Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the June 2002 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host of your diving straining and it's the plugin roundup go figure how about that first Tuesday of each month, we take a look at the plugins that have been recently added to or updated in the WordPress plugin directory. Almost always these are free plugins and we just like to find some interesting things and draw some attention to them because there's some really fun work by developers that are being added to the plugin directory and you might not know about it. So again, as always, with the plugins in the Roundup, we haven't extensively tested these we've kind of taken a look at them briefly and thought they were kind of cool. So you'll want to experiment with these and then you know install them if it solves a problem for you. That's fantastic. But just know you know I'm not saying these are like Nathan's certified plugins I would use on every site necessarily, but many of them solve great problems this time. They're safe, as safe as a plugin in the WordPress directory can be I mean, any plugin is potentially vulnerable, right even premium plugin so you know it's, these are offered to you. It's just fun things to take a look at. So if you are just joining us in zoom, here's my last time I'm going to paste the link here is the handout for today. That is the PDF you are looking at on my screen currently. And let's jump in with our first one which is called Media folders light. Now over the years on the plugin Roundup, we have done a number of plugins that make the management of your media library in folders easier. And you know, I'm trying to think of some of those. There was one called file bird. I think that's one of the ones we really liked. And that was a visual folder system where you could drag and drop your images into folders, but it was really a happy files. Thank you Paul. That was another one happy files. I think they removed the free version of that one though, and it's just a paid plugin now but it was a really good one. You could drag your files around and do some things. So this one, though, is a little different than that, because it actually creates a folder in your uploads directory. So I just realized I forgot to have open and FTP to WP Nathan. So let me get that going and we'll take a look at media folders white. So let's activate our plugin so this is going to create folders in the file structure, which actually affects the URL of the image. So you know, some people think that help with SEO it might who knows. But if you actually want the URL to reflect the file structure of these folders, this is the only thing I've seen that does that. So folder pardon me settings and media is where the settings for this lives. So let's go to media. And down here at the bottom. Look, we have some folders defined so let's do television, movies, whatever you can just start folder names, one at a time here. And now here's the downside of this plugin. Currently, you cannot add pre existing images to folders, which I realize is probably a deal breaker for most of us. But if you start a site with this plugin, it works great and potentially this could be some feature that's coming in the free or it's called Media folders light. So maybe there's a paid plugin coming that would allow you to add, you know, like installing on site and then sort your things after but if you're building a site, it's going to have a big media library and you're you know you can install this from the beginning and it works great. So what I'm going to do, let's just find a keeping in theme with our TV themed website here on the up, Nathan, what was your favorites out like? 80s sitcom, somebody in the chat? Let me let me get that and we'll Google a picture of it. Give me out Give me a break. What a great show. That was nail Carter. You gotta love that one. How many of you remember Give me a break? That was a great show. Alright, so give me a break. There we go. Let's find okay, there's is that the cast that is the cast? Let's find one with Okay, well, we'll describe this man. Is that an 80s hairstyle or is that an 80s hairstyle? So let me just grab that image. Okay, there it is. And I'm going to add a new image here. And notice here at the top, we can select from our folders, and I'm going to upload the image. You do have to select it as you're uploading. But as we go into this now, look what has happened on the where is my window here it is. Okay, so if I oops, close that. If I take a look at the
file structure now of WP Nathan in my wp content and I've changed the media folder here, you will notice that there is now a folder. Scrolling scrolling, there's one for movies that I just added and there's one for television and in it, you will find this folder we just uploaded this. Give me a break, right? So if we take a look at this image in the file URL, or copy and paste that it's right there. So the name of the folder is in the URL and the image so if that's what you're looking for, this is the only plugin I've ever seen that does it. It's pretty interesting. It is media folders like you need to start with a clean site for this one to work well that maybe they'll make an adjustment to that later. Either in a paid a paid plugin or a free one. So any questions or comments about that one? That is media folders light.
