Happy Tuesday. Plugin Roundup is coming up in about five minutes from now glad you've joined us. We got some fun stuff to look at today. Pretty happy with this plugin list. Pretty happy with it. So welcome if you're coming in to zoom, open up the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. I have just gotten the captions all connected and working. So we are in great position here all right in the chat I'm about to drop in the link bundle for today. There in you will find the January plugin list PDF to download. So go ahead and grab that and it's a it's an above average list. I would say there's some here that I think you're gonna be really happy with. So again, welcome. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hello. Hope your week has started off. Well, Barney, you're building an ark Was it raining? Probably the stuff that came through here last night. It was pretty rough here in the Southland. Last evening. Again, welcome everybody. Open up the chat and say Hello Yes, same Sue. We didn't have any tornadoes here. There were some down on the Gulf Coast. But we had some like 50 mile an hour wind which was not fun. Never a dull moment when it comes to weather alright again welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and say hi. I am dropping in once again the links for today including the plugin list and the replay link. And in the meantime, quickly. So we had a discussion last week about all these new upcoming regulations that Google and Yahoo have implemented regarding DKM SPF D mark that's gonna be rolling out at some point this spring. And there was some some questions about that. And so I do have now on the schedule right here Matt Pritchett from sin WP send send WP we'll be talking all about all the alphabet soup related to email authentication. So I'm going to drop that link in the chat. Because that's something I think everybody should listen to. There are new changes coming up and unless you have a really solid understanding of SPF DK I M and D Mark, you really ought to be at that live stream is going to be a good one Matt Pritchett. This is what he does, like he lives in those acronyms. So he'll be a great instructor to take us through those things. So again, welcome if you're just joining us in zoom, I'm dropping in the link bundle. again for those of you just joining us, you'll find there in the chat, the January plugin list, Google Drive link, as well as of course the replay. So he's going to talk through all of that stuff, about how they all mean how they all what they all mean, how they all work. I'll ask him specifically about deciphering some of the demark reports and so forth. Yeah. It'll be good. So welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Irene. Welcome from Greece. Hey Manu. Welcome everybody. Hey Stacy. Connie from Vancouver. Welcome, Vern. Welcome. Good to see everybody. We're about two minutes away from getting started. We'll launch officially at three minutes after if this is your first solid round, solid webinar of the live stream solid live stream of the Year. Welcome and I hope you had a great holiday and got to take some time off hopefully and recharge your battery just a little bit. So again, we're about a minute and a half away from getting started and above average plugin list I would say for this month. I'm pretty happy with it. You know, we're kind of at the mercy of the plugin directory as to you know how many great plugins we have to show are not welcome Hey, Kay, welcome from Sweden burn welcome, Vern I don't know what we're gonna do with YouTube. That has slipped off the the things that people are talking about right now. I do not know. You're happy about that, Vern. Is that right? I don't know. I just do what they tell me. Hey, Bg. Welcome. Glad you're here. Less than a minute to go folks. Glad everybody's coming in the attendee numbers ticking up so let me drop in once again, the link bundle into the chat. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up that chat and say hello, there waiting on you is the January plugin list and the replay link that has all the things so yeah, good stuff. Good stuff this week. Glad you are all here. We got a pretty good plugin list for you today. So 10 seconds to go and we will like this rocket. Hey, Jeffrey, welcome from Guatemala. All right, I've got three minutes after let's start the recording and dive in. Well, happy Tuesday everybody. Welcome to another solid Academy live stream. Glad you're here with us today. It's the plugin roundup Tuesday, January the ninth. Normally this is the first Tuesday of the month, but we were still on vacation last week. And so we bring in now this month's plugin list. All these are plugins that were recently added to or updated in the WordPress plug in directory. And that's a pretty good list this month. So I'm really happy about that. glad you've chosen to take about an hour out of your day to join us. This is always a fun live stream. As we're getting started let me invite everybody to open up the chat if you're not there already. If you're live with us in zoom, open up the chat say hello you'll find there the January plugin list link if you're watching this on the replay it's just below the video you can click the Download the download button just below the video to grab this PDF that has all the links and so forth. And as we're getting started, I do want to make mention of a couple of things. One of which I mentioned in the pre show, but we have a couple of important webinars live streams tomorrow. In particular is our WordPress security roundup for January. This is Tom ray from we watch your website Tom has done several live streams with us lately, and I believe will continue to make him a regular part of the things that we do because Tom and his team and we watch your website monitor millions, millions of WordPress installs and have a really good grasp of the cutting edge ways that people are trying to exploit vulnerabilities in WordPress and so Tom is coming on tomorrow to talk about a really interesting way that the people are getting into websites which is session goodness session hijacking, and he'll be there of course for your questions as well. Something else that's out of our ordinary that I want to bring up is on January the 17th Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder SEO will be with us to have to talk about the customers hierarchy of need. This is a talk that I heard at the recurring revenue retreat back in the fall. It's gonna be great. So if you haven't signed up for this, make sure you do. And last but not least, this webinar live stream that we just scheduled this morning with Matt Pritchett from send WP Matt is going to be talking about all the upcoming changes with Google and Yahoo and the the alphabet soup of email authentication. And so if that's something that you're not 100% knowledgeable about, this is a great live stream to sign up for all these are free and the link to the upcoming webinars. I just dropped it there in the chat. So make sure you join us for all of those. All right now, on to the plugin list. We got a great list of plugins here for January. Again, just the disclaimer that we have not thoroughly tested all of these plugins for compatibility and security and bugs and accessibility and all those things that you would probably want to do before you use these on a site that you're managing for your clients. So make sure you do that. These are just some interesting plugins that we ran across in our monthly comb through the WordPress plugin directory. And we'll begin with something that I thought was really interesting, and that is a plugin called Enable responsive image. anybody guess what this does? Believe it or not,
