WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 37. Ten Other Common Uses for Plugins

So far in this book, I've talked briefly about plugins that help back up your WordPress site, plugins for photo galleries, plugins for contact forms, and plugins for statistics.

This lesson looks at ten additional plugin categories to help you expand your site and briefly outlines a few specific plugins for each. I include the specific plugin names to make it easier when you're searching on the Plugins

Social Networking

Connecting WordPress to other social media is one of the hottest areas of plugin development these days and it's hard to keep up with new offerings. In Lesson 24 I talked about how easy it is to display your latest Tweets on your WordPress site and plugins are available that can help make it even easier.

Here, I want to talk about two other functions that plugins can provide with respect to social networking:

• Letting visitors easily use social media to let others know about your site

• Letting you easily repurpose your WordPress content on your social networking accounts

Visitors can share what they've found on your WordPress site if you install one of several multifunction plugins. Through a single button visitors can share your content by instant message, e-mail, social bookmark, or posting to Facebook or Twitter. Three of the simplest plugins that do this are Add to Any, ShareThis, and Add This. Some plugins target specific ...