Installing WordPress plugins

[title_box title=”Installing WordPress plugins”]

Welcome to another G Web Design Tutorial using WordPress. What will a WordPress website design be without plugins… Plugins have unlimited uses and are so flexible, you can even write your own plugin (This is easier than you might think). The great thing about WordPress plugins are that they are independent of your web design, so they are reusable on any other website design project that you may work on.

Ok let’s get into it, what is a plugin? Plugins add additional functionality to your website, eg. An image slider, Google Maps, etc…

For this tutorial it is assumed you are already signed into your WordPress Backend. Let’s install one of the most well known slider plugins for WordPress called “Meta Slider”.

Step 1

You will find the “Plugins” menu item on the left hand side just below the “Appearance” menu it.
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Hover over it and select “Add New”, this will bring us to the “Add New Plugin” page. As you can see in the screenshot below a list of featured plugins are being showed.

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Step 2

Now we have to find our slider plugin to add some great moving pictures to our web design. We could immediately narrow the search down to Meta Slider by typing Meta Slider into the search box but lets search for “slider” and see which results come up.
As you can see there are literally thousands of plugins to choose from, so how do you differentiate what to use? An easy way to narrow your search is to look for plugins with high downloads (active installs on the screenshot) and good overall rating. This is not the be all and end all as new great plugins come out all the time. Lets look at the first one on the right called “Slider” by Huge-It. Let’s analyse this one little. It has a big amount of downloads 100 000+, tick, it it up to date as it was updated a week ago, tick, it has 253 reviews with an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5, tick. This looks like a great one to use.web design

However as mentioned we are going to use “Meta Slider” for this tutorial. So let search for it using it’s name “Meta Slider”. Let’s analyse it… 700 000+ downloads, tick, updated 2 weeks ago, tick, 342 reviews averaging 5 out of 5 stars, tick.

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Step 3

Once you are happy with your choice you can actually click on the “More details” link to read if this plugin will fulfill your requirements, if not the search continues. Ok now click on install and it will start to do its magic.

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After it is done installing, click the blue “Activate” button and the plugin is ready to use on your web design project.

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Now if you go to the menu item “Plugins” on the left and click on installed plugins, you will see your handy work there. This plugin also creates a menu item and a custom icon called Meta Slider on the left at the bottom. Now you are free to explore the plugin and it’s great features.

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Thanks for reading.

Graham (Web Designers Cape Town)

G Web Design (Web Design Cape Town Company)
“Your partner on the web”

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