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Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.

There are two types of plugins;

  1. Regular plugins
  2. mu-plugins.

These are located in separate folders on your site and work differently.

Image of plugins folders

Regular plugins are located in the “plugins” folder; they can be activated and deactivated on a per-blog level inside your blog dashboard via the Plugins page.

Plugin tab

Mu-plugins, on the other hand, are the plugins located in the “mu-plugins” folder; these are activated by default affecting all blogs on the installation.

While there are over 4,000 regular plugins most of these don’t work on WordPress MU and BuddyPress sites.

Blogs on a BuddyPress site are just regular blogs with no fancy BuddyPress features. So if a WordPress plugin works well on WordPress MU site it’ll be fine on a BuddyPress site.

PLEASE NOTE:

  • Any regular plugins you want to try should be thoroughly tested by uploading to your site, and enabling it just for a test account.
  • Activate the plugin on the test blog taking notes of any errors which occur. Immediately remove any plugins with bugs and only use them site-wide once you have fixed all their issues

Those regular plugins known to work WPMU/BuddyPress include:

1.  AddThis Social Bookmarking plugin
2.  Akismet
3.  Audio and video comments
4.  Greet Box
5.  Subscribe To Comments
6.  Threaded comments

Summary of regular plugins that work on WPMU

See Next: Installing regular plugins on BuddyPress