Now I'll have a link for you to download here in just a moment
glad you're all here we have a lot of fun things to show you today. Pretty good list this month of plugins. Alright captions are now connected think that didn't work? Let's try this again
All right now we're working. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. Hey, John. Good to see you back. But everybody's here. In the chat, you will find the list for today's plugins as well as the replay and transcript link. All right, good to see everybody here. We're about three minutes away from getting started. February plugin round up. Hey, Louis, welcome, Geoffrey. Let's see Vern. Hey, Manu, Paul. Christian. Richard, welcome. Darlene. Good to see everybody today. A B G. Stacey. You're just joining us in zoom open up the chat say hello. The plug in list is there waiting on you can download the PDF and follow along? Many things there for you. Fun little list. Hey Eddie.
Great to see everybody coming on in Welcome welcome. many fun things to show you today. So checking into zoom open up the chat say hello there and you will find the plugin list which you can download. Below maybe we ought to have a best of the best of the best elevator I don't even know if it's in the repo name.
Oh, it's still there. Yeah, it is still there. Still, oh, just 20 active installs. So for those of you that have been around the plugin roundup since the very beginning elevator is one of the OG plugins that we had some fun with early ons early on. It's I mean, you just have to install it and play with it. It's a back to the top button that it plays elevator music as you go back up the page. And then when you get to the top it goes thing like an old elevator. It's great. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm dropping in once again, the slide link there in the chat or the list link, you will find February's plugin list as well as the replay link. there if you want to rewatch or share when we finish corniest plugins, you know there haven't been that many, but the ones that the ones that we've had are pretty awesome like air horn. AIR HORN probably my favorite plugin for funsies
Yes, always the Christmas plugins always the holiday. Winter. Plugins are fun. Alright, I've got three minutes after that means it's time to start. Let me begin the recording and we will dive right in. Well, happy Tuesday everybody. Welcome to another solid Academy live stream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And it is the plugin roundup for February 2024. glad you've joined us for this if you are just now joining us in zoom open up the chat say hello. I'm going to drop in once more the link bundle that has our plugin list which you see right here on your screen. If you're watching this on the replay down below the video you'll find the link to download the plugin list here as well as the chat log in the transcript if you want to dive into any of those. So welcome. We are just about to get started here with an excellent list of plugins that had been added to or updated in the WordPress plugin directory in roughly the last 30 days. So once again, our disclaimer for all of this is look we haven't thoroughly tested these plugins. These are just some that we ran across. We thought they were interesting. You'll want to make sure that they meet your criteria for security and code quality, accessibility, privacy, all those things. This is just a list that we thought was fun and we brought them to you. So let's begin with a plugin that we actually used in a client project in the last six weeks or so it is called page as subdomain white. And as you can imagine, with the title of this plugin, this lets you use a page as a subdomain. So for us, the use case was we had a client that for various reasons needed to create just a simple landing page on a subdomain that would link to some other pages on his site. Long story there. There was a reason for this. This was the best solution to their problem. And so our options were well are we going to put a whole other WordPress installed out there in this subdomain for this one single page. That seems like a lot. But then we ran across this plugin and there's others that do something similar to this as well, but this one was free and it worked really, really well. So let's go in here and activate the plugin. Page as sub domain three, it's called free in the plugin list. It's called light in the plugin directory. i But what this will let you do we'll go here to let's see, where does it live? Right. Where have your settings page hidden? Oh, it's under pages subdomain? Yes, yes. So what this lets you do is select a page from within your WordPress pages. And whatever the slug of that page is what the subdomain will be. So let's just go over to that particular page subdomain and look here. So the slug is subdomain and so this would be subdomain.wp nathan.com. So it's you can't? Well, Manu is asking if it can be used as the WooCommerce page. You can put whatever you want on this page that the site can handle because it's actually on the site, right? But it's not there, but it'll be shown as a subdomain. So we had a few little issues. Like with on one particular site, we had this site that we actually were doing for the client. There was a custom font that was used. And so you couldn't pull the font in correctly from the primary domain, we had to add some htaccess rules. But generally, like if you're just using Google fonts or whatever, this should work just fine. As it is. Now, the tricky part of this plugin is you do have to do some DNS work, right, because it's a subdomain. So you have to set it up wherever DNS is managed, but also you need to set that subdomain up in your cPanel or whatever. Your hosting environment is. So that the DNS knows to point that traffic at your hosting. And your hosting knows that yes, it has something for that subdomain. So you have to set those two DNS rules, and then it'll just it'll load the page so we should all that should still be intact. I forgot to check this today. Although, that last week, when we were doing the list though, subdomain.wp nathan.com and that should load our page here. Yep, there it is. So there's our page on this WordPress site. So if we go here, and edit the page
here you'll see it. So anything you can build in your block editor or page builder or whatever you're using, you can put right here so somebody was asking about WooCommerce. So we could put in I don't know let's just do a featured product to get something in there. We'll just put the Captain America shield about that done. So there's our Captain America shield so if we update that we ought to have product there it is. So if I go here, it'll take me right over to the product where I can add the cart, etc. The question is, does it bring in the menu bar? Yeah. All right here. And notice down here, it's actually it's probably hard to see, but it's linking to the actual site. So it updates the links correctly.
