WordPress Plugins and Widgets

What are plugins and widgets?


WordPress allows for free and accessible additions to the stock WordPress site in the way of plugins and widgets. 

Widgets can best be described by outputting content, such as a sidebar, or a cart system. 

Plugins, on the other hand, provide new functionality to the WordPress site. In this post, I will display how I used both widgets and plugins in my own WordPress site.

Plugins


As the site I am aiming to create has eCommerce functionality, finding a plugin for this purpose makes sense. One of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress is WooCommerce.

WooCommerce provides users with the ability to upload stock, prices and descriptions to their own 'shop', available for purchase. The Plugin has a lot more functionality, but this is all I will need it for.

Starting off by visiting the 'plugins' page within WordPress, we can search for WooCommerce.

From there, it is easy enough to add your own products to the system from the products tab:


This, coupled with a sandbox PayPal account makes for mock payments, easily!

Removing all blog functionality 


As my site is not intended to be used as a blog, all blog functionality should be removed. For this, all blog posts have been removed, as well as all pages associated with it. Though, there was still the ability to comment on some pages of my site, due to the blog functionality, so after searching on how to remove blog functionality from wordpress the following site offered a solution (https://www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/article/how-to-use-wordpress-as-a-website-and-disable-blog-features/).

The solution was to install a plugin by the name of 'Disable Comments'. This plugin completely removes all comment functionality, and with some configuration you are able to stop future comments from occurring, along with any comment boxes. 




Widgets


Some widgets that WordPress provides are redundant if you are not running a blog, such as blog categories and such. Using the Widgets tab, these were removed in favour of some useful ones.

WooCommerce gives you some widgets to play with, which I took advantage of. Mainly the product categories for my shop items, such as 'Fluffy' or 'Cuddly'. This will allow users to quickly filter all items by category easily from the bottom of the page.

Another widget which proved to work well was the installed 'Cart' widget. This took the items held in the WooCommerce cart and displays them at the bottom of the screen for the user, with an additional cart page before paying.

Below are the widgets enabled on my site:




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