What Can WordPress Plugins Do For You?

The function of WordPress has opened up endless possibilities recently, taking it to a new level no longer limited to a blog site. With a huge range of WordPress plugins already available, and many more being added constantly, website owners can put up custom designed pages in a few minutes with a little help.

WordPress plugins are scripts developed by various programmers to give users more options for their blog pages. For example, a WordPress plugin can be used to display recent comments, or as a spam prevention tool. WordPress templates are proving to be extremely popular for externally hosted websites, so having the ability to add more features makes the WordPress plugins a very handy source of free programming!

While many people set up WordPress blog pages to share personal and social stories, blogging has become an essential part of the marketing and promotion sector. With a separately hosted website, WordPress users can include advertising links or Adsense, and promote affiliate products. WordPress plugins provide excellent tools for customizing these types of sites, with add-ons in a wide range of categories including:

 Adsense management
 Advertisement rotators
 Search engine optimization
 User restrictions and password options
 Visitor and click statistics
 Search boxes
 Tracking tools
 Social bookmark tags (e.g. Technorati, Del.icio.us, Digg)

Since there are a large variety of WordPress plugins to suit all sorts of users, the level of expertise required to install some of these varies. You’ll need an understanding of FTP, and Zip files, and some knowledge of HTML. More advanced website owners can even develop their own plugins. A degree of PHP programming is required, and some WordPress plugins also use Javascript or CHMOD to function properly.

A note about WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Although these two sites sound the same, the services offered by each one are different and this often causes confusion for people. The difference lies mainly in the hosting side of things. While a free WordPress blog will be hosted on WordPress.com, the themes and templates are limited and users are not allowed to include advertising or affiliate links. WordPress.org on the other hand requires you to have your own domain and hosting in place, but is a much better option for advertising and marketing purposes, and this is where the WordPress plugins come into the equation!

Self-hosting website owners can make light work of designing their sites with WordPress plugins, creating unique personalized pages to attract their visitors!

 

Are WordPress Templates Difficult To Understand?

One of the things that seems to put people off using the WordPress software on their own site (as opposed to the hosted WordPress blog site) is the technical side of the process involving WordPress templates and themes. There’s a lot of talk about code, PHP, CSS and plenty of other confusing abbreviations that don’t mean a lot to many people! This is unfortunate, as a WordPress blog can make such a big impact on web pages, and can even be used as a standalone website once you get your domain name and hosting sorted out.

Understanding the way WordPress works, installing the software, and figuring out how the templates fit in to themes does require a bit of techie know-how. It is not as hard as it first appears though, and thankfully, for those of us who are a bit technically challenged, there are some excellent guides and resources that can help make the process a whole lot smoother.

The WordPress templates are the backbone of the themes used to build the WordPress blog pages. Themes come in all manner of styles and designs, and can be customized by altering the layouts, installing WordPress plugins and by adding or changing the templates. WordPress templates are basically just a bunch of files that together make up the themes for your WordPress blog site. Generally, a default set of templates for WordPress themes would include some of these essential files:

 index.php – this is the main template file for your WordPress blog
 header.php – the header template
 footer.php – the footer template
 page.php – for creating WordPress pages
 single.php – for creating WordPress posts
 sidebar.php – the WordPress blog page navigation
 style.css – the stylesheet that makes up the layout for your WordPress blog.

These are just the basics; there are many more WordPress templates that can be added to customize your blog; for example, links, search forms, archive posts and WordPress blog comments.

Another confusing aspect for some people is the mention of template tags. Again, these are not as difficult to understand as they first seem. They are basically just bits of code to help the WordPress templates to perform their job properly. The tags within the templates contain the instructions to make your WordPress blog a cleverly designed set of pages!

One of the great things about WordPress templates is that you can customize them to design individual blog pages as well as post pages. The pre-defined templates will usually apply to all the pages on your WordPress blog, but you can add, remove or change the other template files to create unique items on each page.

If you consider the WordPress templates as the mechanics of the themes, you can hopefully begin to understand how they work together to create a WordPress blog.