this is an above average list of plugins this month. I'm pretty excited about these
just about ready to get our captioning finished here
all right captioning should be working for everybody now.
Welcome if you're just joining us, we are about three and a half minutes away from getting started. Let me drop in the links again into the chat
you can download the
handout of our delightful January 2023 plugins.
There's some really good ones here. You're gonna like these several in particular, this might be a hard, I'm just gonna predict I'm gonna predict that the this might be a really hard month for you to vote for your favorite plugin. All right, it's one o'clock we have three minutes left before we get started if you're just joining us in
now the mic should sound a lot better. Sorry about that. Yeah. Usually Sue catches me on the bad mic. Yeah, I had it on the other mic. No, just data Yeah. So if I ever sound like that, let me know because I have not switched the mic over to the good one. All right, everybody, two and a half minutes to go. If you are just joining us. I see our numbers are ticking up here. Is the link to the handout, which we will get to in just a minute one I mean we really tried to have WP Nathan rebuilt for this webinar and we enjoyed the holidays far too much for that so WP Nathan is the same for one more month, or at least one more webinar. Until we get that finished and rebuilt. Just about ready to get started a couple of minutes out. Yeah Chris I think they're all losing sleep over the fact that we didn't get WP Nathan rebuilt. I will say it is definitely time to rebuild WP Nathan because while we had issues, we may we may encounter issues that are related to the testing site. Yeah, today because weird things were happening during testing
All right, everybody. Glad you are here. We are about just about a minute away. One minute 15 seconds and counting from getting started with this year's first webinar. Logging round up for January 2023. Hope everybody got a nice little bit of rest over the holidays.
No questions today. Paul no questions from you?
Ah, yes. Yeah, Doug incredibly Correct. Yeah, it's 2023 now it's gonna be hard to remember that. You know, Stacy, I had a Zoom meeting with somebody earlier and they got stuck in in a zoom update loop. Also, Zoom has just gotten really really particular about needing to update and they they forced those updates,
which,
you know, okay, but sometimes they go bad. Just about ready to start, folks. I'm going to drop in the slide link. Once again. You're just joining us. There's the handout and the replay link. And we're just about ready to kick things off
all right, three minutes after let's get started. Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the January 2023 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host of iThemes Training and happy new year everybody. It's the first webinar of the year. We are so excited about coming back and having a whole other year additional year of great content for you at least two times a week, probably three most weeks. Three webinars a week here on iThemes Training super excited. I noticed there are a number of newer looking attendee names. So if this is your first, this is your first iThemes Training webinar, or one of your first just say hi there in the chat. We'd love to greet you. Tell us where you're logging in from today. Love to say hi, make sure you keep that chat popping popped open because that's how we communicate during these webinars. And again, if you're just joining us, I'm going to drop in one more time the link to today's handout, as well as the replay. We'll have that up and ready about an hour after we finished today along with the chat log and the transcript Hey Oscar from Norway. Welcome. Glad you're here. If you're watching this on the replay, click the Download handout button below the video and you'll be able to download the handout. Okay, let's get started shall we? We have a bunch of great plugins I was telling folks in the pre show two things. First, this is an above average month for plugins which is odd because usually over the holidays developers aren't doing developing and it's kind of you know, not as good of a list in January. This is not like that. I'm predicting actually that folks are going to have trouble picking their favorite plug in the roundup this time. And the other thing I'm going to mention is the weather here is really bad. We have some tornadoes about 1520 miles south of us here in Birmingham. And I've just been kind of watching it's getting a little better but if I disappear it's probably not from a tornado. It could be just that our power went off so our internet drop. So if I disappear, don't panic. It's probably all just fine. But yeah, definitely some weather blowing in here. All right, so here is our January 2023. List. We are working on WP nathan.com Chris and I enjoyed the holiday too much and we did not get WP Nathan rebuilt over the holiday as we had intended to but that will happen very soon. Maybe at some point this month we'll get that rebuilt to the new one. Because this WP Nathan site as you may be aware, has had so many plugins installed and deactivated and reinstalled and it is a nightmare behind the scenes in the database and all that stuff. So you can imagine we probably test 20 or 30 plugins a month at least. And all those every month and this site just keeps getting it uninstalled up. You know it's there's a lot of mess. So if we see something unexpected happened with WP Nathan, that's why, but let's get started with a great plugin, shall we? First of course, the little note that I've started to add at the beginning of each of these handouts and that is I'm not vouching for any of these plugins. Okay, these are plugins. Our goal in the plugin Roundup is just to look out at the WordPress plugin directory. Find about a dozen free plugins in the directory that we think are interesting and we have not thoroughly tested these for you know excellent code or bugs or security or accessibility. You know, we just these are some interesting plugins that we want to bring to your attention and you can play around with them and see if they're going to work for you. So let's get started with the first of those which is called WP Linker. WP Linker. This is an internal linking creator so let's get started with that one. It is an interesting plugin because what it allows you to do is create a very create very easily an internal linking strategy for your website. So let's go down to WP linker and activate that. And what this is going to do is let you redefine a bunch of words on your website that will automatically be linked to a link that you set up right here on this page. Now Paul, we have done similar plugins before there was one of these we did a long time back several years ago. I can't remember what it was called. But it did a similar thing. And so let's just show let me show you an example of how this works. We got a page set up here. So we pre defined a couple of terms. So basically here's how it works. If you see this word appear in the content of a page or a post or whatever, then I want you to link it to this page with this title attribute and you can also add you know a rel attribute you know, canonical, you know, whatever nofollow you know all of this right, so we have two terms defined chat GPT and chat bot and there's this page and look see they are