All right transcripts should now be working for everybody. We are just about two minutes away from getting started. It is plugging around up here on iThemes Training might be the very last plugin roundup we ever have on iThemes Training because then it'll be the solid plugin Roundup. That might actually happen by next month. We'll see how things are going. Glad you're all here again if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello tell us where you are logging in from today. Link bundle is they're waiting on you in the chat with this month's plugin list as well as the replay link. Soon Not yet. Not yet.
All that's why that's that would be success then. All right, folks, just about a minute to go. Glad you're here and ready to go from the plug in round up. We're September 2023. We have several fun things to show you today. Interesting, interesting. Can from Philippines. John from Chicago. Welcome John from West Palm Stacey from Colorado. Hi everybody. Christine from Florida. Rick from Ohio. Paul from Tijuana. Really? Hon from New Jersey, Auxilium DC guy from Tenerife. Good to see everybody. Hey, Connie from Vancouver. 30 seconds to go before we get started. Again, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and you'll find the link bundle for today. They're waiting on you. Hey Stacy.
All right. Many things many things to talk about if you're in the States. Hopefully you had a nice Labor Day yesterday and got an extra day of rest after the weekend. We did some fun food preparation around here had some friends over a lot of fun stuff, good eats and all that. All right, it's three minutes after let me start the recording and we will dive right in. I think we've got too many wrong windows just a second. We're about to have all our things ready. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another Live I iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host of iThemes Training and it is the first Tuesday of the month, which means it's plugging around up here on iThemes Training. Once a month usually the first Tuesday we take a look at the WordPress plugin directory and we grab oh about a dozen or so plugins that we found interesting and we bring those to you and a little thing we call the plugin Roundup. We've been doing this now for a very long time many years. And this is going to be a fun time together. If you're just joining us in zoom open up the chat say hi there and you will also find the link to download this month's plugin list which you now see on the screen for September 2023. As always, we give you the disclaimer that we haven't fully vetted and thoroughly tested these plugins. These are just things that we found to be interesting. And if you're going to use these in client sites, you should make wise decisions about whether or not to implement those. Check them for compatibility and bugs and privacy and accessibility and all the things that you would normally do. These are just plugins that had been recently added to or updated in the free WordPress plugin directory and we thought you might want to take a look. So with that we begin with our first plugin, which is called simple sitemap. Now, having a human sitemap for your site is always really helpful. The you know, having a sitemap link at the bottom where you can click and there's a list of all the pages that's helpful for users in general can be possibly helpful for SEO. But also it's especially important for accessibility if you can have a readable list of all your pages and posts. Paul, you're saying the link is bad. See, now it works. Are you saying the link to download the plugin list is bad? Oh, well, nobody cares about Chris's link. Good grief. Okay. He killed me, Paul. All right. So let's Rewinding back to simple sitemap, right. So simple sitemap is a great way in the block editor to drop out a list of all your pages and a nice little sitemap for your visitors. So let's take a look at that, shall we? I'll simple sitemap. So I've got a little page setup here. First of all, we should activate the plugin because inactive plugins don't do anything for you at all. That's just my little tip for you today. Simple sitemap. Let's activate that plugin. And let's see here right here. We now have a page where I've set this thing up just for you to take a quick look. All right. There it is. Okay. So simple site map is a block and if you take a look, there's actually two blocks that this plugin adds. The first is just a simple sitemap, and the other is a group and we'll actually I'm just going to remove these and we'll start from scratch and I'll show you how this works. So let's just use our basic simple sitemap here. And over here, right? So by default, it's just going to give you a list of pages that are on your site. It's a bulleted list. It is hierarchical if you want it to be so and you have the page titles and it's really nice. Just there it is list of pages. Click through. Good to go. Now, there are some options here. So you know, title, post type label would be pages. If you turn that off, and it wouldn't show pages anymore. You can actually set it to show the excerpt which I think is kind of cool. You can make it linkable or not not quite sure why you'd want to have a sitemap with no links. But you can do that if you'd like. You can also open your links in a new tab. So you can actually change the label of the post type that is in question. You can make it Oh, yes. So if you have multiple post types, for example, if you want to add post to this list, then you could have your things in tabs. They're not rolled in on that, but it does have that option. So that's how this works. And so you can do pages posts either and whatnot. So that is the simple block. Now let's look at the other block this ads, which is a sitemap group and this is kind of cool because what it will do is it's this is going to only work with posts but you can group them by categories or tags. And so here you see our list of posts. Here's a category and the posts that are in that category. So that's kind of cool. Do you want to display the post type label you may or may not depends on that, you know, you want the excerpt you want it to link just like the other. What am I ordering by date? Title, whatever. So it's kind of cool. Now, a couple things. Does it work with custom post types? Yes, but in the pro version, right, so that is an upgrade to the pro version. The free version only shows, pages and posts if you want a custom post type, including WooCommerce products that sort of thing. You do have to upgrade. But for a basic simple sitemap for a brochure site that's only using pages and posts works out really, really well. Can you Exclude Pages? I don't believe you can. Map I don't believe you can. No, it doesn't have a way to exclude pages. But if you have private pages, they're not going to show up. So it doesn't have to be public pages. Soon it will show password protected pages. I'm assuming we have test that but that's it's going to show published pages. So there you go. Pretty neat little plugin works really well. Very easy to create a sitemap So any other questions or comments on this and before we move on? That is simple sitemap by David wire
