I'm going to pause we're going to pause and momentarily we will have the captions connected. Sorry about that y'all. Normally we do this in the pre show and I completely forgot. So it is on me just about to get that done
okay, captions should be working now. Sorry about that y'all. Okie dokie. So WP wand. And we have pre added our API keys here. So you would just scroll down a little below this and paste in your API, open API key. And there you go. So now we can do some things that the first thing I want you to notice is this really annoying magic wand? icon that follows you every single where you go, the WordPress dashboard, surely they are going to address this because that is just unacceptable. Okay. However, the the the deal itself is pretty cool. So let's just get into a new post and click the one right all right, so what do we want to do? Do we want to there's 42 Total templates. You can do a search through these to find the one that you want. And let's say we just want to make some headline generation. You can even at this point, generate a whole blog post. Isn't that cool? Let's generate let's just a blog title here. The detail about our project will be Peter does Peter Parker have a new girlfriend? And let's get eight results. The tone will be witty and will generate content. So let's take a look here. It does take a minute now here's the one thing, the big difference between using chat GPT and using the open AI API is time, particularly in the next plugin, we're gonna see it takes a little while for those things to communicate back and forth. Look at this Spider Man's love life takes a turn. It's these are great headlines in this great Alright, so let's spy these heart gets caught in the web. I mean, come on. This is great. So let's we can just we can copy these to the clipboard. We can insert them into the editor. I'm just going to copy this one and put it right oops. Put it I don't know why that's not working. Blue. Well did not like some so we're gonna try there. All right. So there's our very large font had headline that's coming out what's pre formatted. That's why it was coming in in the post content. All right. So if we go back, we can now go to all templates. And let's do a blog outline.
Let's just do one result in a witty tone and we'll get a blog outline. Now this is not even we're not necessarily going to use this at this moment to generate the content. This is just an exercise to get an outline of what a blog post like this might be. Again, takes a little time with the API. All right. Title intimate group, the digital insert that into the editor and so you get your get your information. Like I accidentally deleted some stuff. What just happened? Oh, I just did this one. So what I'm going to do is just copy all of this. And we can just paste it in here and then use this as sort of a guide to write our post if you want to write it ourselves or we can copy this and put it into another prompt generate a paragraph. So this is one of the ways that AI is working. within WordPress is a little clunkier. I continue to expect these wizard, the wizard approach to get even better. The next plugin we're going to see has a little better of a wizard I think than this one. But it's pretty cool and it does some things. Definitely worth playing around with the pro version gives you some additional things here but even the meta title meta description meta keywords, a lot of things here. You know that you can look at many of which are pro so that is WP one any questions or comments about that one? Another example of how developers are starting to leverage the power of open AI inside of WordPress alright let's trash that one and go down to our next AI plugin called AI scribe. Now we had there I mean literally there were probably a dozen like this and we just picked a couple of them. I picked these two because I like the with the interface of the previous one that we won and I like the wizard in this one although it certainly does have room for improvement. But it's a great example of where AI is going let's deactivate this. And I believe I kept AI scribe active because when you deactivate it, it wants the API key again so we're just gonna go right on into AI scribe and we're gonna go right here generate article. Now this has more of an A wizard approach to it. So let's look for let's article title ideas. We're going to start there and let's go again with Peter
students question does Peter Parker have a girlfriend generate so this one does take a little bit longer than the other one. But it will start to give us some things and you can notice it's you can see what the prompt is. Over here. So it kind of helps you even learn how to get some things from chat GPT a little better. Look here. What do we have here? We didn't change our style and tone. Let's make this creative writing tone is funny, witty, let's do witty and regenerate these and we'll get a little better results so you can pick the tone and so forth to match the writing style of your blog. Or show your clients how to do this. All right, right here. A little bit different All right. I like the headlines that the other one came up with a little better I think honestly. Alright, so what the cool thing about this is we are going to just pick one we'll just pick this one and hit continue. So it remembers that now we're going to identify some keywords. See how it's stepping you all the way through this. So there's some key words and we can generate more. So let's just pick a few of these and keep going so it's going to use those keywords throughout our content. Kind of cool, right? Again, this is not this is not the you know where AI is going to end up in WordPress, but it's a great example of where it is today. I think also we can probably get beyond the Microsoft Office clipart logo here for some of these folks, but Alright, so here's an article outline. We can generate others or whatever. I'm just going to keep this and continue. Now notice it's updating the prompt with some of this information as we go. So now we're working on the introduction
so I don't like that and we'll just kind of keep going. Now adding a tagline we're just going to skip this and move on to the main body. Now this is where it takes a little bit of time. So at this point, it generates the body and what at the end, depending on how long this takes. We may just move on because we're already 15 minutes into the round up, but it will allow you at this point to actually push it right into a post with all this stuff, the title and the you know the body and everything that we've done. So it's pretty cool. This wizard approach I really, really like as opposed to just generating pieces of a blog post. So what do you think is as you're seeing these things happen, let me hear some feedback from me in the chat. What do you think about this so far?
