As you craft your vim environment, one of the most powerful features will be taking advantage of existing plugins. There are a couple plugin management systems that exist (pathogen and vundle are the most common). I've tried both pathogen and vundle and you must use vundle.
Using vundle makes adding and installing plugins to use with vim much
like adding gems to a Gemfile.
Follow these instructions and get vundle installed
and running with your .vimrc.