All right, moving down the list for our next one, which is interesting and you might find a use for this. This is called domain for sale. And this is a forum in an instance where you want to sell a domain name and maybe you want to customize the way that page looks. A lot of domain registrar's have a For Sale option where you can throw up a part page but usually they're they're advertising their own stuff on that and so if you want your own customized domain for sale page, this is a really easy way to do it. So let me go here and activate domain for sale. Right there it is, by theme, Atelier a. Alright. Do I want to allow tracking? No. All right, let's grab our domain for sales settings. And so we have some options right now there's an on off toggle so you can activate it and nothing happens. But you know, when we get ready, we'll turn this on and it'll start to do some things so we can add a fav icon. And then we can start to customize. You know what our background looks like what our typography looks like, et cetera, et cetera. You can change the site title, description and keywords here. There's some information here you'll see where this shows up on the front end in a minute. So price domain name, sale title, some content. There's a contact form where you can fill out some things to get the contact form done pretty good. And then he also has a neat thing where you can import export from one thing to the other. So if you get a style you like and everything you can just push that over to another site you're trying to sell. So we toggle this on and if we go now to WP Nathan incognito here's what it looks like.
Oh, helps when you save your setting. It's all Yeah, always a good thing. Alright, so there's my domain for sale page. Decent, simple. My colors are not great. Let's do maybe something more like this. It looks kind of Marvel ish, in that and there's only these four color schemes. So you don't have a lot of option there. You could probably do something with CSS that looks a little better. And so it's it's a basic domain for sale page. It's a landing page. If you want to sell your domain there it is. does require WordPress to be installed. And here's the other thing on the front end of the site. It's going to redirect every every page. Here, so it's going to redirect all my URLs right back to this landing page. So yeah, so not only does it replace the homepage, it shows up on every page, right? So this could be a site maybe that was alive for a while. And now you want to just sell it you can just add this plugin, boom, there it is for sale, and it takes over the whole site. So yep, that's it. That is domain for sale from theme affiliate. Questions or comments on that one? The Pro version is 29 bucks, you get different template options of things. There you stay for clients who don't pay their bill. Make sure you have that situation covered in your contract if you're going to do that. Yeah. Taking a client's domain offline has consequences, both for them and free. All right, any other questions or comments on this one before we move on? All right, let's scroll on down the list to a plugin which I have mixed feelings about but I bring it up and put it on the list because of a discussion that was occurring in a recent office hours where someone asked the question, is there a plugin that will go through and help me clean up old content on a site? And the answer is yes, it's called delete old posts and pictures and let me just go through here real quick and clean up some of these things that are plugins that we have activated that we need to be activate. Okay. All right. So clean up old posts and pictures. Let me show you what this plugin does. Now, you will note that I have multiple warnings in the notes on this one, right. So first of all, you want to make sure that you backup because when you delete with this plugin, they're really deleted, gone is gone deleted as deleted, permanent is permanent. There is no recovery unless you've made a backup. So you want 100% want to have a backup, possibly two and maybe even three just to be sure. But once you you know you this is going to work for you. You've tried it maybe tested on a staging site. It could work for you pretty well. Now, when you activate this plugin, it adds its own top level menu item for some, you know reason. And so this is it. This is what you get. delete entries that are six months old and older. So it only goes in months. You can't do number of days. It is only in months. But with this setting, you can delete posts that are older than six months. I believe that does include pages as well. And then delete old pictures that are older than that. So that is it. The plot you know I bring this up simply because people asked about it in office hours and yes, there is a plugin that does something similar to cleaning up your site from old content. If it was me though, I would probably go through and hand delete things but you know if you want to live on the wild side, you have delete old posts and pictures by wise Hawk plugins. There you go. Questions or comments about that one? Did I give enough caveat and disclaimer on that plugin. I think I think I did my due diligence there. Okay, let's move down the list shall we? Okay, all right. We're gonna have a few WooCommerce plugins here. There was a number of WooCommerce plugins lots of them, as a matter of fact added to the directory this past month and we've got a few of the better ones. I think the first one is simple, but I think helpful. This is admin previous and next order links for WooCommerce. So one of the things about getting into WooCommerce and dealing with fulfilling orders and so forth is that you get a lot of clicking back and forth. A lot of clicking back and forth. So like you fulfill an order then you gotta go back to the order list and click an order then go into that one. There isn't like just go to the next order in the list. That's what this plugin does. So let's activate this plugin. Admin right here it is okay. So this is a very simple thing, which you're either going