it enables a responsive image and you might be thinking to yourself, Wait a minute. All of my images are already responsive. So why should I want to use this plugin? Well, let me tell you, it's a poorly named plugin because while it's it's accurate ish, it really doesn't describe the totality of what this plugin does. Now this does work with the block editor and the standard image block. That's part of the block editor. Let's activate enable responsive image and take a look at our demo page for it. So what this actually does is extend the core image block that is part of our block editor. So here we have, again, it's just a standard image block. As you can see here, it's just a regular image block. But we have a few extra things over here. Oh look. We've got this option. Now. That is a media query so I can set it for the min width or the max sweat. So here when we hit 600 pixels, a new image is going to show and look this is actually a you can tell it's kind of a cropped in square version of the image. You can actually stack up additional images as you want to so this is a suit. I think you're looking at this the wrong way. So this is the media query value is at what screen size does this new image trigger. So here's how it actually looks in real time. So have you ever for example, you've got a nice wide panoramic type image on a screen. But when it gets to mobile, it's teeny tiny, right? It would be better to have like a square image on mobile. So that's what you can do with this. So watch here as we decrease our screen size. It's going to change about here, boom, see there? It pops in a slightly different image. Now to make you know the other thing you can do here is you can tell it what resolution you want the image to be. So which of the defined WordPress image sizes on your site? Do you want it to show so not only could you show a more optimized maybe cropped version for a smaller screen, but you could also say I don't want this to be the giant full size image. I want it to be medium or a thumbnail so that it doesn't take as long to load. You can do that with this as well because it's actually at this particular breakpoint, which is 600 pixels. It's gonna load this other image. So it can be a completely different image if you want or it can just be a different image size of the same image. It is really really helpful actually next, let me just show let's do it a completely different image just so you get the effect here. So as we go down here to about 600 pixels, boom, see that the whole image changes. So you could use totally different images or just different sizes or whatever. Really, really handy as you're building very customized pages. Yeah, in the block editor and yes, Stacy, this is only for blocks because it extends the core WordPress image block. Dave is asking how does it know what part of the image to crop? Ah, good question. It doesn't because it's actually a separate image. So if we look here in the media library, here is our thing. Well, let's just view and then the original image is here. So I actually I actually cropped this image myself. There are two different images in the media library so you can crop it down, save another image that's just used for mobile. Paul is saying changing images on different devices would be confusing or inconsistent. Yeah, probably. So I just changed to a completely different image, just for effect. So you could see a better it's actually loading a completely different image. Yeah. All right. So that is enable responsive image and it's a pretty cool little plugin. We like that. All right. Any other questions or comments on that one?
Yeah, so bleedy exact voted by by the way, blidi you're chatting only with me if you want to chat with everybody. Drop down the little blue drop down right above where you type your message and choose everyone. But blidi has a great comment about and I did this the same way. If I wanted to do something like this before, I would have to like make a row or something and make that only visible at certain breakpoints. And do it that way. This way. You can just do it in a single block. I think it's a lot nicer. Okay, well, let's scroll on down our list to another clever little plugin called zippy. Zippy. Now Zippy is it's an interesting way to do a couple of things. So first, you could use it to archive pages or posts on your site, just those couple. So maybe you've got a couple posts or some pages that you don't want to show on the site anymore, and for whatever reason, you don't want to draft. You just want to archive them back them up. Here's what Zippy will do for that particular use case. Let me activate zippy. And we'll go over here to our post list. And so now we have this little option here called archive. Zippy. So let's just click that and what it's going to do, you'll see it pop up here, boom, it downloaded a zip file that has a few things in it. So first of all, it has an info dat, which is loops. Let's get a text editor up here. This this is basically the data about the post itself, the post content and so forth. So it is basically a JSON file with a bunch of stuff in it that has all the information about the post, but look, it also grabbed the featured image, which is interesting, right? So here's what you could do. Let's say you have a bunch of posts on another site. And how many of you when going to import posts from an existing website to say a site that you're building? never seems to get all you know like when you do a WordPress export it, it doesn't really preserve like Vernors saying the year and month path of the images or it doesn't even grab the images at all. Let's take a quick look here. I'm gonna go I realized today that I have not deleted the dev site that we used in last month course for building your Starter Site. Let me log in here. I'm not logged in on this particular browser profile. Alright, so here's this other site and I'm just gonna, let's grab a few posts. So we have these three sample posts, and we can do all of them at once. Boom. So we have another zip file here, which is here. And now let's put them in so we'll go to tools and zippy. And you can decide what do I want to import. This, by the way, will catch metadata custom fields taxonomies all of these things. So if you have taxonomies on this import that aren't defined on the current site, you have the option to create them and so forth. You can say which post type you want it to import into or just let it auto detect if you want it to go into the same one. So let's just import this file that we just did. Pretty cool. Paul is asking the next question, which is does it keep the images that might be in the post? And Paul the answer is yes. What it doesn't get is galleries. Unfortunately, it doesn't get galette well it does galleries but in a weird way. Like it will actually bring the images in. And they're present on the site, but they don't show up in the media library. So I'm going to reach out to the plugin developer about that. But it does get just regular images dropped into the post, which is super cool. So if we go over to posts we'll see look, there's our three posts. And one thing that you do have to note it might take a minute for the the images to appear now they're already here for us. So notice here look, we've got all three images that are associated with these posts. It just came right in. So we can view this post in there it is pretty cool. And so yes, it will even grab in content images. Paul, when imported does it keep the current the correct URL for the new site? Yes. Now links I don't know about links in the posts themselves. Let's test that, shall we? Now I'm curious. Let's actually we need to make a new post here so we don't overwrite or goof up our current I just I'm not sure what's going to happen with that new post it's an ipsum text Let's link this to or I don't know about maybe I don't know if it's actually going to add it didn't test the links. So that's something you may want to play with. But we'll see really quickly. Let's zip that