Okay, let's see. Oh, Deb. That's a great question. So what happens if you delete the plugin the x since it's actually creating folders, if you delete the plug in, everything stays the same. You just don't have the folder the option to upload to a folder anymore. So it's pretty cool. Now so like WordPress knows this image is located at this URL that has the folder name in it. And so removing the plugin doesn't change any of that. Can you change the folder of the plugin after it's been uploaded? That's a great question. I don't know the answer that I don't see a way to do that. No, I don't see a way to do that. So there's a little bit of restrictive here but this is a brand new plugin has just been added. So if this is the kind of functionality you're after, watch it see what happens make those change requests on the support area of this plugin in the offer some ideas maybe directly in the media library. I don't think so. There's not really a way to you don't really have any UI here. Now you can also sort by folders here which is kind of nice. Okay, let's move on down to the next one which is better WP admin bar. Now this is again another kind of plugin that we've done a lot of over the years here on iThemes Training, which is doing something with the admin bar. How many of us find the admin bar gets in your way? If you're doing something on the front of the site? A lot of times this will happen if you're doing something with absolute positioning, or maybe there's like a bar across the top of the screen. It's like a screen that's an announcement bar, whatever the admin bar can get in your way, right? And we've done a lot of different plugins that do something with the admin bar like CMS saying, we use it like we've I remember when they added the admin bar to WordPress, anybody remember that? It was like 3.1, or some crazy long time ago version of WordPress, and we all hated it. And now I can't live without it. So anyway, this this, I think is one of my favorite ways to deal with the admin bar. To be honest, I think it's pretty cool. So better WP admin bar. Let's activate that. And while I'm here, let me just deactivate the media folders like okay, so that plugin is active. And now look, it's gone. Oh look, there's a little teeny tiny little in a mouse over up there it is like that. So it's it hides it but with a transparent tab so it's out of the way. It's not going to affect any of my absolute positioning things. And I can mouse over and there it is. So that is a simple little plugin that I think does a great job at hiding the admin bar on those sites where it makes sense, but still making it super easy to get to like there's some plugins I've seen that when you mouse up to this area, the bar pops down, but that's like maybe I just want a mouse up and but here you actually have to hit that little transparent tab to pull it down. So anyway, that is better WP admin bar. Any questions or comments on that one? What about mobile that is an excellent question. And I don't know. So let us
let's just see, shall we? Wait, I know what we can do. This is an excellent
opportunity for me to use Blisk which I just bought on an app sumo deal. And I like it. I'm gonna have to log in though. Let me get logged in on this browser
so we can see the admin bar All right. So let's look at shall we say about an iPhone 13. There it is right there. So you just touch it. You touch the tap the tab, and it works. Now this is again with Blisk. It's just emulating the viewport. If there is if there's anything that is specifically mobile about this plugin. It might change you probably want to test it on an actual device. My guess though this is a simple plug in and it's going to work just like this. So there it is. All right, that is better WP admin bar. Any other questions or comments on that? Can you change the transparency of the tab? I doubt it. I don't think there's any settings for this plugin. Yeah, I don't think there's any settings at all for this plugin. Now it is what it is. All right. Let's move on to the next one, which is very important. It's a plugin that addresses a very important issue. And it's called local Google Fonts by ever press. So as you can imagine, this is addressing the very real issue of Google Fonts being loaded locally. So in our last news roundup, that was the last one we there was fine in the EU about a What does anybody remember what country that was? It was it was a European country that was finding a website, ridiculous amounts of money because it was using Google fonts and therefore violating the GDPR or some or one of the local privacy laws I forget. Anyway, the point is, if you are pulling a Google Font into your website, like, you know, selecting the Google Font from the list of fonts and so forth, that is actually you know, it's importing. You're having to download the font from Google every time the site is loaded. And therefore, your users are you know, your users IP address and other potentially identifiable information is being submitted to Google as part of that. So if you're trying to make the site more private, this is a font that's going to help that and it is local Google Fonts by ever press. So let me just activate this also, by the way, it should speed unless you're on a really bad hosting. This should speed up the delivery of the font because it's gonna be coming right from your web server, rather than having to pull in from Google. There's local Google fonts and let's see where is the setting for that. Always do this. I've forgotten where I saw the settings. Google Fonts right there. settings in Google Fonts. All right. So I have no Google Fonts. Oh, because Hang on. Because I'm using Kadence. And I already have this selected and Kadence which I'm going to get to in just a minute. Let's see what are the general performance No, it's not turned on. Well, that's interesting. Why isn't it picking up? Oh, there it is. Okay. That was really odd. Okay, so this may be I just had to hard refresh. So right here, it's showing Okay, these are the fonts that are the Google fonts that are being used. By this site. So it is being served from Google servers, boom, then I can click hosts locally, hosted locally. Done, right. So right now it's downloading that font family from Google. You can actually see what it's what's being downloaded and I can do this one as well. And now, although we're no longer phoning home to Google, about loading of the fonts, everything's being loaded locally from the site. If you want to get rid of it, you just remove all store data, and you're back to normal. So we'll reload the site. hard refresh. Now it's still not. Oh, no, it doesn't like this for some reason. That's interesting. Now, if you are a Kadence user,
