WordPress is an excellent tool for building a blog site, but what makes it a killer application is the vast amount of free plugins and themes that allow anyone to customize the blog to their needs and taste. On the other hand the huge collection of plugins can be a bit too overwhelming for some people. No wonder that most of us have or should have these questions in mind:

  1. What is a plugin?
  2. What are the essential plugins that everyone should have on their blogs?
  3. Are there any specific plugins that I might need for my particular blog?
  4. Which plugins are nice to have but not necessary?
  5. Where do I look for these plugins?
  6. Will these plugins work for my version of WordPress?
  7. Who writes these plugins; can I trust their code?
  8. Did plugin writers keep the security issues in mind when developing those plugins?


You may have other questions about plugins but make sure you always address the security questions before installing the plugin. It’s not that difficult to write a plugin if you are a programmer. However, every programmer has a certain style, a specific skill set and adheres to a particular set of rules when writing a code. Not every programmer follows a clean well-documented code, knows and focuses on security issues and vulnerabilities of a particular application, performs a sufficient testing of this plugin.

Even WordPress programmers often miss on these things, that’s why they regularly release updated versions of the application on a monthly basis. The latest version 2.1.1 includes “about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code”. Considering that the previous version 2.1 has been released just 30 days prior to the update, that’s 1 bug every day. Most plugin writers don’t update their code as frequently, but who knows how many bugs their code contains?

I will tackle these questions soon and dedicate a few posts on this topic. Meanwhile if you have any other questions about plugins, let me know and I’ll attend to them as well.

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Hi, I'm Vivien. Thanks for visiting my Inspiration Bit. I often find myself scouring the internet looking for either answers to many questions I have or websites that inspire me, sites that I can learn from. On what topics you might ask — any topics that interest me, anything from web design to typography and art, from blogging to entrepreneurship, from programming to open source.
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When I'm not blogging, I design web sites, teach, play with my daughter and try to balance family, work, friends and a somewhat active social life on