welcome everybody if you're just joining us, I'm running just a bit behind today getting some of the connections going for links and captions. Okay, caption should be working for everybody now. Sorry about that. Feels like Monday but it's Wednesday but it's kind of Monday because we were off yesterday. Okay, just about ready to go. If you're just joining us, I'm gonna drop in the links again in the chat. There's today's plug in list, and we're gonna get started in just a second. All right, okay, who's ready to get started with plugin Roundup. I am. Had a fun list of stuff for y'all today. Here we go. Good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the July 2023 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at I iThemes Training and after a few technical problems, we are finally started and glad that you've joined us if you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat. Say hello and tell us where you're logging in from today. And folks logging in from around the United States and around the world. Good to see everybody and they're in the chat. You will find the list of our plugins for today. And this was a little bit different today because we're starting with a plug in that's not a plugin, but it's something we talked about for quite a while here and various news roundups and in office hours and some other places, and that is going to be a lot of fun to get to. So again, if you're just joining us, I'm going to drop in one more time the links there in the chat with the replay link as well as the list of plugins for today. All right, who's ready to get started? We are going to start today with this new really awesome tool called WordPress playground. Now I started talking about this. Oh, it's been a few months ago in the WordPress news roundup where this new concept of running WordPress in the browser was just starting to be talked about in some of the core blog channels. And so you may recall this is something that uses an in browser process and the SQ light integration that's been developed so that you can literally have a database it doesn't even take a MySQL database, you're running a site from a flat text file. And for many sites, especially small simple, like for example, a brochure type site works really well with an SQL lite database. It might even be faster than a corresponding MySQL database. So they put this technology the in browser technology together into this new tool. That is called WordPress playground and you can access it right now@playground.wordpress.net Now why are you doing this in the plugin Roundup? Nathan, you might ask? And the answer is, it's the best place I could find to put it so it doesn't really fit with like a demo in the news roundup. But this is a great place for us to spend a couple of minutes introducing you to the WordPress playground and what you might be able to do with it because I think it has a lot of interesting use cases. Now. This this is the link to actually use it playground@wordpress.net There is a really nice little mini course on the learn.wordpress.org site that shows you how to use it. And then there's also this is really cool. If you are a Visual Studio Code user the software the free text editing software from Microsoft. There is a plugin that will let you connect directly to WordPress playground so that is super cool. Anyway, let's get into it, shall we? Here is WordPress playground. Now this is what you get when you go to playground.wordpress.net. You've got this mock up of a browser and look it is this is WordPress. It is a fully functional WordPress install. It's running right here in the browser. It's running very, very quickly. And it's we're in the 2023 theme now but you can add new themes just like you would before. Now one thing that it doesn't allow you to do is connect to the WordPress theme or plugin directories directly so what you'd have to do is download the plugin to your local computer and then just upload it right here. That's definitely yes. And the key word here is yet that is coming. But currently this is you have to upload the themes and plugins. So but look at this. It's a fully functional version of WordPress. And watch what you can do here. Here's some of our environment options. So you know, we'll come back to this but look, you can run this on anything from PHP 5.6, all the way up to 8.2. So let's just say you want to test a plug in on a new version of PHP. How do you do that? Well, you can do it right here and just flip to whatever version you want. And Vern is asking Where does it live? It lives in the browser. It's just running in browser memory. So it is a WordPress install in the browser, which is super cool right? Now look you can also go back to various versions of WordPress here. So 616059 WordPress nightly. That is the bleeding edge build, like as things are being pushed to the latest core trunk build. That's the nightly build. Definitely don't run that on a live site. But you certainly can. Right there in the browser right here. That's what this WordPress playground is meant to test. So it's super cool. Very easy to use. Now, here's where things get a little interesting. You have three storage types that are here. You've got temporary, which means it's just running in the browser. And you know if I did something here like create a post, block editor running test posts and I publish it, and this works. I can view my post. It's running in 2023 Okay, right. But if I were to refresh this, alright, it's a brand new like what I just did is gone. It is as temporary as it gets. All we have is the Hello World post now and this is gone. Just going to timeout because this scope or this instance is now gone. So that's one option. Another option here is persistent. So this actually uses your browser caching to store this WordPress instance in your browser. So if you have something you want to keep coming back to, you can do that. And it would be you know, just stored in the browser. Now you can only have one of those at a time just based on the way that technology works. But also, you could delete as the sorted data and start fresh so if you want to reset your browser you reset the instance of WordPress you just click this and apply and it would reset it so soon No, no, it will even if you close the browser, it's going to store it in the cache. So you could come back to it and your instance is still there, which is really neat, right? But there's another option which is I think even cooler look at this live directory from your computer and they say beta version, but this totally works for me. And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to select a local directory. So what I'm going to do is just make a new folder here on the desktop. I'm going to call it type right playground. And we're going to select our local directory
playground and hit select now watch what's going to happen here
