Why are these called plugins?

While with WordPress you typically download the plugin to add it to your site, these are codes that are called plugins. Plugins are actually “mini programs” which is why Facebook developers call them plugins. In this case however, you are simply going to get a code and add it to your website.

Are they adaptable?

All of the plugins allow you to change the width. This makes it easy for you to add to your sidebar or to the main page or anywhere you want it. Most all of the plugins allow you to change other options to make it fit your unique site needs so you can make it fit.

What types of plugins do they offer?

There are currently 8 different plugins available.

• Login allows readers to login to Facebook.
• The Like button is quickly being added to sites both big and small.
• Recommendations can show your readers what they might like on your site.
• Activity Feed shows readers what their friends are doing on your site.
• The Like Box shows readers a live stream of your Facebook Fan page.
• Facepile shows your readers which of their friends have already joined your site.
• Comments allows for comments anywhere on your site.
• Live Stream is great for live events so they can share their activities and comments in real time.

Which Facebook plugin should I use?

Just like the features of each plugin depend on your particular needs, so does the plugin that you need. Most sites would recommend that you add the Like Button after that it is up to your website. If your site it too cluttered with gadgets and gizmos you readers may avoid it, yet with popularity of Facebook, you want to make certain some of it is offered. This will help build your popularity in a word of mouth format.

By the way, see the box below this post?  Yes, that’s a Facebook plugin called the activity feed.  And does anyone want to learn how to add the like button to each post?  And how I added the activity box to the posts?  The problem is, it does take going into your CSS code and I want to provide what YOU want

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MJ Schrader

To Add an Album Link or Slideshow

You will need to be logged into Google. You will need to be able to add HTML to site. In WordPress go to the upper right of where you are writing your posts and click HTML. Find where you are going to want the slideshow and go to Picasa in another tab.

If you are on the page that shows all of your albums over on the right you should see two words “Embed Slideshow.” That will show pictures from all your albums. You can copy the code you see there and paste it on your HTML page of your post.

If you want just one album, click the album name. This time you will see “Link to this album” on the right. While this will give you a code to link to the album, it will show just one picture. This may be fine in some cases. But when you clicked that link, “Embed Slideshow” appeared as well. Click that to get the HTML code you need for the slideshow you want. Now you have a slideshow.

This is an online photo sharing site.  When you use their online photo sharing, you can create albums to organize your pictures according to your needs. You can add tags to find certain pictures easier. Tagging people is made easy with their face recognition software.

How much is it?

Their free option allows you to upload up to 1 GB worth of pictures. People with lots of large, high quality pictures may want to upgrade to the paid options which range from 20 GB to 16 TB. You can edit pictures online without having to buy expensive photo editing programs with Picnik, their partner. Most features are free.

What is this going to do?

If you have large high quality pictures you do not want to load them to your website because they will slow your site down. You can use the “add image” in your posts and use the URL. Copy the image location and size down to what you need for the post. You can have the image link to the “original image” which will allow readers to see the original image.

Even if your images are not big, think about this. Each image you load takes up some memory, after a year or several that’s quite a bit of memory that may be used. This will allow the images to be stored elsewhere which will keep your website running faster and smoother.

How do I add pictures?

With WordPress you probably already know how to click the little box that looks like a picture above your post that you are entering. Normally when you click that box you might upload from your computer, instead you are going to click the “From URL” tab that is at the top of that popup. You will want to right click the image you want from Picasa and copy the Image URL, this phrase is slightly different on each browser.

Tomorrow will cover how to add a slideshow! 

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MJ Schrader

Of course not!  Here are 7 options just for you!

1. NextGen Gallery is probably the most popular WordPress Photo Gallery plugin. Create a slide show, a media RSS feed and more. Easily move, copy, upload and delete images. You can even add a flash photo gallery.  See the NextGen Gallery video

2. Featured Content Gallery is a photo gallery WordPress plugin. It allows you to create an automated, rotating image gallery on any post or page. It is very easy to integrate and you simply add a field where you want the gallery to display. Choose from dozens of options to customize according to your website.

3. Flickr Gallery is a great photo plugin if you use Flickr. With their shortcodes system your pages and posts can quickly and easily have your Flickr images incorporated. You can turn on database caching for faster loading.

