WordPress Plugins for Writers: Part 1 – Introduction

One of the reasons I recommend WordPress as the backbone of your writing website is that it is very easy to extend what WP can do using plugins. Installing a WordPress plugin is easy — for the most part, you just upload the folder to the wp-content/plugins folder on your server, go to the “Plugins” tab in WordPress, and activate it. There are plugins that affect the display of your content, how you interact with readers, and the everyday maintenance of the site, among other things. Using a selection of plugins can help add a nice bit of added functionality to your website.

This week, we’ll be looking at several plugins a writer’s site should have. Some of these are useful, even essential, for any site, such as the ones that prevent spammers from filling your comments with ads for porn and poker sites. Others are highly specialized to meet the specific needs of writers, such as one that allows you to share your writing goals and your progress towards them with your readers.

To give you a taste of what plugins can do, I thought I’d start by introducing “Javascript Pull-Quotes”, a plugin that allows you to place selected text from your post into nicely formatted pullquotes. Adding a pull-quote is easy with Javascript Pull-Quotes; all you have to do is place <span class="pullquote">around the content you want in the pullquote</span>. If you use the visual editor in WP, it’s even easier — the plugin inserts a pull-quote button into the writing toolbar — highlight the text you want as a pull-quote and hit the button.

Javascript Pull-Quotes offers several ways to customize the look and placement of your pull-quotes — you can try one of five built-in styles, or if you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add new definitions to your site’s stylesheet. You can place pull-quotes on the left or right-hand side of your text column, and you can have each subsequent pull-quote alternate sides.