if you're a Kadence user you already have this. Okay. So if your theme is Kadence, all you have to do is go in Kadence to general performance, and load Google Fonts locally, done, built in already done. Now, as Ben was developing Kadence he did this as a performance feature because as long as you're on decent hosting, this is going to speed up the loading of your website. But it also removes all of the privacy issues surrounding Google Fonts because it pulls everything in locally and everything is just being loaded out. So to deal with this font issue. Here's a great plugin if you're not using Kadence and if you are no need to install a plug in just do this right here. Any other questions or comments on this one? Yeah, Melanie, great point. If you're using say, Adobe Typekit fonts or other custom fonts that are not part of not a not a Google Font, for example. Kadence does have an add on that supports custom fonts where you can upload the waafs or the whatever's the font, the files. Yeah. Any other questions, comments on this good stuff. So this is one of those issues that we need to be aware of as web developers. Google Fonts, never a dull moment. Remember when building websites used to be easy, that we have to know all these other things. Okay, so Scrolling on down let's take up the next one here, which is Add Link to copy text. This is pretty much the on the nose plugin name, winner. It guess what this one does? If you ever seen a site where when you copy text, it appends a little, you know, attribution link at the front at the end of that text. That's what this does. So if you have a website that might be frequently quoted, or you're supplying information that you know, people might copy and paste, this is a plugin that's going to automatically append whatever you want to say at the end of the copied text. So let me just show you how this works. Let's activate the plugin which, as we've all learned, the hard way is really the first step to getting a plugin to work on your site. So add link to copy text. Now let's go to settings. Right here so you can do text before the link so you know, let's just say this Oh, from WP nathan.com and put a space like that. And we could say I only link to the homepage or it the default is that it's going to link to the page from which the text is copied. So I'm just going to leave it alone. Let's go to a blog post. And let's copy this copy and now let's take a look at that's what pasted Look at that. So you can say whatever you want it to say it's going to automatically link the URL from which the text was copied. And there it is. Pretty cool. So for those of you who you know have a site that's information heavy and you want to make sure attribution is correct. There you go. Neat stuff right. Very simple plug in, add link on copied text, questions or comments on this one.
Okay, moving down to a WooCommerce plugin. So this one is interesting. It has a couple of shortfalls on which I'll talk about in a minute. But this is a really helpful plugin if for example, you have a product or maybe a particular category of products that like you have to buy a minimum number, or they have to be purchased in sets like a set of three. And like you can't just purchase one it has to be three or something like that. So that does come up from time to time. It's a bit of a niche application, but this is a great plugin that solves that problem. So it is called product quantity drop down for WooCommerce and let's get that one active. product quantity dropped down for WooCommerce. Alright, so let's go right here to the settings. And that notice first of all how this can be applied first. This is going to apply to all products period. Or we can say we want to do a specific product. So it could be a specific product like downloadable kitten, so it's only going to work on that one or I could stack up multiple products here. I can't remember like Scooby Snacks is a product. Yeah, so see we can stack up multiple products here. Or we can say apply this to every product in the category. Exclusive for example, or we could set a tag so any product with this tag is going to have this drop down on it right so we can decide how we want that. I'm just going to we're just going to make it apply to the downloadable kittens product here. All right, so where do we want it to be? We're gonna say before the cart, the minimum quantity for this we can set to be like let's just say for some reason these have to be purchased in blocks of five. Okay, so, the most you can purchase is 20 and we're going to make these done at five at a time, right? So minimum is five maximum 20 at five steps. And let's save this and go jump into the store and you'll see how this works. So there's our downloadable kittens. Look set for five and look at that. See how that works. Isn't that interesting? So, if you need to be able to restrict how many or the steps involved or whatever of a particular product like we could say, Alright these are going to be available. We have you have to purchase like these come in a pair or for whatever reason, minimum quantity maximum 20 with a set to first step
when you get this range, right and so it's the free form quantity field is gone. And you can only select from a drop down. So there you go. If you're doing WooCommerce stuff, this could be helpful use me. All right. Any questions or comments on this one? This is quantity dropped down for WooCommerce.