Oh, Stacy, I, I generated an open API key and use that same key in WP one. And in this API scribe. It's the same API key. It's the you know, it belongs to you'd have to create an account with open API, generate the API key and then use the API key in both plugins
this was annoying.
Yeah, so and he's making a good point. Would you get an AI tool that you can use everywhere or just one that's based in WordPress, and anyone with you? I mean, I think I would we use open up we use chatty pte for cogeneration and all kinds of things all the time. However, it's not like you can only pick one or the other this you know, you're not paying a monthly fee for any of these plugins. You know, if you like the flow of sum, then maybe buying the pro version is good, but then just you can use the open API API. So I'm going to skip forward to view and publish. Can I do that? No, you have to skip through. Look at that. We have all there's all of our stuff there. Alright, so you see how this works. It's pretty cool. At the end, it lets you publish it and then you can actually go back and use the AI to evaluate and enhance and so forth. Elizabeth, the number of words varies the cost from one to the other, but use the cent Yeah, it's the same API key and the cost. This this cost right here is what you're paying open API for usage of their API key. You know, it's a metered usage of how many words you use. So you can use the same API, the same API key, and just two different plugins are using it but it's the same cost and so forth. So pretty cool. So those are two really nifty AI solutions for WordPress WP wand and AI scribe. Okay, this is a typo. Thanks for pointing that Elizabeth. This should say 1000 Words the cost to use the open AI API is one penny for 1000 words. This is correct. Approximately one penny. Yeah, so ignore this. That's a Mr. Zero. That's on me. Okay. Pretty cool stuff. Let us move along, shall we do the next plug in have a round up? Giving you a couple of blocks here that are kind of cool. This one is called Master query loop. Master query loop. Now, I know how powerful the Kadence post block advanced the Kadence query block is for showing posts. It's fantastic. The master query loop does a couple of cool things too. And you might want to take a look at it. If you're not especially if you're not using Kadence blocks and you're in the block world but even if you are you might want to take a look at this because it's kind of cool. Master query loop. Let me activate that plugin and move over to our page. I think I deleted what I had there before. Yeah, it's empty. Okay, so let's just go to master query loop. There's our block. And okay, so we have a couple of options here. We can choose from predefined patterns, or we can start blank. So let's just start by choosing a predefined pattern. So it's going to take a minute to load these block patterns from some outside whatever and you get some options here. So this one is you just kind of pick the one that you want it to look like there's another one with image and text that way. Here's this here's a three column. This one's kind of cool. This is a staggered layout. Let's let's do the staggered layout. So we'll click that and boom, there it is. Now once that's in, you can go over with the block selected, and you can inherit query from a template. So if this is a like for example, if it's an archive page template, you could it's going to inherit whatever queries attached to that page. Or you can set it right here. What is this going to be it's going to be posts. How do you want to order those and so forth. So this is pretty basic. Pretty cool. And you got some canned designs. Let's just a checkerboard down the page, which is kind of nice. We could change the the post type there as well. Now another option here though, is oops, delete the right thing. So by the way, that Matt, this master query loop is actually creating a bunch of different blocks. When it's adding something which is kind of cool. Let's do the start blank. Now from here, you sort of get to pick the way you want this to look. So let's do image date and title. Boom. And over here this is a look at this. We can do specific posts. So this is the you can search for posts. So let's just say we want something about Spider Man or Peter Parker. So let's just search for posts that have to do with Peter. And there they are.