linked. Now if we look at the the actual content of the page you'll see there's no links here in the actual content. That's because this is happening. post process so when it pulls it out of the database, and this plugin scans, the tax that's on a page or a post, and if it sees matching text, it drops in the link Sue does Yoast see these? No, because they're actually not in the content of the page. This is done by jQuery as the page is rendering. So just for example, if we want to say open AI I'm not sure if it's going to match with an apostrophe or not. Let's just try it. Let's add a new one open AI it's going to go again to the same open AI. And we can make that nofollow and save. It's going to be interesting to see if that actually matches this term because it's possessive with an apostrophe s. So let's take a look at this and of course WP Nathan is going to go slow because it's a live webinar and we need it to work. Okay, here we go. It's trying again. Okay, so it didn't match this because it's possessive. But if we happen to add that apostrophe s there that will make it work so it works across the site. Across the site, it automatically updates all of this. So if it doesn't like that apostrophe. So that was a really terrible,
really terrible option to show you.
But anywhere the word chatbot or any of these appears across the entire site, it's going to automatically link those over. Now there are some additional settings here that you can not take a look at. And each particular entry has its own settings, where you can say oh, I want this to this particular keyword only if it's in this particular taxonomy, for example, or here, only if it's in this particular post type. And you can continue to stack these up. Like I only want to do this, if it's a product of WooCommerce right, or particular pages can be shown right here. You can also decide just how many links you want. So, you know, do we want two words if it's shown multiple times or you know two words spacing before it links again? Or you know how many items to skip from the start. So maybe if that word shows up once, it doesn't show but then the second or third time it links it there? Or how many Max matches on the page that like every time we see this, you know, terms we want to link it or what you know, so we can put as many as we want, so that every time it shows up. Now the nice thing about this, it can you can use this for internal linking as well and it creates a nice internal linking structure on your site automatically. So this is particularly helpful if you've got a site with a lot of technical terms where you can go in like you could for example, have a glossary page and link to the glossary term. And just put that into a link, this link manager like this, and it would just automatically link all those terms throughout the site to somewhere else. So CSS can you link the word the you absolutely could. But this is WP linker, really cool, very, very useful. Any questions or comments about this one? Be super helpful. All right. Let's move on to the next plugin, which is another interesting plugin called click whale which is a link shortener link tracker and link page creator so this is similar to the redirection plugin that we've used for years in agency work as well as recommended and taught webinars on here on iThemes Training redirection by John Godley, I believe is the author of that plugin. It's been around forever it works great. Little more technically oriented to developers. This is a more friendly version, it kind of approaches links from a different direction. More it's a more user centric Link Manager. So if you have for example, a client that might want to set up redirections, you might want to consider this plugin instead of using the classic redirection plugin. It basically does most of the things that a client would want to do with redirection, or you know, any kind of a basic, more basic type user of WordPress and it makes it a little simpler in my opinion. Plus, it has one other feature that I really liked. So let's go in here and check out this click whale plugin. Get it activated
All right, and once we have this up, you will see that we have a couple of things here so we want to add a new redirection. You know what is this going to be called? Let's call this I don't know we find something from the shop let's say we want to. Alright, here's this product. It's called Scooby snacks. And we're going to make a short cut for Scooby so this is going to be called Scooby. And the slug that it's going to is this one this product Oops It just needs to be the slug, not the first part. So that's how it's going. I don't need a slash. Here we go. Alright, so that's what the link is going to be the target URL. Oh wait, I'm sorry. This is wrong. We're gonna make it Scooby. And the target URL is this so when we go to destination.com/scooby it's going to automatically forwarded to this URL. We can choose the redirection type, which generally speaking, it's always going to be 301 Unless you know of a good technical reason that it shouldn't be a 301. Do we want to mark it as nofollow? No index? Probably not. Do we want is it a sponsored link? So if you've got affiliate links or something you could use this and you could set up a description if you want these links can also have categories now that is something redirection. The plugin does that it just calls them groups. And it's a little more complicated, but this has you know categories just like posts can have you know and so, more basic users of WordPress are more familiar with that. So that works out really well. But we're just going to create that link and it should be all set. So if we go to this link it should automatically forward us to the product. There it is. I Paul it is very similar. To Pretty Link but it does one more thing. Okay. So you've seen pretty links you've seen redirection, but this does one more thing that I think it's what sets it apart from some of these other plugins and that is the link page, the link page. So have you seen the services that basically create it and it's for, you know, like social media services that only let you put one link in your bio, and so people will create a link page that has like their name and logo or whatever, and then a bunch of little button links underneath it for people to go check out like these products or you know, things like that. So, let me just show you this one because, well actually, this one is a more built out version. So this is what I mean by link page, right where you can have you know your logo and some text and then these quick links, like Link tree, thank you that was there was a void it was evading my mind. It's like Link tree, but it's built into WordPress. And so you can define these links and it builds this page just as simply as this so I've created this thing that's called test. It's a brilliant name. So you know the your description is this. You can put your logo in there. What's the slug like right here? It's going to be WP nathan.com/link page and then look you can pick from your links you've defined and just stack them up right there. So you pick from the links you've made and stack stack stack stack. There they are. And we're going to save this you have the option of course to set colors and styling on this page. These are just kind of the default ones. And let's take a look at that. Here's what it looks like. Just real quick.