Or right moving on down to the next one. So again, here's another kind of plug in we've done a few of our this one is interesting to me because of one of the the elements of the user interface. So in the past we've done plugins that for they what they do is they create a table of contents at the top of the post or page or whatever, based on the heading structure of that post. So you have a series of H twos those become links at the top. If they're H threes nested under those s twos then it becomes like an indented hierarchical type list table of contents at the top of the post and it's generated automatically, right? So it's a super helpful way if you have detailed articles with lots of headings and so forth. The nice way to navigate those longer posts. Now what this plugin does, it's a little different from the others. Is that it adds I once you scroll down and the big menu at the top gets out of view. It adds a little tab that pops over with a tray that you when you mouse over it it slides in your navigation. So before you'd have to scroll back to the top and find the navigation which then scrolls you down. So let me show you how this works. It's a pretty cool plugin. So top table of contents. Let's activate this and we have some settings here. Now again, we have a top level menu which quite frankly doesn't need to exist but you know, when you're literally they're just tabs on the same page. But you know, that's one of my pet peeves. So, we want to do this. Let's just say this is going to be just for posts. You can select which post types it applies to. You can set a title for you know what appears above this table of contents, you can actually turn the title off if you want as well. You have all your colors and paddings and borders and all those settings are here. You can decide how the headings look within the table of contents. You got a lot of settings there same for sub headings. This is actually a premium feature and there are some premium themes, more of which are available in the pro version. So let's just leave it as is. And let's go to a post. I actually don't know if we have any headings in some of these. We do not see if I've got some pages. This one has some Okay, so let's apply this also to pages. So this page should now have a table of contents. Yes. All right. So here's our table of contents that was automatically generated from these headings that are left over for from apparently some block add on that I demonstrated. So you click it and it scrolls down like you'd expect. That's pretty cool right now, the neat thing is you can let's see
Christina, they have a vertical list. Yeah, that's all I'm trying to get to here. I thought this added. Oh, you know what, here's the demo. All right, here we go. Yeah, so as you scroll down the page, see what happens. It pops over right there. And so you can scroll through the site. Or you could actually set up like a post template using Kadence. Or if you're using a like a page builder, like Beaver Builder or whatever, you could create like a column and just with a shortcode you can drop in this table of contents as well. So it just stays right there on the vertical side. But this is pretty nice. It's this tray that I really like about this plugin. Pretty cool stuff. The question is, how does it behave on mobile? Good question. Let's pull it over into Blisk. Oh, apparently I haven't licensed this one. That's interesting. I thought I did. What the heck. Well, I guess I can't show it. On that one. I didn't license my software
oops Alright, so here it is on mobile works just the same. slides in
pretty cool. Stacy says I need something like that only for categories and posts. Like just to show a list of categories on the side in the sidebar. Yeah, Jan easy Table of Contents was the last one of these that we did. That's right. And I'm using that on the side as well. It's great. It just doesn't have the little tray
Yeah. All right. So that is top table of contents by Boone Debs. Any other questions or comments on that one?
Okay, scrolling down to the next one is another simple plugin that I think is pretty effective. It just called visual user description editor. Now, if you have any sort of a content rich site, particularly a blog or something like that, a newspaper magazine type site where the author is important there's been a lot of author box type plugins that are in use out there and we've shown some of those. You know, even the new full site editing and a lot of the Kadence blocks will allow you to create a nice little author box on your posts. However, the author description the author bio is just a, it's just like a it's a text area. It's not a rich text WYSIWYG type editor. And that's what this does. So essentially, what this is going to do is on the user profile page, where there's simply the box that gives the spot for the author bio this is going to add in a tiny MCE visual editor right there, where you can do bold and italic and headings and you know, lists and all the things that tiny MCE allows you to do. So let's go in and activate this plugin, and I think you'll find it to be pretty cool. Visual, visual visual script user description editor. So there is that we will activate it. And if I go look at my profile here, I now have right there in the biographical information. There it is. It is now a tiny MCE window whereas before it was just a box. So this is this is core WordPress, where it's just text and the visual user description Editor gives me this nice visual area where I can for example, even add a link if I want to. Right. So yeah, this is kind of a no brainer. If you have a site that uses offer information somewhere. I don't know why you wouldn't use this and it's just a simple light plugin. Amani is asking about like social media profiles. So core has some of those see use too. Anyway. I removed a lot of those, didn't they? Yeah, you have to there you'd need something that would extend the user profile. So currently, no, there is there may be a plugin that does that money. If I were going to do that on a site, I would use something like meta box or pods to add custom fields to the user account. ACF can do that as well. Yep. Paul, if you had HTML on the original and turn it on, does it pick it up? A valid question. Let's see. Let's go down here to our there it is. And let's just wrap I iThemes Training with a strong tag
