Plugins

Plugins are used widely by all WordPress users. They provide extra functionality to your application, making life easier. There are different ways in installing plugins. In this tutorial I will discuss how to install plugins.

1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/

2. Select Plugins panel then Add New, if you want to add new plugins.

3. You can either Search plugin or Upload plugin. To search plugin, enter the keyword in the search engine provided. It will automatically list the possible matched keywords. If you found your plugin, click on Install Now.

3. If you want to Upload plugin, simply click the Upload Plugin button and it will show up an upload file section. You need to upload the zip file of your desired plugin and click Install Now. 

4. If you want to remove or delete plugin, go to Plugins then Installed Plugins. You can find all your installed plugins.

You can either delete or deactivate a plugin. Just click Activate if you want to activate an unused plugin, Delete if you want to delete it, and Deactivate if you want to deactivate an active plugin.

Site Sticky Notes Plugin

1. Go to Sticky Note official WordPress plugin area here. Download the zip file via Download button.

2. Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin. A box appears where you can upload the zip files then click Install Now.

3. Go to your site or any page in your site. Find the button above named Add Note. A popup sticky note will appear. You can input anything you want and click check button to save it and trash bin button to delete.

You can drag and drop them anywhere you’d like, type a note, and change its color/priority.

4. Go back to your WP administration area. Click on Site Notes, you can see the created notes and you can add, edit and deleted notes. Add priority colors and make sure to put the redirection URL or Related Page on your site where you want to add your notes.

So that’s basically how you install the sticky notes. Very easy and convenient for everyday use. I will give additional example on how to install plugins. We will use the famous WooCommerce plugin on this.

WooCommerce Plugin

1. I assume that you are now in the plugin page. Search for the keyword “WooCommerce” and click Install Now.

2. After clicking Install Now, an Active button will appear. Click Active.

3. Right after activation, a new window will appear with WooCommerce configuration wizard. Click Yes Please to continue and setup your store’s key settings. It will ask basic questions about your store.

  • Store Details

This area will ask basic questions as shown in the image. Fill them up because they will be the basis of your sites information. Click Continue.

  • Industry

Pick the industry your site will soon operate. If not found in any of the categories, pick Other. Click Continue.

  • Product Types

Pick any of those product types that you site will offer. You can pick as many as you can, and if you are not familiar with it feel free to press Learn More link. Click Continue.

  • Business Details

Pick on the dropdown list on how many products you want to display and if you are currently selling elsewhere. In are you currently selling elsewhere area, you will be given different set of questions – mostly to boost your site on different advertisement platform (eg FB) and you can enable or disable them if you wish, current site revenue if you have another business site with the same purpose. Try them all Click Continue.

  • Theme

Choose the theme you prefer, you can either get the Free or the Paid version. For now, I will choose Storefront as my theme. Click Choose button or click Live Demo if you want to test it. 

4. Right after picking a theme, it will redirect to this page. You can click Yes Please! if you want to add up Jetpack in you WooCommerce or No Thanks. You can read more about Jetpack and the services it offers in their site. 

5. To verify that your WooCommerce installation is successful, visit your site and look into the navigation menu. If you successfully install the plugin, it will show Cart, Checkout, and Shop pages.

6. We need to further more change our WooCommerce settings, simply navigate to WooCommerce panel, then Settings. In this area you will find different settings. Which includes default currency, shipping zone your store is in, payment method etc.

Pick in any of the tab under Settings for updating different options in your site. Currently the tab is under Shipping, so click on Add Shipping Zone to setup the site.

Under Payments tab, you can enabled or disabled different payment method. As you can see, you can use Paypal, COD, etc as your payment mode. Click Set Up to configure the method.

Setting your WooCommerce is a must for a smooth customer-client transactions. Explore more on this area and learn more on how this settings works. It will always depend on your type of store.

A store is nothing with products. So let’s proceed in adding your products, you can either import or create product via WooCommerce Product panel.

7. Go to Product panel then Add New. Add the necessary product description, images, price, etc.

8. To see all the products imported or created, go to All Products. You will see the list of the products added and you can edit or delete them via this area.