it is now downloading WordPress. Look at this to my desktop. So there's our playground directory. Look here we have a little ways to go here. It's gonna take it a minute. But here this is this directory. And it's all the core WordPress files. Isn't this cool? Now here's where our database lives. I think not too sure about that. But it says database. Okay, so we're done. So watch this. If I want to install a plugin. Let's just go to someplace we'll see that org slash plugins and let's just find something like Oh, I don't know the Gutenberg core plugin. Let's download this. Alright, so we now have our Gutenberg plugin. And if we want to install a plugin, remember we can't upload it. We can't we don't connect directly to the the WordPress plugin directory yet. But all I have to do is drop the plugin file right here in plugins. And when I go to plugins, it'll be there because it's running from this local directory supposed to be cool interesting why didn't that show up
there that isn't the best thing. All right, well, maybe maybe that's not going to work. Let's try this way. Trash. Is it still downloading the site? I don't think so. Oh, I have to sync local files. Hang on. I got about that. Let's put this back. And then we'll sync local files. There it is. You just have to sync it. So there you go. activate the plugin. Boom. Isn't that cool? Would I use what I install? I think security. Oh, think so like. I mean, if you're if you're wanting to test something, but I think security but this is a I would so don't use this to develop a website. Okay. This is really for testing and playing around. It's a playground. It's not a development environment. Alright. So you wouldn't use if you wanted to local environment, you'd still want to use something like, you know, desktop, not desktop server like local or x app or map or something like that. Why not? Because this is still kind of beta. It's brand new. I would not what I would not want to happen is get hours of work in a developing a project and then they change something and whatever. It's not meant to be a development environment. Elizabeth has to be in the future. I don't know. I can't you know if I had a crystal ball, I don't know. So maybe I think that the point of this project is to spin up a quick testing environment right now and if they do something else with it, cool. But this is you know, this quickly lets you test all the things in different environment. So that's kind of cool. All right. Think this is neat. Anyway, that is the WordPress playground. Can the database be used on a web server? No I'm curious I'm curious about what happens
if we put Backup Buddy I don't know if Backup Buddy will work or not. But I'm curious. Like if we were going to do something and then migrate it. I mean, I would not advise this. This is very, very, very beta. But let's just see what happens. I bet I bet it will work. But you know might as well try.
It's not want even to get past the setup wizard
Yeah, we've got major problems here. Yeah, it's not going to work. So anyway. Spend some time play around with WordPress WordPress playground. Check out the course here to learn how to start using it if you'd like if you're using Visual Studio check out the extension. Really, really cool. So I Tom that's a great question of how it's going to measure up with instant WP which is another in browser tool. My guess is instant WP is going to be more geared toward a commercial application. This is really this is really more of a demo type environment. So yeah, we'll have to see but pretty cool, right? You know, show somebody how to do something quickly in WordPress, you just go to playground.wordpress.net and there it is. SUE Yeah, it's disposable. All right, so let's get into the actual plugins now, shall we? Get rid of all this? All right. We have a few really good plugins to show you. The first one is called PLU Redux by Jason Cosper. So this is an interesting little tool that is going to help you see at a glance when all the plugins on your site were last updated. Now this can be very, very helpful, especially in the situation where you are taking on a site maybe for management for a client that's just reached out to you, or whatever and you want to see, do we have any plugins that are super out of date, and this is going to let you do that so let's activate P L you Redux in the first thing you're going to immediately see is right here by the version and author numbers details are is the last updated date, like this just a little bit bigger. So all right, so this shows you if anything's out of date. Now, I added this plugin just the other day, because it's super out of date. And so if anything is over two years old, it's going to give you this warning emoji now. I would like it to be a little more bold, but it's still there's a warning emoji there. And it does happen to site health. I'm going to show you that in just a minute. But this real quick at a glance shows you and in this this is for plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, not for for example, premium plugins like backup button because they're not registering that data. But anything that comes out of the WordPress plugin directory, you see the last updated date. So that's pretty cool. Stacy, that is correct. We're not talking about the date that you last updated that or somebody updated the plugin we're talking about this plugin that's on the site at this version level, you know, so for example, this uber chart, version 1.03 was last updated June the 26th. Okay, so it's connecting those things. In the plugin directory. It's not related to when you or somebody performed updates on the site. So kind of nice, you get this list. That's helpful and it has a little warning emoji if it's over two years old. Now there's something else this does it actually taps into site health. And oh, look, there's a critical issue. Some of your plugins have not been updated in over two years. So that comes from this plugin, and it's showing look any Ipsum has not been updated in over two years. Kind of neat. strat highly suggest that you look for actively developed alternatives and this just links out to the plugin director. So that's kind of nice. It'll just show up it'll surface insight health. Yeah, neat, right. Absolutely. Yeah, that's the only that's where it shows up is right here in the Status screen. And it's gonna show you any plugins are not active in over two years. How often does it check? I think it's it's going to run when you load this page. It's going to check and see if there's the site health page, it's going to look at your plugin list and see if there are any plugins that are over two years old. It's not storing this information anywhere. That I understand. I believe what it's doing is as you're loading this page, it is displaying the last updated date. It's pulling that from the plugin directory. So pretty neat little tool, especially if you're just evaluating a site P L, you Redux any questions or comments about this one?
