Finetuning your blog : Widgets and plugins

You just selected your template/theme and wrote your first post for your adult blog. When you look at it, it may look nice to you, but you can do more with it. WordPress, the bloggingsoftware we use at this site, has the possibility to install so called ‘plugin programs’, programs adding some extra functionality to your blog. Some plugins are not visible from the frontend, only at the backend, for example plugins to report visitor statistics, perform integration with twitter or other social networks or plugins to prevent spam. Other plugins are immediately visible in the frontend, most of them you even can add visually to your blog. These kind of plugins are called widgets.

The Must Haves

When you set up your blog there are a few plugins you must install if you want to have some control on your blog. You can run a blog without, but you can’t expect to make serious money with your blog if -for example- you do not have an idea about the number of visitors you’re facing each day. The blogs I surely would advice you to install you’ll all find when you click in the left menu on the admin panel on the menutopic ‘Plugins’. It shows you a list of the plugins available and already installed. From this list I would advise you to install at least the following :

• All In One SEO Pack : If you want to be visible to Google in the most optimal way, you can’t do without.
• CyStat : WordPress ‘internal’ statistics processor : Get your stats about visitors, Feed access, robots visiting etc.
• Google Analytics for WordPress : Adds GA code to your blog for advanced statistics. You need a Google Analytics account to be able to use it. If you do not have one, I would recommend you to signup right now .
• WP-Spamfree : Activate WP-Spamfree and your commentspam will be virtually null. Please note that accounts allowing excessive can be deleted by the admin, so if you do not want to pass hours deleting comment spam, simply activate WP-Spamfree.
• WP to Twitter : Post a tweet to twitter every time a new post has been added to your blog without having to take extra actions. You need a twitter account to be able to do so. You can sign up right now

Popular Widgets

Every theme has some ‘default sidebar’ (or default sidebars) showing categories, links, archive and tags. But it is very well possible that you do not want these items or at least not in that order. So you’re very lucky since WordPress has support for ‘Widgets’, visual items you can add by dragging and dropping on the sidebar(s) of the theme of your blog. We take a look at our tutorial blog as it looks right now :

The ‘sidebar’ is the right column. Note that this is only for the theme we currently selected, other themes might have a left sidebar or even a sidebar located at the top or the bottom of the page. Some themes have two or even more sidebars. When we go to the backend and click ‘Appearance->Widgets’ we see a screen looking like the screen below :

In the central panel you see grey bars with some title on it. By dragging the grey bar to the panel at the right with the title ‘Sidebar 1′ (note that depending on the naming in the theme, this name can be different) you’ll add a widget to the sidebar. When you add a widget and it needs some special settings, a form will open with the possibilities to enter this settings. If you want to change them, you can do so by clicking the grey bar once it is in one of the ‘sidebar’ panels.

So lets draw the ‘widgets’ (as we call the grey bars from now) for ‘Categories’ and ‘Tag Cloud’ to the sidebar. When we refresh the frontend page, we see our sidebar changed :

In future pages to this tutorial we will discuss the most important plugins and widgets in detail