Yep, pretty cool, right? Can you change the slug? Yes, sure. So you can change the slug. You just need to make sure that the DNS is updated as well. That one of the easiest ways to do that is just with a wildcard or you can set up just an asterisk as a as a, an A record that points to your IP address is probably the easiest way. Again, I'm not going to get into how to set all that up. That would take too long. But this is assuming you know a little bit about DNS and how you would set up a subdomain. But a wildcard wildcard redirect is the best way to set all this up. So no matter what the slug is, it will always push it over. So interesting, right? works. Well. That is, yeah, this the it does show the the subdomain in the in the URL can handle forms. Yeah. So it's just it's drawing from your original site. Works well. Why would somebody want to create a one page subdomain? So yes, Q. We had this actually, we had a client that had a very particular need a lot of times you may want to use this as a landing page. Version, you can't use a different theme because it's pulling from your existing WordPress site. So there, there was a particular use case that required us to create a subdomain, and we've seen this around from time to time so it's not something you'd probably use every day. But there are some paid solutions out there that do this, but this was free. Works well. So moving right along that is page as subdomain light. Any other questions? Or comments about that one?
All righty, so next up, is okay, this one I think you'll like it took me a minute to get my head around what was going on here. This is a really clever plugin called advanced columns. Block layout builder. So let's activate this. Stephanie, if you have a subdomain for the sub folder for the subdomain, so that in this case for this plugin is not correct. Like you can't change the theme because it's loading out of your current website. There will be cases where that would be correct but with this particular plugin that you can't change the theme at all has to use your current, your current setup. Yep. Okay, so advanced Columns Block. So this is an interesting plugin. If you enjoy the block editor. Okay, I activated it. Let's take a look at this plugin. This allows you to build some really well, advanced columns, advanced column layouts. So this is really ugly, but an excellent example. Of a column block that we put together. Let's let me just get a tab open here with the layout. So notice what we've got here we have this three column layout here with this one, the contents flushed to the bottom. We've got something here we've got this one. And then we've got a couple of two columns here and then down below. So here's how this looks in the block editor. Now, it's really nice here in the list view. So you've got these columns where you can set this up how many columns how many rows, but watch what you can do here. So here's this area. This area six, and we can hang on
edit area positions, there we go. Okay, so if I want to drag things around, watch what I can do. So notice this is a four column layout, see the four columns here? You can set? How many what you want the gaps to look like. So like a 212, M gap, two M gap, a one M gap, you can set all that you can change your metrics to pixels or M's, rims or whatever you want there. But watch I can take this and just make it two columns if I want, isn't that interesting? Or one column, boom, or three columns. Like this, and you can move things around it you know, you can pull this up, if you want. You know what, that doesn't work that way. I would actually have to drag it here. Look, that's actually overlaying. Here's where it gets a little a little odd. So you drop drop that down. Here, drop this down there, you can actually overlay columns. See underneath that is, in this particular column and column one. I can set this, you know, how do I want this to be? You've got the indexing, you've got padding, you've got background for each of the columns. Really interesting. All the very intricate layouts you can create right here. It also gives you a responsive view. So if I want to go and look at just grab the whole thing, our base grid here on desktop is four by three, we can check and look at the mobile view. And I've just got it set up to one column. So it just all stacks really nicely. Sue is asking, Can you save that as a pattern? Well, not exactly, but you could save this, watch the you can create a pattern. Oh, I was gonna say reusable block, but now they're calling those patterns. So yes, you can create a pattern out of this so that it's reusable elsewhere. Really, really cool. Can you use this with Kadence? Absolutely. So it might get a little interesting, but you know, these are a container where you could just drop a Kadence row in sight of one of these columns. It might be a little overkill. I'm not sure how Kadence is going to interact with this. It's pretty interesting, too. Would it be a unsynced pattern? I think so. I haven't tried that yet. Great pattern. Yeah, you can choose synced or in sync right there. So yes to all of those things. Does it allow for round corners? Oh, no. Probably. It does a lot of other things. Go back to desktop. And let's grab this column and see the settings exactly that. Maybe not. You could I'm sure you could do it with some some CSS. But I don't see a way immediately. I haven't looked hard but probably I'm sure you could do it with CSS. Billy, so you the basic layout. Yes, you could create this with Kadence blocks no problem at all. What's interesting about this plugin is the way that you have this drag and drop ability to move things around. Like you can you can layer like here's area six that could overlay certain other columns. It's really, really powerful. It's really the UI.