Pretty neat. All right. Well, let's move on to the next plugin in the list, which is permissions plus. So this is a helpful plugin if you're in a WooCommerce environment. It's specifically built to give an extra roll called processor that is designed for filling orders in WooCommerce. So you've got a shop manager role in WooCommerce. But this the developer this plugin thought we probably wouldn't there was something this is a little lower than shop manager that has the ability to view orders and, and change order status, but doesn't have all of the ability that a shop manager has. So that's what this is about. And it does a couple of other things. as well. So let me activate permissions plus, and again, I probably you know, this is really built for WooCommerce. So under WooCommerce, you have the permissions plus link, and we will activate that and so it gives you a little bit of an overview of what this role does. So the shop manager can go in and do like several other things. But the processor can only do has a little bit less so right here for example, we can change what menu items the processor role can see. So checking on means turning off so if we have a person that's a processor, and we don't want them to see the updates or the dashboard, we can turn that off. If we don't want them to see posts or anything underneath it. We can turn that off our custom post types. So it's I think Sync does something similar to this where you can edit the menus. The menu items in a site by the user, advanced access manager that we've seen in the past also has this ability similar to this by the at the role level. But this is a it's a very simple, lightweight plugin that just allows you to create this processor role and then hide some of the items in the in the WordPress admin menu from that role. So it's a simple plugin. But if you have a situation like maybe there's a client and they they have an order processor that doesn't need to see all the things this is a really easy way to activate it. Now you have the processor role and you can hide things from the processor people and that's a good thing. So really easy to use, not complex at all very lightweight, decent plugin from digital Bodi called permissions plus questions or comments on this one before we move along.
All right. All right. This is a plugin that was suggested by Ben Anderson. Ben, are you here? Yeah, there he is. Alright, Ben. Yes. So Ben suggested this plugin and by the way, if you want to suggest a plugin, we invite all of you to do that. And there's a little note at the top of the plugin Roundup, and we welcome your suggestions for plugins each month, and you can suggest a plugin here. And right here is a little short form on the training site, where you can enter the information about a plugin, and we'll put it in the list. To evaluate each month. And so that's what Ben did with this plugin. And thank you, Ben. I thought it was cool too. So basically, what this plugin is going to do is broaden the kinds of errors for which you'll get an email from WordPress. Now for a number of it's been probably a couple of years now. 5.7. WordPress, I think started 5.9. Anyway, one of the five dot versions of WordPress added the this function where if your site goes into a critical error, whereas it used to many times, just give a white screen. Now it's sort of recover from that automatically and sends you an email with or a sense the site administrator that an email with the information about the error, and that's really helpful. But sometimes, the errors don't reach the threshold. Of that critical error that would trigger an email. So this plugin broadens, the kinds of errors that you'll get an email for. So let's go into this particular plugin. And it is called Fatal Error notify. Right here and there's a nice little settings page that goes along with this plugin. Under Settings fatal error, notify. And okay right here. So this is the email address that will receive the notifications which is nice. You can specify that and then you can treat you know which type of errors do you want it to send? I just checked everything. And I'm going to send myself a test message. And I'll show you what that looks like. It's just a very basic email. Soon as it comes here
just about
Alright, so here's what it just sent. And it gave me a sample of all the different just type of error here. So this is what you'd get very similar to the core notification. So you know, lets you know what the the offenders were in the line and what the request was and all of that, and lets you know where it came from. So this is really, really helpful. For example, if you are going to switch a PHP version and you want to know any errors that are happening whatsoever, even ones that aren't a fatal error that's going to, you know, shut the site down. This is a way for you to get proactively notified about that and not just be recorded in an error log. So yeah, I like this a lot. Now there is a pro version. If we take a look at this pro version, it includes WooCommerce errors, Gravity Forms errors, AP fusion errors. Some other things here as well. You can pause notifications if there's out of memory notification, and also can push notifications to a Slack channel. instead of emailing you. And I met Yeah, didn't write down. Here's the link of the program. Look at that. So pricing is Yep, so $120 a year for unlimited sites if this is a tool that you want to use in your agency it's it's not here, but there's some cost to it, but it might save you some time. And a call right. Manu I don't know if this would work with web playground or not. I don't know that the IN BROWSER WordPress has a a way to send mail very well. That's something he had to play with. I don't know if it would if that. If the playground has a mail sending ability. It's just the PHP function. Maybe it would but something to play with. I don't know. So anyway, that is fatal error notify from very good plugins which is a very good name for a plugin shop. All right, any other questions or comments on this one? I would find this to be really helpful. Yeah. Pretty cool plugin Thank you, Ben for suggesting that one for us. All right, next up scrolling down the list is Auto Update Image attributes from file name. Now this is a very long name for a plugin and it does exactly what the file the title says it will do. It's very similar to another plugin that we did some time ago, which I'm also going to mention in this list. So what basically what this does is if you have a well let's just see if I've got something right here. All right. We just launched this site the other day and here's an image that I have, it's called serve my city share image. And if you were to upload this to the media library, then you know, you obviously you're not going to have any alt text or anything like that generated but with this plugin active let me activate this and show you the settings