bring it in I just don't know what's going to happen here. My guess is it's going to make the links relative
Yeah, it kept it made. So it did update the URL. But it made it a relative link. So you might have to deal with some links. But this is still a really great way to pull posts in from other sites. Yeah. Pretty cool. All right. Any other questions about Zippy one other note you got to have the zip extension enabled on the PHP install wherever this is going to live. Otherwise it can't zip and then it's just p Okay, any other questions, comments or snide remarks about Zippy pretty cool plugin. All right. Let's scroll down the list to what I think is a very helpful plugin that is going to be practically impossible to demonstrate. It is called preload featured image, preload featured image. So what this is going to do and this is one of those plugins that you just activate and it works. This will be one you might want to play around with yourself and experiment with. But what this does is essentially it adds a rel equals preload to your image, which tells the browser as it scans the page to start to preload the featured image of a page or post immediately. In other words, don't wait until you're processing all the way down the page to get to the place where the featured image displays. To start to load the featured image instead, go ahead and preload the featured image at the beginning. So it puts it up in the head and starts the download immediately. Now what that can do is speed up the overall page speed of a site, particularly if there's a lot of stuff that has to load prior to it actually getting to the featured image. So this is really really hard to actually to show. But it ought to at least marginally. Speed up the way posts load on your page. Let's take a quick look and see if I can find the line. Yeah, right here. So up here at the very top up here in the head. It's giving us this link rel equals preload and then nope, that's the that's actually the font hang on a minute. That's the font. That's the font right here. So there's our preload for our featured image. And so before it it's just gonna make the browser start to download it faster so that when all when all is said and done, the page should load a bit faster. So you know, this is probably not going to dramatically speed up your page load, but it could speed up the page load marginally and there's not really a reason not to use this. So pretty interesting. It's a single php file. You can even put drop that PHP in your own little Emmy plugin. So that is preload Featured Image. Questions or comments on that one. If you are a WordPress speed aficionado, pretty cool little plugin. You might want to look at it. Okay, moving on down the list. So there's a great plugin out there called admin columns. And this is an iteration of admin columns by the developer WP clever, they've done a lot of plugins we've done several of them here. On the roundup and admin columns has over the years and you can't fault the developer for this. But over the years, they've moved a lot of the more useful features of admin columns into the pro version can't fault the developer for that. WPC admin columns actually gives us a little more of a feature set in the free plugin. And so what these plugins do is give you control over you know, when you get to a post list page like this, it gives us control over what actually shows up in the columns. So let's activate WPC admin columns. And I will show you an example of how this works. All right, so settings where is it tools? Where is it? I do like it when the plugin is put. Oh, yes. Okay. So prompting my frustrated emoji here is that it adds its own very ad heavy own top level menu item. It's just not my favorite thing. But what this will allow us to do here is looking under admin columns. Not a whole lot of settings here. Oh, yes, this is helpful. So every user actually can have their own way they want the columns to appear, which is pretty cool. But the actual changes happen on the post itself. So now we have this button here called columns. So let's say just for example, that we want to see the featured image over here Well, we can add this new column and look at all these things we can show. In the column. Let's just show for example Featured Image make it a width of 200 pixels. And we'll call it the top Featured Image top of the column and save the changes. And it adds it over here. Now let's say we want it at the beginning. Well we can just reorder it and save. And we'll get not sure why that's not showing up larger than 200. That's interesting. Did I miss something here? Let's try 100% and see what it does. Now goof like that. Oh, you know what? It's 200 pixel. Column Width is what that's all about. The column width is that length. So anyway, but here you can still see the featured image showing up. We could also do something like one of the options here is word count. So I know there are plugins that do this, but here's one that'll let you do a lot of different things. So these are items on the post that you could reveal like last modified date. Like was word count word count is you can change. Pardon me, you can change the text color if you want. We could make our word count red. There it is. We didn't give the column a title. Just get the idea. You can move things around you can. Let's say we don't really care who the author is. We can just toggle that off. Hide that one. Yeah, do you have a lot of control over what happens you can also within a column reveal things such as custom fields. So you know, is there a custom field attached to this post that you want to show in the list? Well, you can do that here and just select the one you want and show it as however you want to show it's very, very powerful. To reveal some things. So very similar to the admin columns plugin, but it has a few more features in the free version. So that is WP MC admin columns questions or comments about that? Version? Yeah, it's it is a pretty powerful plugin, especially at the free level. And that ability to customize by the user is really really cool
