How To Install WP Plugins On Your WordPress Blog
Knowing How To Install WP Plugins On Your WordPress Blog, probably seems like childs play to most of you seasoned bloggers, but I wonder how many of you remember what it was like when you started out with WordPress..? Due to the fact I have just taken on a couple of excellent content writers for one of my other blogs & following a couple of lengthy chats, it suddenly brought home to me, just how much the more seasoned bloggers take for granted.
We simply accept that everyone knows what to do & that we all have equal knowledge when it comes to blogging, the truth is that this very often is not the case & for newcomers to blogging it can sometimes be very difficult trying to find out how to carry out what most of us see as simple mundane tasks.
So for the benefit of those that don’t know, this article is going to cover, in step by step instruction, the installation of WP Plugins on your WordPress blog.
Step 1. The most important task is to make certain you have an upto date backup of your blog!
Step 2. Log into your WordPress Admin area.
Step 3. Look down the left hand column for “Plugins” and then click on the word “Plugins”.
Manage Plugins Screen
Step 4. Just to the right of the title “Manage Plugins” in the image above, you can see a button marked “Add New”, click this button.
Upload From PC Screen
Step 5. The image above shows the option to upload a plugin from your own PC, this could be a plugin you had previously downloaded from another blog or website, but needs to be in the correct format to be able to upload and install. The format required for this is Zip & although WinRar will actually de-compress these files, it is unable to compress them back to Zip format, therefore I recommend you get hold of a copy 7-Zip which is very siimilar to WinRar, but has more options. Having said that, 99% of the time the plugin will already be in the correct format to allow upload & installation.
Search Plugins Screen
Step 6. Your other option when adding plugins, is to carry out a search. This search will only actually query the WordPress plugin library and will usually give you several pages of results. Alongside each result you will see an install button, which when clicked will install that plugin directly to your blog.
There are on occassion slight problems or errors with plugins, that can & will prevent your blog from loading correctly. Should you ever experience this then please stay calm, simply use an FTP program to access your blog, then browse to /public_html/wp-content/plugins and just delete the plugin you have just installed. In the majority of cases this is all that is required to remedy the situaton.
Tips To Follow Before Installing A Plugin:
1. Always make sure you have a current backup of your blog.
2. Always check the compatability of the plugin, with your version of WordPress. (If a plugin requires WP 3.1 & you are running WP 2.9.2 then don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work!)
3. Always check for the date of the last update on the plugin (plugins that are updated regularly are less likely to cause you problems).
Note: The above details in 2 & 3 can usually be found by clicking the name of the plugin in the search results page.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Oct 22 2011. Filed under Wordpress Plugins.
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