WordPress in an Hour or Less: The Get It Done Guide to Installing and Using WordPress (10 page)

A common use for this type of link is to include a banner advertisement to a product or a service.  Many themes allow for the addition of text widgets to the footer area of the site, so in such cases you could place a clickable banner advertisement in the footer of your site.

As the start of the chapter mentioned, you can take WordPress far beyond its basic capabilities by taking advantage of the power of
plug-Ins
.  Plug-Ins are miniature programs that extend the range of capabilities of the basic WordPress feature set.  Plug-ins add literally any imaginable capability to WordPress.  Some examples are adding Facebook "Like" buttons, adding photo galleries, providing a feature for creating an automated backup of your entire site, managing mailing lists, sending text messages to mobile phones, support of e-commerce including credit card processing, and many, many more.  If there is a task that you can imagine as being handled by a computer, chances are there's a WordPress plug-in that will manage the task.

The plug-ins that you choose to add will be very much your choice, depending on the needs of your site. But I’ll illustrate how you can extend the basic power of WordPress by providing step-by-step details for installing a plug-in that nearly every site needs—a flexible, customizable contact form. There are dozens, if not hundreds of contact forms available as WordPress plug-ins but the one that I will recommend is the Contact Form 7 from Takayuki Miyoshi. It is simple to install and set up, yet it is flexible and includes some great anti-spam features like support for Captcha and Akismet.
 

To install the Contact Form 7 plug-in (or to install any plug-in, for that matter), go to the Dashboard, and under Plug-Ins, click
Add New
.  Doing so causes the Install Plug-Ins screen to appear, as shown here:

In the Search box, you can enter a search term, or you can narrow your search by clicking on any of the categories shown in the lower half of the screen.  For our example, type 'contact form 7' into the Search box, and click 'Search Plug-Ins.' The Search Results screen displays the results of your search, as shown here:

In this case, Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi appears as the first item in the list.  To install this plug in, make sure you have located the one authored by Miyoshi (you can find the author's name in the details section of any plug-in.) After you have located the desired plug-in, click the Install Now link located just underneath the name of the plug-in.  You will see a dialog box asking for confirmation; click OK, and WordPress will upload the file to your web host, unzip the file, and install the plug-in.  The next screen that appears will tell you that the plug-in has been successfully installed, and you'll see a link that lets you activate the plug-in.  Click Activate Plug-In, and you will see the Contact Form 7 plug-in appear in your list of available plug-ins, as shown here.

To use this Plug-In, first click the dashboard icon in the Dashboard, just to refresh the list of dashboard menu choices. 
Once you do this you will see that a new menu choice, 'Contact', has been added to the dashboard menu options (see below).

To create a contact form using the new plug-in, click the Contact menu item on the Dashboard.  Doing so reveals a new Contact Form 7 screen, and it already contains one contact form for your use; it's the one called 'contact form 1' in the list, and since you have not yet created any other forms, it's the only one in the list.

Click the Edit link directly under the name of the first contact form.  The following screen appears, with the lower half revealing fields for a site visitor's name, e-mail address, subject line entry message, and a 'Submit' button (see illustration).

This default layout for a contact form will work fine for our example, so copy the code that you see at the top of the screen (you can click anywhere within the code, then right-click to select it, and choose copy from the shortcut menu that appears.) Then click
Save at the far right, to save the form.  Now, click Pages in the Dashboard, and find the Contact Us page that you created back in Chapter 3.  Click the 'Edit' link to open the page in the WordPress editor.  If you followed the tutorial example earlier in this text, the page looks like this:

Change the second line about reaching you by way of e-mail to read, 'Fill in the form that appears below.' Then add a blank line, and press CTRL+V to paste the code you copied to your clipboard earlier into this page.  The page should now look like the following:

Click Update to update the site's Contact Us page with your changes, then click View Page to bring up the page the way that it would appear to a site's visitor.  You'll see that instead of the plain text with an e-mail address, your Contact Us page now has a professional-looking feedback form, generated entirely by the Contact Form 7 plug-in (see illustration).

As mentioned, different plug-ins are installed and used differently, depending on exactly what tasks the plug-in is performing for you, so you will need to read the directions provided by the author of the plug-in to determine exactly how to put the plug-in to work at your site.  The better-written plug-ins will all provide detailed directions on how the plug-in can be used. (Also, if you found your plug-ins at the WordPress site, note that the details sections nearly always include a reference to the developer's web site, where you may find additional details regarding the plug-in.

TIP: Remember that you can
easily install plug-ins from directly within WordPress. To do this, at the Dashboard, choose
Plug-Ins, and then click
Add New
.  Doing so causes the Install Plug-Ins screen to appear. You can then search for and locate the desired plug-in, click the 'Install Now' link, and (when the next screen appears) click the 'Activate' link. At this point, your plug-in is operational, and you can refer to the documentation link for the plug-in for additional details on its use.