I’m getting back into WordPress and there are so many different plugins and things that it is so confusing for someone who is not a complete noob (where the defaults work well) and not a major hacker (eg a professional developer). So here are some things that I’ve learned:
- You want to use Jetpack. It comes from WordPress and it has some useful addons. The most notable is integration with Facebook and Twitter, so that cross posts work
- Wordfence. For security, you really want this as well as it monitors the site and tells you who is logged in or not.
- WP Backup. This does a complete backup of all your files and throws them into dropbox and into your uploads directory
For themes, this is the most confusing part as there are so many. And the core themes aren’t super well documented. You can install them from the themes things, but you have to go to the themes directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes to find the documentation
- If you just use the standard theme, like Twenty Twelve (nice way to say 2012). Then for your header image, you have to stuff it nto the directory and make sure the header is exactly 1000×228. It will do a rotation for any files in that directory which is pretty cool.