and see what happens. So profile updated. There's my strong tag. I'm gonna guess it's gonna work. Activate
and refresh. Look at that. Getting that spiffy so yes, it pulls in the HTML. Nifty nifty All right. Great question, Paul. Any other questions about this one visual user description editor. When can you use this on social? So yeah, so mono if you're gonna say Twitter if I wanted to highlight that and put in my Twitter URL. I could do that. Sure. Maybe make that link to an external window. Boom. Yep, there it is. Totally works. Alright, anybody else on this one? minute when posting I'm not sure what you're asking money
are you saying posting like when you make a post? Can you share that on Facebook? Like automatically Okay, that's completely different type of plugin. There are some out there but generally the best practice is to directly post from the social media platform. Most social media all that there are things like jetpack and other plugins that will allow you to automatically when you post a WordPress post, it will push it out to a social media platform. A while ago social media platforms started D prioritizing posts that were added that way they want you to log into Facebook and post the URL directly. And so you don't get if you automatically post you don't get the post won't get seen as much as if you post manually. Okay, moving down to the next one. Is a plugin called posts, visitors, posts visitors now this is a very simple, just say it takes your analytics back to 1999. So how many of you are around and you remember the the old timey post hit counter at the bottom of your screen? Like there was that? might like the the odometer scrolling thing. It's not quite that bad, right? But it's a simple number. And so why would I ever want to do this? Well, maybe you don't you know you have some privacy concerns or whatever or you want to make it super easy for the your client to just see how many times a post has been viewed. This is going to do that and it's just so simple to use. Let's go into Plugins. Doug is saying he still has clients that ask for that. Yeah, so post visitors. Let's just activate that. And then let's go look at our posts. So look right there. There's now a column in the post list that shows a number and yes Sherry saying you can do this with Google Data Studio. Absolutely. You can do like I do with clients sites and put the executive summary of Google Analytics with dashboard widget in there. totally do that. Some clients just show me how many times this post has been seen. Right. And yes, it is visible on the site. So right here the we're moving on up post if I go there, right down here at the bottom. Post visitors one and we'll need we need to change some settings there but right there. So it does post it right there on the bottom. Yes, you have control over where and how this is seen. Let's see where is it actually, it does create a top level menu but I forgot where it is. Let's see all right there. Host visitors I'm blind today. Okay, so where do you want it to be? You can choose? Let's see. Oh, this only by the way. It only works for posts does not work for custom post types. Only posts. Likely that would be an easy feature to add or request. The addition of Sharia saying can you own Can you hide the public view counted only show in the admin?
Yes, probably if you've saved manual, then you would then you would use the post visitor shortcode. So if I save this as manual, it's not going to show on the front end until I put a shortcode out there to display it now. Yep. I think that answers your question. But then it would still show up back here on the back end. Yeah, Christine, so it's all posts Exactly. Visitors count and this is not sortable. You could do something like add, you could add a plug in like admin columns and make this sortable. But by default, it's not sortable. Again, that's a simple thing that developer could add with a few lines of code and be a great feature request. For the developer if you like this. So super simple, right? But, you know, do I want is that what if you're after you know that the other thing is right here on the dashboard, it gives you right there, your list of posts, and how many visitors they got. So there's a dashboard widget as well. So when they log in, they can see it so super simple analytics, no privacy concerns. This is literally an increment in the database like it's a post meta field. Every time it's viewed it's going to increment it by one it's not going to make your database huge. You there's no privacy issues whatsoever. All right, any other questions on this one posts visitors. Fun stuff. Okie dokie Scrolling on down the list to the next one called image filters. Now we've done again, we've done some plugins like this before and we're like you can add a Gradient Overlay to your images and those sorts of things. And those overlays were dependent upon the the plugin being active and some other things it didn't actually affect the image itself. This one actually rewrites the image. So it's a separate standalone image in the media library. Let me show you what I'm talking about here. So let's go activate image filters. And just so I'm let's deactivate a bunch of these plugins so we don't have a collision that is unexpected as can sometimes happen here on the plugin Roundup. Let's deactivate those and activate image filters. There it is. Okay, so we will go to our little test page that we have set up here. All right. So this is actually let me remove this, whatever that what used to be. So this is a block. It only works with the block editor. So if we go to image filters Okay, let's find an image in the media library. So let's pick one let's just do our gimme a break image that we just did there. Okay, there it is. And look, we've got these pre configured filters. There's your really 70s Looking instamatic type filter like that alright, oversaturated filter this. All these filters aren't they don't really it's not really showing up well in this let me do another image