And we can keep adding additional posts just like this. So selecting one so you can customize exactly which posts that you want in the layout, which is kind of cool. Let's see here. There's the ones and you can delete certain ones or delete them all. You can also turn this into popular posts. If you have something that's tracking views and a Medicare you can turn that on if you want to. You can. Again you can change your post type and you have all those options here as well. There's some additional filters here about filtering by taxonomy, author keyword. So here even we can go delete all of these and let's say we want to just any posts that includes the keyword Peter there it is. That any any if we add another post, it's gonna automatically appear here. That's really it is a really cool plugin. I like it a lot. Does a lot of things. The Kadence post plugin is also excellent this could be in addition to the Kadence plugin if you're using if you're using it. So anyway, that is master query loop. Paul, if you keep this layout do you need to keep the plugin installed? Yeah, you need to keep the plug in installed. It's a block and it's going to control all those things.
Any other questions or comments? Master query loop from WP masterpiece. All right. Let us move on to the next plugin which is a simple one, but potentially very useful in certain situations. It is called admin email change now, you probably noticed several versions ago. Word the WordPress Core added a new flow for changing the email address of the admin user. So the reason that happened was people would inadvertently type in the wrong admin email address, you know, like a typo or whatever or they lost access to that email address and then they have problems because they didn't have the admin email address. set correctly and WordPress. And so core WordPress today what we're going to do if you make a change to the admin email and that's the one here in settings in general, which is here. There's a new flow and it even says it right here. If you change this An email will be sent to your new address to confirm that the address will not become active until you confirm. So by changes something else, the site sins that email account and email you have to click it and that validates that yes, this is the new email address. So it's a good idea. However, there are some times where you may not want to have to go through that process and that's where this plugin comes into play admin email change. will activate that and now looking back at this page look we have a change email. Let's see No
All right now I'm gonna type in Nathan at Nathan ingram.com change email. admin email has been updated right there so it didn't have to go through the validation process with this plugin active boom, we have a new email. And what I would probably do at that point is then get rid of the plugin because in general, I probably want that flow to happen. But there may be cases where you want to change the the admin email and you don't want to go through that whole validation process. So this is a great plugin to do that
I forgot to Refresh
All right. Now I'm back to where I want to be.
All right. Very, you could totally do that in MySQL. Yes. So there you go. It's one of the simple but useful plugins you probably want to put that in your back pocket. It's a toolbox plug in, but there it is admin email change very, very simple, but does something important that you may need at some point there you got an Admin email change any other questions or comments on that one? Stacy's asking do you get an email to verify well you do in with the core WordPress behavior. So WordPress by default does that this plugin is created to circumvent that process so that you don't have to verify the email. All right, next one down the list is simple key word to link. Now we've done some plugins like this in the past and this is certainly one of them. And it is helpful to create a dynamic internal linking strategy for your website. So let's just say for example, you have a site with a lot of technical terms. And maybe there's a blog post or a glossary that defines some of these terms. Wouldn't it be great to automatically go through your website and link all of those terms to the correct page? So let me just show you how this would work. Let's just activate first simple keyword to link and we'll take a look at the UI for it which I believe lives under settings. I think it has its own tools. Oh, where is it? Ah, it's up here. Oh, yeah. It put at the very top, of course, because that's where you'd want it right. Alright, let's just say I mean, we're on a Peter Parker theme today
we have something alright, let's just say for whatever reason
let's do this make it easier to find let's gonna see here a page here or a yeah, we can just use this. Okay. All right, that will say Peter Parker is going to link to this product in the store, whatever. Do I want it on all occurrences? Yes. case sensitive. It doesn't matter if it's case sensitive. It needs to be the full word whole thing. Peter Parker. We're going to save that link. Now what is happening at this point is this plugin is keeping track of all the words that it needs to link to certain places. And what it's going to do is every time a page is loaded, it's going to use jQuery to scan that page as it loads. And if it finds that term, it's going to dynamically add a link to whatever link that you've defined. So here's this post with Peter Parker. And we will refresh the page. And now look, Peter Parker is linked to this page that we just set it to and it's gonna do that everywhere we see Peter Parker