Very simple right? Put not all plugins are useable specially if you’re running a discussion board plugins or some E-commerce plugins. So what will we do about it? We can have a user registration or user login setup. In the next tutorial I will teach you how to work around User Registration Settings.

Affiliates Manager Plugin

Another helpful plugin for your WooCommerce site is the Affiliates Manager plugin. This plugin help you manage an affiliate marketing program to create more traffic and sales to your store. This plugin is one of the most fastest and growing advertising method, and it’s an open source plugin which means you can modify it when you need something that it’s not currently existing. It facilitates the affiliates recruitment, login, registration, and management process. It will also track the referrals your affiliates send to your site and give commissions appropriately. Affiliates Manager plugin integrates with some of the most popular e-commerce solutions.

1. Go to Plugins > Add New > search for Affiliates Manager > Install Now > Activate

2. After activation, the plugin will create new option found on the left side of your admin area named Affiliates.

Click or hover Affiliates and you can see multiple options you can update and configure for your fulfilment. You can also click on the My Affiliates where it list all you affs, or add new affs, etc. The most important thing you need setup is the Settings.

3. In Settings area, you can modify the pages for  login, registration, etc. Look into the payment also and the General option. Just to be sure, check the Settings properly to configure your site properly.

4. Let’s try to register as new affiliate, logout as admin then go to your homepage. Once the Affiliates Manager plugin is installed it will automatically create 3 pages:

  • Store Affiliate ‐ A welcome page which allows a user to sign up for an affiliate account or login to their dashboard
  • Register ‐ A page containing the affiliate registration form.
  • Affiliate Login ‐ A page containing the affiliate login form

Take note that you can modify your menu structure and arrange your links for faster registration and login. Sometimes your affiliate will find it hard to find your registration and login page.

5. Click on Store Affiliate in the menu section of your site. You can see links for registration or login. So click Register.

Put in the necessary information, and make sure to put a working email because you will need to get your password via email after registration.

6. After submitting your application, you will be redirected to this page saying you can now login but where is the password? This is found in your email sent after registration. So better check your mail.

7. Check your email and you can see your username and password and the login URL.

8. Click on the URL given, this will redirect to the login page. Input the email/username and the password given.

9. After login, you will see different tabs where you can configure your account. Click on Creatives, this shows the affiliate ID and referral URL you can use to promote the site.

10. Next thing you need to setup is the Edit Profile, this is where you need to setup the Payment Details. 

Click on Save Changes if you’re done editing your personal informations.

So that ends our affiliate tutorial. You can now add affiliates without a problem, next thing you can do is add user to your WordPress (non affiliates). You can enable user registration in WordPress to allow users to add posts, or comment, or perform other actions on your website.

1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/

2. Select Settings panel then General. Scroll down to the ‘Membership’ section and check the box next to ‘Anyone can register’ option.

3. Next you need to select the New User Default Role. This is the user role assigned to each new user who registers on your website.

4. Click Save Changes.

Note: Do not use Administrator as the default user role for user registrations.

Now you are done with allowing users to use your site. Next thing we will do is to allow user to register and login to your site by adding the links to login and registration pages. There are multiple ways to do that. We will discuss two of the most common method used.

Method 1

You can add a login link via meta widget. You need to do the following to add meta widget in you sidebar.

1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/

2. Go to Appearances then Widgets.

3. Find Sidebar and add the Meta widget to a sidebar.

Method 2

Another way for user to login and register is to create custom login and registration pages.

The first method basically gives users access to your admin area instead of allowing them to go to your site without seeing admin panel page. This second method will do that trick for you.

Here is how to create your own custom login and registration page in WordPress.

1. Install and activate Paid Memberships Pro. Please see tutorial above on how to install a plugin

2. After activation, navigate to Dashboard area of Memberships.

3. Go to Settings then Manage Membership Pages, edit all the necessary pages you need eg. Login and Registration page. You can also use the default created pages and edit them. Click Save Settings.

Note: Automatically generated pages.