4. WP Photo Album easily allows you to manage WordPress photo albums. Create albums and move photos to and from them. Upload and delete photos and add a bit of code to post your album where needed.

5. Lazyest Gallery with a name like that, how can you not like this WordPress plugin? It creates thumbs and slides automatically. Easily manage comments per image or folder. Arrange your images and folders as you wish and handle many other details as you see fit.

6. Shutter Reloaded is an image viewer but is minimal in size. It will resize large images, combine images in sets and pre-load images for faster display. You can customize background and color for captions, buttons and menu.

7. Lightbox 2 allows viewers to see a larger image in a unique format. Once an image is clicked it will pop up and the rest of the page will darken. Load times remain almost the same.

Tomorrow I will cover one more option.  It is not a plugin so it will need a bit more explanation than these do.

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MJ Schrader

Please thank Donald Tregde for this post!

One thing to note, since I have been asked before… there are over 11,000 plugins.  This number grows daily so if you have seen me mention a smaller number… I did.  There were just over 2000 when I started working with WordPress.

Finding Your Site.

You may want plugins that help search engines find you.  Perhaps you want an SEO plugin such as All in One SEO or Platinum.  I prefer Platinum, but it’s personal preference.  You probably want Google XML SiteMaps.  It maps your site and keeps the map current.

Socially acceptable

Some people like social media plugins that allow readers to share favorite posts with social networking sites. Sociable, Sexy Bookmarks and many more allow your site to be shared on various social media formats.

Security

There are plugins for various types of security.  Backing up your blog was mentioned two days ago and is in related posts below.  You can hide your blog, your pages, change your robot.txt.  The types are too many to list and are as unique as your needs.

Speaking of Unique Needs

If you have pictures, audios or videos you may want a related specialty WordPress plugins. You may have another specialty plugin you need.  Don’t worry, I plan to cover some of the better plugins over the next few days.

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MJ Schrader

Why is it so popular?

It has a small footprint, meaning it doesn’t use much memory or power and is easy to use.   Yet like anything online there is a learning curve, hopefully this video will fully explain how to use this plugin.  Remember you must use the galleries and must have pictures in the galleries for these to work correctly.

Galleries are made up of pictures which you can load individually, as a zip file or point to a folder.   Pictures can be moved around after you have uploaded with the manage gallery feature.

Albums can be several galleries together.

Yesterday covered installing and setting up the Mingle Forum Plugin. Today is going to cover skins and how to add your forum to your website.

Adding to your website.

Create a new page. You will want to use a name that lets people know there is discussions, forums or talk on the page. On the page type [mingleforum] and then press publish. This will create a forum on that web page. With this you will have a great website forum on your WordPress website without the hassle other sites would create.

Changing Skins

Blue may not work with your theme. Or you may not like the default skin. While the colors of the Mingle Forum skins are still somewhat limited you do have choices other than blue. You can visit Get Forum Skins.

From There you can pick from the reds, blues, green, orange, blacks, and pink that they have available. You will need to download the skin, or skins you like.

Using your favorite method, (I prefer File Manager) you will upload the skins to /wp-content/mingle-forum-skins/ The advantage of this method is with changes and upgrades you will not need to reinstall several times.

IF YOU WANT TO BREAK IT

If you change the name of the folder, Mingle Forums will not work. If you delete the Default skin or change the name of it Mingle Forums will not work.

What if the folder does not exist.

Then you can create a folder using your file manager or FTP. You will want to create it exactly as the name as listed above.

Installing the skins

Go back to your WordPress Dashboard and activate the skin you want to use. Now you are ready to go with a forum that looks just as you need!

Good luck!!

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MJ Schrader

Perhaps you need a forum on your WordPress website. Fortunately there is a very nice Forum plugin that is fairly simple to use*. Note the star… Forums are not exactly the easiest things to set up, thus fairly simple does not necessarily mean simple.

This WordPress forum plugin is called Mingle Forum. If you are on Mingle, it works great with it or stands alone. It is highly customizable. There are skins, categories, rankings for users and much more.

