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Editing and installing plugins
By Mike | April 25, 2007
This is the third part of the answer to the following question.
I’m new to blogging with WP. I want to know how to quickly modify a theme template and edit a plug-in without being a geek-nerd
The past two days we discussed the theme portion. Today lets talk about the plugins.
Quite a few plugins don’t require anything more than to upload them into the wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then log in to your dashboard and click plugins, then click to activate them.
All done. No fuss no muss. There may be options available inside that you can change or alter right from the dashboard. Widgets for example. If you upload the sidebar widget plugin and your theme is widget ready you will only need to click presentation, sidebar widgets then drag and drop the widgets in the order you want them to be.
Now there are others that interact with your theme. Those you will need to do some changes but again most of those have good documentation on their site.
For example - I always add in SEO Title Tags to my blogs. To make this work you do need to edit one line of code in your template. If you click on the name of the plugin where you activated it you will go to their site and they have very explicit instructions of how to do this. More importantly they show you exactly where to find it and what to replace it with. I just copy the new code into a notepad document then go to theme editor and look for the piece of code.
Now any time I am going to edit any pieces of my theme the first thing I do is make a backup of the file. Just click inside the box and ctl a - ctl c then copy into a notepad document.
This way if I make a mistake (and it happens way too often, I am old and bald after all) I can just replace the changes I made with the original.
In summary for most plugins they are pretty much plug and play but for a few you will need to at least be able to follow directions.
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