Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?
If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!
The first thing you may be asking yourselves is: “Jetpack…What exactly is this plugin, and what does it do?” Here’s the simple answer: it brings all the feature of sites hosted on Automattic’s WordPress.com platform to your self hosted WordPress site. This includes WP-Stats, YouTube embeds, a user-friendly Twitter widget, Sharedaddy, PollDaddy, and even the easy ability for the VideoPress upgrade. This makes it the best, user friendly way to view complicated information and manage otherwise complicated settings and installations.
The first thing to do is to create a WordPress.com account if you don’t have one already. You can do that by clicking here. The next thing you want to do is download download Jetpack by Automattic. Then, when activated via the admin panel on your WordPress install, you’ll see a banner telling you to login with your WordPress.com account. Follow those directions, and you should have all that “cloud-power” at your finger tips.
Of course, there is always the lack of Grunion, another great WordPress plugin used for creating forms, but that should be included by Automattic in the next release, or at least I hope so.
This article was contributed by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer.
