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Installing Plugins

Posted 04th October, 2018

Plugins are the most powerful feature of WordPress; they can extend the core functionality in infinite ways. One plugin can turn a site into an ecommerce store, another plugin will enable a forum or a photography portfolio.

Plugins may do anything from enabling specific features, to modifying the display options on a page, to easily embedding some code such as Google Analytics.

Automatic installation

Many plugins are available through the Wordpress repository, and can be browsed and installed in the admin area directly as follows:

  1. Log in to the Wordpress admin area.
  2. Navigate to Plugins, then Add New.
  3. Either browse for a desired plugin or, if this is a third party plugin, upload it.
  4. Click Install.
  5. This plugin can now be activated under the Plugins menu.

Manual installation

The manual installation is the best option for many of the premium plugins that are sometimes too big to install the automatic way. To install a plugin manually follow these steps:

  1. Connect to your hosting using FTP
  2. Unzip your plugin to a directory on your computer
  3. Upload the plugin's folder that you previously unzipped in wp-content/plugins directory on your hosting.

4.Go back to your WordPress dashboard and activate the plugin from the Plugins menu.

Updating Plugins

Because Plugins extend the core of WordPress and are scripts with full access to WordPress files and database, it is fundamentally important to ensure they are up to date and not vulnerable.

In addition, old plugins can become incompatible and lack the bug fixes and new features of updated versions.

Plugins can be updated as follows:

  1. Log in to the Wordpress admin area
  2. Navigate to Plugins.
  3. Select the plugins that require updates.
  4. Click Update in the drop- down menu.

Plugin Configuration

The simplest of plugins are Install and Use, which means there is no additional configuration options. These simple plugins may have extremely basic functionality, such as pasted a daily quote.

For plugins that do have configuration options, these can be edited eithe in the Wordpress Admin Area, with a new navigation menu item dedicated to that plugin, or under Settings > Tools.

Shortcodes

Plugins can often be embedded into a page. For instance, a calculator plugin could be embedded into a post or page.

This is usually done with shortcodes. The shortcode consists of square brackets, the plugin or WordPress function name and usually the id of the element. For instance, these might add an image slider to a post:

[gallery id=”402″]
[gallery order="DESC" orderby="ID"]
[gallery columns="4"]