So pretty interesting plugin. I've not seen anything in the block editor that is like this one. It's really slick. Pretty, pretty interesting. Let's see advanced Columns Block, I would say download it and play with it. Pretty cool. Any other questions or comments about this one?
All right. Q Yeah, yes. So everything we do on the plugin roundup comes out of the WordPress plugin directory, so they are all free. That's what's great about the plugin Roundup. So here you'll find this one right there in the WordPress plugin directory. And you can download it install it. That is actually a requirement for all of the plugins in our list. Okay, moving right along to a WooCommerce plugin for this month. This is called order test for WooCommerce. So have you ever run into a situation where you want to test your WooCommerce checkout? Every let's just say everything but the payment gateway. So like maybe you got coupons you want to apply or you want to test the flow of how an email was sent or whatever, but you don't want to actually create a paid for order. A lot of times you can set up like a 50 cent product to actually bill and, you know, go through this. What this does. This plugin creates a payment gateway in WooCommerce that you can use to test so it's a fake payment gateway that approves every transaction but it lets you test your flow. So let's activate order test for WooCommerce. And when we do that we will see here under WooCommerce and settings go under payments. This is where all your payment gateways live. So right here we have this new payment gateway created called order test for WooCommerce. I'm just going to drag this to the top so it gets preferred and when we do manage, we have a few settings. So do we want to enable it? Yes, you can set a an automatic product that gets added to a checkout. So you can just go directly to the checkout. To test. You can also set a particular information to be the billing default. Or if you're logged in, it'll just pull from your own user. So with this selected, let's go to we'll just use the Captain America shield I think the other one we was selected was a variable product. We'll just go straight to checkout here. And notice that the shield is already in there. I'm going to use the order test for WooCommerce. And look now it lets me well how do you want to set the status for this order? Do you want to be processing on hold all these statuses that WooCommerce gives you so if you want to test certain things related to a status, you can do that. So I'm just going to put this on processing and place the order and boom it's done. gone through. You can see the whole order complete page how that looks. You can see all of that and it even shows up as an actual order right here that we just made. So it's a great little plugin to test all the things you know related to your site. Now obviously, it's not going to test if you have like Stripe connected to WooCommerce it's not going to test to make sure the payment process is through stripe because it is functioning itself as a payment gateway. So pretty interesting. John is asking if order tests for WooCommerce is turned on does it impact an actual customer completing an order? Yes, it is a payment gateway. So this is something that you will want to turn off right after you test because it does show up for everybody. As a payment gateway. You can just toggle it off right there. And that will turn it off so it would show up just like if you had stripe and PayPal and you know cash on delivery as payment payment gateways. This is going to show up just like one of those haul does it change inventory amounts? Yes, it's running through an actual order. So if you're tracking inventory, you'll want to deal with that but this is a great way to make sure your inventory management works. So yeah, it is just like you processed an actual order with another payment gateway. It just automatically approved the purchase. Yep. All right. Any other questions or comments on that one? Certainly a helpful plugin. This is one that was again, this is classic plugin round up plugin because it's super helpful. And it just released and nobody knows about it yet. Perfect example of a plugin around that plug in that I think will be very helpful as you are testing your WooCommerce sites. All right, anybody else before we move along? That is order test for WooCommerce. In John is correct if you have a busy ecommerce site, this is probably not one you want to put on a live site. Yeah, because it does show it for everybody. Okay, moving right along to All right. This plugin is called Disable password changed admin email. Pretty much right on the nose for the plugin name here. How many of you get tired of getting emails whenever a user on the WordPress site changes their password? Because by default WordPress sends the site admin an email for every password change that happens. So this is a great little plugin. That simply by installing and activating
