New here, love bluehost and want to install it all from cpanel!

[aboutsouthjersey]

hi all, I am a newbie so please excuse me for doing the whole intro thing, but nice to be hear. 1st off, I LOVE bluehost, I used to use yahoo and since discovering bluehost, my life has changed, I am on it every night working on sites! So a question for all the great people here, I have a few sites I made with wordpress, sure like most people I want to make money off of them. But one thing I am addicted to, is the control panel on bluehost! I want to install everything! My sites are wordpress sites, but I installed a chat software on one site (like anyone will actually chat on my site) but it is so fun to just look at the cpanel and all the free options, I also installed a lime survey program which really is awesome since I can easily create surveys which are usefull.
So, to end a long post, am I the only one that goes install crazy? Does anyone recomend a certain program on the cpanel to add to my wordpress sites? Wiki seems neet but a lot of work and for my sites, not much need. Forums seem cool, the survey is great too. I just wanted to get some feedback and any recomondations on stuff to install.
Also, I installed the zen photo gallary for my main site, but I didn't want to erase my current website which in wordpress has the wp-admin after the domain name, so I named the directory zen, so its aboutsouthjersey.com/zen/ and I changed the permalink so that page goes right to the gallary, but I feel I am not doing it right. Anyone know if I am doing this wrong or how to do it right??
Thanks all! Its great to be hear and I promise to keep future posts much shorter. I just got laid off today (and somehow I am happy)

[bh_WP_fan]

Sorry about your getting laid off. I hope things work out well for you from here on out.

As a suggestion, I wouldn't worry so much about installing anything and everything, but rather, installing a few basic things that work well and do the job. I'm a WordPress fan myself, but have seen WAY too many issues with people who install a ton of themes and plugins and end up having their sites break. I'd suggest only ever having a few plugins or themes installed at once. Always find the best one for the job needed, yet make sure that it is compatible with the later versions of WordPress. Installing a neat plugin on WordPress 2.8.3 that hasn't been testing since version 2.5 is probably not the best idea. :) Also look for plugins that help to optimize your site, because, to be honest, when a site actually starts getting a lot of traffic, plugins and many other things can cause your database to get overloaded and slow your site down.

With that said, don't let it stop you from playing with installing things! I agree it can be quite fun. Install it, play with it, see if you like it and, if you don't, just remove it and delete whatever was left over in that directory.

Once you get going, take advantage of the backup tool in the cPanel every so often to make sure you don't lose your valuable data.

Best of luck!

[MrDelish]

Sound advice from the above poster. I've gone nuts with installing plugins a few times myself, but I try to make sure things are sill working and make my steps easy to retrace in case I really botch my installation (always back up!). Since 2.7 or so they made it so you don't even have to leave the dashboard to install a plugin, so it's easy for them to add up. Also, be sure to clean up after you're done experimenting.