Boom. There's our two links. works really, really well. So this is something that's easy enough for a client to use or you might even consider you know baking this into website builds. If you have a customer that is you know, interested in they do a lot on social media, and they need a link page like this. You could throw that in for them at really no cost and it's branded to their website. Really cool. Really cool thing so that is Oh, and by the way, here's the other thing about this. You can have multiple link pages, right? You can just I'm sorry that's wrong. I think it's the pro version. That gives you multiple link pages. And it is have a link for the pro version. I'm sure they're going to add more in the pro version. I don't have information on the pricing there. It also noticed that it it does track views as well. It gives you basic analytics on how many times that link has been clicked, which is helpful. Yeah, so pretty cool. One thing that I will note and I've mentioned this to the developer in the support for this plugin, these link pages for whatever reason don't work under PHP eight. They give a 500 error. It's probably some simple little issue they need to deal with in the programming, but yet it does not work under PHP eight with these link pages yet. That should be a quick fix for them and hopefully they'll get that remedied pretty soon. All right. That is click well. Any questions or comments about that one? Pretty good stuff. All right. Let's keep moving down the list to this is a super helpful plugin called media types by Fez, the dev which is my award winner for the best developer name of the roundup so fed the Dev has created this plugin called media types. And here's the thing. Have you ever had a client upload a like a a bitmap image? Or maybe they've uploaded a GIF or some giant something or they have a tendency to upload you know video files to your WordPress media library? You don't want that? Yeah, so this is a really easy to use plugin that lets you deselect the file types that you do not want to have uploaded to WordPress. Look how easy this is to use. Let's go activate media types by Feb, the dev
media types All right. And that is under settings or no tool, no settings, settings media types. Okay, here we go. So there's a couple of tabs here. So we'll start over here with audio. And here's all these various formats of audio. Now by default, all of these are green. Green means good green means you can upload them to the WordPress media library. If I don't want any audio to be uploaded, I can just uncheck them or maybe I only want mp3 to be uploaded, just like that. So right now, you can't upload anything but an mp3 to the Media Library or dislike that one and no audio can be uploaded at all. Oops. I just confused it that's interesting. I haven't seen that happen before. We're getting errors weird errors. I'm going up Nathan. This was what I was warning about in the beginning our images the same way. This is super helpful. No bitmaps no tariffs no JPEGs or ATI C's or ICOMOS only JPEGs web peas and pings. Great. Let's save that. Fantastic. How about video? Do we want the client to upload video? The answer to that question is no. Any video save it. Something is happening here. Chris Did you see this happen? I didn't see this happening when we were looking at this earlier. It does not like something I don't know what's going on there. Maybe it just needs one to be I don't know. That's really weird.
Yeah, it didn't like something. I don't know what's going on there. That's interesting. Also here under Text, we want to prevent these text types. From being uploaded. The same for various applications. So this is kind of crazy, but like for example, there's Java but like docx files, G zip files we want to upload zips at all Excel files, all these various file extensions. There you go. Ronnie can PSDs be prevented PSDs you can't upload by default in WordPress. These are all I think in that right.
See if there is an option. So they don't have an option specifically to disable PSD but I didn't think you could upload PSDs
in the media library.
Maybe you can I've not ever tried that running. So I don't have a good answer. You'd want to test that. But this particular plugin does not under images for example, have a PSD option. So that is media types by third the dead with a couple of weird errors that I think are related to WP Nathan, I would imagine if you tried this on your own site, it's going to be fun
All right, any other any questions or comments about that one that is media types. And basically by the way, what happens when you try to upload something that's been disallowed in this plugin it says you can't upload that file type. Much like you get if you try to upload an SVG to WordPress before, you know allowing that with some plugin. It just says that file type is not supported. That's the error that you get here.