this right no settings no nothing. It just works. Now. The email when you change the password is disabled. Simply install it, activate it and you're done. There are no settings to deal with now. The also by the way, if you're if you are comfortable with code or implementing code snippets, there are code snippets out here that are out there that will do this as well that you can find so if you don't like to do code, just install and activate this plug in, you're done. It's a simple plug in it's not going to slow your website down. Just works or not. Yes, like Billy is mentioning this is one of the functions that I gave you for the custom functions plug in back in the Starter Site course in November. If you remember, I said members of solid Academy already have a function that does this. But this is a great little plugin if you don't want to touch code or you just want something simple to turn off that reminder. This absolutely does it. So not a lot to talk about here other than that disabled password changed admin email questions or comments about that. Vern is asking how scared should we be of a brand new plugin? Oh, you know, that's that's the tricky part. Right? So this one is two weeks old with fewer than 10 installs brand new. Something else so it would depend on how critical of a role does this plugin play? Is it a big plugin that does something that's crucial to the site? If it does, then I probably would want to lean more towards something that's been around a while. Longer, right? But these simple plugins like this. Honestly, this boils down to a simple function. If I wouldn't worry about this one too much. Oh, Vern, does WordPress vet them. Okay. Let's talk about that just for a minute. So yes, sort of. All right. So WordPress, doesn't go in and vet code quality. They do basic security checks, but not you know, detailed security checks. That's why my goodness, you get all those plugins every week on the solid vulnerability list from solid WP that shows you all these, you know, 100 and some vulnerable plugins, every you know, every month so there's not detailed code. Evaluation, there's just no way that it could do that. Remember, there's a team of a handful of volunteers that is looking at these plugins, so they have some software that kind of scans the code they're looking for. Violations of the WordPress plugin guidelines is what they're looking for. They're not really looking for code quality, detailed security checks, that sort of thing. Yeah, good question. By the way, the evaluation for all WordPress plugins up until last year, most of it was handled by one person that nobody ever knew her name is Mika. Epstein. She is brilliant. And for many years, ran the WordPress plugin directory all these evaluations. So yeah, mica mica stepped down from that role, and I don't blame her. It's quite a lot of work. Okay, moving right along to the next plugin in the list. That is on hover link preview, on hover link preview, scrolling, scrolling. Alright, this was kind of cool. And what this is actually going to do is give you a link preview pop up. Yep. On links on the website, so there's a settings page right here that you go right to So by default, it says the links are shown for all a tags in the pages. they exclude menu items in the header in the footer, etc. They they exclude also any links on images that have an a link, but this is for like linking off to an external site, you can mouse over that link, and it'll show you a preview of what that site looks like. So this is actually a little bit large. I'm gonna make that half the size. Notice here you can also exclude this for certain HTML elements. You can put classes around things that say I want to exclude a preview on those so you have a lot of flexibility on how this works. But let me just show you an example of something and how it can benefit you. So here's our on link preview. So notice we got a couple of pages here. So here's one for the BBC. And look, you get this nice little preview of the actual live BBC homepage. Okay, so, okay, so this is a good example. If it's a site that has frequent updates, like the BBC. This is using a service called M shots. Now M shots has been around forever and ever. It's a service that automatic provides, and it goes out every so often and scrapes a thumbnail from a website. And so this is an example of one where the thumbnail from him shots hasn't quite caught up with the actual line this this page probably updates a few times a day. But if you go here to solid WP Look at that. Pretty nice. Or this cool site kadence.com. Yep, so that's on link preview. Yeah, it works for any URL, literally. All you have to do is drop in your link. So I'm just gonna do
that we'll just put in MEP Nathan that can make that a link and automatically. It is going to show us preview takes a second for me shots to grab that preview. Oh, you know what this is behind? Cloudflare I think that's not going to work. So that is something to consider. I bet Cloudflare is blocking that. That link Yep, I'm sure that's what's going on. Well, let's update the link to something else. How about wordpress.org
and Sue Yes, this works for any link on your site automatically. So there you go. Yeah, Cloudflare was blocking him shots. from accessing is in shots like a caching service as sort of it's made to do this. So like, for years I had a little shortcode running for a portfolio on my site that would go grab using any shots. And you just put a URL in there and it would grab the link for it. It's a are their speed low in loading applications. Now it doesn't really load anything until you mouse over. And that's when it would go pull the link from him shots. So, I mean, that's my understanding. You probably want to test that if you had a page full of links. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And it just automatically works for any external links on the website. Yeah. So that is on, on hover, link preview. Pretty cool. Little plug in any other questions or comments on that one? And note, if there were some images that you or some links that you didn't want to show, you could put a class on them and exclude that class in the settings. So that's kind of cool. John, so you couldn't use it to view a SR website? Sure. You could. Yeah, as long as they're, like we just ran into this issue with Cloudflare. You'd have to make sure that Cloudflare allows him shots to scrape the the image does it work with keyboard? That's a great question Q. All right. So I am navigate. No, it has to be a mouse over so there is an accessibility issue here. Yep, it is only with mouse so.
