In my last post, I wrote about how I was busy setting up my WordPress blog and how I found out about the huge plugins repository that WordPress really had. I did end up using a lot of them as you can see from this list of plugins that I use.
Plugins can make your life easy or hell. Depends on how and what plugin you are using or plan to use on your blog. No really. There’s certainly nothing funny here.

Now, let me share my experience with you considering what I went through in order to configure them to work cohesively with my blog.

My approach was simple. It was what anybody would tend to follow: I visited blogs, sites and plugin repositories, I liked some; I downloaded them.

It was all fine up until I faced my first problem. After activating a plugin, I went over to my site to test it and presto! It ain’t working. It was giving some huge PHP error. Now back to the site admin dashboard. Deactivate last plugin (that I had activated before the error happened). Checked the site and this time it was working fine (I later found out that some plugins were never upward compatible and some were never backward compatible).

This experience should give you some warning. It tells you NOT to mess up your online blog with mistakes like these. Unless you want people to be freaked out by the stupid errors that the server throws up when during this period a visitor comes to your site. This will give him a bad impression about your site.

Remember these things when choosing your plugins:

1. Before you set out looking for plugins, I must tell you to write down these things which are very important:
   • The PHP version that your server is running
   • The MySQL version that your site is running
   • and; The WordPress version you are running your blog on.
2. If you like a plugin on any site and it looks to be working fine with them, this DOES NOT mean it will work fine with you. This is one thing you MUST understand. Do some research about the plugin. Ask yourself questions like, “Is the plugin compatible with your version of WordPress? Is it compatible with other plugins that you may have running on your website. It is a good idea to read the Release Notes/Readme (no matter how boring they may look to you) of the plugin.
3. It is better if you go in for plugins that are backward compatible. This saves you the trouble of losing the functionality that this plugin provides if, God Forbid, you mess up with the latest release of WordPress and decide to stick with an older version.
4. Be sure to check out any issues or requirements that the plugin may have with the specific MySql version (Some plugins are using the database).
5. Make sure you have a test environment where you check your plugin thoroughly before you make your plugin live. (This is one approach that I learned the hard way as mentioned above in this very article and I follow it to the T. No compromise).

I will be telling you about setting up your own environment at your home so that you are good with all kinds of compatibility tests and are confident enough to upload it to your actual website.

I leave you with some related articles that might interest you:

Getting ready to start your blog, then you should read this.

Need some cool plugins for your WordPress blog, check this list.

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