the distinction between those filters isn't really showing up well in that one let's do a do a kitty cat. Now we can really see the difference because there's so many colors in that other picture
look at that really nice fee. So you could actually set up all your images this way. Let's just make this one forenza So we'll click that and now it's applied. But look at what has happened in the media library. A new image has been created with the filter applied so I can deactivate this plugin. Whatever the feet the image stays there. I can download this image directly. This this plugin is actually apply the filter and save the whole new image. So this is a little different than some of these other image overlays that we've used in the past where the image itself hasn't actually changed. It's just the CSS overlay that's been applied to it. But this one actually rewrites the image, which is pretty cool. I think. Paul, can you fork this and apply your own brand colors? I mean, sure, why not? I would imagine if you get into the code of the plugin, it's just a bunch of CSS gradients that are being applied to the image and it's being written out. Interesting. Ah, yes. Mana Yes. So Kadence allows you to change some things like this. It's using a CSS though to make an image grayscale or not or whatever. Barbara is there one that's not how BB is there. One that's not made for the block editor. Now this is a block unfortunately, everything's going to the block editor. As I mentioned in previous webinars lately, we've moved to block editor for all of our blog posts for posts working really well. Still not to the point of using block editor for a full site design yet in our agency world. It'd be great for you no simpler site we just we still struggle with that just a little bit in some places. But I in the blog, blog posts, especially it's just super easy. I see him Yes, you create the image then use it anywhere. That's the point of this Yeah. So good stuff, image filters, any other questions or comments on this one? All right. Let us move down the list to the next one block player by Gutenberg is another block. So this is a video block now Kadence has a nice video block. The core has a nice bit oops, I shouldn't have done that. The core WordPress has a nice video block. Let me show you some of the things this will do. So first of all, let me show you the Kadence video block. So Kadence has right here a video pop up which is super helpful. Where let me just grab. We have a video. It happens to be a Rick Roll video. That when in use the video pop up block will let you you know put an image on it and then the video pops up. So this is the Kadence block. There we go. But what's different about this one, and again, it's just how do you want to display your blocks on your website or your videos on the site. This one just does things a little bit differently. So let's let me grab the
Oh, before using a plugin one must activate the plugin
that's my my little bit of advice for you today. Very helpful. Okay, trying again now.
Trying again. New block Okay, video. Just wanted the Video, Video Press. Video Press Right. No, no video player, this is it. Okay. So look at all the options we have here. Okay, so we want to play from a media library we can do that. We also have the option of YouTube Vimeo or whatever the heck this is. What is that? Is that twitch? Yeah, Twitch. That's a pro version feature though. But like we can pull in a Vimeo video. Like there's something there. We'll just use that one for now. So you have the ability to change out the thumbnail, the poster image, you have the ability to change the player width and height. Is it going to loot mute, autoplay, all those things. Right? What are the controls look like? Full Screen volume control offer on you know, whatever. Let's, let's just grab our own video so we have some control over how it's seen. poster image. There we go. So we can change you know all of the things about the player itself. We can change the color involved, that's extra. All those are pro features. We do have the ability to put a border radius on it which is kind of cool. Like a 20 pixel border, look at that. That's kind of nice. I like that a lot. So if we update this that was a nice, you know, get download all these toggles are here under you know the control so a lot of control. It's great if you want the video to actually play on the page rather than popping up totally up to you. Block player by guten player in the free version very powerful, very light plug in pretty neat stuff. questions in the chat minute. Can you place a different source than YouTube Vimeo with an external link? It doesn't appear so. Now either has to be in the media library, YouTube Vimeo and Twitch is a paid feature but there's no just drop in a URL option to play a video. John So are you suggesting to host videos on your site versus having them on Vimeo? Absolutely not. I simply use this that video here for convenience as a best practice, you want you know a web server is not specifically designed to be a video platform, a video delivery platform. You want to use a platform that's designed for that like YouTube or Vimeo. So for us like on the agency side, we put everything in a Vimeo account with its background video if we ever use that, whether it's you know, customer videos, product ID all that should you know best practice should be in a Vimeo or YouTube account. Do you have speed issues? Sherry's asking? Not really not really because those platforms are designed to deliver video and they're typically even going to be a little faster than your web server. So yeah. Great questions. Been so this has extra control over Vimeo appearance. Yep. So you get all that with this block all those features there. Yep. Now, I would say yeah, because it's using its own controls here.