Oh yes, it creates its own top level menu item which all of you know I just love. Okay, so, do we want to enable it to work? Yes, no. Do we want to remove special characters like dots, hyphens and underscores like this, for example. Do we want to remove numbers? So if it's, you know, a stock photo that has a bunch of numbers after it but the photo name is you know, woman walking beside ocean dash 46582 did it at at a dot jpg. Let's remove those numbers. And we want to get rid of any extra spaces. I just have all that turned on. And that's our default settings. And so when we go to add a new media item, I've got this image. And let's just go and take a look at that image we just uploaded so without doing anything else, look it pulled in alt text, caption and description based on the file name of the image. Now that's really helpful and this is not by the way, not the best way to do alt text. But it may be better than nothing, especially if you if you might have a client that you're working with that you can never get them to put alt text in their images, but maybe you could get them to rename the image file before they upload it. Pretty neat. Kay, okay. The I don't know what the translation would work. It's going to pull whatever text is in the image file name. So the question I would have is characters, but this is just dots, hyphens and underscores. So even if it was a character that, for example, might not be something that's in English, it still would probably pull it in because your WordPress instance is going to support that character. I bet it would work. You'd want to probably test that and just see okay, but I bet it would work. Does it affect SEO? Having alt text can help your SEO Yeah. Or captions? Yeah. Yeah, so this is super cool. I like this a lot. And we've been using something like this on certain sites for a while. So this plugin the the new one that we're looking at today. Auto Update Image attributes from file name does exactly what we just saw. Now, there's another option for me, there is another option and it is a very similarly, a very similarly named plugin. And it is called auto image attributes from file name with bulk uploader. So let's do that one. Now it does exactly the same thing as this new plugin that we just saw. Other than it doesn't put in a top level menu. And we also have what's weird is this refresh to see the settings menu image attributes is where it settings live. And you'll notice it is very similar except with this plugin. I can say I don't want to know or you can turn on and off which things it's actually going to update. So maybe I I want the alt text but I don't want it to do the caption or the description. But I want to do the title and alt text awesome. It let me specify which thing which characters I want to remove from the file name and it also will insert the image title into posts. So in within the image tag using a standard WordPress image. I'm not sure how this would work with page builders, you'd have to test that or with the image block but I bet it would work in the image block. This adds the title equals whatever it generates. So that's kind of cool. If I save that it's done. But the really nice part of this plugin is this bulk updater. So if you run bulk updater it's going to look at now all the images in your library and bulk update everything that you've just set it to do. So it's like this plugin that's brand new, but it adds some other functions. And I wanted to mention that because it's been a while since we talked about this plugin. It was in the base stack that I suggested a few years ago. But yeah, either these plugins do a good job. We just had a situation where it was an E commerce site that we were developing, and we needed to generate alt text because it wasn't there. And we use this plugin to do it. And so it just generated all our alt text because the images were properly named, which is the key to all of this. All right. Now let's see Ben does it update alt text for images that already have alt text? That is a good question. And I don't know the answer, let's see.
All right, it's gonna do one image it's probably going to be the last image. So this image, let's edit the alt text and then see if it replaces because I don't know the answer that question. Let's test the bulk updater.
Did WooCommerce placeable why would it do that? That's the oldest image
Yeah, okay. So let's try this one more time. Okay, so our alt text now says WooCommerce placeholder demo. Let's update that. And now let's test this again. Hopefully does the same image reset the camera? I think it's going one by one now. Test the bulk update. Okay, now let's see if it updated it. Yes, so it's going to overwrite everything. So if you already have some alt text, this is not going to help you. If you don't have any alt text, it might help you unless all your images are named img four or five six dot jpg or one. So, yep. All right. So the best case scenario is that you put really good alt text in for every specific image but if your image names have some descriptive value, this is better than nothing. Yeah, Ben, I agreed it would be nice to like not overwrite existing you could request that to the developer. All right. That is or was Auto Update Image attributes from file name and also this one which is auto image attributes from file name with bulk uploader. So there you go. Yeah, just reach out to the developer and see if they'll add that. Add that feature. All right. Moving down the list. How many notion users do we have here who loves notion like I do? notion is super cool. Very, very powerful to build even in screen, you know, in, in app databases and views and lots of cool stuff. So yes, if you're not aware of what notion is go to notion.es Oh, I believe Yeah, right here. It's like, I don't want to show that well. Okay. I mean, here it is. There's, I'm logged in already. It is what it is. So this is something that for example, the solid WP team has the brand guide in here. It's like it's like a next generation of Evernote. It is quite good. It does lots of neat things. So let me just show you. Here's my app. Let me get to Okay. All right. So this is my app on notion. And what I have right here in this is just an imported thing that I created called a people directory. And you can see that there's see how very app like