WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

37

Other Common Uses for Plugins

So far in this book, I've talked about plugins that help back up your WordPress site plugins for monitoring site statistics.

This lesson looks at more plugin categories to help you expand your site's functionality and briefly outlines a few specific plugins for each to make it easier when you're searching on the Plugins Add New page.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Connecting WordPress to other social media is one of the hottest areas of plugin development these days and it's hard to keep up with new offerings.

Plugins can provide three main functions with respect to social networking:

• Letting you easily display your social media profile or content on your website
• Letting visitors easily use social media to tell others about your site
• Letting you easily repurpose your WordPress content on your social networking accounts

Making it simple for people to connect to your social media profiles is an important feature of websites these days, and many plugins make it simple for you to implement this on your site. Good control over the look and positioning of your site is what you want from plugins of this type: for instance, having graphical interfaces that stay in place while the page scrolls (at the side or the top/bottom of the browser window) is a popular feature. Plugins are available that cater to special social media, such as Facebook, but you're typically going ...