Gotta Love the New Plugin Installer in Wordpress 2.8

If you haven’t upgraded to Wordpress 2.8 yet, here’s another good reason: Automatic Plugin installation.

All right, technically speaking, the plugin installer was added in Wordpress 2.7. But let’s face it, it was not quite up to speed back then.

Now, though, it’s a different story. No longer do you need to weed your way through the Wordpress Plugins page, download the plugin to your hard drive, unzip the package, upload it to your wordpress install and activate it.

Nope, now it all happens from within your plugins management page.

You can search for a plugin using a keyword or, if you know the name of the plugin you’re looking for, enter that. Wordpress will give you a list of plugins that match your search phrase. Click the install button next to the one you want to install, wait a few seconds, activate the plugin and voila, you’re done!

If you haven’t tried the plugin installer yet, go check it out. Though be careful: Installing plugins is so easy now you may find yourself going on a plugin binge!

And one word of caution, there are some plugins that have not been upgraded to work with Wordpress 2.8 yet. And some of them can actually crash your install – no you won’t lose your database. So, if possible, stick with plugins that have been tested up to WP 2.8.