Jetpack: Supercharge Your Self Hosted WordPress Site!
By Jacob Zarobsky | Filed Under Plugins
Tag(s): Automattic, Jetpack, Plugins, WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress.com
This guest post was written by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.
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.
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Jacob Zarobsky
Jake is an all-around Apple enthusiast who loves his iOS devices. In addition to writing for WP Hacks and hanging with his two pups, he is also an amateur photographer for Grasshopper Pix, a writer for Today's iPhone, and a freshman in high school. Be sure to follow him on Twitter @jakezarobsky.
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There Are 18 Responses So Far »
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Aliza Shehpatii says: May 8, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Thanks for writing such an informative article i will must try this plugin in my wordpress site and will tell you how it worked.
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lisa says: May 10, 2011 at 9:08 am
The plugin Jetpack in wordpress. What support wordpress version ?
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New Dian Ribut says: May 11, 2011 at 3:25 am
thanks for sharing jacob,i will download and install it into my wordpress site.i’m waiting your next plugins
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Shubham Dev says: May 15, 2011 at 10:00 pm
JetPack is a very essential plugin for all self-hosted wordpress blog! Official page: jetpack.me
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Hillary Bost says: May 16, 2011 at 11:44 am
nice i have a couple sites that i could really use this for. Great share.
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deo singh says: May 18, 2011 at 6:26 am
Hi Jacob! Thank you! Very informative! I clear understand the work this Jetpack plugin do, but can it convert psd (Photoshop) to wordpress documents? I now work in Adobe Photoshop and i wanted to know because program I use is timewaste…
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Tivisiana says: May 20, 2011 at 9:24 am
thanks for sharing jacob,i will download and install it into my wordpress site.i’m waiting your next plugins
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eka_luin says: May 23, 2011 at 6:36 am
Hi Jacob! Hi Deo… I heard the good one is the Divine Elemente plugin designed for PS. It converts psd to wordpress. I am going to try one, maybe on trial. Let me know if anything else ins better??
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Hillary Bost says: May 23, 2011 at 11:27 am
I didn’t realize that these things were available on a wp hosted blog. That is really interesting to know.
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castro.camila says: May 26, 2011 at 4:31 am
WP-Stats, YouTube embeds, Twitter widget, Sharedaddy, PollDaddy…all for bloggers, who seek good blog promotion. As for psd conversion , try elemente.divine-project. com/ Nothing special, but it does what you would have to pay aside.
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Fabrizio T. says: May 27, 2011 at 1:26 am
Thanks for sharing the info about this plubin, it looks very good!
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David says: June 10, 2011 at 1:14 am
*disclaimer: it’s late and I’m a bit cynical at the moment.
No, wordpress doesn’t come bundled with those features, it comes bundled with a heck of a lot more! If you want those specific features, yes, you do need a plugin and if you’re coming from wordpress.com, it’s a great way to get what you’re familiar with. There’s more wordpress plugins than you could possibly imagine with more features than you could ever dream of.
I always value handpicking each and every plugin for each and every need. There’s always a dozen plugins that can do what you want, but it’s a matter of finding the one that fits your needs the best, has good reviews, and has good support.
I’m generally not a fan of bundled plugins, but if you use every feature, then excellent, it’s the way to go! But generally bundled plugins have uneeded features and tend not to be as thorough and expansive on each one. But I can’t speak for this one by any means. I’ve used a ton of different video imbed, video lightbox, and video gallery plugins, image hover and effects plugins, analytics, social interaction etc. I even use different plugins for different websites I use! Thus I want to choose the specific ones for the specific needs of my site. Yes, it takes more work. But it’s worth reading reviews as you’ll learn about the other options along the way.
The one plugin I would highly suggest to everyone, primarily because it doesn’t seem to get much attention, is an incredibly flexible lightbox called wp-pretty-photo. No, it’s not just for photos. I never seen or used a lightbox this effective, flexible, and robust. It supports Images, brs, flash, vids, even just straight up content and html! You can even use it for tooltips!
Because it fits multiple needs quite effectively, I’m not loading as many javascripts increasing my page load time. If you grab it, make sure you read the basic how to on the plugin website. I has a superb overview of demos, the code for each one. IMO, much more clear than the directions in the plugin repository.
Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox now. Cheers all!
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Mark Sheridan says: June 16, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Thanks for sharing this plugin and i appreciate your good work on this article
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Peter says: August 3, 2011 at 8:42 am
@David – I think you’re right on, in general. Honestly, I havent been wowed by jetpack (admittedly, I havent explored it very thoroughly), just because most of the features aren’t particularly applicable to me, and the marketing around the bundle (and in this post) makes it feel like it’s really going to revolutionize your install.
However – At the very least, you know plugins coming out of Automattic are going to be extremely high quality, and well supported. If your choice is something from Automattic or someone else, and both match your requirements, I’d stick with Automattic.
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Hillary Bost says: October 10, 2011 at 10:51 am
Great plugin but a bit of knowledge is needed to set it up.
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Aman@blogogeek says: October 26, 2011 at 12:35 am
The jet pack is actually a must have for all kind of wordpress blogs.
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patrick says: November 23, 2011 at 12:49 am
Been using the plugin recently and its great because you get to know where your visitors is coming from in the stats.
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Thanks for sharing this plugin and i appreciate your good work on this article.