All right, let's move down to the next one which is a WooCommerce add on called product quantity updater product quantity updated now I like this one because it makes it really easy to add quantity increase or decrease buttons on either side of the Quantity field. So product quantity updater. And there's various ways to do this with your theme or with other there's other plugins to do this sort of thing. This is a really simple way to do it and makes it really easy to use. Let me just get to a particular product. Okay. Here's what it adds right there, these buttons and so Kadence you'll notice has something like this, these it's in the settings, but if you want something that's a little more workable. little bigger for example, like you may not know until you mouse over the quantity like these make it really easy to click. This I think would be especially helpful if you have users and perhaps an older age demographic, where a more pronounced Quantity field. A quantity adjustment might make sense to them. Rather than having to mouse over something, you know, make it a little more plain that could be helpful. It also has these buttons in the cart itself. If we can get the cart to load we're having issues with WP Nathan today. Alright goodness.
So these are and even though that these are buttons that you can style very easily with CSS as well. There aren't any settings on the back end here. Yeah, we're having the weird errors we're getting with them up Nathan are Ajax related. Yeah, it put in the cart. It was just hung. So you can see him here in the cart as well. And when I stopped clicking, notice it automatically refreshed. The cart. So what I clicked at once, and it automatically triggers a cart refresh, to make that quantity stick so it's a pretty nice little plug in. It's called product quantity updater. Any questions comments about this one can be a nice add on for your WooCommerce site. Depending on how you want that function to work.
Alright, moving on down to the next one submitted by Sue Polinsky. So everybody can thank Sue for this one. This is a really cool plugin by the way. And as I am thinking about it, you can submit a plug in once you're logged into the training site. If you're a member, you can right click here to suggest a plug in and there's a simple form to fill out the plug in name plug in link, your name and your email. And just notice these have to be free plugins. We did have a couple that were premium plugins that have been suggested that we don't put in these roundups. And also if the plugin requires an API to connect, we usually don't feature those because it's really just an API. But, you know, we'll take a look at those as they come in. This is a great plugin called XML sitemap for PDFs for Yoast SEO by a developer you may have heard before named Yoast evoke, I don't know, maybe you've heard of him before. He is the Yoast by the way behind Yoast SEO and this is a great plugin in the case where you you have a site that has a lot of PDFs in the media library. So maybe this is a resource site. And there's a whole bunch of PDFs and you want those to get found by search engines. Better. This way it actually puts all of the PDFs in your media library in a sitemap have its own. So let me just activate this. There aren't any settings. It just works, which is nice. So activating that one I'm going to go to the also can't spell. Let's go to the sitemap for the site.
Goodness Nathan.
Okay, so right here. This is really small. So here's our the sitemap that Yoast SEO the plugin generates for each of the post types or taxonomies or whatever. Notice down here, there is one here called PDF files. And what happens here is this is actually searching the media library it does not depend on their it being live on a page or anything like that. If it's in the media library, it's going to show up here on the PDF sitemap. It doesn't have to be attached to a page or anything like that. This this plugin scans the Media Library for any file that ends in PDF and creates a sitemap out of it. So it's super helpful for a resource site or something where they want the PDFs to be found and indexed by search engines. Now, the converse side of this is Did you know that any PDF you upload to your media library is probably going to be found and indexed by Google, which means like WordPress, by default makes everything in the media library public. So if you have, you know, some proprietary organizational type information, don't put that in the media library because it can be found just by Google scanning the page and it will, Google will index the content of that PDF, as long as that is its text content. So this if you have a site where you want those PDFs to be accessed, this is a great thing to add because it's this is how Google wants to be informed that this content exists on your website. So simple plugin, just install and activate it that is an XML sitemap for PDFs for Yoast SEO and yes, it does depend on Yoast SEO being installed and active on the site in order to work because it's just extending the Yoast SEO sitemap features. All right. Paul, how about if it is protected and not found? I'm not sure what you mean by that. If it's in the media library, it's indexable. Unless you have some other plugin that's preventing the the access of files like that digital Sue, do you mean easy digital downloads are easy digital downloads stores, its stuff in a whole other file, a whole other folder system, as does something like download manager or one of those types of plugins. Yeah, they're stored outside the media library. Paul, if you want to prevent a PDF from being accessed, then you need to use some other plugin that's that has its own scheme for storing those types of documents, like download monitor, download manager, easy digital downloads, things like that. memberpress has something like that also.
