What are Plugins & Why do they Matter?

You may have read some of my previous post and heard me mention plugins and be wondering to yourself, what in the world is a WordPress Plugin.  A WordPress Plugin is really nothing more than an App for your website.  The thing that you need to know is that Plugins can do just about anything you are interested in doing for your website and they are easy to install and start using.

Let me give you an example:  At my church, we record all of my sermons.  I thought it would be great to start putting those sermons on my website and even cooler if we could have them go into a iTunes Podcast.  I did a search on WordPress’ Plugin search page for “Podcasting” and came up with these results.  I happened to use the first plugin that came up, “Blubrry Podcasting Plugin”  I literally installed (clicked install) the plugin, clicked activate on the plugin.  Went in and configured what I wanted the podcast to be called, etc.   I wrote a post, uploaded a file through the easy file upload interface, copied the address to the file and pasted it into the podcasting dialogue and wamo blamo, my file could be played right on the site or accessed through an iTunes Podcast!  Sounds like a lot, but it took longer to upload the file than to set up the configuration!

Check it out in action on my church’s website http://epic4life.com/category/sermons/!

Plugins are just another HUGE reason to chose a WordPress enabled website over any other!