is the other plugin from no so admin columns has been around forever and ever. And that's a different developer. Yeah. Any other questions comments before we move on? WPC admin columns? All right, next up is a plugin called content update tracker. Now I know many of you who are involved in SEO are aware of how important it is to have fresh content on your website. So this is a plugin. I'm gonna Well, the user interface was developed by a developer and we just that enough said, but this is a plugin that very quickly allows you to have a visual of what content is new, old somewhere in the middle. It gives you the ability to make some exports based on the age of your content. So it can be super helpful. It's not one that I would leave on the site probably all the time. But if we take a look, here's her very developer interface, which is interesting. You can see really quickly here with a nice graph of here's articles that have been updated in the last three months. The others are between three and six months old. Which is really helpful. I can take a look at the list of when things were last updated. I can only show for example, you know, show me the ones that are new boom. If they're old, really old. You can sort by read the oldest color the yellow color and whatnot. You can also export to a CSV. Let's just say I want to export the ones that are super new, boom, there they go. And so you can grab that CSV and you can have that to look at and do whatever you want to do as you're managing content on a site to try to keep it fresh. So it's a very targeted plug in. But if you are interested in watching websites and making sure the content is new and updated and as fresh as possible, this is a really good one. It's got a lot of nice filtering abilities here even by title so you can really quickly search for just a post in the list to grab the last updated date. You can even add notes to a particular host in the list and save that so that when you come back later you can look at your notes if you've got anything to say about this or when it was updated or what's going on there. Nice plugin just to yeah to manage fresh content. The question is does it make a client update their blog? Been there's not a plugin powerful enough in the world to do that? Oh, Sadie, that's the answer, Sadie for the when the answer is that that comes in the premium version. You have to upgrade for that. Thank you, Sadie. That was awesome. Okay, any other questions comments about content update tracker, a really helpful plugin if you're concerned about the freshness of the content on your website. Okie dokie Scrolling on down our list to a plugin that I almost didn't put on the list because it has a real downside but it does have an upside so the upside was enough of an upside that I kept it okay. But it is called prevent users concurrent sign in. So this is a plugin that will be very helpful in the case where you have a website maybe it's a membership site or it's a you know, a more informationally secure website than just some guys persons brochure site. And you want to make sure that somebody can only log in in one at one time. So the way WordPress works is that when a user logs in, it creates what is called a nonce. It's a key that's assigned to that user in that session. And it identifies the user to WordPress to let WordPress know what that user is doing. So it's based off the salts that are in the WP config file. They're just a really long string of text. Okay, the other way word, the thing about WordPress is I could be logged in here on this shared screen. I could also open up my phone and log into the same site with the same username and password. That could be in many cases inherently insecure, especially if you're not using something like to FA to protect that session. So the issue is how how can we deal with that? This is actually one of the things that Tom Rafe is going to be talking about tomorrow with session hijacking, because you can have users logged in at the same user logged in in two different instances with WordPress by default. So what this is going to do there are no settings you simply activate this plugin prevent users Oh, you know what I forgot I was going to actually do it and I had deleted it. So let's add this is how you add a plugin. in WordPress. You go to add plugins and you drop in the title and the byline from my list and you hit install always copy the byline because a lot of times WordPress won't find the plugin the first time because the WordPress search algorithm is poor. Paul yes you must activate the plugin. That is the pro tip. So notice what it did it just forced me to log out. So it is it wipes out the session cookies of all the logged in users go I log in again here and now it is locked down my username to only this session in this browser. So if I go to try to log in the web, that's the wrong one. The WP Nathan in an incognito window it won't work. And I'm going to have to copy my password
it will just reload the login page. That's it. So that's it. I can't log in In another instance until I log out of this instance. Then I'll be able to log in over here
and if I try to log in over here, it won't work. It has nothing to do with the IP address. What it's doing is this logged in user in my in this case the Incognito instance has a particular nonce that Long's particular string of text right and so it's only going to allow WordPress, it's going to check and see if my users already logged in with a nonce. And if it is, then it's the session that's open. If the same user tries to log in, it's not going to allow it to happen. And Paul, you put your finger on the downside so there's a lot of upside to this, right. But let's say like, I'm sure you never do this, but sometimes I forget to log out of WordPress. I'm sure none of you do that. But let's just say I remained login here at home and I'm out someplace and for whatever reason I need to log in on my phone to that site. Can't do it until you log out. Then you'll be able to log in won't work until that session is close. And there is no message oh by the way, I think that's because I have it turned off here in solid security. The the high error message let's see what is that called that error. I forget what that setting is in solid security that hides the login error message. That's probably it normally will say this user is already logged in. So there you go. This is why I was on the fence about putting this in. Kids you boot off the other login somehow you would have to force a logout which would the simplest way to do that would be to change the salt, salt keys or log in with a different user. It is per be averted as per user. So again, there are some downsides to this plugin. But it's also interesting. Particularly if it's your website and you're the only person logging in ever and you're only going to do it from one computer. Like yeah, you're good. If you switch roles, Sue, you mean switch users. You user role. You can't switch your own user role you have you'd have to log out into another user change the role of that user and then login is that user? No there are no there's not not a settings page for this plugin. There's not a settings page. So it just it's on or off. All or nothing. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. So you're talking about the user switching plugin. And in that case, I don't know how that would work. You'd have to test it my guess is it would be not good if you're trying to use user switching okay. So again, this may be overkill, it may not be the better solution all the way around is to require to FA for your login. And using two FA is that's just going to work. Okay, so now with all of the questions and wonders and scratching of the heads. This is why originally I thought I don't know about this plugin and then I thought maybe we'll see. So that's prevent user concurrent side sign on. Vern, so if I do log in with a second user, how do you kill this first session? You don't you can't. Oh, how do you kill the first session? I don't know. I don't think you can. You went out. So if you log Ctrl, Alt Delete. So okay, if you logged in with a second admin user, what you would have to do is you could there's a number of plugins that will allow you to log out a particular user or Yes, definitely, you could disable the plugin, or you could go into solid security and and flip the salts around that with logout everybody. Yeah. So you know, Do with this what you will, this is one I would stick in your toolbox. And maybe there'll be a use case for this and some you know, and it'll be the perfect answer. For some problem. You're facing three, six months from now who knows? Okay. All right, Scrolling on down the list. The next one here, okay. If you are a WooCommerce person, I think you're gonna like this. This plugin is called discount gauge, which is not the best name because you know, when I hear gauge, I think like a visual gauge and it doesn't do that. But it does something very helpful for WooCommerce so let us activate discount gauge. And we now have a menu under WooCommerce called discount display. And here's why it works. So you can it's basically going to underneath the price of a product which is on sale. It's going to let you say save 50% Or save X number of you know dollars or pounds or whatever you're doing this then let me grab a product which I know is on sale, which in our store, which is the Infinity Stones. And if we view this look here, save 50% and it calculated that dynamically based on the sales price, or we could say I want this to be a saved amount, save the changes, fresh save $500 Not bad, right? So this you just activate the plug in and it works and this is it has some very basic customizations here of changing the background color and the text color. But maybe you want to turn this into like a pill or some some sort of a design like that. Very easy. It's wrapped in a in a span here and a paragraph ID and so you could do a lot with this right here with CSS and it's a global CSS so whenever it appears, it would look however you style it. Pretty nice. So if you are using WooCommerce this is this is a nice little addition I think to your display here, a very simple and light plugin called discount gauge. questions comments about this one?
Pretty straightforward, right? All right, scrolling down a list to the name of a plugin that I hate the worst. This is a silly name for a plugin, but it's a really cool plugin. It is called Table Burg, table Burg, and this is a new block within your block editor that does tables. So have you ever tried to do tables in the block editor? Even doing tables? Even doing tables in the classic editor is not fun. Tables are just kind of a nightmare, although and but they do have a use case. I mean, I'm old enough to have for a number of years designed for our full websites using tables. Anybody remember those days? Yeah, but there's still a use case for tables and displaying tabular information. This is a great plugin to keep in mind because it's way better. than the standard block four tables. Let's just activate table Burg. People Burg oh look, it just dropped an update. Let's update it. Before we activate it because why not? Of course that will likely break everything. Look, they've put Freemius into it. This just happened since this afternoon. Since this morning. Okay, so now we have a top level menu item we didn't have before okay, maybe I should have gone back to the previous version. Anyway, let's take a look at table Berg. I still like this because it's the best table block that I've seen. All right. So before actually before we do the table table let's take a look at the standard block editor table. So table Berg has its own block but here's the classic block here. Great the table rows and columns right it's okay. I mean it's barely okay. But, you know, you can't really do a lot with these things. The table cells are there just you can't do a lot with these. So here's what table Berg does. Let me delete all the junk that I just put in here
all right. Here's our pre baked able Berg block. It's beautiful, wouldn't you say? But look what we have here. When you drop it down. Oh look, we have nested blocks for tables and cells and there's blocks within the cell block. So you can actually do many, many things here. It is so nice to work with. Much nicer than the standard table block. So you have a lot of ability to even move things around if you want to, you know change. If you can not you can't drag the cells but you can select just the cell and do certain things with it. Really, really nice. You have controls over how you know how alignment works and so forth. It's just a much nicer way to deal with tables. So yeah, you can drag rows around but just not the cells, which kind of makes sense. Yeah, so if you have to work with tables, this is a great way to do it. John is asking can you import a CSV? I don't believe so. I don't know. Let's take a quick look at our settings. Again. And this is a brand new plugin. They're just really doing some things with it. See I don't think I saw an option.
Documentation is just getting started. Doesn't look like you can add through an import. It wouldn't be surprised. I would not be surprised though. If they add that feature, or maybe in a pro version, but currently it doesn't look like you can do that's pretty good documentation.
Sue, can you set column width in percentages? are only in pixels. Let's take a look.
How do we set the comp does it do it dynamically? I'm not seeing many settings here. Oh, it looks like it sets it dynamically Sue? Yeah, I think it's setting it dynamically based on the content. Yeah, but again, this is something that reached out to the developer in the support forum. There's not a drag interface here. But clear. I mean, this is the this is a brand new plugin. It is just it is very new. Right so this is they just this was the version that I just tested. And they just dropped this one this morning. Yeah, it's brand new. So reach out to the developer. Make that as a suggestion. Because I really do like this approach to tables. Yeah, the one star rating I think was prompted by apparently it was outputting some PHP errors see I don't agree with that. The back end UX is actually pretty darn good. When it when you see you can actually drill down other table options. Don't even let you do this. I don't know. Do each zone. Okay, so that is table Berg. Other questions or comments about that one? Okay, scrolling down the list. Okay, this one's interesting. I first saw this I thought and then it grew on me. It is called overlapping image blocks, overlapping image blocks. So if you're a block editor person, I think you're gonna like this. We first again as the important lesson we've all learned is that you must activate the plugin before you can use it. So let's do that. Then you can use overlapping image blocks. And what this plugin does is give you the ability to have an overlapping image block. So here it is. Within the image block, you've got a heading and a paragraph and then you've got these other images, which you can choose options for and they have four predefined layouts of how this might look which you can choose it's just an interesting design.