Yeah. All right. Any other questions or comments on that one? All right, let's take you down to the next plug in which is the Love it or hate it plugin of the roundup. So this is one you're either gonna love it. Or you're gonna hate it. I actually hate it, but it's really well executed. So we put it on here anyway. It is called Better smooth scroll. And what this basically does is enable smooth scrolling as a feature on your site. Some Kitchen Sink themes include this by default in the settings, many of the later things like Kadence that are more focused on performance do not put this in as part of the theme. But if you like this, and I've had some clients that love this they you know this is a great way to do it. So better smooth scroll, let me go into the settings of this plugin. And let's just show you actually, first what it does. So I've turned off the scroll bar. So what this does, I'm going to scroll my the wheel on my mouse just a little bit and you'll see it what it does. It's the smooth scrolling like this. And you've probably seen this on pages before where it scrolls in increment and then stops at the smooth scrolling. And that's what this plugin allows it's gonna be probably hard for you to see on this demo. So I've actually actually accidentally disabled the scroll bar. So let's put that back. This is it also allows you to customize the look of the scroll bar on the side of the page as well. So those are the two basic features. You can decide only on certain browsers to do this. Yeah, Beth hates this. I'm not a big fan on it, but there listen I mean, I've had clients that want this. And this is a great way to add it to the site. So let's hear from you in the chat. You like it. You hate it. That a love it or hate it. Let's hear from you there pass man. Yeah. But one day, a client is gonna say can you make one of those smooth scroll things near go? Ah, yeah, Nathan had a plugin one time. It was called Better smooth scroll. We can absolutely do that. So when that day comes, just think
me then and we'll move on to the next plugin
which is shareable password protected posts. Now this is very cool. Because what this does what this does is extend the password protection feature on a WordPress page is the core password protect option and allows you to create a link that is shareable that bypasses the password. Let me show you what I mean. Let's go here. into the back end and grab a page I don't know. Let's do let's do the web page. We're not actually I'm not we're not gonna be able to see that because it's the blog page. Let's just grab this one. Okay, so any page in WordPress, as you are likely aware over here under visibility. Over here under visibility, you can set it to be password protected right there. Now we're going to create a password. It says use a secure password. So we're going to use the most secure password of all time. Password 123 which as we all know super uncrackable. Right. So there it is password protected. We're going to update this. I also forgot to activate this plugin. Rule one a plug in. As always, the plugin must be active before you can demo it on a webinar. So let me activate the plugin
and what this is actually going to do now that this page is set to be password protected. Underneath here when I refresh this page, you're going to see a link as soon as it activates everything is slow today
and we'll wait for it to reload. My goodness. We need a new website. Okay, right here. Look, share Post Via secret URL. Check that box and look there's now a secret URL which we can copy. We need to update it to make sure that URL actually works. Now we get this weird key at the end and so forth. But that what that lets you do is password the page protect the page from the public, but then you could send a client that might not want to type in a password or whatever, you can just send them a link to the page and they can access it It bypasses the password protection just like that. So even if I go here in an incognito window, and I use that key it's going to let me view the page Boom, just like that. So it bypasses the password, but its own little key and pretty helpful, easy way to accomplish that. Yeah, Ben, you're saying you've had a few requests for that. Yeah. Pretty cool.
So that is shareable password protected posts. Any questions or comments? about that one?
Good stuff. Let's see a couple of other things here. Let's see where
were protected posts. Chris, was there a settings page for this one where we can get to this filter? This is on for all post types. By default, but okay, you can change that with code. But yeah, by default it works for all post types. So any standardly defined custom post type, you can do this. Good deal. All right. That is shareable password protected posts. Good stuff. Moving down to the next one. Now you might find this to be a really helpful tool as you're developing a site. I'm not sure I'd leave it on. A site after it was live and had been launched. But as you're clicking, clicking, clicking all the way, you know, finding pages and posts and whatever developing a site, you may find that admin page spider is helpful. Because what it does, is it adds to the top of your page did it not activate boy, WP Nathan is limping along for bear life. Oh, it is there. I'm just blind. Okay, notice up here at the top there's now two new menu items for for editing pages and posts and what has happened here is this plugin has spidered the list of pages and posts on the website. Now it only works for pages and posts. Not custom post types. But look, boom. You can just click directly to a page and it opens it up in the editor. That's really helpful as you're building sites. You no one's having to click the pages scroll find the page especially if there's a lot of pages on the page you're looking for hit edit. This just lets you mouse over click it and you're right into edit mode. Works for posts as well. Pretty cool thing very, very simple to toolbox plug in that as you're developing might be really helpful to you. That's called admin. Page spider. Any questions comments about that one? Stacy does it give the option to edit in Beaver Builder or Elementor? Well, so it brings you into like here's a page that's using Beaver Builder for example. If we click this, it just takes us to the edit screen and oh you know what I don't have Beaver Builder activate it we would have that thing at the top edit in Beaver Builder. Right so if you're using a page builder, it would have it there. Right. So admin page spider super simple. Like there's there's it's really low tech but it's little plugins like this sometimes that can save you a few clicks and a few clicks saved up every time over the course of a project can end up into you know some real time saving. So that is admin page spider from J seven digital All right. There are some basic settings. Let's see. And you can change what that is, I guess in the settings. Yeah, Edit Page, edit posts. You can change the names of those or hide one or the other. Yeah. Pretty simple. All right. This plug in this plug in is a big one. Okay. I found this plugin because I just wanted something that I could paste in a list of taxonomy terms out of a spreadsheet and just paste it in somewhere and let it bulk create those things. And I ran across tax suppress. And