WORDPRESS
Michael Reed concludes his overview of setting up and maintaining a WordPress site with some finishing touches and a look at plugins.
Credit: http://wordpress.org
After installing WordPress and customising it in parts A one and two of this series, we’re ready to start extending its functionality with the plugin system. By the end of this series, you should be ready to handle every major aspect of managing a WordPress site. We’re now going to add the finishing touches so the site is ready to go on the internet for use by the general public.
Managing plugins
We’ll assume that you have a working WordPress installation that you can access via a web browser, and the WordPress installation can be located on professional hosting or installed on your own server. Last month, we customised the appearance of the site, but you don’t need to have followed any of those procedures to try out the ideas that we’re delving into this month.
Plugins are the principal mechanism for extending the functionality of your WordPress website, and there are nearly 60,000 to choose from. To begin the process of choosing and adding plugins, make sure you are signed into your WordPress website as an administrator (go to http:// [URL of website]/wp-admin). If you’re signed in but not in the Dashboard, use the link at the top-left of the window to navigate to it.
We’ll be spending a lot of time this month on the Plugins administration page, accessible from the side menu of the Dashboard. This page lists the installed plugins and also enables you to activate, deactivate and delete plugins. Deactivation is sometimes required when troubleshooting, because it enables you to eliminate a given plugin when you’re trying to track down the cause of a problem on your site. Many of the more complicated plugins also have a settings option that takes you to the settings page for that particular plugin. Other plugins add the link to their settings page to the sidebar of the Dashboard.
This page also shows which plugins have an update available; do this by clicking on Update. However, you can enable the auto-updates feature on your plugins, and you can do this per individual plugin by clicking on the Enable Auto-Updates link, but you can also carry out bulk management operations. To do this, click on the empty checkbox before the plugin name for multiple selection or click on the empty checkbox at the top or bottom of the entire list. There’s a number of actions that you can carry out that are selectable fro
