or database issues, Liz enjoys writing about plants and sharing pictures of nature at her WordPress blog, wildeherb.com.
Preface
WordPress has thousands of plugins available—most of them don't work as advertised, are out dated, or simply don't work. Wordpress Top Plugins takes you through the process of finding the very best plugins to build a powerful and engaging website or blog.
With access to over 10,000 plugins, finding the ones that actually work as advertised is becoming exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Wordpress Top Plugins removes this time-consuming act by delivering only the best free plugins available on WordPress today.
Each chapter tackles common objectives most websites need to achieve, such as: building a community, sharing content, working with multiple authors, and securing your website. With exact search terms, screenshots, and complexity levels, you'll find exactly what you need to quickly install and setup each of the plugins that fits your technical skills.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Plugin Basics covers the basics in finding, choosing, and installing plugins on your WordPress powered blog.
Chapter 2, Generating Content will expose the top plugins for dynamically creating content on your blog.
Chapter 3, Sharing Content will help you turn your blog in to a content sharing machine by making it easy for your readers and yourself to promote your blogs content across the entire social web.
Chapter 4, Style and Function covers the best WordPress plugins for increasing your blog's usability, beauty, and fun.
Chapter 5, Building a Community with BuddyPress shows you, step by step, how to turn your blog into a full blown social network.
Chapter 6, Generate Revenue will show you the best plugins for creating on-going automated revenue for your website.
Chapter 7, Working with Multiple Authors highlights the best plugins for websites with multiple writers.
Chapter 8, Security and Maintenance covers plugins that help maintain a healthy and secure WordPress blog.
Chapter 9, Power Admin covers the plugins that will turn you in to a WordPress administrating juggernaut.
Chapter 10, Time for Action covers some of the best external resources for continuing your WordPress education.
What you need for this book
WordPress 2.8 or higher.
Who this book is for
Regardless if this is your first-time working with WordPress, or you're a seasoned WordPress coding ninja—WordPress Top Plugins will walk you through finding and installing the best plugins for generating and sharing content, building communities and reader base, and generating real advertising revenue.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can also include [blogurl], [blogtitle], and [backtime]; each will be replaced with the actual information when a user visits the site."
A block of code is set as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail <[email protected]>.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Note
Downloading the example code for this book
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
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Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
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We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Plugin Basics
There is literally a plugin for almost anything you want to achieve in WordPress. A quick glance at the WordPress Plugin Directory will show you just how many options are available. Admin, Ajax, Comments, Google, Posts, Sidebar, Twitter, and Widgets are all so very well represented that finding the right one can be a full-time gig. Twitter alone has over 200 plugins dedicated to pulling, pushing, and searching through its masses of data. However, before we can auto-tweet a post, or dynamically interleave links to Amazon products, we have to comprehend how a plugin works, and more importantly, how to install and activate them on our blog.
Every plugin is written in PHP (an awesome open source programming language) and are usually accompanied by various other internet file types such as CSS, Javascript, XML, images, JSON files, and so on. Thanks to WordPress's open architecture, developers can inject their plugin's code throughout your blog without you having to touch a single line of code, unless, of course, you want to.
In this chapter, we cover the following:
Safety first
It's very much imperative to understand that plugins have the ability to affect virtually every part of your blog. If a plugin developer was feeling decidedly evil, he/she could create mayhem to your website with a few tiny lines of code. Make sure you trust the recommending source that's promoting a plugin before you install it.
I personally recommend and reference almost exclusively throughout this book http://Wordpress.org/extend/plugins, the official Wordpress.org Plugin Directory. This self-policing community often provides very valuable and detailed pros and cons for almost every plugin, with the ability to sort by popularity, rank, and date released.
Automatic install versus manual install
WordPress offers two main methods to install a plugin. One is WordPress' own baked-in Plugin Installer (results may vary) and the other is the manual method using SFTP or FTP. WordPress's automatic install makes life significantly easier, depending on your webhosting provider, however it might not be available for your hosting package. If this is the case, and your site doesn't support automatic install, you can still manually install plugins using FTP.
Honestly, if your host doesn't support automatic installation, you should seriously consider changing web hosts. The ability to automatically install WordPress updates, plugin updates, and new plugins is one of the reasons WordPress is great; the process is hard enough without letting things become outdated.
Automatic plugin installation
Out of the box, WordPress comes with its own plugin app store, which allows you to search through a huge library of free plugins. To access WordPress's built-in plugin browser, click Add New under the Plugins menu. Once inside the plugin app store, you have the option to either search by keyword or name, browse by popular tags, or see the newest plugins added.
After you search or browse by a tag, you will be presented with a list of plugins that are available for you to install from WordPress's Plugin Directory. Each will list its version number (the later the version, the more stable, usually), a community rating, a more detailed description, and an Install link.
Now is a good time to remember that you are dealing with FREE software; what you are about to install will most likely offer NO guarantees or warrantees. Never forget that a plugin runs server-side code on your website, which means that a plugin can access your database(s), can read, write, and delete files, and even send e-mails from your domain.
Note
Please read the reviews and listen to what the community has to say about the plugin you are about to install.
If a plugin is rated with 1 star by a lot of the community, it would be wise to keep your distance. But if a plugin has been installed 40,000 times and has a 3+ star rating, it's fair to say that it is trustworthy.
Clicking Install on this screen will not actually install the plugin; instead, it will launch a window that provides even more details about the specific plugin.
Plugin detail
The plugin details pop-up window provides you with a deeper look into the plugin you are about to install.
The important areas to pay attention to are as follows:
Many times, plugins require no additional setup or configuration, while others need a bit more tooling around to get running. If the developer provided Installation instructions, make sure to look them over to ensure that you're not getting in over your head. If you are happy with what you see, click the big red Install Now button.
Downloading, unpacking, installing
If, after clicking the Install Now button, you make it through all of the steps and see Activate Plugin, you're in for a treat! Congratulations, your web host supports the Automatic Install of WordPress.
Activating the plugin
While you have installed the plugin, you aren't done yet! We still need to activate it.
Once you click Activate Plugin, WordPress will go through the process of turning the plugin on. Depending on what the plugin does, this process could include creating new database tables or setting up new folders and files.
Once activated, you still might be required to provide more information before the plugin can run properly. For example, if you're installing Alex King's Twitter Tools plugin, you'll need to provide your Twitter credentials before it can do any of its magic.
Connection Information required
If, when you click Install Now, you see the Connection Information form, like the image in the next screenshot, then we have a little more work to do before we can start installing plugins automatically. However, you still have a chance to have "Automatic Install" if your hosting-provider allows it. Follow the next few steps to see if it's still a possibility. Don't worry if the next steps fail; we will still be able to install plugins quickly, just not as quickly as the "Automatic Install".
In this window, provide your Hostname, which will most likely be just your domain name. For example: icorbin.com (minus the http), your FTP username, and its password. Some installations might have FTP and SFTP for the connection type; if SFTP is available and it works when you click proceed, use it.
If your web host doesn't support this method, then we need to attack the problem without WordPress and instead use our own FTP client.
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.
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:
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