this is like you can run little mini databases in it. Like here's this person and I got a bio and a picture and all this. And it's there's like a database like it is literally a database here of all of these people and you know, there's different views that you can make by team by location. So it's really cool and this is just demo data that I imported. You can do so much more with this. But the question is, wouldn't it be cool to put this out into WordPress where maybe you've got a client and they don't want to log into WordPress and full with all that but they're, they're using notion or something like it to have like a list, you know? I don't know some product list or something like that, that they could maintain inside of notion, but the changes would immediately be shown on their website, and that's what this plugin does. Called embed notion pages. Now, changes made a notion are live on the page. Now, you do first have to create, we broke our rules. Normally, we don't do plugins that are merely an embed for some external service. This is so cool, though and so useful. We will occasionally break our own rules. What can I say I'm unpredictable. So embed notion pages. There's a free account. It is a very restricted free account level though they really want you to pay in for this the the well, let's see. Links expire after 14 days. And you can only have five at a time unless you want to pay for it. So it's pretty restricted free level, but it's enough to let you see if you at least want to use the service. So here is that so what you do is you'd go here, and it's a little clunky, I mean, I gotta I gotta be honest, it's a little clunky. You generate an iframe embed code on their website. The plug in itself is not terribly helpful because it really just creates a shortcode. And you put the ID in rather than creating the iframe embed, but you have to go do that anyway, it's just I don't know, it's a little clunky. But it's this is a really, like, why would I even put this in the roundup? And the reason is, it can be really useful to manage content inside of notion. So why don't I just show it and show you how it looks? see em bed notion pages. And let's go to the page we have set up for this. I'm just going to show you what's in this page really quickly. So what I've done, let's see, this one is set to display none so it's this one. Alright, so this is where I went out to embed notion page.com I took this page right here, and I did the share and publish and copy the web link. Now this by the way, has every notion item has its own direct web link. It's really ugly. But see, I can view this on the web which is really, really cool. But you take that you can't make this into an iframe though. But you can't iframe in this URL, it doesn't work. So you have to have some sort of service that uses the notion API to call things in. So here's the iframe that it generates and here is the page and how it looks right within WordPress. And it looks just like it looks in the app. Now they do put their badge on here because you know, they do. It is responsive. So it works nicely. You know it responds to screen sizes nicely. Pretty cool. All the functionality is there. And if I go here in notion and I make a change to this person make her Sally Miller
there she is live right there on the site in that cool. So Evernote, I don't know this. If you're familiar with air table notion has a lot of the Dwayne you can do an internal database and notion is very similar to air table it's really powerful. It is really powerful. So you burned you need two accounts now. So you set up an account at embed notion pages.com If you're going to use this, that service and that lets you create the embeds. Now, what I would suggest though, if you like this and if you're using notion I would actually suggest that you look at a different service. This doesn't have a WordPress plugin. But like this pro level at $8 a month still has some restrictions. These guys really want you paying $30 a month. That's their really their higher level. So like this only gives you 20 embeds but no expiration no watermark. $28 a month gives you unlimited embeds. This service does exactly the same thing. And it's $9 a month. So if you want to use this, this is the service I would suggest and it would let you embed unlimited notion pages. Pretty cool. Anyway, again, kind of a non plugin plugin for the roundup here. But a really cool application of technology to bring notion content right into WordPress. So with all that said, Any questions or comments about that one before we move along to the next one, which is actually a plugin Okey dokey. Moving down the list to MailChimp block. So if you are if you are running in the block editor you're building in the block editor and you're loving the block editor. One of the things that you might find difficult to deal with is getting a subscriber block in place. And if you're using MailChimp, this is a really powerful block that will allow you to have a subscribe form that connects right to your MailChimp account from within WordPress. So let's activate our MailChimp block right here and check out the little page we have set up for it
so here's our really ugly newsletter blog. But it's really easy to configure. So I will just jump right here into this page. And clicking in here you have a lot of control over how this whole thing looks. So you know if we're in if we're using Kadence then maybe what we want to do here is drop in a row and put it in the center, that sort of thing. You can drag the stuff around and make it really easy you have to make this however you want it to be
the configuration you add in your MailChimp API key and the audience ID there's direct links to help if you need help doing that sort of thing. What elements do we want in the forum? Labels descriptions first name, last name, whatever. What do you want the button to say? What is the message they get if it was successful, or if it's an error, placeholder text for the fields if you want that. There are a number of different form themes to get you started. And then you can go over here to styling where you can deal with all of your background and padding and typography and so forth. So really powerful, really powerful block to let you do all you want. It's from BB pardon me be plugins which is has built a lot of really nice blocks. So I've been does it have interest in birthday? No, I don't believe it does. It only has these options. So if you want a form that's more granular you'll have to create that the old fashioned way. Jan, the old MailChimp plugin doesn't have a block I don't think does it?
