WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9: Getting New Features with Plugins

WordPress offers an impressive set of built-in features. In the previous chapters, you used them to write posts and pages, and to glam up your site. But serious WordPress fans have a way to get even more from the program—or, technically, about 60,000 ways to get more, because that's how many free WordPress plugins you can use to supercharge your site.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to search for interesting plugins, decide whether a plugin is a good fit, and see how to install it on your site. This gets you ready for the rest of the book, where you'll use plenty of plugins to solve stubborn problems, fill gaps, and add frills.

You'll also try out Jetpack, a feature-packed plugin developed by Automattic, the same people who built WordPress. Jetpack is an unusual creation—instead of offering a few neat features organized around a specific theme, it gives you a grab bag of unrelated enhancements. The original idea was for Jetpack to give WordPress website builders (that's you) the same features that people get when they sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com. But Jetpack is useful for anyone. It's a starting point for many of the features you'll see later in this book, like Facebook and Twitter comments (Chapter 10), site statistics (Chapter 12), and even backups (Chapter 14).

How Plugins Work

Technically, a plugin is a small program written in the same programming language that runs the entire WordPress system, PHP.

Plugins work ...