to love or hate. And so let's go to this order. And right there, there's previous orders, and there's next orders, so you can do what you need to do complete the order, and then go to the next one. And now we have navigation. We only had previous order on the one before because it was the latest order. So now you see you have forward and back navigation on the orders. This is all this plugin does. But honestly, if you've got a stack of orders, this can save a little time and it's kind of nice. Plus you've got buttons right here that look like they're ready to party like it's 1999. So you got some really awesome CSS happening here. So you know, why not just add it for that. That's what it does. Add been previous order next order links for WooCommerce. That's it pretty good and helpful if you've got lots of things to do. Questions or comments on that one? Pretty straightforward, right? All right. Next up, generate random orders for WooCommerce. This one you might find to be pretty helpful if you are testing out either a new site or you're testing some changes that you've made to an order process. And what this is going to do when you activate it is I believe it or not, it's going to generate some random orders for WooCommerce. So I know that's hard to figure out from the name of the plugin, but that's actually what this does. So let me activate this plugin. And it's going to allow you to create a certain number of things so it WooCommerce and then random orders is where this is located. And how many orders do we want to generate? Let's say I don't want to do 100 Because then I have to delete them all. But let's do five. And so what's actually happening here is this script is creating an orders that JSON file in the root of the WordPress directory, which in this case will be the public html folder. And it's it generates that and then it gets WooCommerce to import that file. Now with that button saw and I don't know why you wouldn't want to check this box but probably always have this box checked, because that tells the plugin after you've imported the orders, go delete that orders dot JSON file. I don't think I want that sitting out in my in my root directory. It's probably not a big deal. I just don't want that stuff out there. So anyway, we're going to generate it's creating the JSON file and it's going to run the importer. Okay, there they are. Alright, so for items just randomly generated a bunch of things. And so here they all are, right. So, you know, random items were added and so forth. We can take a look at you know, all this stuff, the stock level, you can check and make sure that you know your inventory management is working all of this. The other thing that's happening at this point is Chris just got five emails, I think his Yeah, Chris just got five emails, because his name is on the admin part of this WooCommerce site. But it lets you test all of that and let you see how the orders gonna look and just make sure everything is set. The other neat thing that it does is at least one of these. Like you can check your shipping based on the garbage addresses that it creates it also if you have coupons set up, at least one of the orders will include a coupon just so you can make sure all that's working. So it's kind of nice, it's just a tester doesn't give you a lot of granular control over what you're testing is just going to generate some random orders and kind of hit the high points of your WooCommerce system. especially helpful for you know, just watching how things go. And if you need to demo a site for somebody, this is a great way to drop some orders in it. So that is generate random orders for WooCommerce from WP zone. Any questions or comments on that one? Paul, does it indicate it is a fake order? Not other than the fact that it's John Smith and that you just did the randoms and you can see when that happened? I mean the order the order name was John Smith and Jane Doe. So yeah. So no, John this John is asking does it link to stripe right now? This is bypassing the payment process. So it it tests the whole process. It's generating orders and WooCommerce it's not testing the payment system. So this is for testing just the WooCommerce side of things. It's not actually creating orders all the way through stripe
and then when you're done you just go through and delete
then you're done. Questions or comments on that one?
Okey dokey. Moving down the list. Chris really likes this one. This is WooCommerce product filters by flair. So if you have a WooCommerce store and you want to get some really nice filters maybe in a sidebar to select from categories and that sort of thing. Nice Ajax filters that update your your pricing grid as soon as you make some changes. This is a really simple way to do that. Now I will say there are better ways to do it, especially in the premium plugin world but for a simple store. And for free. This works really well. It just does. It has basic filters and it just you put it in there and it works. So let's go in here and activate this WooCommerce product filters by I flare Okay, and what this is going to do is completely take over your shop page. So that's one of the downsides of this. It fully takes over your shop page so you can of course go in with CSS and that sort of thing. If you're using something like Kadence shop kit or other things are in the customizer to tweak how your shop looks, you'll want to test this to make sure we have what's going to be affected. But again for a basic shop. Here you go look choose options. For sorting. You can change that really easily. It gives a really nice Ajax product search you can also search by category here. Yeah, I mean, it looks decent out of the box. And it's you know, it's basic filtering, and it works really well. It looks good. I mean, I have no problems with this. Does it search words? Sure. Yeah, I just did one helmet. Let me get rid of all my filters here. So let's just say we want storm right if we just search for storm it's going to match that. Yep. It searches, whatever you want here. Category is under here, right? So you can here are our current store categories. And so you can filter just by category there but the search is through by product. Now there are some let's see the top level yes. No product. Yes. All right. So there is a settings page again, top level menu. item for this, and it lets you set you know how many columns for the shop page. How many do you want to load? What happens when you use the load more button? Let's just say if we had three columns on the shop page we wanted to show six and loads six more. We ought to get our load more button now.