Note: Adding of Membership Level or Role.

4. Now got to your site and check the menu. You can see newly added pages. Login, and Membership Account. Since we used the default pages, you can see under sub menu of Membership Account -> Membership Checkout – suppose to be Registration Page. You can of course edit the names of this pages.

5. Fill in the necessary information then click Submit and Confirm. It will eventually redirect to confirmation page and you are on login.

6. If you’re already registered, click on Login in the menu. Input the username or email and password then click Log In.

You can also register via Login Page via Join Now or retrieve password using Lost Password link.

Adding Sock'Em SPAMbots Plugin

Reduce spam registrations by using this amazing plugin. You just need a little setup and voila! CAPTCHA fields inhibit both human and robot participation in important kitty-related discussions. Sock’Em SPAMbots exists to take a more seamless approach to SPAM blocking, placing the burden on the robots, not the humans.

this plugin gives you a variety of options for blocking SPAM comments, such as honeypots, speed tests, maximum number of links in a comment, and more. SPAMbots plays well with Akismet for even more SPAM fighting power.

1. Go to Plugins > search keyword Sock’Em SPAMbots > Install Now > Activate

2. Proceed to set the necessary settings of your Sock’Em SPAMbots plugin.

Go to Settings > Sock’Em SPAMbots. You will notice all the possible changes you can enabled or disabled. Using the checkbox, tick what you need to updates. 

Click Save button, if all changes done.

3. To make sure that your plugin is working correctly, click on the Enable Debugging, this is found same place as the settings is located. Click Save.

4. After clicking the enabled debugging, 2 new rows will show – Empty Log and Click here to view the log. To empty your log check empty log and if you want to see your logs, click here to view it.

5. Try adding comments in one of your post, add multiple links, special characters, and so on. Make it like as if human can’t read it. As check out your log.

Adding Form in Pages

After creating form using WPForms, we will now proceed in putting or embedding this form into our page.

1. Go to Pages then Add New.

2. On the page screen, you will notice the + button. Click the + button and search for WPForms in the search engine.

Click on the WPForms and it will show the list of forms you previously created.

3. Select the registration form you previously created.

4. The form will automatically load in your page editor. After doing that, you can either Preview the page with form or you can Publish it to live.

Creating Login Form is the same as creating Registration Form. Do the same steps but instead of picking User Registration Form Template, pick the User Login Form Template. The rest of the steps are the same. Don’t forget to add the form in your page.

I hope this tutorial helped you in many ways.

Adminimize Plugin​

If you are planning to let specific users to login in your site but still in doubt because they might see important options then Adminimize Plugin will help you with that. There are lots of things in the WordPress admin area that your users don’t need to see or use. This plugin help you to hide unnecessary things from WordPress administration area. This plugin makes it easy to remove items from view based on a user’s role.

1. Go to Plugins > Add New > Search for Adminimize > Install Now > Activate

2. Check Settings > Adminimize – it will show if the plugin was successfully installed and activated.

3. You can create new user – we need new user(s) for testing the features of this plugin. Go to Users > Add New > Fill in the necessary information and make sure to pick the Role of that user you are adding > Add New User

4. Navigate back to your plugin settings. You will have multiple options that you can select to hide/show certain part of your website basing on different user role.

Let’s try to hide the Admin Bar Backend and Admin Bar Front End for our administrator account. As you can see you can click Select All and all options found in your admin bar will be hidden. Then click Update Options and to see the changes you then need to Log Out. 

5. We go back to our Login page then login as administrator or the previous user that you created given if the user role was administrator. 

As you can see, the Admin Bar was missing both for backend and front end display. So that means the plugin is working perfectly! Cool!

6. If you want a specific class or ID to hide, it is possible to add own options to hide areas in the back-end of WordPress. It is easy and you must only input the ID or class, a selector, of the markup, that you will hide.

This plugin is diverse, explore every settings and modify them according to your needs.