Alright, anybody else before we move on? Okay, scrolling down the page. core files update clean up. Oh, this is a good one. All right. So how many of you have noticed that after every WordPress update it leaves a little garbage in your root directory, such as the licensed dot txt file, the readme dot HTML and the WP config sample dot php. Now, there's really no security risk about this, but as the plugin developer says, it's another vector for script kiddies to identify your site as a WordPress site. script kiddies are people who are just out there using pre configured hacking type scripts. You know, they're they're not really detailed hackers. But yeah, so you could you know, if you go to a site and try to go to WP config sample dot php, it might load right now it'd be much there. Nothing. It's not exposing security information, but it is showing it's a WordPress site, or the readme dot HTML you know that you can go there
I can't this site but anyhow, so the what this those files even if I were to delete them right now, every time WordPress doesn't update it's going to put those files back. So this plugin goes out there and deletes those files. And it's, you know, it runs whenever WordPress updates. So this plugin hooks into the function that WordPress uses to run a WordPress Core update. And after WordPress Core update executes, this plugin comes in and deletes those three files. So you know, if you care about that, this is a nice way to clean those core files up and to cool really anything to demonstrate here any questions or comments? Ah, que so it deletes these three files. So, WordPress updates clean up after themselves. But much look for example, on every major WordPress release like from 6.3 to six dot for WordPress wants to install a default theme and Hello Dolly and Akismet by default, so there's some scripts or that actually there's a WP config constant you can add to stop that from happening. But this plugin actually goes in and wipes out these three core files as well. Paul, you could ask it Yeah, to delete the error log. I'm not sure if you'd want to do that. But you certainly could. It's a pretty simple plugin. Yep. Okie dokie screw, Jeffrey, is it just those three files there lots. It's just these three files. So WordPress cleans itself up pretty well. From actually you know, the what downloads and up runs the update. It cleans all that stuff. up really well automatically. But it does drop these three files in the root of the WordPress install All right, moving down our list to the next plugin which is called Page Break description. Page Break description now I kind of liked this plugin. It is really helpful in the case where you have a super long page or post in the block editor. It is a block. So it does require the block editor super long page or post that you might want to break into segments without creating multiple pages or posts. Let me show you what I mean. Page Break the scription so it works on pages and posts
you have a sample one set up here. So notice we've got just some text broken up into page one, page two, page three, this is all on one page. And we've dropped in this block. And okay, we can type in the description of this page and the description of the next page and so on. It'll be helpful if I show you what it looks like on the front end. Because look at this next page. Oh I've got this hang on. Let's get rid of that preview
so I can go to page two, page three, it all stays on the page. But look up here it uses standard nomenclature like WordPress uses for pagination. And you get this really nice simple pagination with the descriptions that you have identified right here. So it's pretty cool. You can very easily this is very easily styled the plugin doesn't give you a lot of options to do that. But it's it's a simple class that you could style this to make it look nice. And the URL for a really long page. This could be really good. It's kind of overwhelming sometimes for people to see, you know all of that information could be some SEO implications here. That's that's something to think about. But for usability I really really like the way this works. What does that look like on mobile? It looks like this. So pretty nice. I kind of like this one. Grab There we go. The creek that is called Page Break description. Are there accessibility issues? No. So I'm having inter takes me right to the page so it is keyboard navigable? Yep. little note here from Chris don't mix this block with the page break block, because things get weird. Ah, yeah. So he was asking what does it count as one page? So it's the URL is broken up. So my understanding is Google would see this as separate content. Kay, like I mentioned a minute ago, there's not an option in the plugin itself to change. Yeah, nope. You would have to do that manually with CSS but yeah, this is there's a very simple class here. Hey, a post page numbers and then post. Yeah, it's all just post page numbers. There's very clear divs here where you can style it. But you would have to do that manually with CSS. Yeah. All righty. Anybody else on Page Break description, not a bad little plugin. Scrolling on down to another WooCommerce plugin. This one is called UTM for WooCommerce. So how many of you are creating UTM codes for tracking social posts? Or whatever for WooCommerce products? This