Any other questions or comments about this one block player. Johnson what is the case for using it? I mean, if you want to show a video on a page. Yeah. Is I guess I think John, what you're asking is why would I use this instead of just dropping in like a Vimeo link so that it oh embeds on the page and the answer to that is the just the O embed or standard block Editor video block doesn't give you the granular control that this does. And how it displays Yep. Alright, anybody else on this one before we move to the next one? This is kind of the month of simpler plugins that do cool things. Okay, next one is just another one of those types of plugins. We've done some like this before, but this one is really cool. This is called Easy posts order. So here is the situation. Have you ever for example, created a oh, let's just say it's a like a team, custom post type and it's got all your staff members of your clients team there right are all the employees or whatever. And you've got them all in there. And then but but they don't want the team page sorted by alphabetical order, or by last name or whatever they want, like the CEO and the CTO and the all those people and then everybody else, right? How do you do that? And there's, there's ways you can do like, you can create a Sort Order field. And then do it like that. It's a little kludgy, though like you add a team member, then you gotta go change things. It's kind of difficult. So what this does, is it actually gives you the ability to drag and drop your posts in the posts list. And that becomes the order on which they display on the front end if you select the right thing in the query. So let me show you how this might work. Let us first activate the plugin because you know, that's what you have to do. Plugins All right. So we want easy hosts. Okay, and just as a demo, I'm going to go in here to our summaries. Now notice what I've got here. I have three. And the question is does it work with custom post types? Absolutely. And whether whether whether using custom post type UI or any other custom post type, this is a custom post type. It's created by pods, but the Creator I mean, you could use code create custom post type that doesn't matter. So you know, we can use Could you do WooCommerce products? Absolutely same thing. So we can drag and drop. However we want these to be okay, so our order, you know, 132 is our order. Now, okay? And that's all we have to do. There's no save or anything. We're just dragging these around, you know, in whatever order 231 I'm just going to leave them like this. Okay. And now what we have to do is now when we show our hosts list, and however we're doing that, whether it's with a query Loop block in the block editor, or whether it's with you know, if you're using a page builder, like Beaver Builder and a post module, you have to set it for a specific thing. So let's go into our page here, edit the page. Let's get rid of the Rick Roll. Okay, now I'm gonna do a query loop. Actually, I could just do post then either way. We'll just do a post, delete, posts, posts. This is the Kadence block. You can do any block, but Okay, so here, we first want to set it to summary so we get the right things. And what we have to make sure that we do here is set this to the menu order 231. Look at that. 231. So let's update this. And let's say something happens and we want three to be at the beginning. Now it's at the top. And if I refresh three is now the first one. Isn't that cool? Nice, right? Easy. You do have to set it for now there's a couple of options that might be menu order or selection order. Either one of those should work. Some UIs are going to have one or the other. And so either one of those are going to work menu order or selection order will will cause this drag and drop thing to echo out on the front end. So pretty cool stuff. Let me try it. Let me show you this. Now with Mr. Move
is lock now let's need to do this oh, you know what? To get Beaver Builder to work on this. I didn't want to show this in the Page Builder. I'm gonna have to go in to the Post List and look at it there. And now of course things are slow. There we go. Okay, pages grief I just trash that page some days. All right, who saw what I just did? Did I screw something up? I don't know what I just did to lose my page. Oh dear. Okay, we'll just add a new page showing
all right. Oh, wait. I know. Beaver Builder is an active before one uses a plugin one must activate the plugin Oh my okay now everything is slow suddenly. I bet my kids started streaming I'm gonna guess that's what happened. All right, published Beaver Builder. So here's how this would work in a page builder. If we grab our posts module, very similar. We're gonna grab let's see summaries right? ORDER BY will order by menu order or selection order both of these work just fine. So in this case, we'll just do selection order and there it is. 3321321 Let's make it 312312 There it is. Pretty cool, right? WooCommerce example they asked. Okay, so let's go into products. And there's our products and let's just make sure geeky T shirts is at the top. And if I go right into here and we change this to products as our post type, still keeping with selection order T shirts right at the top if we want to make downloadable kittens at the top, we just drag it up there. Boom. Just like that. Now, this is this is not going to work on the default. Actually, you know what it did look at that. Even in the shop page to make sure that I didn't think that would work. Now he does run on the shop page, the default shop page. It's affecting that. Let me see what I'm doing. And this is no this is a this is the regular WooCommerce shop page. It's it's affecting the default layout. So that's pretty cool. I didn't know that. That is easy posts order. Nifty, right? So this is one of those plugins that has fewer than 10 installs was only added three weeks ago. There's others out there that do something similar, by the way. But yeah, there you go for it, you know anybody that's worried about oh, it's got less than 10 installs. That's oftentimes a good indicator of it's not very valuable. But yeah, this is pretty cool stuff. There are other plugins that change the sort order like this, Sally, does it work with all page builders? I mean, all is a big word right? But if in your in your page builder, you have like we just showed the ability to sort by and then select menu order or selection order, it should work. Because what this is doing, there's actually a post meta field on each of these posts. That is the menu order or or selection order, and it's just updating that in the background. So in that's what it's pulling from, to sort rather than the date of the title or whatever. Does that make sense? It should asterisk work with every page builder. If your page builder gives you that sorting option okie dokie. Anybody else on this one? All right, next one up is the Tick Tock plugin. We're getting really short on time today. So there's really not a lot I can show you here because I am not a tick talker. Can you believe it? I am not a tick talker. And anyway, but tick tock is one of the most downloaded app it cetera, et cetera. It is a great way to sell things as well. Lots of product is happening. It's moving on tick tock and this is a plugin that is CO developed by tick tock WooCommerce and automatic they are the three authors of this plugin. There's a lot behind this. It's very compatible. And what this does, is it brings Tiktok into the back end of WooCommerce and allows you to set up ads on tick tock within WooCommerce so it's super cool. I'm not going to go through all of the things for this just for the sake of time and also because I don't have a tick tock account nor did I want to create one. We activate because the world is slow for some reason. Goodness, okay, so it's under mark. This took me forever to find by the way. It's under marketing and tic toc.
