WordPress is a great platform for very simple blogs but in order to give them a more professional look and to make them function more efficiently themes and plugins are essential.

Basically a theme is what makes your blog look the way it does whereas plugins take care of a lot of the functions behind the theme. Think of the theme as being the outside look of your car, WordPress itself as the engine with the plugins being the things such as the lights, indicators, warning lights etc that are good to have but not essential to run the engine of the car. I am no mechanic but you get the idea.

What are WordPress plugins?

I guess the simplest explanation is that they are a bit of code that make things easier to do or allows you to do things that without the particular plugin are very difficult to do and beyond the capabilities of anyone other than a person with a technical knowledge of WordPress.

Why use WordPress plugins?

They allow you do to do things with WordPress that without them would be either time consuming and may also require technical expertise in WordPress beyond that of the majority of WordPress users.

What are some examples of WordPress plugins?

Akismet is a popular plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” Without such a plugin your blog could easily become full of undesirable comments that you certainly do not want your readers to read. Read the rest of this entry

Please consider buying me a coffee if you find my content useful.