On set sat here let me show you what it looks like on the front end.
And yes, it is nicely responsive it looks good. However you however you do it. It has these four canned layouts. And so if you've got a page with a bunch of images and information, it's just a nice way to display it I think. So you can just drop in here and replace the image from wherever you want to replace it from and there you go. Works really well. You can choose the color right now it's set as a gray. You can make that whatever you want it to be. You do it
yeah. You can choose the background color. Kind of nice. It does the chairman's jump to the front. No, it just it is what it is. Right here. It's not it's not interactive
it looks like this on mobile. But still kind of nice. I really liked this action. And you can put any blocks you want in here so you could even put a video if you want you can do any block that's a block and go in that section. I don't know how the CSS works. It's probably a bunch of negative margins and stuff. You can get in here and tweak the CSS if you want. There's a there's a lot going on with the CSS as you can imagine to make it display like this. Yeah, okay. There are only four layouts out of the box. But you can again tweak, tweak the CSS to make it your own. So that is overlapping image blocks, which is creative. I like it all right, Scrolling on down our list too. Material board this Alright, so those of you who who've been around plugin roundups for a while we've been doing these for over 10 years now. You know, I have tried my share of dashboard, styling replacements and it's always like it's like the Lucy moving the football before Charlie Brown kicks that kind of thing. I always get so excited that maybe somebody has come up with a nice update for the WordPress dashboard and then you activate it and it's awful. But this one is not bad. Okay. i This is actually the first dashboard replacement plugin that I've done ever on the plugin roundup that I actually might use, and it pulls in and the reason it looks nice, is they're not trying to invent their own styling. They're actually pulling in styling from Google's material design guidelines. So let's activate and material board and you can see what it looks like. It is very different it is nice and clean. And I like it y'all. So let's take a look at under Appearance and material board. And we have some options. So all the icons are from the Google material icons. You can change the primary color to match with you know your clients branding. So let's say your client has a you know, they're an orange type company like that. You can choose an accent as well. Looks really nice. You have some options about you know, we're going to round the corners of buttons and so forth. What is the primary font we're going to use? There's a small choice here, but they all look really nice. Like there's our Roboto which is super clean. You can use Hugh bot sans there's Billy there's not really a performance hit. It's on the back end. So even if there was I mean, back end it's not a huge performance hit. So yeah, you've got a lot of nice options here. You can also now notice they've they've added this saref header which I'm I'm on the fence about I don't hate it I don't love it. You can turn that off if you want and that just pulls in the the Hugh bots right now. Are you bot sans Ramona sans I mean, I don't I don't mind this at all. And you can choose between material icons and standard WordPress dash icons. If you don't like the icons that you're handed you can go back with WordPress icon. There's not a problem there. It still looks really, really nice. What I noticed going to material icons is that some of the premium plugin icons got replaced by Stephanie How much space does it use? I wouldn't I don't know but I wouldn't think a lot. Let's take a look at the download. So it's 414 ks zipped. And a lot of that's probably I here's the plugin. So it's got some fonts in it. And then it's just CSS files. There's not a lot here. Probably the weight. The weight of the plugin is the fonts that are included. So you know this is own this is a back end dashboard styler. So your front end does not change at all. There's only on Well, I mean your admin bar, obviously, but it doesn't change the actual look of your site. It only affects your back end. Now I kind of like this, I'm honest. Any other questions or comments on this one that is material board install and play with it? Sucia thing like this. I don't like the orange and I do like the plugin. Okay, moving down the list to the final two plugins of the roundup. You always know I saved the best for last right, Billy? Yeah, it's only 10 downloads. But again, that's the deal with plugin roundup plugins. These are brand new. And there we try to find plugins that haven't been seen much before and bring those to you. So all right, next up here. Fresh forms for gravity. All right, so this is by a developer Samuel Galera. Samuel is a longtime member of the Gravity Forms team, so he knows what he's talking about with this plugin. And so here's the here's the thing, how many of you and it's not going to help you if you use a different form plugin, but have you noticed how if you're using some sort of website optimization plugin, like Lightspeed or rock, or you know, nitro pack or WP Rocket or something like that, those can sometimes cause problems for forms. Have you noticed that? Like, it won't submit the form, right? Or there's some weird, like, if the form is trying to go to stripe, it's not processing it correctly. And it's the optimization plugin that's causing the problem. And so we've had that issue over and over again, and actually what we've had to do is go through and manually Mark pages where gravity forms exist as no optimize. I know cash, right. So that's one of the last parts of our pre launch process is going through and making sure wherever a form appears just to be sure, we're going to no cash no optimize that page. This is a plugin that does it for you, and I love it. So I was actually back and forth with Samuel about this plugin a bit, because what it does is it checks to see if a gravity form is on a page, and it does that through a number of ways. First, it looks is there a gravity form block? Like are you using block editors or block? Are you using gravity form shortcode on a page or looking at this? It even supports third party gravity form embeds like the one from power pack and the UA BB one where the Gravity Forms styler. We use the power pack one a lot and we like it and actually that's what I was back and forth with Samuel about he added power pack support for me. And so it notices if the if a gravity form exists on a page and if so, it marks it is no cache. So it will take it out of caching for plugins for browsers and even CD ends like if you're using Cloudflare or whatever, it will make that page no cache it supports all major caching plugins. But if you're using breeze or nitro pack, you do it. There's a workaround. It doesn't work out of the box, but there's a workaround. You got to look it up on the documentation. Vern dynamic like every time the page loads, yeah. Paul, there's not a reason you wouldn't want to use this. It is awesome. It is as soon as