Interesting, that was good. We want to get into that something's not doing quite right here. One thing is nice. Here is this button. here that says store filter data in the URL. And so notice up here we've got query strings. And so, you know you could link directly to this page, which is kind of nice. If you have a blog post or something that only has certain things, then you know, even an incognito window it's going to show your filters based on the query string which is kind of cool. So that is WooCommerce product filters. By I flare. Soon as asking about the search, and I don't I it says by product name. Let's just say okay, spin. Let's see if it'll find the word spin which is in the description and it does. Yeah. So product name description. Yeah. It searches by not just the product, but by some of the details in the product. You'd want to test that to see what it actually is going to search for. Any other questions, comments? About this one? WooCommerce product filters by FLIR All right, moving on down the list. This correctly annoying Okay, next is a the final WooCommerce plugin for today is called upsell smart pop up and you're gonna love this or hate it. It's bad out there very few people who are going to have an in between opinion on this. It does create a pop up in your checkout flow. But honestly I hate these things but they do convert and people do buy them if the if the offer is correct. So let's take a look at this and activate WooCommerce or no just upsell smart pop up upsells smart pop up there it is so we are at WooCommerce Settings upsell might pop up. Okay. So this gives us two options. There is a cart upsell. So if you have this enabled, then when you go to the cart, it's going to give a pop up with some suggestions or a checkout upsell. So when you go to the checkout page, it could have a pop up you can do one either or both by having those enabled. So I'm just going to have we have the cart upsell on you can have your own heading there. What the delay is after they hit the page. And then you add the product ID now this is a little clunky to me. I wish I wish this would be differently but so we have a product ID 443 I can't member which one that is will you'll see it in a minute. And then you could say enable the smart pop up only if the cart is above $25 for example in under you know I don't know whatever amount so you can set it on a current amounts. You can hide the upsell product so if we only want for for three to be available if they have a cart over $25 Awesome and this could be like a free product that you get if your current is over XML and give them the option to you know to add that for example. And then you can set it to only sell one of those if you want. Let me just show you what this looks like on the front end. So if we were to let's just I don't have anything. Let's just add something to the cart. And we'll get here and just in a couple of hours. I gotta go to the cart. When I go to the cart after a couple of seconds we get the pop up so do I want to add this? Sure. Let's add that to the cart. And it's going to add it to the cart. So yeah. Yeah, the snazzy blue helmet comes in red. I'm not sure where that came from some demo product that we did one time yes Beth. This is only this works with WooCommerce it doesn't work with anything else is a WooCommerce add on. So it just interrupts the checkout flow. It can be used and you know, with cart minimums and so forth. Could be really helpful. And I mean, as annoying as these things are. They actually do convert. They do actually work. Every study I've ever read says that. Yeah, they work. So that is upsell smart pop up. Any other questions or comments on this? That says she needs this? Hey, Beth. Here's the URL right there. You can have it for free. Any other questions or comments on this one? All right. All right. Let's move along to our next plugin on the list, which is show post ID with sorting. Okay, so this will see how long you folks had been around I iThemes Training. How many of you remember the plugin that we always used to talk about called simply show IDs, simply show IDs so that it's been around for forever and ever except it got abandoned a million years ago and you can't There's another one called Show Ids by 99 robots, which is you know, it works just fine. They have some other stuff that they throw in there. This is a really good simple plugin that lets you it shows the post ID in the post column and then lets you sort it, which is really, really helpful but it does one other thing that I think you'll like as well. So I show post ID with sorting. Let's find that show. Where is it? WP See, this is where developers get me annoyed because they it's different. You know their title in the repository is this but it shows up in your list is this. So let's activate WP apps, show post ID. And now I don't think there are any settings. No. So let's look at our posts list. And we have our really nice little column right there. Boom, reveal the post ID there it is. And sometimes you need this for various things. It's actually becoming less and less needed. It used to be I was looking for these things all the time and it's not quite so much anymore. But the the neat thing that this one does that simply Show Ids never did before. Was make it sortable. So I can sort you know by ascending or descending and not post IDs that can be really helpful. The other thing that's cool that this one does, is that it gives you this copy post IDs option. So let's just say I have I want to get a bunch of WooCommerce products to show and I want to show products that are oh no I need to search for something you know WooCommerce products that contain the word power. I mean, do we have any Ah yes. Okay, several Okay. Watch this. This is cool. So I can bulk select these and hit copy post IDs. And this is what it just copied to my to my clipboard. A comma separated list of all the selected posts. Now why would this be helpful? You might say, Well, what you can do then is you can come into a page
oh my goodness, I can't type okay, we can come into a page. We can oops that's not what I want. I want post grid carousel the Kadence one and then look here I can select post by individually and then I should know I can't do that. Maybe okay, maybe I have to use the WooCommerce one.
