WordPress as a “social” machine
One of the great features of WordPress is that “social” is built in. In addition to having blog roots there are thousands of plugins that you can add to extend the abilities of your site or micro-site. As more and more social and review applications are introduced like Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, SCVNGR, Yelp, etc., WordPress developers answer the call. This makes it possible to integrate social campaigns with the tools and applications that your target audience is currently using. We all see the way that the Internet changes almost daily and WordPress has been built to keep up and even lead the charge.
Selecting a plugin for your site
Plugins are a big part of how WordPress stays ahead of the curve. As an Open Source project there are thousands of programmers from around the World that contribute by adding themes and plugins. A plugin can add various functionality to a site kind of like adding a snow plow to the front of a truck can add the ability to move snow. There are WordPress plugins for SEO, Social Network integration, Google Maps, slide shows, pop up marketing, and much, much more.
You should be aware that not all plugins are created equal. While you browse through the available plugins on www.WordPress.org, keep in mind that out of the almost 14,000 plugins available you will come across some that are old or just not built well. WordPress has added the ability for users to rate and review plugins in addition to giving you other valuable information about them. As you begin to use new plugins always take note of the age, update frequency, ratings, reviews, and support channels. As you use continue to use WordPress you will also become familiar with certain plugin authors that you are comfortable with.
As you will see in the video it is possible to search for plugins that provide specific functionality like “YouTube video player”. You can also type in the name of the plugin, upload a plugin from your desktop (needs to be in a .zip file) or just browse the plugins based on popularity or most recent.
Uploading and setting up your plugin
Once you have chosen your plugin all you need to do is select upload then activate and it will be ready to go. Set up of your plugin will vary depending on the functionality.
Tubepress Video plugin for YouTube and Vimeo
In the Tubepress plugin that I set up in the video there are many options that can be chosen or you can just install add a YouTube user and be done. In the video you will see that I chose the later and just added a YouTube channel, but there is much more functionality available. You can display videos or galleries of videos from playlists, video searches, combine Vimeo and YouTube videos and much more. I have also included a link to the documentation just in case you want to explore a little more.
Link for Tubepress documentation:
http://tubepress.org/documentation/start
DealerTrend WordPress Website Clients
If you are a DealerTrend website client and would like us to help you set up Tubepress on you site please contact us at support@dealertrend.com.