Toolset Plugins

Another awesome plugins for handy updating your WordPress site is by using Toolset plugin. Toolset comes with many plugins you can use and install. The downside of this plugin is that you need to purchase it but I assure you, it will be worthy. Toolset includes everything that you need to design great-looking sites. We use the WordPress Block Editor as a basis and built our library of design elements on it. You can also optimize your designs for different screen sizes, so that they look great on desktops, tablets and phones. And this comes with overall package you can use.

I will walk you through the step by step process in installing toolset plugins and how are they connected to each other.

1. You need to make sure that you will download first toolset plugins that you need. See the image beside, you can see that I got 5 important plugins that I downloaded from toolset site. Or you can just install the main toolset plugin and install the others later.

2. Login to your WordPress admin area, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin > Choose the file you want to upload then hit Install Now > Activate the plugin(s).

  • Toolset Types – lets you set up the custom post types, fields and taxonomy, that will hold the listing items
  • Toolset Blocks – your design engine for how content appears on the site’s front-end
  • Toolset Forms – lets you build the front-end forms, that allow visitors to submit and edit their own directory items
  • Toolset Maps – needed for directory sites that show information on maps
  • Toolset Access – needed when you want to control what different people and roles can do on the site’s front-end and back-end

3. Right after Activation, you can see a link that will redirect you to register or add site key. Clicking the link will redirect to a page where you can input the key. See 2nd image on the right side. Input the site key and click OK

4. After clicking OK, you will notice a list of plugins you can activate and use. I personally installed 5 plugins at the start so you can see that some plugins don’t have checkbox anymore, that means its already installed and working on your site. 

To add more plugins, click on the checkbox and install it. 

The first thing we need to do when building our sample website is to create its structure. You do this by creating custom post types, adding custom fields and using custom taxonomy to categorize your content.

  • Custom post types – for the items that the directory site lists (like a “car” custom post type for a car dealership site)
  • Custom fields – for the additional information that the directory items require (like a “price” field for cars)
  • Custom taxonomy – to organize the directory items (like “car type” for cars)

1. You can edit these post types, fields, and taxonomy in Toolset option menu found on the left side of your WP admin area.

2. You can also add custom fields, etc on the built-in post and pages of WordPress, simply go to Toolset > Dashboard and you will see the list of the possible post or pages you can add fields.

3. So example is add custom field for Post Type, add in Skype as required field. Add in the necessary information that you want to show in your Post when you create one. 

Try to go to Post > Add New > click on the options above and see the toolset options available.

This plugin also allows you to load posts from the database and display them, as fancy lists, on the front-end. A list can appear in any way you choose. It can be a responsive grid, masonry or collage layout, or any other style you wish.

1. So let’s try to create or edit a page, post or a template and insert the View block.

2. Use the WordPress Block Editor to design your View.

3. Use Toolset blocks to add dynamic fields to the template.

Now, you can enhance your View with advanced features. For example, you can add pagination and infinite scrolling, front-end sorting, filter the list, or add a custom search.

Not only that we can do content types including custom post types, custom taxonomies and advanced content types using custom tables, we can also manage and customize forms and users. In the next steps we will discuss how to edit, create those.

1. Go to Toolset > User Forms > Add New

2. It will redirect to new page where you can input all the necessary inputs, buttons, etc on the build form. Save it.

3. To add this form you created, simply go to pages or post where you can embed the user form.

Click on the tools above, you can see based on the image on the 3rd option. Click it then see Toolset – Form > RegUser (this is the name I gave when I created the user form awhile ago)

Then it will simply add short code on the editor page. 

Sometimes you need to control who has access to different areas. Use Toolset Access plugin to control who can access different parts of the WordPress admin and front-end pages. This is much easier with Toolset, plus you can add privileges to certain users and even add new role.

1. Go to Toolset > Access Control > Custom Roles

2. Go to the bottom of the page, Enabled Advance Mode – to be able to edit roles per user account.

3. As you can see the list of Role, you can hover in the bottom of each user then Change Permission > List all the permission per user and you can edit them according to what you prefer > Save the permission.

You can edit all the settings like Post Types, Taxonomies, etc based on what you need and more.