I'm going to tell you something, this plugin does everything you could possibly want with taxonomies and WordPress, categories, tags, custom taxonomies whatever it is incredibly powerful, especially for a free plugin. It's incredibly powerful for a paid plugin. And there is a pro version available that does more things but honestly, this free plug in is absolutely amazing. Let me go in here and activate tax suppress and you'll see what I mean. Again, I found this because I was just looking for something to paste in a list of terms and it has, you know, auto populate my category with these terms. So it does that but that's the bare that's just the bare minimum of what it does. So moving right along here waiting for it to load Okay, there is now a new tax Oh press option. Okay, so right here. In one view, we can see okay, what are all of the public taxonomies that had been created on this site? So there's categories colors, which was the custom taxonomy applied to the stuff custom post type WooCommerce stuff here. So it shows you what post types they apply to what all the terms are. This is super helpful for just getting your hands around a site maybe that you haven't been in for a while. Or if you've maybe you know are inheriting a like a rescue site from somebody just seeing what's going on. But now we can look at the terms over here. And the terms here's all of the various options that have been defined in the various taxonomies so you can sort that like I want to see all the categories that had been defined on the site. So that's super helpful, right. Then you can do a terms display, which is something like a tag cloud, where you can tag cloud but for taxonomy terms of any type, you can display those with a shortcode like if you have a blog or something and you want you know some sort of a you know your custom taxonomy terms in a tag cloud, you've got that. The same thing to display terms for the current post that works. There's so many things it says it has a related posts function that within its own architecture it like you don't need to separate Related Posts Plugin. It will suggest related posts based on taxonomy terms. So it's got a shortcode for that when you can set up and define related posts. It's got these auto links are super cool, very similar to the first plugin that we looked at, where you know if a term appears like if you have a taxonomy term or like a tag on your website for this particular term, it will automatically go through your site and link that term to the archive page for that tag or that category or whatever. So they're super helpful. Like what I use and auto terms that will actually go through and make some suggestions for you based on post content of some new terms you might want to create which is incredibly helpful. Let's see here we can mass edit terms that are used on the site. So you know, here's this post, what terms we want to apply to it. Boom, boom, boom, boom and update all hit manage terms is what I use to bulk create. So we can say I want to add terms, and I just I want to create you decide how I want it to be on this post type and what the taxonomy term is. And then you can just string out your list of all the terms you want to add and boom, it just populates the taxonomy with all the terms you define. So it's super, super powerful. There isn't much you'd want to do with a taxonomy that this won't handle and there's a pro version that does even more things. So that is tax so press. It is really, really cool. Any questions or comments about this one? Beth, will it allow you to customize the order of the terms to be displayed on the back end? No, with something like that you need something like something called simple post order. We've got a plug in fairly recently that did that. But you'd need something where you're dragging the term and making it a menu order that way, but this doesn't change the order of terms No. Other questions or comments about tech suppress pretty cool stuff. Very, very powerful. All right, moving down to the next one, which is notification, custom notifications and alerts for WordPress. Now in the past, we featured plugins. One was called stream, which is a really cool user monitoring plugin that keeps track of when people log in and log out or deactivate plugins or do things and you can set alerts if those things happen. This is similar to that. It's not so much focus. It doesn't do user logging, but it's really focused on the notifications. And your your ability to create notification is a lot more granular than like the stream plugin offered. So if you need something that's going to send you an alert when something happens in WordPress, and by alert, it can be an email, or it could be a web hook like zap that you could attach to Zapier with this. The Pro version allows you to attach to Slack, like send a Slack message or something happens on the site. This gives you a lot of options for doing that. So let me go in and activate that plugin. Notifications. Notification singular. And we have a define where it's located. Right there. Okay, so just a few examples here. Of some predefined Notifications we set up so here if a page is trashed
so we're calling it's called page a trash page. The subject of the email is a page was trashed on your site, page trashing user it Nice name. Just trash the page on dopey nathan.com. And it shows the page type a title ID and permalink. So this is going to happen if anytime somebody trashes the page and email is going to be sent to me with this information. This is really helpful if you got you know users that are doing stuff to your site that you don't want it to do. There's a lot of different things that you can use as a trigger as well. So look here, a pages published, published privately scheduled page trash page updated if they create any category terms or change or delete. Same with tags. If a user logs in logs out user registers oops, user deleted password changes, media added updated trashed comment published added reply to prove lots of comment options. If the site email in settings is changed, you can trigger there anything with plugins, activate deactivate update installed removed theme anything with themes here? If there's privacy requests from the WordPress privacy system, so lots of core things if any of these things happen. You can trigger an email to be sent or you could actually you can also create a instead of an email in the free version, you can create a web hook. So like if you're using Zapier or something like that, you can create a zap that has a web hook. And so when something happens on the WordPress site, it will talk to that web hook and then Zapier will take off and do whatever you've told Zapier to do. So this is really powerful. It can do a lot of things. There's a pro version that does a lot more things. Pretty cool. So that is notification by brackets space. Questions or comments on this one? A nice little plugin. Dave, would it look at plugin events to like an event added to the events calendar? That is a great question. I'm gonna guess not in the free version. I think I've got Events Calendar set up let's just test that but like, for example, WooCommerce is on the site and adding a new WooCommerce product isn't there actually let's take a look here maybe it's under post added.
