Sometimes the best plug in for what you need is free.
There might be a light version of a plug in that has all the functionality you need for your project
or a developer or team of developers who routinely release and update their free plugins.
This video is about how to find and evaluate the plugins you find in the free WordPress plugin repository.
Let's start by looking at the Wordpress plugin repository at Wordpress dot org slash plugins.
We've been here before in one of our earlier chapters when we were first setting up our brochure site
with a few free plug ins with forty thousand six 630 plug ins inside the repository.
It's not that easy to narrow down what you need and what are the best plugins in the repository.
One of the things that WordPress did recently and automatic The company behind Wordpress is that they
they started reporting how many active installs there are on each of these plugins as opposed to how
many downloads have ever happened.
That shows us that plugins will climb to the top which have more and more active installs as opposed
to just original downloads.
And if the plugin has been abandoned then that number wouldn't have gotten any smaller.
There's a few things we're looking for within a plug in.
And if I load the acus met plug in from automatic and wordpress this is a comment spam filter plugin
that ships with wordpress it comes with every press WordPress org download we would look for in any
plug in we're going to evaluate a few different things.
Let's look at the number of active installs.
When it was last updated what version of Wordpress it's compatible to and what version of Wordpress
it requires.
Although that's not quite as important.
Hopefully you're only using the latest version of Wordpress and you keep your clients and your sites
updated.
You can also look below at the ratings and look at the total ratings and you can rate how much value
you place on these star ratings by how many ratings that it's coming from maybe how many one star ratings
there are compared to five star ratings.
You can look through the authors and see which developers are involved in the maintenance and the original
programming of the plug in.
You can click through to their profile page on WordPress dot org.
Matt Mullenweg one of the original founders and inventors of WordPress.
He's got several plug ins that he's involved in.
And you can do a little bit of research on the plug in developers or development teams by going through
those links there.
You can also look at the support page within WordPress dot org.
These tabs across the top of the content area but below the image and the tagline of the plug in can
give you a lot of good information under support you can get an idea of whether the developers of this
plugin actually support it and reply to these posts which are questions and topics by the public who's
using this plug in whichever plug in it is.
Let's go back to the Wordpress or plug ins page and do a search for a common type of plug in contact
form.
Here you can see that there are a whole slew of contact form plug ins available for free in the Wordpress
plugin repository.
Now if you go through and browse them the first thing I usually look at are how many active installs
does it have.
And I can see that I've got a hundred thousand here on the contact form seven honeypot that the contact
form 7 which we used in our brochure site has more than a million active installs.
Here's 8000.
Not bad.
I'm looking at 10 right here 40000 30000.
So if we only pick from the ones that have the most active installs.
The second thing I'd look at is the last updated date this contact form 7 pop up response plug in has
last been updated 2 years ago.
Not so good.
Not one that I might actually use this plugin is also only compatible up to 3 9 that 12.
Not even for version 4 of WordPress.
This one is a contact form 7 pop up response for when somebody hits the submit button.
It will display a validation message like your message was sent successfully in a pop up interesting
tidbit coming from our last video on the end Vado marketplace.
I just got a free version of a plugin that does this exact thing pop up messages for a contact form
7 for those validation messages.
As one of their freebies I think it costs 17 bucks or something.
Anyway if you do click through to a plug in that's been updated more than two years ago it will even
give you a warning at the top.
The plug in has not been updated in more than two years and it may not be supported by the developer
or the development team.
Let's look at another category of plug ins.
We've done this before.
For Google Analytics there's another group of plug ins where there's a lot of different plug ins in
this plug in type again a lot of them have thousands or hundreds of thousands of active installs.
And those are the ones that I would choose.
I know that we used Google Analytics by monster insights in our earlier video.
We also have the Google Analytics editor which if we open up the Google Analytics later is powered by
the same company that brings you sumo me which is a great social networking and social marketing development
company and we get into using them later in this course.
But this is an example of an excellent plug in.
That's got plenty of installs.
They spend their own time and money keeping it updated compatible with the latest version of Wordpress
because they hope that by using this plug in you'll also look at their other paid offerings.
This is how a lot of the greatest plugins inside the plugin repository get support from development
teams.
There are either light versions that have a limited set of functions or not every function is powered
and they also might have ADD ons that you can place if you look at the new commerce plug in which commerce
is currently owned by automatic and is in the process of being brought into the core files of wordpress.
But in any case it's still a plug in at this time.
But you can see that there are tons of different wew add ons in the free plugin repository and there
are also a lot of paid add ons from wew.
The company itself so that they can give away their e-commerce plug in and hope that you'll buy some
of the add ons that you need later.
So there's nothing wrong with using a light version of a plug in as long as it gives you the functionalities
that you need.
It's usually supported by a development team that will keep it updated with updates in wordpress.
Here's one that we're going to be able to experience in this course.
The light version as well as the commercial pro version I have the pro version and I use it extensively
with my own sites and with client work.
This soliloquy slider plug in I do have it installed inside of W.P. of course dotcom in your students
sandbox and we'll be playing with it later in this course.
But Thomas Griffin here does offer a light version and it is an excellent plug in.
It just doesn't come with every add on that you might want inside of a slider plug in.
But it gives you a great free plug in.
That's supported by a development team and it's updated often as Wordpress updates.
One more thing you should know you don't necessarily have to go to the Wordpress dot org slash plug
ins plug in directory or repository as we refer to it.
But if you're within Wordpress and logged in if you go to plug ins and add new it's going to open all
the same information as you can find in the Wordpress dot org plug in repository itself including if
you click through to any of the plug in the title or the more details button.
It will open up a modal window in front of your own WordPress installation.
Pulling information from the Web site like the description and some of those tabs across the top the
installation information and especially the ratings the reviews the contributors and their links as
well as all this essential information when the plug in was last updated and what version it requires
what it's compatible to and how many active installs.
Then of course you can install it right into your Wordpress installation with the button right there.
I've already got the latest version of acus met installed.
But what if I wanted to install a bird jetpack by WordPress dotcom I could hit the install but now or
look at more details first evaluate the plug in.
Right within my wordpress dashboard and then I can scroll down and install.
Now if I want in this video we briefly went over the criteria you should be using when evaluating a
free plug in from the Wordpress repository.
We looked at a few of the most popular plugin types and found a couple of the best and you saw how you
can access and install plugins from the Wordpress plugin repository right inside any WordPress dashboard.
Next we'll return to the locally hosted photography site we've been working with and do some assessments
on plug in speed and performance