So basically, those are the connections between all those plugins in toolset that you can use to fully customize your site – just the way you want it.

Apocalypse Meow Plugin

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This plugin provides detailed explanations and links to external resources you can use to know a certain option. From security logs where you can check every now and then to customizable password strength requirements. All you can find in this plugin.

1. Go to Plugins > Add New > Search for Apocalypse Meow > Install Now > Activate

2. Right after activation, you will see a new option named Apocalypse Meow, you can see 3 options – Settings, Login Activity, and Pro License.

The series of images below are the data you can manipulate in Settings area of this plugin. Click on the question mark beside each option and you will see a popup of explanation on what and how that option works. 

These options are divided into different sections and each section provides another set of settings/options you can modify. One is the Brute-Force Protection, this plugin will keeps track of login attempts and will temporarily ban any person or robot who has failed too much, too fast. This is critical set-and-forget protection.

Another option you can modify is the User Registration, this section provide several tests designed to detect and block robot submissions, while remaining entirely invisible to actual humans. And also the Password Requirements where you can set different trappings for your WordPress password.

Click Save Settings when everything is set and done. Click Reset button to reset the default WordPress settings.

3. The next option you can pick aside from Settings, is the Login Activity. 

You can see people who login to your site. Logging the date, status, network and the username. You can also search in date range, status, etc.

Ultimate WooCommerce Auction Plugin

If you already setup a WooCommerce plugin, and asumming that you are familiar with how woocommerce works (if you don’t please refer to the tutorials above) and you wanted to have bidding on some of your important or ancient products that you think are in demand or high in value then you will need this plugin. Ultimate WooCommerces Auction plugin allows easy and quick way to add your products as auctions on your site. Simple and flexible, lots of features, very configurable. Easy to setup, plus a great support.

1. Go to Plugins > Add New > search for keyword “Ultimate WooCommerce Auction Plugin” > Install Now > Activate

2. Go to Products > Add New > enter all product information including name, description, price, weight, etc then scroll down to bottom and see Product Data > Dropdown and pick Auction Product > a new Auction tab above General will appear > Input all information that you need for the bidding (see 2nd image for the screenshot)

3. So in the example above, you created a new product and mark it as an auction product. Now, we will see the Auction menu on the left hand side, where you can see the Settings and Auctions. Note that, this is a free version – Pro features has more options you can use so feel free to buy this plugin. 

Auction Settings, you can set auction status, restrictions, bidding time, etc. Feel free to explore more as you scroll down to the bottom. Don’t forget to save it once you finish editing.

Auctions, this will list all the auctioned products, starting bid, ending time, bidders, etc. This is the summary of the products under bid and how they are currently doing. This page will list both Live Auctions | Expired Auctions, click any of those.

4. Sign out as admin, and go to your homepage or product store page.

In the first image, you can see 2 products. The first one has a bid logo just above the product image while the other one is a regular product. As you noticed, there is a button named Bid Now and a starting bid of  $1000.

Click on the Bid Now button and you can see the product information with time left for bidding, you can input bidding price then Place Bid or Buy Now directly. If you click on Place Bid, a warning will appear that you need to login in order to place the bidding amount, this is because we need to get information for the bidder in order to declare the winner and contact them after bidding time ends.

Email Log

Email Log plugin that allows you to easily log and view all emails sent from WordPress. This would be very useful for debugging email related problems in your WordPress site or for storing sent emails for auditing purposes.

1. Login to your administration page, go to Plugins > Add New > keyword search Email Log.

2. Install and Activate Email Log plugin.

3. After activation it will automatically generate new menu named Email Log where you can configure all the settings.

4. Click Email Log > View Logs. This area will list all your sent email including the status, to, subject, and sent at.

5. You can also setup the settings via Email Log > Settings. You can set who can see the logs, remove data, disable dashboard widget, and database size notification. Each of this has description, so just check it out.

6. Try sending out mail, logout as admin and try to go to contact page or try to send out email for your customers. 

7. Right after sending, go back to your Email Log > View Logs, you can see all the email you sent out and if it did successfully sent.