plugins
wordpress 4 CommentsLinda asked When activating the disclosure policy plugin I get a “fatal error” message. Any suggestions?
It may just not be compatible with the version of worpdress you’re using. I suggest you check the plugin author’s page to check. While you’re there, see if they have an update.
Let’s take this question as an opportunity to have a chat about wordpress plugins.
In the past with a normal HTML website when you wanted something like a nice looking contact form with a function to protect your email in box from spam, you’d have two choices, write the HTML code yourself or hire a coder to do the job.
Now, with wordpress you can just download a plugin, install it, activate it and you’re done.
Look now at the top navigation bar of this blog and you’ll see a link called “Contact Craig” next to the home link. Go ahead and click on it. A plugin did that, not me.
If you don’t know how to install and activate a wordpress plugin, Click Here to see a video showing how to install a plugin I made for a member of the Warrior forum.
In the video I am teaching how to install a wordpress admin drop down menu plugin. This plugin is so cool. Click here to get a copy of that.
Someone asked me, “What are the best five wordpress plugins?”
I have no idea because it all depends on what you are trying to do.
When thinking of something I want a blog to do, the first thing I do is Google something like “Question and Answer wordpress plugin”, or contact form for wordpress plugin. I then read about what is available paying attention to any issues others are having with the plugin being recommended. No need downloading and activating if there are issues.
Here are a few plugins I like to use right away.
1. A contact form that keeps spam bots away. ( A Spam Bot is software that runs on auto spamming email forms of websites.)
Here is the next contact form I am going to use.
http://green-beast.com/blog/?page_id=136
2. Google sitemap ( Still need to install this one here )
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
3. SEO Plugin ( This helps your blog be more search engine friendly )
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
One thought to keep in mind is, if you load your blog with loads of cool plugins, come wordpress update time (Which is often) and you update, some of those wordpress plugins may not work anymore.
I’ll post about upgrading your blog easily soon but for now, keep the above thought in mind because if you have more than one blog, updating them with all the plugins you installed will eat time up fast!
If you know of some cool plugins you’d like to share, leave a comment.
I’d like to recommend that everyone install a Google sitemap plugin. A sitemap is a special file that goes on your blog site (or any type of web site) that tells Google what pages are on your blog. It gets updated by the plugin every time you make a new post.
The reason this plugin is so valuable is because it typically will get your pages indexed in Google (and probably other search engines) much faster than any other method will. Before I started using a sitemap on various web sites I have, I could wait days or weeks to get any of my pages indexed whenever I started a new web site or added new pages.
Now that I use sitemaps, my pages get indexed much, much quicker, sometimes within hours (though you might occasionally have some pages that will never get indexed).
A sitemap is only useful if you update it when you have new pages and then notify Google that the sitemap has new entries. The nice thing about the Google plugin is that it does both of these things automatically for you.
Excellent Rob! Thank you for a well written explanation of site maps.
Thanks
Wow! is all I can say. I’ve learned more in the past couple days than I have in a LONG time. And that’s not because I don’t stay up to date on web “stuff” but it is obvious that too much of it is bad for what ails me.
Back to basics! Why waste time fixing when it can be done correctly the first time? Arigato Craig! This blog is outstanding and jam packed with valuable information.
Already installed the “All in one SEO package” and I really like the fact that the post URLs can be edited to reflect the keywords. Just installed the Google sitemap plugin. Indexed the whole thing in record time because the blog only has 60 posts. Yesterday, I published the first post with a ‘trackback’! Can’t wait to see the results of all these improvements to my blog.
Only missing ingredient? Traffic! ;0)
Quick question. If I already created a sitemap and uploaded it already then do I need to sitempap plug-in? Or in general does the plug-in take the place of manually creating it and uploading it, etc.?
Thanks,
Carey