I saw this on our list, I thought Oh, could this do it? I think it does. Oh, it does what I think it does. This is a great idea. And so again, if you put in a ticket to Gravity Forms, the chances are high it will be Samuel who responds to you. So I don't know this. For sure but my the story I'm telling myself in my head about this plugin is it Samuel got sick and tired of support questions coming in. About Hey, this you know, my I can't my plug in my forms not submitting at all. It's a caching problem, whatever. Here's how you fix it. So he built a plugin to do that is that I don't know that for sure. But That sure sounds like a good backstory for this. So anyway, I really liked this plug in fresh forms for gravity. Yeah, so I don't know about including it in core. I don't know. It it's like core WordPress, right it. Developers are very careful about the things they put into core. We build core WordPress and we build plugins to be extendable. So if you want that feature, you can add it and that and because sometimes having that built into core can cause other unexpected problems. And so it's usually better to extend the core with something rather than putting it in core. I don't know there's always a debate about that. But that's fresh forms for gravity. If you're a Gravity Forms user, put this one on your list, because I mean, I don't know of a good reason not to use it. Yeah. Vern it is very lightweight.
Very lightweight. Okay, last but certainly not least, least holy cow. Y'all wait till you see fluent snippets. Okay, there's 112 Different WordPress snippet plugins right like WP snippets and code snippets and somebody else's snippets and there's you know, there's seriously a dozen different WordPress snippet plugins that have a huge user base all of them so why in the world would the fluent team the same folks behind fluid forums and fluent CRM, why in the world would they build another snippets plugin? And here's the reason by the way, this is an interesting read if you are a technical geeky person. Let me find the yes, here, okay. Read the background story. So I'm going to drop this link in the chat. If you're a if you want to know why. This is a great backstory of why they did this plugin. And they even said, look, there's all these plugins, why would we write our own right? And they explain that and basically, here's why. I'm just gonna show you the way all of these plugins that we're familiar with WP code and code snippets and header footer code and all of these code code code right? Even the the premium ones what they do is they store the snippet in a database table. So if you as you're loading a page, and that page has a snippet, it's got to go get another call to database and back and if you know anything about WordPress speed, you know, the thing you want to reduce the most is database queries, because that is by far the slowest process of getting a WordPress page to render. So these code snippet plugins, store the snippets in the database, and then it renders out to execute the code on the front end. That is slow, and it can also be a security issue because you're storing these this code in the database, which could get compromised a lot easier than just say, code in a file. So what they've done is they create with in the this code snippets plugin, the fluid snippets actually builds out flat PHP files. It builds them out in a folder called wp content, fluent snippet storage. It's, well I meant to have the cPanel open. We'll open it up real quick so you can see it. So it actually stores them as PHP files. That way. It's more secure, and it's faster. Yes, Ben, just like a plugin. So for example, I need to activate the plugin because that's how this works. Hang on a minute. I got really excited and forgot to activate the plugin. Fluent snippets Oh, you know what? I'm also going to deactivate this so you can see how they want you to see their plugin interface. And we will act Okay. Fluent snippets will go down here. Alright, so I've created the single snippet and literally all this is is a PHP file that has hello world commented out. Okay. So that's what I created. It let you know, it has the ability to, you know, where's this going to display with conditional logic? Is it displayed based on the user or on a certain page or on a certain date? Or whatever, so it has all the content pin conditional logic options that you might expect. You can also group snippets and do all that. But here's the neat thing that makes this different. When you create a snippet, here's our cPanel File Manager for WP Nathan you go in here and you go into content and you go and look, here's our folder, fluent snippet storage. Look, one hello world PHP, and you open up that file, and you've got all of its plugins stuff, but there's my file and if I go in here and say
Add a File, add something to the snippet. It's going to update that snippet, right here in the file itself
not updated and updated
Yeah, we just up it's updating the flat file. So this is super cool. It's more secure, it's going to be faster. And yeah, it's really really, really smart. So the other thing you can do, this blew me away. Okay. You look in the settings. Let's say you just use this to get all your testing done and you want to get rid of the plugin. You can click Enable standalone mode and this will move everything over to an EMI plugin. So now let me see if it actually put it in. There it is. Look at that. It's going to pull all your snippets into a single file called WP snippets, fluid snippets dot m mu, and it's running its code but it also well, I hadn't tested this anyway, it's gonna allow you to, oh, you know what it's doing? This code is telling it to go look for all these other snippets in the folder. So anyway, the bottom line is when you put this into standalone mode, even if you uninstall or delete this plugin your snippets still run. It's just brilliant. Just brilliant. There's no other snippet plugin in WordPress that does it this way. This is brand new, and it's great. So this is now without a doubt my favorite snippets plugin period Yeah. Ben would add to an existing m u folder in and out so what it does is it makes its own m u plugin called fluent snippets. And this plugin is telling WordPress to go out and look at all of the PHP files that are in this folder. Right. So it's just great. I mean, if I was using this plugin, I probably wouldn't deactivate it like this. But yeah, it's both ways. You know, you can go both ways. Oh, the other thing look at this automatically disabled the script on a fatal error. So if you I'm sure none of you would do this, but me I will occasionally forget a semicolon or something. And the site blows up or I get a white screen or whatever. This would catch that and disable the script so that it doesn't blow up your site. It's just there's this site, this plugin is awesome. So Sue, would I use this instead of adding PHP so for me, I, I would continue in many cases, I would continue like I have my own immune plugins and all that. I wouldn't change that for this. But if I needed to add code on a site, and maybe for whatever reason, didn't want to add in a new plugin myself, this is the way to add code now to WordPress. It is the way to do it. Brilliant.