Doesn't look like it's it doesn't like it doesn't give us WooCommerce options. So I'm gonna guess it doesn't do anything with the events calendar either. We'll just double check that maybe something they offer in the pro version, user media comments plugins. Now I was thinking maybe over here in the post area, they would have like a post type but these are this is just the merge tags that you would use here in the email message. So it doesn't look like that. Now you might want to check the pro version. Maybe it'll do that. All right. Any other questions, comments about this one?
All right. Next to the last and potentially the mind blowing plugin of the day is called scroll sequence. Scroll sequence. So have you seen these really cool UI designs like for example on the Apple website, where as you're scrolling down the page with your mouse or you're flipping your your you're sliding your finger on your phone or using a touchpad whatever. Like the laptop spins around and opens up but the page isn't actually going down. Like there's interaction with something there. This plugin does that for WordPress. It is pretty cool. Scroll sequence. Now, the best way for me to show you this is actually the demo on the site because I'm not even going to try to set one up. But here's, here's the demo the link is right here in the handout, and I'm scrolling down the site and we have this whatever this is. And this DNA strand is gradually doing its thing and the text is changing and so forth. And then we move down to the rest of the page. Does the same going back up just reverses the process. It is super, super cool. Now you can actually play in their sandbox here. Oh.
I'm getting an error when trying to open the sandbox. That's not helpful.
Okay, so I'm having trouble opening that. Let me get into the sandbox so you can actually see what's going on there because you really need to see how this works. The there's that so each of these steps is a separate image. So there's like 60 ad images happening here. Okay, so it's not to say it's not the lightest page way in the world. But it does lazy load some of those images and so forth. So it does as well as it can for you know, the situation that it's in
I can't open the sandbox for some reason. I've got an issue with this link.
Live Demo. There we go. Here it is. So just go if you want to see the sandbox, go to scroll sequence.com examples live demo there. It is. And a demo demo. We'll open this up. And like for example, if you see the Media Library in this, you can see like here's a bag, and they're just very incremental changes in this rotating bag image to get it where it needs to go and there's only you know, 50,000 images in the media library. What could go wrong? But there's some really cool stuff here like here's a watch. Here's an example of what it can do. That cool.
That's where we just were pretty amazing. But all these are gradual. Images.
Yeah, so that is pretty cool. Pretty cool. I mean, not something I use on every website. This would be very expensive, I think to create. But yeah, like you could get a video of something like a watch spinning like that and then using a video editing software, you can excerpt keyframes, you know, just make a bunch of single images out of that video file. There's a number of video editors that do that. Pretty cool. That is scroll sequence that lets you do all those things. And if this is interesting to you, play around with it a little bit. Kind of cool. All right and last but not least, this is gonna be a controversial plugin of the roundup. It is AI content writer. So this is a plugin that brings in the power of the open AI GPT three into WordPress. It is rather interesting. So let us activate this Xiaomi AI content writer and we are going to I need I need we're just going to create a post from scratch here all right. Go away please. There we go. So many metal boxes Okay. I need a subject please who would like to create a subject for our blog post? Anybody anybody? Privacy? Okay. So here's our AI button. He missed that right up here. In the post editor. We're going to click that article title is going to be basics of website of of how about this, the basics of how about keeping your password safe. The basics. How about that? Okay. We're going to have five headings so five headings in the article. It is thinking about them right now. They just generated these five headings Those all sound good you can choose what H tag you want them to have. Next. This is awfully cool. What is your writing style? This is going to be I don't know technical, and the tone will be humorous. It will also add an image in the post if you want this. We will try it I've had mixed results with this. Do we want an introduction and conclusion paragraphs? Yes, generate the article. And we watch and see what it does.
Scott yes, we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Okay. So here's our article. There's our intro paragraph here or each of our sections. Were missing. We didn't get these did not come in as a list. Block. We need to fix that
not good. Well anyway, but there's some formatting issues there. But there is our nicely created article. There's our generated image. Not terrible. Interesting, right. Bring it right into WordPress. Ah, yes, this is free Beth you could do the same thing with chat GPT.