I don't know. So this is a block that gives you all the styling options so yeah, great plugin if you're using MailChimp good option for you. This is the MailChimp block from the plugins any questions or comments on this one before we move on? Soon no you don't have to make the form not what this plugin anyway you make the forum here and then you connect to MailChimp. Manu the plugin is free. Yeah, everything we do here is free. All the plugins are freely available on the WordPress plugin directory. You don't have a MailChimp account but MailChimp has a free level. Yep. Any other questions? Or comments before we move on to the next. Okay, next up is a interesting little plugin if you deal with WooCommerce it is called WC WPC variation duplicator for WooCommerce. Now, like I say here WooCommerce variations like there are not many things in WordPress that make me just want to pull what's left of my hair out more than WooCommerce variations they can get really complicated and very time consuming to set up right. And the reason for that is when you get into WooCommerce variations let me bump into a product here
when you get into a product that has variations. Here's our variable product. You know there is a way based on the attributes you have selected for WooCommerce to automatically generate all your variations. For you, right. But what if your variations have, you know, weight and dimensions and they're all the same, like it's just a different color? Well, if you automatically generate your variations, then you have to go in and every single one of those options. You have to fill in your weight and your dimensions and all the stuff right? What this plugin allows you to do is to very simply just duplicate the next variation. Let me show you what I mean. This can be a huge time saver, if you have variations that are basically the same other than like the color and so you set all the details in the first one and then just duplicate it rather than having WooCommerce generate all of them at once and you go in and fill in all the data after the fact. So let's get this plugin activated. And then we'll refresh this page okay, now when we go to variations, look we have a number of different colors set up for this site red, green, yellow, black, blue, and in our variations we have red and green. Well watch what we're going to do here now we can just click duplicate and what colors are going to be yellow, we're done. All the stuff. Obviously we want to update the SKU because that does duplicate but you know as long as the waiver everything else is the same. You just duplicate it and change the option and you're done. That's it. huge time saver. Very, very, you know in a certain circumstance now if you have multiple attributes where it's color and size, and the WooCommerce automatic generator might be your better option. But if you just have 111 thing that varies like color, or size or whatever, and all of this data is the same. Then this just is a huge time saver. Yeah. So this is WPC variation duplicator from WooCommerce. That's from DDP clever. They do a lot don't be clever. Does a lot of really cool WooCommerce stuff. You may recognize that developer name because we've featured several of their plugins over the last month. Any questions or comments on this one before we move along? Cool stuff, right? Okie dokie let's move down the list. Now when I saw this plugin come up. I thought okay, I wanted the icon for that. And this shows my age and see if any of you geezers like me remember this but it I saw AI bud what I thought I thought I read air buds. I was looking for a golden retriever. You know like icon but no, this is AI bud WP AI bud WP and so this is another integration with chat GPT and WordPress. This is like our token AI plugin of the month. There's so many they're doing this now and ultimately it comes down to some of them have may have a certain feature that you like better than the others. They all kind of have a similar base of features. But you know, we're just kind of bringing them the ones we kind of liked the best and mentioning those here. This is not terribly different from other AI plugins. Other than this has a really neat WooCommerce integration. That's really what I want to focus on. So let me activate Air Bud here. And just just to note, by the way, you have to go in and connect it to open API open API with the API key. So you set up an account and it's gonna it's unmetered usage, like we've talked about in the past. It's very inexpensive. And so once you get that all set up, you have some of the basic things like image generator, other AI things we've done in the past. do similar things where you can, you know, generate images on the fly based on settings here and what you want to create. It also has a playground, where you know, you can just talk directly to chat GPT or open AI right here. The Pro version gives you a chat bot other ones do that. So that's really you know, this is not anything different. What is different is this, let me go to products and let's just go to here to these Iron Man guns. Now earbud AI bud over here, adds a little meta box to the sign of a WooCommerce product and so let's go to generate. Now we already in this we have our man gauntlets. We've got some stuff here, and so forth, right? We've got our there's no product short description, but we've got our basic description. So let's just hit generate and watch what happens. There's our title. So let's generate things based on that. Now this does take a second because it's talking back and forth, right now to open API via the API. And this will probably cost like a penny today. Okay, here we go. Look. Here's our description. Alright man gauntlets for must have for any moral fans. Okay, let's use that. So let's push that into our description. There it is. And we want the short description. Yeah, let's put that in there. Oh, look, it's gonna do product tags. Let's put those in there. So it added those tags. Look at that, or I could have just done right all fields, and it would have pushed all of that in there. Isn't that neat? So there's all our tags that just went in. Pretty neat. All right, how about an image let's go do an image. So right now it's talking back and forth to the the open AI and there's our like that, but if we wanted to use it, we could just apply it they would pull it right in. Pretty cool. So this is just a little extra thing that this one does the AI bud WP does that some of these other. Oh, open API integrations don't so kind of cool. Let's API but questions or comments on this. And by the way, while you're typing, if you happen to have any questions, I will tell you that the Kadence API is still being worked on. It's still in beta. They're doing a lot of work on it right now. But it is still coming. Ben it will do any language that open AI will do so you just go up here into settings and you'll have access to that. Well, hey Chris, we need to roll the API key because I just exposed it. Yeah, right here. So there's all the languages that it supports. It's all the ones that open AI supports. Anyway out of the box. Any other questions or comments?
All righty. All right. Next down, okay, if you liked that one, y'all. The last two plugins in this roundup are going to blow your mind. And I'm not even kidding. The first one is called Super stage WP. Now some people have dropped off our attendee count has gone down a few throughout this webinar, and I am just saying this is why you should stick around for all the webinars because I always put the best at the end. And this one is super staged. WP, y'all, this thing is amazing. Have you ever just wanted to throw up a quick staging site of your WordPress site? Just just put a staging site together really fast and you know, for for, you know, testing something or you know, having a plugin developer test something or whatever. Or maybe you just want to develop some content in a staging area and then push it to live. If you're in a cpanel environment, you can do that with WP toolkit. To spin up a staging site, but you can't push back. If you're in a managed WordPress scenario. Depending on which one you got the push and pull may not be great. It may work a little bit whatever. This works and it's easy and I can't believe how easy it is when I first read the description of this plugin, I thought I mean, hell come on. Really. Y'all. It 100% works. I don't know how it works. It's some sort of magic that I don't understand. But super stage WP is amazing. It is from rev max which is the team that is behind infinite WP and Dopey time capsule. They've been around forever and they're really good. And let me just show you how this thing works. So let's first of all, deactivate ear bud and let's activate super stage right here. Okay, so this is gonna give us a menu item. Are y'all ready to be astonished?
