WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is available for download now and I’ve been testing out some of the new features. In this post I’ll demonstrate the plugin management features of WordPress 2.7.
The plugin admin interface can be accessed from the dashboard using the sidebar. Each of the plugin management interfaces is grouped under “Plugins”. Clicking on either “Plugins” or “Installed” will take you to the same page.
The Manage Plugins page will list all installed plugins, grouping them together as Active or Inactive. On a new installation of WordPress only the Akismet and Hello Dolly plugins are installed, and each is inactive. Clicking the Plugin Browser/Installer link will take you to the Install Plugins page.
The Install Plugins page offers you several ways to view and install plugins. You can search the WordPress Plugin Directory based on a term, author, or tag. You can also view one of many popular tags such as “Flickr” and “AJAX”, or upload a plugin in a zip file to be installed. This new upload capability negates the need to use an FTP client to upload plugins to your WordPress blog.
Installing plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory
To install a new plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory first search for a keyword that will help you find a suitable plugin. In this example I want to find a plugin to help me write series of posts.
The search results will display all of the plugins in the directory that match the keyword “series”. I want to install the “In Series” plugin, so I simply click the “Install” link on the right side of the search results.
This opens a lightbox popup containing the WordPress Plugin Directory information for In Series as well as a link to install the plugin on my WordPress blog.
When a new plugin is installed it is not automatically activated, however you can do this by clicking the link on the installation results page.
The Manage Plugins page also lets you perform bulk actions against your plugins. You can select the check boxes next to several plugins and either activate, deactivate, or delete them by choosing the action from the dropdown list and then clicking Apply.
The new WordPress 2.7 plugin management interface makes it much easier to install and manage plugins on your WordPress blog. You no longer need to browse to the plugin directory, download zip files, FTP them to your web host, and then log in to your blog and activate them. For people that like to test many plugins on their blogs this will be a great time saver.
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