Plugging It In

I’ve been digging deeper and deeper in WordPress on the various sites I’m working on (just starting to work with Adsense on one of them - very interesting) and there are 2 plugins that make my life so much easier that I actually have the time to write about them!

The first one is the One-Click Installer (thanks to @wiredpig for telling me I needed it) - this plugin allows you to upload themes or plugins without having to unzip the file and upload via ftp, which can be a major time suck. I love, love, LOVE this plugin! With this, you can upload the themes/plugins directly from your WordPress dashboard. The only thing I’ve found difficult is that sometimes a theme/plugin folder is buried within a subfolder in the zip file (thanks to Taylor for helping me with this!) so in this case, you would have to actually go through the “old-fashioned” way of uploading.

Speaking of ftp and uploading, I’ve started using Filezilla (on recommendation of MANY) and find it incredibly easy to use. The file manager makes it easy to manage the numerous sites I’m working on.

The second favorite is the Automatic Upgrade plugin. This plugin does all of the hard work of upgrading to the newest version of WordPress - I have to admit that I’ve been too scared to try manually upgrading and now haven’t even had to! It’s worked great so far - I’m loving it.

I use many other plugins, but the favorites listed above haven’t saved me quite enough time to sing praises for all of them - you can find a list of them in my diigo bookmarks tagged plugins. All WordPress related resources are in my diigo bookmarks tagged Wordpress.

Also, a great tip from Talia Carbis (which I definitely follow) is to make sure to save all of your themes and plugins in an easy-to-access folder on your computer so you can use them again in another WP installation if needed.

Most of you know that I started out blogging (not all that long ago) on edublogs and I can’t say enough about how wonderful it was to start out there (and I hear they’re upgrading to 2.5 soon, yay!). Now that I’m diving into the deep end of the blogging technical pool, I realize how absolutely impossible it would have been if I wouldn’t have had the chance to test out the waters (sorry for that!) at edublogs, where there were tons of great themes already installed, plugins upon plugins available, an amazing community of educators, and the wonderful technical help of James Farmer and Sue Waters. I moved on because I wanted more flexibility and the ability to fully use my own domain name, but edublogs was the best possible place to start my blogging journey (swim?). I do know many bloggers have also had great success starting out at Blogger - I just wrote my first post on a Blogger blog on Saturday, it was incredibly easy to figure out. I just haven’t had as much time to play there, but I hope to in the future.

I’ve definitely been guilty of neglecting my own site for the sake of other work both in Moodle and WordPress - I need to get back in here and mess around some more with the design soon. If you have any great plugins, themes, or other Wordpress resources for me, PLEASE share here! (I suppose I’ll take Blogger resources as well, for the sake of research…………)

Oh, wait! Can you believe I forgot to tell you who made this new site possible? Jeff O’Hara (yup, the edmodo guy!) VERY generously offered to host my site when I mentioned that I was a bit overwhelmed a while back and didn’t know how to back-up my old blog - he did a lot of the grunt work here so I didn’t have to. Who says we can’t meet great friends online? So, thanks to Jeff for making the move here happen much sooner than it would have otherwise!

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