Difference between revisions of "Plugin Overview"

Plugins are used to extend the core functionality of WordPress. The majority of plugins are written by WordPress community members and are provided freely to the community. We've pre-selected a handful of useful and popular plugins.

Please feel free to take a look and try them out on your site. If you see an interesting feature on a WordPress site that you'd like to reproduce on your own site please let us know. We may already have installed a plugin for it.

Getting Started

To use the plugins below you will need to be the administrator for your site.

1. After you have logged in, go to the Plugins tab in your Dashboard. This will show you a list of all currently available Active and Inactive plugins.
2. click on the Activate link to activate a new plugin.
3. Note the link to the plugin's home page. This is a great place to get instructions on how to use the plugin.
4. Most plugins come with their own settings/option page. This will usually appear in the Settings tab in your Dashboard after the plugin is activated or in a separate section at the bottom of all your Dashboard tabs.

Important

Only activate those plugins which you are actively using. Plugins consume server resources and sometimes conflict with one another.

About plugin support

Please keep in mind that although these plugins may work today, they are not guaranteed by the plugin developers and may not stay current with the latest release of WordPress. We do our best to test all plugins before making them available on blogs.evergreen.edu but they may need to be removed if they pose a security threat or stop functioning after a WordPress update.

Plugins available at blogs.evergreen.edu

Mapping/Geo-location Plugins

• GeoMashup Google Maps plugin Lets you save location information with posts, pages, and other WordPress objects.

Media Plugins

• FLV Embed Allows for full screen video embed of .flv files.
• Kimili Flash Embed Allows for the embed of .swf files.
• NextGEN Gallery WordPress image gallery plugin.
• QuickTime Embed Allows for embedding various flavors of quicktime. This is what Evergreen curricular sites are using to embed enhanced podcasts.
• UStreamTV Allows embedding video content from UStream.
• Viper's Video QuickTags Adds the quick video embed icons to the editor. Note: vipers-video-quicktags.php should be installed in mu-plugins, everything else goes in plugins. availability: networkwide
• Awesome Flickr Gallery Quickly and easily incorporate your Flickr photos and galleries into your WordPress pages and posts.
• Haiku a minimalist audio player and perfect if all you will be hosting is mp3s and you don't want to fuss around with complicated short code.
• WP-audio Creates a nice embedded audio player. Flexible but can be complicated to use.
• SoundCloud Embed an audio file using SoundCloud - keep your audio in the cloud. Recommended!

Web Forms

• Formidable Pro makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag and drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to create extremely effective forms immediately. available by request only

Social Networking and Communication Plugins

• Sociable Allows for easy sharing of posts on social networks.
• Subscribe2 Enable subscribers to receive email of each new post to your site.
• WP PostRatings Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog's post/page.

Calendaring and Events

• Event Calendar

Appearance and Content Plugins

• Better RSS Widget Allows for more control of rss feeds as a widget. Also lets you embed feed in post or page see instructions. Available by request only
• wiki-append
• WP-Table Reloaded WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP's admin area.
• movabletype-importer
• wpcat2tag-importer
• Unfiltered MU prevents WordPress from stripping <iframe>, <embed>, etc. tags from users' posts. Available by request only
• FeedWordPress FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; the content it syndicates appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. Available by request only
• Zotpress This plugin displays your Zotero citations on your WordPress site.
• Widgets on Pages Allows 'in-page' widget areas so widgets can be defined via shortcut straight into page/post content or through the use of a template tag.

Networkwide Plugins

Plugins are already activated on all blogs.evergreen.edu sites

• rss-importer
• wordpress-importer
• SafeCSS replaced WP2 css editor plugin
• Multisite Privacy
• Akismet key hard coded into akismet.php for multi site usage
• Avatars Allows the ability to attach a profile picture to a user account

Still didn't find what you were looking for?

See Requesting New Wordpress Plugins and Widgets