WordPress Plugins:
WP Plugins are a way to extend the functionality of WordPress. They allow you to add features that are not in the core of WP. There are many developers out there writing code for WP to do things the original code doesn’t cover. Some of the functions that people have written pertain to backups, social media, facebook integration, analytics, and much more. You can find new plugins by going to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ or by clicking “Add New” on the screenshot.
I have a few plugins that I can’t live without. They are listed below along with a short description of what they do.
BackupBuddy* – Backup and restore and migrate plugin for wordpress. This is a purchase version. Backups are important. Although in all the years that I’ve been running wordpress (probably 7 years, and 10 sites), I’ve never used one of my backups. But I believe in backups and always do backups.
WordPress Database Backup – (free / donate) Backup to email plugin. It isn’t as fully featured as backupbuddy, and that’s why I moved to backupbuddy. But I’ve used this for years and it does work. You’ll need to know someone that can restore it though, if something happens to your blog. This only backs up your database, and not the files that you’ve uploaded. The files that are uploaded are all the photos. If you want to be able to restore your entire site, photos and all, this is not the plugin.
Easy Recipe – (free / donate) This is what I am using to format the recipes on this blog. It makes it really simple to get it in the correct format for google.
Feedburner Form – (free / donate) This allows people to subscribe to your blog and get updates via email. It does take a little patience to configure this to work. (hint google the error message)
Google Analyticator – (free / donate) This is used to put google analytics on all the pages of the blog. There are several different versions by several different people, and for the most part they all work about the same. I just chose this one.
Google XML Sitemaps – (free / donate) This plugin generates XML sitemaps, duh, for google. This is important for google webmaster tools, as well as seo. It tells google what pages you have and where they are.
Quick Cache – (free / donate) Speeds up the blog by caching the pages and posts. If you have a ton of traffic, the site won’t have to generate the same thing over and over. It just ponies up what it already built.
Social Sharing Toolkit – (free / donate) Enables the facebook, twitter, linked in, etc. sharing buttons on each post. I have mine configured to put them at the bottom of each post, just before the comments.
Spam Free WordPress – (free / donate) This blocks spam from comments. It seems to work very well. Ever since I implemented this one, I’ve gotten rid of Askimet.
Starting Your Own Blog Resources:
Here are a few pages of how to start your own blog. I originally had this in 3 parts, but decided it would be better broken down to more specific steps. I’ve also added a few other resources pages, such as camera and lighting pages, as well as general technology pages. These pages are most of the general steps in starting your own blog.
| WordPress Pages | ||
|---|---|---|
| WP Part 1 – Domain Names | WP Part 2 – Hosting | WP Part 3 – WordPress (installation) |
| WP Part 4 – Configure WP | WP Part 5 – Themes | WP Part 6 – Plugins |
| WP Part 7 – Widgets | WP Part 8 – Pages and Menus | WP Part 9 – Posts and Categories |
**DISCLAIMER: THERE MAY BE AFFILIATE LINKS ON THESE PAGES. If you buy from these vendors, I earn a small commission from them. Please support me by purchase with these links.