Product
mostly filters oh god Where's let's see
alright, I'm struggling here. There is one of these post grids where you can just drop in a list of all the IDs or Paul like for the upsell plugin. I don't know if it'll let you put a series of those. Matter of fact, let's just try that because my current demo is not going very well. I wonder if it'll let us do that. Let's see.
mean the only thing it's going to do is break. Yeah, if you copy and paste post IDs into a shortcode This is really super cool. Let's see if this actually works.
Need to come back into the cart. I think we just confused the we just confused it. So that didn't work. But yeah, there's often times where you'll need this comma separated list of ids and this will let you do that. The other thing this does is look up here in the on the front end of the site. It shows ideas up here in the admin toolbar. So it's a little utility. It's pretty handy that you might need from time to time on certain sites. And it is called Shell post ID with sorting for web apps. All right, any other questions or comments on that one? I kind of like this one.
All right. Next up for anyone who is and the events calendar user, a user of the events calendar. You might like this little plugin because what it's going to do is make it very very easy for you to display a quick event list based on the criteria that you have selected. One thing about the events calendar, it's a very powerful plugin, I bet doesn't have an easy way just to put a little event block in that's customizable to how you want it to look. And this is going to let you do that pretty simply. So let's go into events shortcodes event shortcodes for the events calendar.
And let me show you how this works. So we and it does give you this events add ons, which is useless I'm just gonna say that it does let you see all the other plugins they have, but it's kind of annoying. They does have some, you know, basic CSS setup for the way the grid is going to display, which is kind of cool. But let me show you the demo page. how easy this is. So there's a few built in styles here. Here's our first style or set of events. Here's our second style. Here's our third style. I mean they're decent they're decent, and they're fairly easy to stall to style with CSS. And here's how they work. So they're gigantic shortcodes. But let me just remove these and we'll do a brand new one and you'll see how easy it is to create one of these because basically what this is going to do there is a block and it needs to be the second block this opens up our little modal window that lets us put the shortcode together. Now why do you have a shortcode with the block you might ask? Well, because that's how the events calendar pulls things in as a shortcode. It's, it just is what it is. So here we can show you know which event categories do we want to show? What is our template that we want to use? So we have the option of timeline and then three different styles and you saw those three styles in the last that we previewed it or you want to you'd want to play around with this a little and understand what the styles are before you select obviously, what is my date format? We're going to say January 1018. How many events do I want to show? In what order am I hiding the venue? Do we want past or future only upcoming? Is there a social share button and then I can select my date range? Get it the way you want it hit Insert shortcode and boom, there it is. Save the page. View the page and we have what we just asked for. There's our timeline view. So that's how this works. It's a nice little add on Stacy, can you use it without blocks? Yes, you would just need to use get the shortcode. So let's see shortcode attributes. So right here again at the dashboard under shortcode settings and then attributes. You can copy the shortcode here and then just change the you know the the data inside the shortcode and it tells you what your options are in this table underneath. So it's really simple to you know, change this yourself. Yeah, you don't have to have the block editor work. The block editor is just there to launch that modal window to drop in the shortcode which is I mean it is what it is. So that's the event shortcode for the events calendar from cool plugins. Any other questions or comments on that? One?