Which makes sense, I guess. But okay. And then I just connect my account. Now once I connect my account, I have the ability to do many things. There's lots of videos here like you can right here. There's the ad builder where you can actually build your ad and then publish it right on YouTube from right within WooCommerce on the back end. So if you've got WooCommerce clients or if you want to dip your toe into the arena of TiC tock advertising for your product. If you have a product that would go well on that platform, then this is a great plugin you want to experiment with I've done nothing else other than activate it search for the settings and then stop because I didn't want to create an account. There you go. Alright, so that is the Tick Tock official tick tock plugin by tick tock WooCommerce and automatic. Last but certainly not least, by well just the other day we had people asking about dark mode. Remember that was it in the Kadence webinar? Yes. Okay. So I happen to find a dark mode plugin that I think y'all will enjoy, if you like the dark modes. So let us go into the plugins and activate the plugin and it is W what's it called? WP dark mode I think that one didn't get installed. So let us do that. I for anybody's wondering this is how you add a plugin to WordPress. Okay. Here it is install. And wait. Everything is slow right now. Activate this one's super cool. Okay, I've done nothing other than activate this plugin. And refresh. Look. There's a dark mode icon. I haven't done anything but activate the plugin. That's it. It knows it's just ninja magic has occurred. And now my site is in dark mode. Isn't that cool? I think that's pretty cool. Also on the back end, we'll turn that on. It's actually a really nice dark mode. Probably the nicest WordPress dark mode I've seen in the admin area. A lot of them are really awful. Neat, right? Yeah. So front end and back end correct. And you can toggle with you know, a toggle right here light mode, dark mode, mode, dark mode so dark mode is made if you are if you work with the lights out, like if you work at night and the lights are down. This is actually really saves eyestrain. It's really helpful. Like if you try this in a darker room. Yeah, it's really in developers love dark mode. Like it right now. At I think headquarters in Edmond, Oklahoma. In the developer area in the support area. The lights are off. There are a few little lights but it is a it is a it is a fairly dimly lit room. And developers like to work with the lights down they just do yeah so dark mode. There it is. Many comments okay. Any questions or comments about that one? That is for those of you that are we're looking for a dark mode, there you go. Dark Mode, dark mode by WP pool. And that pool has we've done a number of plugins from them. They did I think they are I think they had like a Google Sheets plugin. We did that we really liked it's a good development shot, which I mean, obviously, it's this is nicely done. So any final questions or comments on that one? Then let us scroll to the top and ask the question that we always end with which is what was your favorite plugin in the roundup one vote one vote only please. Wow, okay. Admin many many votes for easy post order. Many votes. Block player is a second dark mode a second Yeah, easily post order for the win. We'll keep it up in a few more seconds here your vote one vote one vote only please. Yeah, definitely easy posts order.
And then with a dark mode and block player as runner ups. Okay. So your vote will be reflected tomorrow on the best of AI iThemes Training plugin roundup for January through June of 2022. If you have not already registered for this one. There is the link in the chat to register for tomorrow's webinar. That's one o'clock central time we are in we will take all of the top votes from the last six months of plugin roundups and put those together in the best of list. It always seems like the comment is only I forgot about that when that was such a great plugin that always happens on these. So make sure you join us tomorrow one o'clock Central Same time, same place for the best of plugin round up. And with that we will wrap it up for today. I'll see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock when I think straining where we go further together.