What is Jetpack?
Back in the day, there were great features available to WordPress.com users that were not available on self-hosted WordPress installs. Jetpack is a plugin that connects to WordPress.com and enables awesome features, powered by our cloud infrastructure.
What features does it have?
- WordPress.com Stats: Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.
- Comments: enables your visitors to use WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook accounts when commenting on your site.
- Subscriptions: Allow users to subscribe to your posts and comments to receive a notification via email.
- Contact Form: Easily insert a contact form any where on your site.
- Sharing: The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.
- Spelling and Grammar: Improve your spelling, style, and grammar with the After the Deadline Proofreading service.
- Gravatar Hovercards: Show a pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments.
- Shortcode Embeds: Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.
- WP.me Shortlinks: Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.
- Beautiful Math: Mark up your posts with the markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.
- Extra Sidebar Widgets: Easily add images, Twitter updates, and your site’s RSS links to your theme’s sidebar.
- Enhanced Distribution: Share your public posts and comments to search engines and other services in real-time.
- Custom CSS: Customize the appearance of your site using CSS but without modifying your theme.
Some of these features use the powerful WordPress.com cloud, others are popular features provided for the convenience of not having to install and manage several separate plugin installations.
What is required to install Jetpack?
Any WordPress site running 3.1 or later can install Jetpack just like any other plugin. Some hosting providers will auto-install Jetpack with WordPress, saving you the trouble.
If you use WordPress.com, you don’t need Jetpack, as its features are already bundled into WordPress.com.
After you install Jetpack, connect it to WordPress.com with a WordPress.com account. If you don’t have one already you can create one very easily during the connection process.
Who should install Jetpack?
Anyone who is hosting their own WordPress (anywhere except WordPress.com), and wants to take advantage of the awesome features that Jetpack provides.
Is Jetpack Free?
Jetpack itself is, and always will be free. Some individual features that Jetpack provides will be free, but others in the future may require payment. Installing Jetpack is free and requires no payment information.
I already use a plugin that is now part of Jetpack (such as WordPress.com Stats). What do I do now?
As we upgrade each of our individual plugins to be a part of Jetpack, we’ll prompt you to switch over to the new, Jetpack-powered version. Don’t worry about upgrading, we’ll automatically take care of carefully switching over all of your settings and options so that it’s the smoothest experience possible. Once you’ve upgraded to Jetpack, you can remove the older versions of those plugins.
Is this related to Mozilla’s Jetpack project?
Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs, which, if you know HTML/CSS/JavaScript, makes it easier than ever to improve Firefox. We checked with them beforehand and mutually agreed our use of the Jetpack name would be fine.
Are you ready to reach the clouds? Go here to download the latest version of Jetpack.