Okey dokey, moving down the list. All right. This is a fun plugin. This is called VK. Dynamic if block. Now this plugin I'm very interested in it because what it does is create a container in which you can put other blocks this is a block plugin. So it's a container in the block editor in which you can put whatever blocks you want. And then it has some advanced conditionals on it for how that block how that container will display. So for example, you know Kadence does this in some way. Matter of fact, let me instead of talking about it, I will just show you Kadence has some conditional options on the row and section blocks. Oh, you know what, again, always helps when you activate the plugin first before you try to use it
there we go. Okay
all right. So if we were to just drop in a Kadence row here, for example. You have many options. Let me just put something in here. Okay. Okay, so we've got a roadblock and under Advanced, you've got various options here. Right, like conditional display, you can toggle that on. And if post custom field title blah, blah, blah is an empty whatever. You have those options right. Now, what this does, is it gives you a little bit more capability on the conditional display. So if I go to this, and by the way, this inserts like any other block, it's just a dynamic if and when it shows up. It puts this little dotted box around and you can see it in the list. It shows up kind of like a Kadence row does, it's just a wrapper. And here's what our options are. So our display conditions, what is the page type? We have those options. So a lot of these are the standard WordPress conditionals is what this is tapping into. If you remember the old widget logic plugins from way back in the day, these are similar options to those. So you've got page type, you've got post type restrictions. The user role restrictions only show in this certain context. This is also really cool. If the custom field test has the value of something then so if you have a custom field on your page or post and you've got this if block, you can test that custom field and show the block if if the custom field contains some certain content. Or if it's not empty. You can do something there. So that's kind of cool. You can also set publish time, right so you can say set to display for the specified period, right, so you can have this block on your page. It's only going to display in a certain date range, which is cool. But what you also just saw was look at this, you could have a date in a custom field, and it can pull that date in to say this is what I want you to display. So that's pretty darn cool. Really, it's it says that this is advanced, it's not for everybody. But if you get what I'm talking about here and the power of the conditions at this blog, you you're immediately saying oh this has some possibilities in advanced use cases, right? So you can also test the number of days from a certain day. Anyway, there's lots of different options here that allow you to stack conditions in ways that are actually a little better than the Kadence row. So it's kind of neat. That is VK dynamic, if block by vector Incorporated. Questions, comments about this one? You see the possibilities here. If you're doing some advanced building this is going to give you a really cool tool. All right, the chat is silent. We will move on to the next one, which is called core, roll back or roll back. Now a little bit of trivia here. The developer of this plugin is Andy Frager. And actually Dr. Andy fragance. Dr. fraggin is an active contributor to WordPress core. He has been for many years. WordPress has his hobby because his day job is he's a practicing surgeon who in his free time contributes to WordPress core. This guy's amazing he's been around for quite a while look him up. He's got a lot of plugins and a lot of contributions in WordPress core. Anyway, this is one of his plugins, and it is called core rollback core rollback. And it's particularly helpful if you want if you have a need to rollback the version of WordPress Core. So I know a lot of folks just think gosh, if I update WordPress and something breaks, then I've got to Restore a Backup and it gets complicated. This is actually a plugin that will let you roll back your core version in a very safe way. So let's activate core rollback. And now we have a tender, tender updates. Up tools. Okay, so tools, core a rollback core is right here. And you have a drop down list of all the safe versions of WordPress to roll you back that you can roll back to so these are the versions of WordPress that are currently being kept secure by the WordPress core team. So you know the last version of WordPress six, two of 61605958 and so forth. So these, these final dot versions are the last secure version of in that case, WordPress 5.4. And so if I want to roll back, let's roll back to WordPress five, four. We're gonna hit roll back it's a two step process. So once we do this, now we say I want to reinstall version five, four. So it is now doing that it's pulling in WordPress five four from the WordPress repo. Oh and something broke now I may have a problem. I may have a real problem. I think we just broke the world. Okay, now we got to figure out how to fix this because I wasn't anticipating this. Okay, so if it breaks then you're toast. So what we got to do, it's probably a plugin that is incompatible, one of these old junky plugins that I'm using. So what we're going to do, this is how we rescue ourselves. We pull up our file manager, we're going to first go into wp content and we are going to change the name of our plugin folder so none of them work anymore. And let's see if that fixes our problem. And it does. Now we're going to update to WordPress six, three again really quick. And it'll be working again. All right, let's rename our plugins folder. Okay, so when you do this, just be careful how far you're rolling back. You would probably never roll back that far. So now our plugins are back. That was fun. Let's try this again. Shall we with a more actual Okay, so the better use case for this would be I was we're currently on WordPress six dot 3.1. And let's say we were on six three and the 631 update broke something right well, I want to roll back to WordPress six, three. So let's do that. And that's not going to break anything. We're going to reinstall WordPress six, three, downloading, downloading, downloading done and now we're back on WordPress six, three. That's how that works. And it's really, it's really easy. If you want to roll back to, you know, the six to the latest version of six two, if you have an issue with six 3d, there you go. Stacey's saying elements are had issues with WordPress six, three. Well right there. Let's roll back to six two. And we're done. So now we're on six, two. And if we ever when we get ready to upgrade, we just do the regular upgrade routine and upgrade to 631. Okay, so we broke and fixed WordPress really quickly there but I think you can see the value of this nifty little plugin called core rollback by Andy fragen. Probably not one you're gonna want to have on every single site, but it will let you roll back just in case so this is definitely one for the back pocket or for your toolbox. In case you ever have an issue with a an update breaking your site. questions comments about this one? No, you cannot roll back all the way to be to cafe log. I don't think that works past PHP four or something. Okay, moving down the list. Okay, for those of us who have membership sites, you might like this plugin depending on how your membership site handles this sort of situation. The new user approved plugin basically drops in and interrupts the standard flow of a user sign up on your WordPress site. So what's gonna happen when we activate this plugin, is that an interstitial step in that's kind of a redundancy anyway, it's going to drop in an interim step in our user registration flow. So normally what happens if I have in my WordPress site this setting check for anyone can register under General. Then you can just register, set up your username and password you can immediately log in as a subscriber and do whatever. Now there may be certain cases where you want to approve anyone who is going to, you know, log into your site, right you may want to have an approval process set up. And if you don't, if your membership plugin doesn't do that, and many of them don't. Or if you don't want a whole membership plugin just for this one feature. This is a really great plugin that does exactly that. So let's did I activate that? I don't think I did. New User approved right there. Alright, so this is now done.