Okay, oh, I still have this. So the other day, let me get rid of the staging site. And he did delete the old staging site that's on me. I should have done that already. Oh, it's deleted. That fast done. Okay, so here's our staging site name. If I want to change that I can do I want to direct link the images or just don't have any images? So we're just going to direct link the images meaning the images will show up on staging, but they're not in the media library. They're not taking up space. They're just copying from the live. They're pulling from the live site. Let's click stage now. Ready? Go. Now this is going to take a little bit of time because it's the first time okay, we got the database clone that's done right now. And now it's gonna start copying over our files and stuff that does give us a note here that when we get to the staging site, when it gets all done, you gotta reset permalinks because there's a new URL structure. So it'll be up nathan.com/staging/whatever, right. So here it goes. It's copying. It takes I don't know, three or four minutes the first time. So I'm gonna sit here and talk for a minute. But I gotta tell you, it is so easy to push and pull from the staging to live with this. I don't know what sort of magic these people have done to make this happen. But the magic is strong with this one. It is really quite something. So we got a bunch of plugins to push out. A que no, you do not need a subdomain or it's gonna it's building the staging site. At WP nathan.com/staging. Are they visible so hold your hold? So they can be if you want them to be? There's a setting at the end of this where it's going to do we want to hide it from search engines. What I would suggest you do Sue is I would put in like our private site plugin on the staging site. Maybe shouldn't have deleted that staging site. Because this is going to take a little bit I forgot how long it takes. It takes a little bit to create because it's copying all the plugin files. Stasi can I create a staging site without every plugin? No the first time you create the staging site it has to be a direct duplicate, but you can push and pull and select certain even certain database tables or certain files down to the file level. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to let this run because we're already five minutes after I'm going to let this run and go down to the next plugin which will also blow your mind and then yeah, let me show you this. So get well so you're asking y'all if it can skip things. When you're creating the staging site. No, it's going to make a mirror image. But once it's created, when you do push and pull, you can select out you can exclude certain things. So okay, if you have a two gigabyte media site, it's well it's not gonna copy the media. And I don't know if it's gonna copy a backup directory been I don't you have to test that. But let me move on to the next one here. This is called Mighty share. We'll come back to the staging site in just a moment. Mighty share. Okay, so Matt Cromwell from the gift WP team who is you folks have met him in the solid branding webinars that we've done with the rebrand in public. Matt is leading that effort. Mighty share is something he put me on to and again, y'all. I'm gonna tell you something. This one's a game changer. It just is. Okay, so another plugin where you do have to create an account. Again, we don't usually do this. This one is cool enough that we're you know, ignoring our own rules. Because Holy cow, this thing is awesome. So you go in, you create an account that mighty share, and then you connect the API key. That's all you do. And let me get this plugin activated. I'm thinking about this. I don't know what's going to happen if I activate a plug in I guess we'll see what the staging site mighty share. And let me log into mighty share. That I Oh, I Oh, hi. Oh. Log in. It's Chris's account. All right. So here inside the account, you can set what you want things to look like. So there's a bunch of different templates that you can use and font choices. You got all this stuff. But basically, you're just going to connect the API key. Now once this is done, we have settings and mighty share. And here you can decide what this is going to look like. Where do I want it to generate my sharing images, post pages into all your custom post types? What is the template you want it to look like? Let's take a quick look. You got all these templates that you can play around with I'm just gonna go back to where it was this one. Here's our template options where you can select in the paid version. You can actually specify a Google Font if you want. And there's the color do I want subheadings involved is going on my logo. Is there a fallback image I want to use if it doesn't have a featured image? So this is how it integrates with Yoast and other of the big major SEO tools. So watch this. I'm just gonna go to my first post. And if I look at this post, it has this featured image which is an AI generated image. Now watch what happens when I go to the Facebook debugger. Which is right here if you need it. Blink is in the chat, or just Google Facebook debugger. And I'm going to drop in this URL and check what it's going to share. And look at that image. That is my share image. Isn't that amazing? So this service grabs the featured image runs it through the template with your selected color drops in the title of the image right here and this is what the share looks like. But it doesn't change your featured image. Right? Like I wouldn't want this with the title as my featured image because I want my my title in text obviously, right? Is this not absolutely amazing? It blows me away. It absolutely blows me away. Let's look at another one. Jeffrey, can you override it for certain posts? I don't know there may be a setting for that. I haven't tested that yet.
