The WordPress Helpers has been “live” for exactly five weeks. While many of the things we have planned were carefully considered before we started up, some are developing—or at least evolving—as we get to know you. For example, while we knew that education was going to be a big part of The WordPress Helpers, and while we have talented folks here with expertise in writing, speaking, radio, and television production, we’re still working on exactly how we organize the educational aspects here because, let’s face it:

WordPress is complex enough that this will always need to be evolving

Bringing us (back) to Bob Dunn. Bob does both on-line and in-person corporate WordPress Training. We’ve mentioned Bob a few times here, most recently in this piece about changing your WordPress theme. Every time we’ve written about Bob we’ve been careful to point out the positives in what we’re writing, but because we’re also addressing deficiencies Bob hasn’t been especially happy with our descriptions of his work.

So on the “evolution of The WordPress Helpers’ Mission” issue, we’ve been—and when necessary will continue to be—critical.

Today I came across a piece Bob Dunn (re)-published from about a year ago (see, Bob, we’re paying attention to your complaints!). To my surprise, we didn’t find it at BobWP, as linked below, but at a mirror of BobWP. If you follow both links, though, you’ll see that the mirror is imperfect; Bob’s video won’t play at one site but will at the other, because of the way he’s set up media rights.

Now, almost 300 words in, we get to the idea in the title: plugins and widgets.

Bob Dunn’s piece on plugins and widgets doesn’t say very much, because honestly, beyond saying that plugins and widgets are two different ways to extend the functionality of WordPress, there isn’t much to say that accurately differentiates the two kinds of add-on WordPress software. Bob hits the right points: in general plugins add something to WordPress whereas widgets add some way to do things. And I’ll not pick on Bob too hard for his assertion that plugins will show up in your WordPress Control Panel because it just isn’t that simple; some plug-ins appear nowhere, and some widgets depending on the design of your theme can be used in a slightly different way than Bob describes.

And that’s the point; we’re feeling our way through the way we present training here because there are a lot of different ways to handle WordPress training. And talking about Bob Dunn and his work is helping us wrap our heads around that.

And we hope watching helps you wrap your head around all there is to learn about WordPress. Of course, you don’t have to sit idly by and watch; you can participate!

<center>The WordPress Helpers: Making WordPress Work</center>

Article Title:

WordPress Plugins and Widgets

Subject:

WordPress Plugins and Widgets are both the lifeblood of most WordPress websites and the bane of their administrators' existence. Why? No-one knows what plugins and widgets are.

Author:

The WordPress Helpers