Back to: How to Build Your Free ELN

Using Plugins

WordPress has add-ons that extend its basic capabilities. These add-ons are called plugins. There are over 50,000 free plugins on the WordPress site. That does not include the many professional plugins that require payment. One benefit of building this free ELN from this site is that we have done some of the work for determining appropriate plugins for an ELN. However, this list of plugins is only our opinion from our limited experience and according to the needs that we had for a certain research project. This approach should be applicable to many different types of research projects, though, especially those that require geo-location data.

Note that all of the plugins that we recommend are available from within the WordPress installation itself, from the Add New Plugin menu item (/wp-admin/plugin-install.php).

Recommended Plugins

We have chosen to include the following plugins for this ELN.

• Security – If our ELN has any access from the public internet, then it is prudent to have some type of security plugin. We have found the WordFence plugin to be appropriate for our needs.
• Classic Widgets – This is the classic way of editing WordPress before the Gutenberg block system was adopted. This is included as a backup for the cases where the Gutenberg block system is confusing.
• Elementor – This provides enhancements to the basic Gutenberg block system. This is not essential, but does seem to provide some additional options when setting up some of the GeoDirectory blocks.