Plugins are Content Management Extensions Useful to Developers

    Why Plugins are important for bloggers or website developers?

    Plugins play a pivot role in blog management and add value to the blog or website. Plugins do a lot of useful spade work to the blogger adding style to the blog post or page.

    The main focus of the bloggers or website developers is to create informative content to their visitors. The blog post or webpage is not just the main content but associated values of the content, values like outbound links, leads to real-time news on the niche, adding promotional material of their own products and services to the blog post or page. 

    This is possible through plugins. Plugins are like library functions developed by independent developers on demand from the bloggers. Here is a illustration of this point .

    The purpose of a multi website WordPress installation is to cater media files and many associated files across all websites on the network. This facility is useful to the developer to upload all media files in one place and share the same files like images, video across other websites or blogs.  Network Shared Media plugin will do this job. But for this plugin the developer has to upload media files for every individual blogs or website.

    Another important reason to support plugins role to blog developers 

    All blog developers are not software professionals. Many of them do not know hard-core coding. Coding requires knowledge of a software language and related principles. All blog developers are not experts in software coding and cannot code the required plugin code and the ready-made plugins will fulfil this gap. Another example is some bloggers like to have different content in their blog headers, side bars and footers. customers sidebars plugin will fulfil this need to create different content for sidebars, headers and footers. Some screen shots below displaying different content on sidebars for different categories of the blog.

    plugins

    This custom sidebar have different sidebar widgets for different class posts or pages. Heath related topics have social media icons followed by 3 text blocks with some HTML content and lastly RSS feed.

    The Font page sidebar have social media icons with links followed by 4 text boxed with different content in the text bars.  This amazing useful feature is possible only through a plugin

    Some plugins will save the blog with spam comments like Akismet plugin. This plugin filters spam comments and highly recommended by WordPress.

    An estimated number of plugins in WordPress directory is 38,679 plugins with 971,907,318 total downloads.

    How to Choose a Plugin?

    Choosing a plugin is a hard task for the bloggers. Sometimes plugins cause many problems like slowing down the page loads, not displaying the posts and pages. Sometime plugins may crash and create problems for the blog or website. 

    Tips to decide  plugins for a blog or website
    •  DO not use plugins unless essential
    • Check the reviews and ratings in terms of downloads and present status of a plugin before installing.
    • Check  when the plug-in last updated or the plug-in is out dated or active.
    • Keep a watch on plugin updates and update the plugin
    • Wherever you can avoid plugins and use your own coding to solve the related issue do it. Do not overload the blog with plugins.
    • Delete the plugins that are not useful to save space on the server
    • Do not use many plugins that do the same job. They may interfere and cause crash.

    With these precautions, use plugins power to develop a great blog or website.