Today I’m going to talk about Plugins.

Plugins  can  extend WordPress to do almost  anything you can imagine.

                                                                                                        I’ll be going through each of the plugins on my blog, explaining how to install them, what they do and the benefits of having them installed on your blog.

The value of any blog is its content, and the comments that your readers leave in reply to your posts.

Imagine if you lost your blog, and had to start from scratch! Remember that ultimately your blog is sitting on a computer somewhere at your website host provider, and we all know that computers can go wrong, or can be hacked. Also bear in mind that it’s recommended before you upgrade WordPress to a  newer version, that you should ALWAYS backup your blog. There are many reasons why things can go wrong.

You need to get your backup now! Don’t leave until later, because the next time you’ll be thinking about backups is when your blog goes down. That’ll be much too late!

It is of course possible to backup your blog or your whole website using an FTP transfer program. I use CuteFTP, this software program allows you to transfer all the files from your blog or website to any local hard disk. The problem with this approach is that you have to remember to do it, and it’s not automated.

You can also backup your blog from your websites control panel, using ”phpMyAdmin”, but I prefer to use plugins where they are available, especially since plugins are usually automatic once installed, and it just makes the whole process easier.

 

First off, the most important plugin in my opinion, you’ll want to install on your blog is the “backup WordPress”  program you can download from here:

This plugin is currently at public beta, which means its usable, but is not quite a finished product. The authors are adding new options all the time, but the backup itself works fine.

The easiest steps for installing the plug in are as follows:-

From your dashboard, in plugins TAB, click Add New.

In the Search Field enter “backupwordpress”, and click the search Plugins button.

Next to the Backup WordPress Item click the Install Button.

The plugin has two modes, easy mode & an advanced mode. When first installed, the plugin will default to easy mode.

Easy Mode:

* Switch between Easy Mode and Advanced Mode
* Database backup as well as directory structure including uploaded files, plugins, etc.
* Set up Mail notification on new backups
* Trigger backup manually
* Set basic schedules for your backups
* restore backups
* staggered SQL import when restoring
* automatically continue unfinished backups in background
* download backups
* Help page
* Language Support for english and german(deutsch)

more options in Advanced Mode
* Set and manage custom schedules * Check disk space
* View backup Logs
* Delete backups manually
* Manage backup presets
* Manage exclude-lists for use with these presets

There are just a few options to setup in easy mode, Backup Path (tell the backup where to put your backup files), Basic Scheduling (tell the backup how often to run automatically), Mail Setup (do you want the backups sending to an email address).

This backup plugin has been happily backing up all of the files on my blog with no issues whatsoever, so this plugin definitely gets my vote, especially since I don’t have to remember to backup my blog at all. Perfect.

So whichever method you decide to use to back up your blog, the main thing is to make sure you actually do backup regularly!

You know it makes sense….

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