Doug, yeah, that's a great point. So this plugin is less than a month old and already has 2000 installs. And the reason is, that word a lot of WordPress security people are talking about talking about this. Like here on the the page. Yeah. The Yeah, Calvin Alcon from snicko is high, you know, supporting this. The only way I could study plugins should be done. There's a lot of important people, a recognizable people in the WordPress space who are talking about this. So that's fluid snippets and that oh suit, can this replace Header Footer Scripts? It should replace Header Footer Scripts. Yes. Like you ought to replace Header Footer Scripts with this plugin. It does the same thing. But it does it so that it's faster and more secure. Yep. The Header Footer Scripts, plugin stores all that stuff in the database. Yeah, so I mean, to me, it's not like I would go spend four or five hours today, replacing all that stuff. It's just the next time you're in that site, move everything over into this plugin. You know, do a little bit it's not like nothing's on fire with the Header Footer Scripts. Login. This is just a better way to do it that over time, you should probably gradually move over to but from here forward definitely use this plugin. All right. Not a bad way to end up right. So let's ask the question that we always do at the end of these plugin round ups. What was your favorite plugin to the round up we calculate these votes when we do our best of plugin round ups twice a year. So fluid fluid snippets all over the place. Yeah, that's like all of them admin columns gets a vote. Zippy gets a vote. Fluid snippets the Gravity Forms one. Elevator Gravity Forms, okay. So the last two, by default are by far the fresh forms for gravity and fluent snippets are the winners and you'll see those again in our best of Roundup, which will be in June. We always we do it in June and December, or six months at a time. Zippy should get an honorable mention. I agree. So yeah, well, so you know, we go back and review the last bit of each of these videos when we're preparing for the best stuff. And so we'll remember, it's definitely fluid snippets. It's definitely fresh forms for gravity and Zippy as an honorable mention. All right, so if you dropped in late today, let me just remind you we have some really good live streams coming up on solid Academy tomorrow. We have Tom Wraith. From we watch your website talking all about WordPress security. Make sure you sign up for that all our upcoming live streams are here on this page. We also have next Wednesday. Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder is going to be talking about the customer's hierarchy of needs and helping a customer and make understand what their needs are to make the best decision. It is a wonderful talk that I highly recommend that you come in here. Also, we've got a security talk coming up Timothy Jacobs and myself talking about understanding and managing threats and vulnerabilities. So when you get these vulnerability notices, how do you deal with those? Timothy Jacobs? It's been a while since Timothy was with us and it's great to have him back as we talk about WordPress security. And finally for those of you who are members, we do have the this month's premium course is up and ready for you to register. It is the WooCommerce bootcamp with Zap with Zach step IK. Zach is a WooCommerce guru, and he will be talking us through four very important topics fundamentals. Now this is more than the basics. We're assuming a basic understanding of WooCommerce coming in, of how to create a basic product and just kind of the basics of WooCommerce. We're understanding and we're expecting you to have some basic understanding of that. We're gonna get into some more the the not basics but fundamentals of WooCommerce like the tricky stuff like taxes and shipping and those sorts of things. In that first hour. We're going to talk about some advanced WooCommerce topics and the second our third hour is going to be all about speeding up WooCommerce This is what Zack does for a living in his agency. He takes WooCommerce sites and works on scaling and speeding them up. So he's he is the authority on this. And then finally WooCommerce and Kadence in the last hour, so lots of neat stuff. Kim Yes. Thank you for mentioning that. I did add one other live stream, which I talked about in the pre show, but failed to mention just a moment ago and that is this one on February the second with the changes coming up with Google and Yahoo mail. They are going to at some point this spring, they're going to require DKM and SPF records to be set up on all incoming mail. And if you send over 5000 messages to Google or Yahoo in a day, like with a bulk mailing system or whatever, you must implement demark and so he's going to be talking about that whole alphabet soup of when that they say the first of February Stacy but I'm hearing that could get delayed. I could be wrong about that. But it's coming up for sure. And Matt is from Sindh WP he lives and breathes email authentication like this is his thing. And he's going to make all this alphabet soup makes sense to us. So this live stream is scheduled for February the second what Stacey was talking about with February. The first is when Google says they're going to start these changes. I'm thinking that's gonna get pushed back. Because that's what Google does. But either way, soon into February, we'll be talking about all of these items. All right, that's gonna wrap us up for this month's plugin Roundup. Thanks so much for hanging out with me for the last hour. Hopefully you've picked up a few fun things to play around with. Hopefully I'll see you back here tomorrow for Tom Rafinha security round up here on the solid Academy where we go further together.