A sample set of plugins on the demo site

- To give you a sampling of what a site may look like once you install a series of plugins to extend its functionality, I've added some plugins I often use to the site. As you can see, in addition to Akismet and Hello Dolly, which came stocked with WordPress, I've add Contact Form 7, Limit Login Attempts, Regenerate Thumbnails, and Tiled Galleries Carousel Without jetpack. So now I can walk you through these. Show you how they work and show you what they do. We're going to start with Contact Form 7. As you saw previously, when you add Contact Form 7 to your site, you get a new menu item up here in the content area called Contact.

And from here, you can create contact forms. By default, you get one contact form created and you can also create new custom contact forms. Now I won't go into the details of how you do this, we have another course for that called WordPress Plugins Contact Forms that covers this and other contact form plugins. But basically, you add a contact form and once you've done that you can add it to a specific page, so in this case, I created a new page called Contact H+ Sport. I've wrote in some basic text and then I added the contact form so people can contact me directly from the site.

The next plugin is Limit Login Attempts and we'll talk about this plugin in more detail later on in the course. Limit Login Attempts sits in the background and runs constantly and all it's doing is preventing computers from trying to guess the password on my site. This plugin adds a new feature to the main menu in the Admin panel but you'll only find it if you go to settings, and you see here at the bottom, you have Limit Login Attempts. So here you have more settings for this plugin. Now we've covered this plugin in more detail in the Locking Down WordPress course also in this library.

If you paid close attention, you will have noticed that I installed a plugin called Regenerate Thumbnails but didn't activate it. That's because this plugin is a very specific feature you only use when you change your themes. So let's say you have a theme currently active. 2015 maybe or something else and you've used featured images. And then you switched to another theme that has featured images but the featured images are a completely different size. What will happen is all your featured images will either look stretched or squished or won't work at all. If that's the case, you need to run this plugin, Regenerate Thumbnails.

What it does is go through every single image you've ever uploaded to your site and it regenerates new versions of it for your featured images. To make it work, you activate it, then you go to Tools and Regenerate Thumbnails, which is a new feature added by the plugin. And then you just click on Regenerate All Thumbnails. Depending on how many images you have on your site, this may take a couple of minutes or it may take a very long time. And for that reason, you can also go into the Media Library, switch to the list view and from here, you can regenerate individual thumbnails if you don't want to do it to every single photo on your entire site.

The reason I'm showing you this particular plugin is that it falls into that category of rare use scenarios where you will install it and then use it and then you might as well deactivate and delete it because you won't use it again until the next time you switch a theme. So many plugins work like that. You use them once, then put all of them away, and then if you ever need them again you just bring them back in because they're free, they come from the web, you can just reinstall them into your site. Finally, I've added a plugin called Tiled Galleries Carousel Without jetpack.

Now this is one of those really strange things with WordPress. Sometimes, people will release a plugin that does something really well but it also does something else that people don't want. Case in point, there's a plugin called Jetpack that is actually a bunch of different plugins bundled into one big package. So if you only want the Tiled Galleries function you have to download all of Jetpack and get all its other functions at the same time and they may conflict with your site or cause other problems. When that happens, plugin developers will often go into the big plugin, find the section they want, carve it out and make a new plugin of just that one feature.

Like in this case, Tiled Galleries Carousel. And what happens is you can then install those plugins individually and you get features like what you see here. You'll remember, earlier in the course I created this gallery of all my product and then when you clicked on them, you just jumped to a new page. Well with this new plugin installed, I can now display the gallery's a circles or in different ways and when I click on them, they open in this nice slideshow or a carousel instead where I can navigate through and see the product in more detail and then close it down when I want to.

So it adds a much better user experience without adding all the bulk of the rest of Jetpack. Now like I said, this is a small sampling of some plugins running on my site. And depending on the site you're building, you will have your own list of custom plugins. Just remember, anytime you have a plugin on your site that you're not using, always delete it. So I'm going to delete Hello Dolly because I'm never going to use it.