WordPress is easily the most widely used blogging CMS and the extension of WordPress plugins has allowed the functioanlity of WordPress to expanded tremendously by the development of plugins by independent developers looking to solve a problem and contriute to the community. The quality of the plugins vary a bit, but a little bit of searching and testing should uncover a plugin that solve the problem you need.
The challenge with plugins is detemining if they work properly and what problems it may cause to your website. Depending upon the skill of the developer of the plugin and the testing that was done, it is not uncommon for plugins to crash your site or cause other parts not to work properly. The other challenge is that the core WordPress software is constantly being upgraded which requires the plugins to be upgraded depending upon the compatability with WordPress.org update. When the two are incompatible, it can cause problems with you website.
This recently happened to my site with a Linkedin plugin that was being used to populate the About page with the information from my Linkedin profile. The plugin simply imported your experience, education, and bio sections from Linkedin and updated the page of your site that you requested. If a page was made to your Linkedin profile, then it would also be reflected on your website.
The plugin that I was using must have failed with the recent upgrade to WordPress 3.0 which caused the Linkedin profile of the plugin developer to be displayed on my about page instead of my Linkedin information. The unfortuante thing about this is I am not sure how long this problem existed before it was pointed out to me. Vry frustrating, but also the downside of open source software that is rarely talked about.
Take some time and review your site and ensure that everything is working properly. It should only take a few minutes, but could find some issues that you did not know existed due to problems with plugins. Although I am appreciative of the effort and quality of most Wordpres plugins and the WordPress platform in general, I will routinely take a few mintues to review my site. It will be definitely be time well spent.
I really appreciate that you keep coming back to my site, it's loyal people like you that make what I do worth it. If you have any questions feel free to email me. Oh and since you obviously like our site it'd be great if you could share it with a friend... They'll love you for it!
