Adding Plugins to Your WordPress Blog

This post is for people who are new to WordPress and are not webmasters or computer geeks. If you have a WordPress blog that your host, or maybe a friend, installed for you and you’re looking into customizing it, read on. Steve and Aviva, this one is for you!

I will start with a general tutorial about how to add plugins followed by one about widgets widgets. Once we’re over that, I’ll do a separate post specifically about adding Facebook and Twitter widgets to your sidebar.

You folks don’t know just how lucky you are. I still remember the days when you had to hack at ugly PHP code to make changes to your WordPress sidebar. Yeah, I am THAT old. These days, everything is automated, so you don’t have to know any code in order to customize your blog.

What’s a WordPress Plugin

A plugin is a component that can be added to WordPress. It is optional and does not come with the basic software, but it is created to fit in, or plug into the application, hopefully seamlessly.

Plugins can customize your basic WordPress installation in literally thousands of different ways. You can find a huge library of plugins right here on the official WordPress site. You can download any plugin and upload it to your WordPress installation. Once you have it online it should show up in your Admin Interface under the Plugins menu where you can switch it on or off as you wish.

How to Add a WordPress Plugin to Your Blog

An Illustrated Guide for Beginners

Essentially, you have to choose your plugin, upload it to your server into the right location and unzip the files. Fortunately, the entire process is built into the latest versions of WordPress. Let me walk you through the steps:

Step 1 – Access Your Plugins Panel

On the left of your admin panel screen you’ll find the collapsible navigation menu. It has titles such as “Posts”, “Media” and so on. If you click any of them, the menu opens up to show you the options for that item. Find the one that says “Plugins” and click on it.

Step 2 – The Plugins Interface

You now see your Plugins Management screen. Here is where you see the list of all your installed plugins. You can activate or deactivate any plugin from here and tweak the settings for some of them. Your next move is to click where it says “Add New” in the Plugins menu box to your left.

Step 3 – Choose Your Plugin

From this screen you can potentially upload any plugins that you had previously downloaded elsewhere on the web and saved to your own computer. However, in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to do everything from within your WordPress installation: you can even find your plugins in here.

Just enter your search term (or the name of a specific plugin) into the form and your WordPress will search the entire plugin collection. For example, write “Twitter” in the search box and hit the “search plugins” button.

Step 4

Voila! WordPress has retrieved every Twitter-related plugin available in the collection. You can view descriptions and rating and choose the one you wish to try out.

Found something you like? Just click where it says install. For this example, I decided to try the “Twitter for WordPress” plugin. It won’t quite install it right away though, but would just bring up a pop-up window with more details:

Don’t be intimidated by the fine print. De-activating a plugin and deleting it is fairly easy. Unless your plugin is designed to do something drastic like deleting your entire database, you should be fine with giving it a try. So, go ahead, click the red button. It won’t explode (hopefully).

Step 6 – Connection Information

WordPress now asks you for your account FTP information. It needs it in order to upload the plugin for you. Don’t be shy about it – this is not a form of identity theft, just an online utility.

You need three bits of info here, your FTP hostname, your account username and your account password. Note: these are not your admin login details.

For these, you need your host. Most likely, this information can be found in the email you got from your host when your hosting account was set up. If you don’t have it – it’s time to drop them an note and ask for just these three bits of info.

Once you have them, just enter in the form and hit “Proceed”.

Step 7

This is pretty much it! WordPress can do the rest now. Go do something else for a bit. Depending on the size of the plugin, this could take a few minutes and finally show you the screen above. All that you have left to do is activate the plugin.

Note: you may encounter a problem at this stage. Do not panic (and always carry a towel, of course). If you get an error message at this page informing you that WordPress couldn’t upload the files, you are almost certainly dealing with a permissions issue. In plain English: every file and folder on your server has a set of permissions which define who can change/add anything to it. You can read more about it here. If you know nothing about this and don’t want to know anything about it then just contact your server support and ask for their help. Tell them you need to make the /wp-content/ on your domain name writable and let them take care of that for you. You would only need to do this once for all future plugin installs.

With some plugins, you may need to adjust some settings before you start using them. These should be available in one of two places -

1. The Settings menu of your Admin panel. They will show up as a new item there only after you activate the plugin.
2. The plugins management menu, right next to that plugin name.

That’s it! Everything you ever wanted to know about installing plugins in WordPress and never knew who to ask.

I plan on writing another tutorial about widgets which should complement this one and help you manage widget-related plugins too. Please leave me comments/feedback and if you found it helpful, spread the word!

Tagged as: plugins, wordpress