Here's the thing. Y'all remember in the news roundup. Last year, we talked about? Hey, Google is starting to watch for AI content right and they're they don't like aI generated content. Now my question is why? Really? Because honestly, I mean, unless the article is super technical, you may find that the AI generated content is better than that. $5 An hour copywriter that you hire from somewhere I don't know. But anyway, how would Google know is the question I'm always asked and here's how Google would know. Here's a link right here to hugging face dot CEO open AI detector. I was having some problems with this website earlier. I think they're getting hammered because chat Okay, here we go. I am going to simply copy. Let's just get into the meat of the article and let's copy this paragraph and drop it in here. And it's going to think about whether or not this is AI generated text. It takes it a minute. It's kind of slow. I'm gonna guess this slide is gonna get really, really slow. The more chat GPL gets used GPT gets used but I will let that sit for a minute.
I may just wait and we'll come back to in a minute. But yeah, it generally detects that it is AI generated content. And so you know, Google says we don't like that. So I don't want you to do with that. This this sort of AI generation is really helpful. The content generator like this can is super helpful because it can at least get you started with some ideas for blog posts.
Yeah. Still Still thinking about it. So while it continues to think we're going to any other questions or comments about the AI content writer, just the port from the open AI GPT into WordPress Beth does it work with page builders and classic editor? I don't know. That is the WordPress editor. I don't know the answer to that. You'd have to test it. I would imagine you'll have to use the standard WordPress editor and then maybe grow that into your page builder if you're using a page builder. I sue it does not show up in the source. What's still thinking about that? Wow. All right, let's try this again. I've also found that starting and stopping starting over again. Rebooting the webpage makes it work faster.
Boy, it's slow.
Yeah, so there's you can look at the content. There's nothing in the content that would suggest that it's generated. It's just straight text.
Any other questions or comments about this class but Google will know you have the plug in installed maybe? Maybe? Yeah, Beth, I think AI is here to stay. I think you're right. Yeah, look here. 79% Fake just with this block. Interesting, right. Let's do this. Let's test it with. This is the description from the plugin page that we assumed the plugin developer wrote let's test that and see what it thinks.
Questions or comments again about scroll sequence while we're waiting on this.
Paste in my bio. Right now it's running slow again. So that's a good idea though. Make try that.
Ronnie, what is meant by requires an API free okay. So when you set this up for the first time, let's see is under Settings. Hang on.
Settings. And let's see there it is down. Here. You need you have to go out and drop in an API key from open AI. So we usually don't do plugins that are just like an API connection. But this one was so cool. I went ahead and broke my rule. But yeah, you just you need this. You need an API key. You can get it right here at this link. You need to have an account with their on the open api.com It's free. So yeah, you just connect it up. Once you have an account, drop in the API key. You're good to go. Oh, yeah. This is I don't have enough resources on my server to handle all these. All these hits. Okay, well, we're gonna give up on that. So y'all can test this. You've got the link to this tester right there and you can play around with it. And further cripple these poor people's server resources. All righty, any final questions or comments on that last one open AI or the AI content writer. Well, that brings us to the end of our list. For January 2023. It was quite a list. Now it's time for you to vote for what your favorite plugin of the roundup was. One vote one vote only please tech suppress tax suppress tech suppress content, click wail, tech suppress content, click whale Linker. linker, click whale writer
Alright, any last votes tech suppress. Paul, I'll do that just for you. All right, everybody. So it looks to me like taxall press was the clear winner with the AI content writer coming in second, and click whale as an honorable mention. So we will add those to our list for the best off plugin roundup which will happen in June for the first six months of this year. As always, if you missed last month, we did the best of July through December of 2022. And it was a really great list of those as well. All right, folks. We do not have a webinar tomorrow. We're getting all of our January webinars filled out. I do want to mention, we of course there's Office Hours Thursday for members that is as always, but we did add this webinar last week. The state of password managers in 2023. For some reason, something came up in the news. You know about password managers. I think last pass something happened. Kidding. Of course many of you were struggling with passwords over the holiday week, which was terrible. So Kathy Zant is going to come talk to us about password managers. give a broad overview, talk about some specifics with recommendations of where to go from here. Talking about the future of password less login with past keys. And that is scheduled. It's a free webinar scheduled for one week from today, January the 10th at one o'clock central time, and we'll have more webinars for January filling in later this week. So be watching that schedule. If you're a member, make sure you are ready to go for fly 2023. We start up on the 11th That's a week from tomorrow with our productivity and of course the news roundup here on January the 17th is scheduled and ready to go. That's gonna wrap it up for us today. Hope it's been a fun use of your time maybe found a few plugins you can start to use right away. I will see members back on Thursday until then have a great rest of the week. I'll see you back here on Thursday for on iThemes Training where we go further together.