I’m going to make a small article on these two points. People who use WordPress do not see the difficulty in installing a theme or a plugin but the ones who don’t use it perhaps don’t know that it is really easy to do and it could scare them in his jump to WordPress. There are no complications at all.

Installing plugins

We have already commented that plugins are extensions that add many new features to your blog. The typical installation of a plugin consists of three steps, at most four:

1. Download the plugin. Perhaps you’ve heard some talk about a certain plugin and there is a link directly to the author’s homepage, but if not you can search the plugins directory of WordPress where there are plugins that perform almost any given task. Once it is downloaded then you have to decompress it. If it comes with instructions probably there will be explained the entire installation process along with its functionality.
2. Upload to plugin your server. There are times when the plugin is composed of a single file .php, and on other occasions you will have to upload an entire directory because it consist of several files. You can use a free FTP client (SmartFTP, FileZilla, FireFTP, etc). We have to leave in the directory /wp-content/plugins.
3. Go to the administrator’s panel . You have to have a section called plugins and within it the entire list of plugins you have available (uploaded to your server). Look for the one you’ve just uploaded, you’ll see that in the right column you have a link to activate it so go on.
4. Setup / handling. Once installed it may have a settings panel, is not always the case. Or you can have a control panel to see results that it could give. It depens on plugin. Some plugins have a new type of widget to be put in the sidebar.

It wasn’t complicated, was it? Some plugins, few of them, require you to add some lines in your php index.php or another file. In this case certainly is well explained in a text file that comes with the plugin.

Installation of themes

The theme is the component that gives the visual appearance to your blog, a kind of skin. You can design your own theme or you can get one of the thousands of free themes available on the Internet. If you are going to try a free theme be sure at least that is a proven theme, full operative and free of malicious code. Here is a myriad of themes you can try directly from the web. The steps to install a theme are:

1. Download and unpack the theme.
2. Upload the whole directory using your FTP client location /wp-content/themes.
3. In the admin’s panel you have a section for the themes. In WP v2.5 or higher it’s in Design> Themes, and there you have to see the new theme uploaded. Simply select and automatically loads. Take a look at the appearance of your blog now. Note: The admin’s panel does not change.

That was all. I think there is not much complication. I hope it had been useful for you.

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