Websites hosted at the CUNY J-School come with numerous plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress. Learn more about plugins or see the ones we’ve most recently installed or upgraded. Installed plugins include: Post Author Box, Twitter Tools, and WordPress.com Custom CSS.

The plugins menu can found in the left-hand column of your site’s admin area:

The plugins that we have installed do a lot, but they don’t do everything. Fortunately, there’s an extensive ecosystem of open source WordPress plugins that we have access to and can be installed at your request.

When looking through plugins, you should be aware of the following three criteria that we use to determine whether we can install a requested plugin.

GPL-compatible – We can only install plugins on our server that are compatible with the GNU General Public License. This ensures we have the legal right to modify the plugin if it breaks, and make it available to all members of our community. All WordPress.org plugins should be compatible. The license must be packaged with the plugin. Unfortunately, Creative Commons licenses are not GPL-compatible.

Regularly updated and well-rated – The plugin has been updated in the last 6 months or so by its author. WordPress adds new features regularly, so it’s necessary the developer keep the plugin compatible with the latest version. Community members can also indicate whether the most recent version of the plugin is compatible with the most recent version of WordPress. You can find this information on the right hand of the plugin’s profile page.

Performs well – A couple of ways you can see whether it’s a good plugin are googling the name of the plugin to see if there’s any negative feedback, or looking in the support forums. If there are a lot of site comments or discussion threads complaining about problems with the plugin, it’s usually a bad sign.

When you find a plugin meeting these criteria, feel free to create a support ticket including the name of the plugin, its URL, and why you want to use it.