In this chapter we'll be looking at plug ins premium commercial ones and free plug ins from the Wordpress
repository at Wordpress dot org.
This video will cover the plug in offerings at W.P. m u dev dot org.
A company in Australia that's been developing and updating WordPress plugins for a long time.
By the end you'll understand some of the reasons for using commercial or premium plugins and get an
overview of many of the plug ins I trust and use in my business.
First let's look at the W PMU dev Web site.
If you just go to W.P. and you dev dot org it redirects to a secure site at age TTP.
It's called premium the PMU dev dot org and WP and you used to be the insignia for the multi-user WordPress
extension.
The way that I'm using WP dev course dot com.
I'm using a what is now called multi-site to enable more than one Web site in a single WordPress installation.
Well they started out as experts on WordPress multi-site or at the time it was called WPA and you and
they were a development company making plugins and extensions for Wordpress multi-site.
That does mean that they have a lot of plug ins and functionality that they offer for multi-site installations
but they have a lot of good plugins and themes as well that are part of their membership site that work
on all kinds of Wordpress sites.
I've talked about them before a little bit in our earlier chapters in this course but let's take a look
in detail under their plugins section.
They have a number of different categories online business SEO Marketing publishing community multi-site
and Buddy press which is a social networking extension for wordpress.
But if we scroll down a little bit we can look at some of their best plug ins.
I'm just going to pick out a few and give you a little bit of review and show you how I use them in
my business.
Many of these plug ins are available for you to play with inside of your student sandbox.
Students W.P. of course dot.com pre-installed inside of your own Web site at WBM udev dot org.
The plugins list if I scroll down a little bit you can see the number of plugins that they've developed.
And another thing that I've talked about in the past that's very important for me as I run a WordPress
based business is that if I'm using these plug ins I want them to be supported by the development team
meaning as Wordpress comes out with new versions.
I want these plugins to be updated so they're sure to work into the future.
And these are one of the plug ins that I use often is called Ultimate branding this plug in lets you
display your own logos colors.
It really lets you brand the dashboard to how ever you want it to look.
You can eliminate all mention of WordPress.
If that's not important to your client at all you can populate the administration dashboard with your
own links and things like that and you can do a lot of different branding to your Wordpress installation
so that your clients know that that's coming from you.
This plugin is all about branding your Wordpress installation and handing it off to your client.
You can do easy customisations to the log in page.
You can put in your logo and different links in the admin bar and there's a lot of different parts to
the plug in that you can enable or disable as needed.
I'm using the ultimate branding plug in to brand the dashboard areas at WP of course dot com when you
get your own site in multi-site ultimate branding works and multi-site.
I've used it to create some custom links up here at the top to eliminate some of the menu items that
I don't want you to see over here.
And putting a link down here to the hosting theme and plug in resources page that I have inside of your
dashboard.
Another great plug in that comes with your WPA new dev membership is called their dashboard.
This one manages the plug ins and themes that you're using from WBM udev within your membership.
It installs into your dashboard and gives you a lot of different benefits to going in and installing
this plug in.
It gives you some up time monitoring.
It can show you the performance and some different stats about the Web site it's installed on and it
also gives you access to install activate and configure all of the WPA you def plug ins from one place
inside your dashboard in addition to those general use plug ins they've also got some very specific
plug ins that have particular excellent uses defender is one that does security scans and vulnerability
reports and gets your site hardened for security.
Humming-Bird is for speed and fast loading and it will check a number of different specific things within
your Wordpress installation and help you to fix them pop up pro is a very configurable pop up plug in
that can configure different conditions for whether the users are going to see the pop up message or
not.
It's a great place to build an email list and a way to do that on your Web site.
Membership 2 pro is a plug in we're going to delve deeply in one of our future chapters where we'll
build a membership site from this plug in and wordpress.
One of the plugins that I use all the time from WBM udev is their backup and restoration put plug in
called snapshot pro.
They built it as kind of a time machine like the backup system on a Mac and it kind of is it's easy
to take a snapshot of your whole website including files and database or either or if you like and save
it to an external location or right there on the server downloaded to your own computer.
And it's easy to restore that version of the Web site.
It also has scheduled backups that you can incorporate so that every day or every hour or every week
if you like you can back up yours or your client sites and then if something goes wrong you can always
go back and restore a backup.
I use this plug in all the time for web site migrations just like we've used the free all in one.
I use the snapshot pro plug in to do the same process I would encourage you to go in and explore their
plugins section at the WBM you dev dot org Web site and check out their offerings.
There's appointments schedulers there's events schedulers and sign up areas.
There's all kinds of different functionalities that you can add to WordPress and you can trust that
all these plug ins are always going to work inside of your dashboard at W.P. dev course come inside
of your site.
If you click plug ins you'll notice that a lot of the plug ins that I have preinstalled inside your
sandbox environment are from WGME death.
We've got custom press and as we go down Google Maps market press membership to that pop up pro plug
in that I mentioned a lot of the plug ins that we'll play with for certain sites that we're creating
in this course will use these plug ins to accomplish what we need.
WPA you devs membership works on an ongoing basis.
You pay a monthly or yearly fee to access all of their plugins and themes on an unlimited basis.
That means you can use them on all your own sites and all your client sites as much as you want.
I find the fee well worth it.
As I start to use these plug ins on my sites and my client sites in this video we went over some of
the plug ins offered by the WPA new dev team when you need a specific function for a web site project
a premium plug in is often the best way to go.
In the next video we'll explore another resource for premium plug ins.
The enviro marketplace in Vado isn't just a single developer but a resource for thousands of developers
selling their plugins and themes at affordable prices.
Let's check it out.