is a really cool plugin if you're doing that. I've not seen anything else like it that does this. There are a few shortcomings but I really like what what's happening here. So let us do UTM for WooCommerce. So what this does is it brings into our order list UTM, the UTM information that was used when the person placed the order so here's an order that Chris created to test this and we did really well on January 3, the 31st in the first those were really good days here on WP Nathan, you know about not 12 grand between the the three days. But so you can see here these are the UTM details pulled right in here. So I can see that this order came from an email newsletter in January 2024. So you have the option to do lots of different things here with the with the UTM code. And of course this does depend on you creating a UTM code which links over to the product and you can create UTM codes right here with Google's own little builder and put all that stuff in and it will generate out a UTM code for you. But, you know, I don't want to get deep into UTM codes and all that here. This is not the purpose of this livestream. But if you know what those are and you're using them, this is super helpful. So Paul, you're talking about pages and posts? Yes, he really probably Google Analytics is your best bet for that. Because this is tracking an order that was purchased through the link that contained the UTM code. So that's what's helpful here. And you know, all these options, like maybe you're not using some of the term in the content, or Facebook, so forth. You can hide that up here. But like if you're not using some of these things, you can hide those so that your your order list is not crazy long, like that. So it's pretty neat. UTM for WooCommerce su would like a webinar on UTM code setup. We've done those in the Google Analytics bootcamp from last year I believe Chris Edie not it was two years ago, Chris Edwards got into UTM codes. So that we do have some, some content on that. But we will make sure in this year's Google Analytics bootcamp that we talk a bit about UTM codes. All right, any other questions or comments on this one? Pretty neat stuff. Okey, dokey. Let's talk about cookies, shall we? Flexible cookies is the next plugin. This is a really neat little plugin. I'm saying that a lot today there there's an above average amount of usable plugins. This plugin round up that I think would be interesting. So this is a cookie consent plugin that actually scans your website for cookies and lets you mark them as required or optional or whatever. And it's free and it's pretty darn good. So flexible cookies. Let's activate this one. And we'll take a look at its settings page. Flexible cookies. I also like this because it nests itself under Settings and doesn't take up a top level menu item. That's such a nice thing. All right. So do we want to show it is it a simple cookie bar or do we want to give options of except the URL just the required ones or whatever? This is the message that's going to show up on your website. Do you want to set it this is interesting to automatically accept cookies if they don't interact with the banner after a certain amount of time. Or if they scroll down the page we're just gonna say they automatically accept cookies that has some the both of these options have some legal implications you need to know about. But the options are there. Do we want to block cookies automatically? Before accepting so in other words, do you accept cookies automatically, like by default until you say no? Or do you reject cookies? Automatically until you say yes. So you can choose that here. You've got some appearance options. Just basic stuff here. We've got out too far. So you got buttons. You can enable custom styling you can add some custom CSS, we just have basic black and gray colors here. Now, we do have some categories set up here for advertisement analytics, functional, necessary others and performance. So those are the built in six types of cookies that this will work on and here in the scanner. This is actually scanning the website and pulling up all the cookies that are loading on the site and you can categorize them over here in this list. So that now when I go to the website, I'll get my cookie banner. Oops, let's go to the front end of the website
where's my banner? Well let's take a look. I missed something. Oh, critical error. No bueno.
What just happened? This might be a plugin conflict. All right. Settings, flexible cookies. Su this does not deal with location. So soon as asking to some What about some states that don't recognize cookies? If you need something that's geo located that knows what to present for certain states. That's when you're going to want a paid solution. Okay, show the cookie bar. Oh, right there. I am logged in as an administrator. So that would be why I didn't see the cookie banner. Let's try this again. Q I completely agree not to assume a default opt in that has legal issues or legal implications. That's why I mentioned what I did earlier. So here look I can accept all I can deny all or I can open preferences and only accept certain cookies that I want. So for a free cookie plugin, it is pretty, pretty richly featured gives you most of the options you're going to want so that is flexible cookies, questions or comments about that one.