How to Install

Simply go to WordPress plugins, click add new. Type Mingle forum in search, then install. You will see a new box appear called Mingle Forum. Scroll down to it and open for the sub categories.

Mingle Forum

This subcategory you can mostly leave alone. There is very little you will want to change, unless you want to change the name or number of posts that it takes for users to go to the next level.

Skins

Only a blue skin comes pre-installed. Other skins will have to be downloaded and installed in a particular file on your file manager. This is something you may want to leave to your tech person, unless you are the tech person.  It will be covered in more detail tomorrow.

Categories and Forums

This seems backwards to me. When you add new you create a category. Then once you have created a category you can “add forum” which will be basically a subcategory. You could conversely create another category. These will be the main boxes, and the “forums” will be the sub boxes.

Moderators

You can be a moderator. Once you have users you can set up individual users as moderators. You can set someone up for all forums or some.

User Groups

When you add new, you can give a name to groups of users. After you name the group you can add members or remove members.

About

Just like it says some information about the plugin.

Final Touches

That will be covered tomorrow

This blog post was by request.   NextGen Gallery is one of the most popular and highly recommended of the WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins.  You install via Plugins and add new. Scroll down your dashboard a bit.

Add a Gallery

Click on add a gallery. Type in your new gallery’s name in the add new gallery box. Then choose Upload images to upload images off your computer. When you upload images make certain you choose a gallery. If you have several images in a Zip File you can choose that. Another option is import image folder if you know the server path. (Importing requires the images be some place online and accessible.)

Manage Gallery will let you change the name of a gallery or add a description. Here you can also link the gallery to a specific page. The images in the gallery will be below. Click on them to change their name, description or tags.

Manage Albums will allow you to create an album and add one or more galleries to it. Tags will let you add, change or delete tags you use in the photo albums.

Options

Options gives you several options to change or create. You can change the maximum size of thumbnails and other images. You can choose the quality that of images Next Gen will set up for quality resizing. You can choose to backup images or automatically resize. You can set up features in the gallery, such as how the images display and much more. You can also add effects to how your images show. Next is the watermark, use an image or your website name or other text. You can choose the font, color and size. Finally the last option is what you want the slideshow to look like.

The next buttons under gallery.

After options is style. This requires knowing and understanding css code. If you have other users on your blog, you will want to set up Roles, as to who can manage, edit or make changes to the albums. About is the credits and the final one, you do not need to mess with unless you actually want to start over, or uninstall Next Gen.

On posts and pages

Make certain you have TinyMCE loaded. If you do you will have a button appear that looks like a little album with photos. Click this and you will be able to add images to your post. You can choose to add images, galleries, or albums. Whatever you need for that blog post.

There you have it!  Next Gen Photo Gallery plugin is great for photographers or those in need of many pictures.

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MJ Schrader

Many people ask me about WordPress plugins. What scares me is how often “Do you know all the plugins?” Currently there are over 10,000 available on WordPress.org. There are others sold by individuals and business. Some plugins are only available to members of certain websites, and many more options.

The other thing people think is more plugins means better. Yes, I do have about 8 to 12 on each of my websites. But if you have played Tetris, you know that there are multiple shapes of blocks. The same is true with plugins, they are not all the same shape. They do not always fit neatly together. The more plugins you have it’s like the more blocks on Tetris you have, you start having holes, and suddenly the end of the game starts coming because pieces are not fitting right.

The same is true with plugins. They don’t always fit together quite right and with more plugins the more likely you are to have problems. The reason I went with Disqus is because it did the job of 3 or 4 plugins. That’s why Platinum SEO is better than All in One, it does the job of two plugins.

Research every plugin. The other problem is knowing if a plugin is a good one. Some plugins are not worth it. Some plugins will cause your site problems. Some plugins do not perform as stated, some plugins may not do what you really need. Know what your plugins are and if they will do what you need.

Just because a plugin gets a great rating and does what you want it may not work with your theme or plugins that you simply “must have.”  Decide what is more valuable and go with that.   If a plugin does not work or you no longer need a plugin, deactivate it, then delete it. Keep your WordPress website like your desk. Keep what you need, throw away the rest and don’t over load it.

Hope you are having a grand and glorious day!!

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MJ Schrader