But look how it's all these are going to be branded. They're all going to look similar. Do that. That's amazing. Now, how much does it cost? Up to 50 renders per month so we just use two, right? So two images were generated. You get 50 every month at the free level which is amazing. paid plans start at $5 a month. I mean, look at this for 500 renders and you can use that on unlimited sites. So one $5 Academy. Does anybody or your clients going to post more than 500 things a month? I don't know that man would do that. So like one $5 account could cover all of your clients with a single API key. Pretty amazing. If you need more $8 A month or 1000 or 1650 or 2500. I mean it's super cheap. So this is cool. It's a great service blows me away that is mighty share any questions or comments about that? Before we go back and take a look at the class a render is an image basically, a render is an image. So figure it that way and yes, the same API key can go on different domains. That's why it says here unlimited sites. And all these paid levels lets you use Google Now by the way, the Google Fonts thing. It's not like it's it's creating an image using a particular Google font so it's not going to be pulling in the Google Fonts API with privacy concerns and all that. It's using a Google font to generate this image. So if you have a Google Font, that's your branded font, you use that you could use that for your share image. Pretty cool. Okay, not bad, right. Let's go back. This is gonna be a really hard vote. Because now look, we have our staging site created. So it actually finished up at seven minutes after so it took what, maybe three or four minutes, five minutes to create. Y'all, let's go to dopey nation.com/staging. And we're gonna log in like we would normally. Now I've got Cloudflare protecting this which is why it's my same login because it's just a clone. All right. It gives us purple in staging so we know we're on the staging site. Now it did instruct me to go reset permalinks. So let's do that. Really quick.
Okay, so we've reset permalinks and now we have our staging site. So let's just go here really quick. Manu, is it taking up storage space? Yeah, I mean, it's a whole other thing. So let's just do something similar. In this, let's just change one title here, just to show the the push. And here we're going to do we're going to take our staging, and you can do this from either end you can make your changes in the well, okay, let me back up a second. On the staging site, under our menu item. Here's where we can exclude content from being pushed. And pulled. So this is really helpful. So what I'm gonna do really quick is the only thing in this pool that I want to change is I just edited that one post. Where is it? It's this one post? Or did I actually even edit it? I must not have saved getting ahead of myself. Yep.
Okay, so we just have this. No, wait, see, here's where I'm getting confused. I'm on the live site now. All right, staging live. I do this to myself all the time. Okay. We make sure I'm editing the right place. I'm in staging. Okay, there's our explanation now if I want to push to live over on the staging site, I can decide I don't want to move any of these files that are in the directory or any of these directories. I'm just going to exclude these from the push.
I can also I think I can walk select things
so you can you can exclude there and copy site to live here. Now over here back on the live site. We can say I want to copy from the live site. You can do it that way. I'm just going to have it copy the whole database but none of the files we're just going to leave that so it's going to copy the whole database and none of the files. I can hit copy site to live here or over on the live site I can push to live or I can copy from live. So I'm on the live site push to live means I'm going to take everything I'm staging and push it to live. Or if I'm on the staging site, I can copy site to live does the same thing either way. I'm just going to work from the live site
database is clone link links are replaced processing files. There were no files to copy because I excluded them all. And it's done. Just that quick. Push and Pull
there's my change. works really, really well. It's a live version of the site. It lives in a subdirectory. Not us it will not do subdomains. It's correct. Because Ben think about it. It's inside of WordPress right. So WordPress doesn't know about subdomains. It just knows about where it lives in its domain. You'd have to have something at the hosting level to do a clone into a sub into a subdomain Stasi. It's not using a separate database. It's creating new tables. In the current database that it knows about. Pretty cool, easy way to spin up a fast staging site that you can push and pull from Pretty nifty. Pretty nifty. If you want to see what that database looks like. Jump into cPanel really quick. We got to quit it's 15 minutes after
if we look inside the PHP myadmin you should see a bunch of extra tables Yeah, so it see what it did. Here's our regular WordPress install and it prepended that with a I don't know 10 number string at the beginning. So everything's in the same database. It just knows what to do. Pretty neat. Dave, if you want to try new photos, yeah. Oh.
How would that work? I don't know. You'd have to test that. You'd have to test that.
I would have met it would probably have to upload them to the Media Library of the live site. That's something to play with. But that is WP Super stage. So we are really really long today. But we've just reached the end. So let's wrap up with the favorite question of the day which is what is your favorite plugin of the round up one vote one vote only please. Mighty share Fatal Error mighty share stage stage. Fatal Error stage mighty share. One vote for AI bud another row for AI bud playground All right, it looks like mighty share and super stage super stage one. Ai bud and mighty share. Yeah. All right. Well, that was fun, wasn't it? One of the better roundups of the recent past. Okey dokey. Well, we're gonna wrap up today for members. I am back tomorrow for office hours. But I do want to show you one thing that we just got sheduled on the iThemes Training website. Actually, I'm gonna show you two things. If you missed it, last week, we did get the scheduled for this is coming up a week. From yesterday. We from yesterday. So Tuesday of next week. Timothy Jacobs is going to be with us talking about the new solid security plugin as I think security evolves with our solid WP brand and a bunch of new features and it will several new features and a lot of changes inside the user interface. It's going to become solid security. And Timothy is going to be walking us through that plugin and all the changes that are coming. It is so much easier to use. The menuing is much more intuitive than the current I think security plugin. So Timothy is going to be there to talk about that. And of course you can ask any other WordPress related security question that you would like again, that is coming up Tuesday. Wednesday of next week for members is the fly 2023 course on systems. And then scrolling down this is the other one that I just added just today. Kathy Zant is going to be with us on the 19th two weeks from today, talking about the new Kadence form block the advanced form block that is going to be released very soon with Kadence or may actually be out already. It'll definitely be out by that day. So she's going to walk us through that and show us some cool things happening with Kadence as well. And take all of your Kadence questions if you have them. Okay, I'm back tomorrow for members with Office Hours. See you tomorrow, one o'clock central time here on iThemes Training, where we go further together.