All right, moving on. Lizabeth, how are the cookies originated. WordPress and various plugins create cookies in their normal operations. And this will scan the what cookies are being used and give you the options of what to do with it. Very similar to other paid solutions that are out there. But again, if you if you want something that is geo located, then you're going to want one of the paid solutions out there. Our queue if the user says no to the cookie, then it doesn't load. Yep, again, this is one of those plugins you're definitely want to test and experiment with. But seems to be a pretty good plugin in this by the way this developer has been around a while. And this is a good little thing we haven't done in a while. If you want to check a developer out, the best way to do that is to go here to development and click on their contributor link. And this will show you what plugins they have out there. So see this developer has a lot of plugins some that have many 1000s of installs. So this will help you sort of vet whether a developer is trustworthy or not. All right, let's keep moving down the list. Okay, simple custom login page. All right. So there's a number of different plugins that we've done over the years that help you customize the WordPress login page. All of them up till now have used the WordPress customizer which there's nothing wrong with that. However, be aware that the WordPress customizer at some point in the future is going to go away completely. The customizer in block themes has been completely removed. So block themes do not use the customizer, they use the site editor. So we have to be aware of that. And so if you're thinking forward on maybe what solution could I use for login page customization. This is a pretty good one. It's also very, very light, not as full featured as some of the other plugins that we've used, but it does all the basics for a simple custom login page. So let's go and activate this plugin
simple custom login page, rolling down through the link in settings. Alright, so here's our logo image we can upload a where does that logo link what color is the page background? What color is the login form background, the color, the text, the color the links? So very basic, but it honestly does. Pretty much what you want it so here's our custom login page. We can change the background or whatever but this is a very simple light way to get some branding on your clients login page. Pretty neat. As soon as asking when is the customizer going away? It if you are using a block theme, it's already gone. So part of the Project Gutenberg is replacing the customizer so at some point, you know I'm not sure if I haven't heard to what degree the customizer will be supported going forward. For classic themes. I would I would my guess is if you're using a classic theme, the customizer is still there. But you know, the customizer is not the future of WordPress, but it's also not going away tomorrow or this year. Or next year. So yeah. All right. Yeah. Questions about Kadence. So that's not they want to spend a lot of time on that. Kadence is a classic theme. It is not currently a block theme. What the Kadence team have said since the beginning, they are watching the development of the way the site editor is working. And they're going to do they're going to integrate with that at some point. Kadence existed before the site editor and full site editing came along. And it was a moving target for a long time on how they were actually going to implement the site editor. So you know Kadence has sort of existed alongside in parallel to the side editor. But there I know that they are. They are thinking about all this and how at some point you know, where did the paths intersect? But if you want more information on that reach out to the Kadence theme team. I am not the official voice at all for the Kadence folks. All right, let's move down to the next option here. Next plugin which is menu icons by theme aisle. And I really like this plugin too. This is going to let you in a very simple way. Put icons on menu items and whether that's in the main site nav menu or this I would see very useful in like a little sidebar context menu, like in a member area or whatever you have nice little icons that make it feel more app like this is a great little plugin from a developer that's been around for a while. menu icons. Let's activate that. There's some really cool stuff here. Is it under so the UI is actually on the menu items themselves right here. Okay, so look here you get access to all of these icon sets which is really cool. A lot of other menu icon plugins only give you access to WordPress dash icons which are not bad. They're just limited. So here you get like, I'm not familiar with the lucid but the whole font awesome library foundation icons, generic generic icons. Lots of neat stuff here. You can actually use images as well or drop in your own SVG if you have custom graphics, but the UI is really nice. Like right here you've got this icon where you can ROP and if you want to look and do something else you can grab here's dash icons, here's where you can upload your own SVG file. You can also those are the only three that are selected but we could also at this point, pull in let's do font awesome save. Like that. Oh, I have to reload the page