And we're gonna skip our access to all my data thing. Okay. So notice there is now a new top level menu for this thing, which is basically all garbage. This is one of those things with this really be a submenu. All this stuff is just upgrade garbage. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, here's the process. This will show you if you have any users who've requested activation. This is a list of users you've approved or that are approved to log into your site. These are issues things you've denied and the cool thing here, we'll get to it in a minute. This will integrate with Zapier for some advanced integrations. So what she'll do is well, let's just log in, get an incognito window up
okay. So if I'm going to register
now at this point, what just happened is, you get a new message and email has been sent to the site administrators, they're going to review it you'll receive an email with instructions on what to do next. Now as a site administrator, I just got an email. Let me see if I can pull that up for you quick.
I'm gonna verify myself. Yes, I am me. Chris, you may have gotten this email. I wonder if somebody got this email and it wasn't me. Let's see spam.
Okay, something happened with Okay, well, we have pending users here we can just look at it here. So the administrator would get an email saying no another somebody has requested access. Right here I can click Approve. So that's done. They're in the approved list. And the the person that logged in just got an email that said you've membership has been approved. Click here to reset your password. So basically, it just drops a middle step in the registration process, and then allows, you know the approval and then the person can set their password. So pretty cool, really nice if you need to, you know, validate who's actually having access, but you want people to be able to register on their own. The other thing that's really neat here is this invitation code. So we can you can add, so it's the pro version auto generates, but if you just come up with a you know, you could use chat GPT for this you know, give me a
list of 10 Eight character random strings. Right, so you could just do this and copy this, right? And this can go there. And now if you give the user a code, then they can put that code in as they register and then it'll bypass this whole process. So that's pretty cool. Oh, one code per line, added 10 variables. And you enable that so that will now let people immediately register with the code. So if you that removes this whole approval process. So if you want it to be open to everybody, but you don't want to have to approve and you can give people an individual code, and it'll let them log in themselves just an extra little step to make it a semi private site, if that makes sense. So interesting use cases here. This is new user approved from WP expert. Yo, or something. questions comments about that one?
Okay, moving down the list to error log viewer. So in the whole PHP eight upgrade that many of you have fought through or are currently fighting through error logs have become your friend, I think probably hopefully, and you've gotten you know, you've gotten used to going out and looking at those error logs to see what plugins are not quite PHP eight or eight, one right two compatible and it's kind of hard to go through and get into your file manager. Look at all this is a plugin that brings those error logs into WordPress and actually makes it easier to monitor them so let's go and activate this one. This is error log viewer from Best Websoft. And down here we have a top level menu item. And Alright, so here's look what we have here. So we've got a couple of different error logs that we can look at. And we just checked on this is our standard PHP error log. It's located here. And we can actually go into the log monitor. And look we have the actual right here in WordPress. We have the log. Look at that. So this was probably when we upgraded or downgraded our version of WordPress, and the world came to an end so this was something in WordPress core that created a problem. Who knows right? But we can actually from here, we can save this out as a txt file. You know, do I only want to see the last X number of lines. I want to see the log from, you know, some date to Sunday. You can do that here. Really cool. And I can actually even clear the log file right here. And it'll just go out there and delete that log file. That's kind of cool, right. The other thing that's neat is I can actually set notifications. So I want to send emails to my user and digest those maybe once a week with issues that pop up in my error log. So I like this a lot. This is a great little tool that will let you easily monitor the error logs on your site without having to be logged in and have to go through all the process of individually monitoring. So yeah, this was pretty late. It is error log viewer from Best Websoft any questions or comments on that one? Like this one. No questions. No comments. Pretty nifty. Okay. Last but certainly not least, in the past we have talked about WordPress playground, and it is quite cool WordPress playground is let's see it is I can't go WordPress that it will probably come up right here there to developer.wordpress.org/playground Okay, if you've never played in WordPress playground, you should because it's super cool. It is a WordPress instance in the browser. And so right now okay, it just installed WordPress. This is WordPress running in my browser. It is a fully functional version of WordPress that is just for me right here. It is running in temporary storage space in the browser. Although you can change that to be persistent, which is stored in the browser until you dump your cache you can also even download this to a directory or a folder on your computer and run WordPress from there through your browser. It's really