How to install a WordPress plugin or module

WordPress is a great content management solution that you can use to set up your own blog or website. This article is assuming that you have already installed the basic WordPress program to your web server and that you are currently setting it up or already using it. Plugins are tools that help you to expand the functionality and usefulness of your WordPress blog or site. Here is how you install them.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Wordpress site or blog
• FTP program

1. It is important to note that there are numerous WordPress plugins, written by a variety of web programmers. Because of this, some of them are really simple to install - I call these "drag and drop plugins" - and then there are some other plugins that require a lot of configuration, messing with your site templates, and editing code. For the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on how to install the easy "drag and drop plugins".

2. The first step is to log into your WordPress blog or site by going to one of the following links:
   
   www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php (or)
   www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-login.php)

3. Enter in your username and password to get into your admin dashboard. Now leave this open in the background and open up a new browser window. We are going to take a look at some of the plugins available for download at the official WordPress plugin website.

4. Using the link provided in the resources section of this article, enter this into your new browser window to get to the WordPress plugin directory. Select the plugin that you want to install on your WordPress blog or WordPress site. Examples are video plugins, image plugins, stat counters, adsense plugins, etc. Do a search for the Most Popular to find a few good ones to start with.

5. Once you find a plugin that you want to use, download it to your desktop.

6. Once the file has completed downloading, you will now want to unzip the plugin files using 7-zip or a similar compression tool. Again unzip the files to your desktop so that you can easily find them. Once the files completely unzip, move them to your local website root directory so that you can easily upload them to your webserver once connected via FTP.

7. Now, open your FTP program and log into your site's root directory. Now find the folder that you uploaded your original WordPress application into. For example, if you only use WordPress on your site as a blog, you may have created a folder called blog in which you moved your files. If you are using WordPress as your main website tool, then you will want to simply stay within the site's root directory.

8. Now look for the folder called "wp-content" within the WordPress folder structure. Open this up, and you will see a seconde folder called "plugins" located inside the "wp-content" folder. Open this "plugins" folder.

9. Using your FTP program, move the entire unzipped plugin folder into the "wp-content/plugins" folder on your website server directory. This will move all of the needed files for the plugin into your web WordPress file structure and let WordPress konw that this plugin is available for configuration when you log into your admin dashboard.

10. Excellent - once the FTP is complete, refresh your web server to make sure that the files you moved have successfully been moved from your local directory to your web directory. If everything has been moved, then pop back over to your web browser that you originally opened in Steps 2-3. We want to take a look at our admin dashboard now to activate the new plugin we just installed.

11. Refresh your screen, and then click on the "plugins" link located in your admin dashboard menu up at the top. When you open the plugins, you should now see the new plugin that you installed to your FTP directory. WordPress should list it with some details about what it does.

12. Click on the new plugin that you want to activate, and then simply click the "activate" link. That is it! Your plugin should now be active within your WordPress blog or site. Check your admin dashboard to see if there are options there to configure the new plugin.

13. You will probably have to configure the plugin now by going through the options that it provides in your admin dashboard. Once you have completed configuring the plugin for your site, go to your blogs page and make sure that it is working correctly. This step will vary for each plugin that you install - as some are really easy to setup - the "drag and drop plugins", where other ones require a lot of configuration, template changes, and code changes.

Tips & Warnings

• Occasionally an installed plugin will really mess up your WordPress blog or site. You will know when you activate it and you get nothing by a blank screen. Don’t panic. Just FTP to the plugin directory and rename the plugin that you activated to something else - like "wrekced". Then refresh your admin page and WordPress automatically deactivates the faulty plugin. You can then go back and try to reinstall it or find a more stable plugin that will give you the functionality you want.
• As a rule of thumb, before you ever make any template changes that might be required when installing more advanced plugins, be sure to save the original files on the server with a new extension like as “.old” to make sure that you can restore your site if necessary.

Resources

• WordPress Plugin Site
• How to install WordPress on your server
• How to install a WordPress Theme
• How to install Drupal

[efficientparent]

on 8/13/2009 5* and rec...adding to favs. thx