so we can grab the font, see how it just pulls right in here to the other font libraries. So it's pretty neat. And here's how it looks on the front end. Now notice this was before the plugin was active and if we refresh the page now we've got our little little icons up here now I probably wouldn't do this on the main nav of the site. But you know maybe even a top nav bar will contact link with a maybe an envelope or something or a context menu in the sidebar. little icons like this really go a long way. I dug footer nav exactly that sort of thing as well. So really nice. And works super well. Lots of icon sets. Yeah. You can we create our own library of icons. It'll recognize. I don't think so. But let's just take a look. Now it's just these let's say you have some really nice settings here two extensions. I comun. Actually, maybe what I would do that what I would probably do Q is I would just use the SVG and upload your own individual SVG rather than making an icon set for the for this. I don't see how you can register another menu, font family or an icon font family so individual SVG he's like quicker actually than a font family to load. Anybody else before we move along? That is menu icons by theme I'll pretty nice, nice little plugin. All right, scrolling down to our final plugin of the round up, which is called effortless custom fields. You've heard of ACF since ECF. Now before you you know, make fun of it. This is actually a really well done plugin if you're looking for a standalone plugin to add some custom fields that's free. I mean, this is really good. Let me show you how this works. The UI is fantastic. They've, the developer has done a great job of integrating an AJAX user experience that just works nicely. So down here under ECF. There is one we we've added a field here for our movie custom post type and open that up with Ajax. We have one field called rating and look at all your options here. So I here under movies, I'll just show you one. We get this custom field at the bottom. And this particular custom field is a Number Slider with a minimum of one max of five so one to five rating. And Alright, there it is. Yeah. really slick little UI. So you've got a lot of different field types, text text areas, multi text, email URL, select the color, custom HTML, drop, a pick list, choice, multi select radio, multi checkbox, single checkbox, images, file upload, like there's, it does lots of different things here. So you have even a WYSIWYG editor. So the pro version gives you the ability to put tabs and accordions in the custom field UI. So pretty nifty. And Sue is asking, can they go on every post or can you keep it to a category so right over here filled visibility, every movie or look you can just do certain movies. You can also set actually, let's go back to posts where we actually have
where is it attached to me? I think it's when it was set up. So let's copy this over to posts also.
Back there so now we have our rating visible on every posts for certain posts certain users or by role isn't that neat? shown.
I don't know Sue, it doesn't look like it can be based on taxonomy. But on So honestly, if I have a post category that has certain extra information, like extra custom fields, I'm probably going to move that out to a custom post type. Anyway just as a matter of organizing the information. But you can make these show up for you know, there's a lot of a lot of conditional logic options here. So pretty neat. Elizabeth will that conflict with pods? I wouldn't use this in pods together. unit this is it. This does custom fields, pods does custom fields. It would probably work. Like we have pods running on this site. And this and here in the movies. You'll notice that here's some pods custom fields and here's the ACF fields so it does work but it's just not a good idea to have two plugins that have the same job. So does that make sense? Pretty plugin to be honest, and maybe the best UI and a free custom field creator. Yeah. The Pro version gives you additional options for your layout and some other things. So pretty neat little plugin. Anybody else questions comments before we wrap this one up?
So that is effortless custom fields that kind of liked that one. All right. That brings us to the end of the February 2024 plugin round up here on the solid Academy. So we end with the question that we always end with which is, which was your favorite plugin of the round up? One vote one vote only please. We will tally these and our best of round up every six months. One plugin one vote one vote. It is hard to choose just one. Order test icons order test order tests, custom fields link order test. Order well order tests has taken it away today. Columns description custom fields flexible cookies order test order test. Wow link, order test, by bar. link preview so probably link preview and order tests as I'm scrolling up here are probably the favorites by a nose all right pretty good plugin list so this always happens like we had a couple of iffy months December in January usually a little bit light developers are on holiday February's come back strong and this is that's pretty normal. So a lot of neat. Oh yes. So for those of you that came in late and you don't have the the link bundle right there it is in the chat. You can download this PDF at the February plugin list link and if you're watching this on the replay, you can download the list right below the video. Alright folks as we are wrapping up here, let me remind you that there's a couple of great events coming up on solid Academy, especially tomorrow. Probably your you've heard at some point over the last several weeks that there are changes that had been made by Google and Yahoo about demark records and email authentication. Tomorrow we have Matt Pritchett from Sindh WP, who is going to be talking about this alphabet soup of email authentication, SPF DK I M and D mark. This is what Matt does. He lives and breathes this stuff every day. And so he'll be with us tomorrow. That is a free live stream. I'll copy that link in the chat. If you haven't registered, please do that. And join us for Matt, office hours for members on Thursday. And then on Tuesday. Our own Chris Malone from my team will be here talking about how to break the internet lessons from the support desk. So Chris does a marvelous job with customer support from my agency. And he will be talking about some principles that he employs and supporting our customers. Well, so that's coming up a free live stream as well. I'll drop that link in the chat also. All right, folks, that's gonna do it for us today. I will be I will see you tomorrow for our email authentication, live stream with Matt Pritchett. Until then have a great rest of the day. See you back here tomorrow on solid Academy where we go further together.