cool. It's great for spinning up a test site to test some things. And it works. It's super fast. It just works really really well. Now that's just WordPress playground out of the box. This plugin does something interesting. Where is it? WordPress playground there we go. So what this will allow you to do is from within WordPress. In the playground area, you have some options. clone your site with its theme and all its plugins and playground. Now I gotta say I got really excited about this. It only works with free themes and plugins though so it's not like you can push your whole site over to playground and you get exactly like an instant staging site. Unfortunately, that doesn't work and it makes sense because playground has to pull in from the free WordPress plug in directory. So I can click this and it gives me a list of all my active plugins of which ones I want to plug in. But look, you want to make sure that you uncheck all non repository plugins. So that's kind of a bummer. But what it would let you do if you have a site that's just all free plugins, you can just push it right over and it actually would be a an actual staging site for you, which is kind of neat. But there it does have the option of creating a playground from scratch with generator. So what what plugins do I want so you could enter a comma selected a comma separated list of plugins slug but that they're your theme. Like if I want to start out with Kadence I'm just gonna do that. I can select my WordPress version latest PHP version 8.2 I want this to be temporary, and I'm gonna hit generate and so it is now oops. Always
it is now going to open up playground with Kadence installed and whatever other plugins I had put in their by their slug comma separated slug it would have put those in as well. That's kind of cool. Also, you have the ability to play with any theme from the WordPress plugin directory. This is kind of cool watch this. You can say I want to view this one in playground. And it'll open it up for you. Boom, there it is. Or you can say I want to look at plugins. Here's my plugin list. And let's just say I want to try this error log viewer. I don't know if this is gonna work. Sometimes there are issues in WordPress playground with plugins that want to do things that are kind of server related. And I can what's active here already? Well, let's just do this. Move that to playground Yeah, it's gonna have a problem. Some plugins don't play well with playground
there you go. Cool. So if you've never played around with WordPress playground, do it. This gives you a few more little things to play around with. And yeah, it works really well. Questions or comments about that? That is toys for playground from Mark Harmon Zhu.
Any other questions, comments before we wrap this one up? All right, well Thus ends the September 2023 plugin round up here on iThemes Training. So we end with the question that we always end with one vote one vote only pleased What was your favorite plugin of the roundup these votes will count towards the best of plugin roundup that will do at the end of the year. So rollback rollback sitemap error log error log sitemap sitemap log shortcode event shortcodes new user error log, looks like error log viewer and simple sitemap or the favorites. Error Logs shortcode sitemap. Last chance to vote. Rollback. Yep. Rollback. Alright, looks like rollback sitemap and error log viewer all kind of kind of. Yeah, those three are winners and it's pretty well balanced between those. Alright, folks, that's gonna wrap it up for us today tomorrow. Let me remind you that tomorrow we have things happening. Don't have here we go. Tomorrow we have Thomas ray from we watch your website with us. Talking about the three dimensional strategy for WordPress security, talking about server security, WordPress, security and user security. Thomas is brilliant. They manage well over a million sites and we watched your website I can't remember the number exactly, but it's a lot. It may be on his bio actually. He's just a delightful person. is five and a half million sites. They've removed malware from over the years. And they monitor the files and databases of over 6 million sites today. So just that amount of data this guy knows what he's talking about with WordPress security. And Thomas is going to be with us talking about securing your server WordPress and user. If you can't make it, the replay will be there. Obviously here is the link for that one. Also, let's see a course office hours is on Thursday. And then next week, we have fly and office hours as well. There's something else going on the next week. What that is, let's see. Oh, yes, September the 12th. I don't have it up there yet. But September the 12th. We will be having Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP on to talk about past keys. So past keys, of course are the future of passwords and password less living. It can't come soon enough. Since the last time we did a pass keys webinar, which was last year. You've seen now the broader implementation of past keys along a lot of high security websites like Pay Pal and your bank perhaps and Stripe and others have begun to implement pass keys. I think security began supporting pass keys is the first WordPress plugin to do that natively. And that Timothy is going to be talking about how that process works, what's changed and how you can better implement pass keys for yourself. And your clients. That's coming up next Tuesday. I'll have all those events up here very shortly. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for the last little bit here. Hopefully you found a couple plugins that were interesting. I'll be back here tomorrow with Thomas Rafe on that three dimensional strategy for WordPress security. Hope you have a great rest of the day. We'll see you back here tomorrow when I iThemes Training where we go further together.