No, not the headline with this is only going to work inside of post content so you really wouldn't want your your header to be your title to be linked. linked to anything, right. So three guessing the question that some of you may have, do you have to keep the plugin active? Yes, because it's the plugin that's making these dynamic links. Will it slow down your page? Elizabeth is mentioning a minuscule fraction of a tidbit. Right because it's jQuery running, but this is a very quick pre processing of your content. You know, if you had 100 words, maybe, maybe it might slow down in a little bit, but if we're talking, you know, is really this. Let me answer it this way. This is really going to be related to the speed of me. If you want a good server, then this is not going to take nearly as long because it's going to render much it's going to render quickly. If you're on really bad shared hosting, you might have a perceptible slowdown. Yeah, so yeah, miniscule fraction of a tidbit. Yeah. It's very, very teeny tiny little bit and that is yes. A technical term. Carla No, it does not actually change the page. So if we go in here, for example, and here's our right here. If we delete this link it's gone right or if we deactivated the plugin, it's gone. So it's, it's every time a page is loaded. It's looking for any of those words that you've defined in the plugin settings, and it's going to automatically add that link dynamically to that term. That's how this works. So it's not actually changing the content of the database to add that link. It's doing it as the page renders with jQuery. It used to be that this sort of jQuery back in the day with mutt when servers are much slower and browsers were you know, internet was yes, you would potentially see some perceptible speed difference, but these days, it's really you shouldn't if you're on a good host, seeing that, you know, perceptible speed changes like that. Anyway, that is simple keyword to link questions or comments on that one. Pretty good. Pretty useful. Okey dokey. While on the subject of speed, let How about oh, I forgot to change the icon. Oh, got it. Well, anyway, this is a plugin called Speed checker. And what this one does is it's another API key dependent plugin, you will need to create an API key in the Google Developer Console. And once you do that, make sure it's connected to PageSpeed Insights as one of the services that API key has access to. If you don't know how to do that, you can Google it. There's plenty of articles on how to do it. What this does is automatically check the speed of every single page and post on your website. Like on the inside here, I had this active and running earlier, it does take a while to run. And I haven't looked at this in a few hours. So hopefully it's done now under Tools and speed checker. So it's going where it's supposed to go which is awesome. Are we
nothing is there. That's awesome. I wonder if I accidentally deactivated earlier.
Okay, checking of course when we get on the live webinar, there's going to be some issue, right. This shows that it gives a little thermometer type bar graph right there that shows you your PageSpeed score, both on desktop and on mobile. And probably half of these were done about two hours ago. And none of them show up. That is awesome. I can't tell you how happy I am that this is not showing in this crisis. Oh, Elizabeth, this keyword to Lincoln slowing it down. I don't think that's the case. But you know, who the heck knows. That is so weird. Why it would have gone away that maybe I do. Yeah, maybe I went back in time. It's just it's not loading. Isn't that something I wonder something happened to my API key.
Nope, it's there. I don't know. I just put it on your site and run it. It works great. I promise. It's a great little phenomena and it gives you the score. So the the takeaway from this is when it works, you'll be able to log on here and you and you'll be able to see all of the PageSpeed of all of your pages right in one spot which is really really helpful and I don't know why all of a sudden it decided not to work, but there it is. That is speed checker. Isn't it? Awesome. It's not the plugin developers problem. This something on the site, I mean, it was working earlier. Okay. We're gonna leave that running and come back later and maybe it's maybe it's intended to work all right, next up is a plugin suggested by Ben Bradley right there in the chat. Hello, Ben. And a great recommendation. Were a cool plugin called RSVP and event management. So reading the developer story, this was a plugin that this developer wrote for his own wedding. And he wanted some way within WordPress for people to RSVP to various wedding celebration parts of the wedding celebration, right. And so he created this thing and then made it available. Now this is a well known developer DP chill we've done some plugins from them over the years. They are the creators of WP SMTP, which you have perhaps use, also the download monitor plug in. Pretty nifty. So this is great for all sorts of events where you'd want people to register now where I had a hiccup right at the beginning because I didn't read the documentation. Who reads the documentation? Me? Anyway, what I couldn't like why isn't this working? Well, by default, the way this flies Stacy lemons reads the documentation. I read it when something breaks. But the way this plugin works is and it makes sense you first upload a list of people that can RSVP and then that you send those people the link and they can RSVP. Now there is a setting however for open registration, which I've given you a link to they have great documentation on this plugin. It is one of the best documented free plugins that I've seen, and it's quite good. So let's get this activated. RSVP Hello. All right, RSVP. is activated. And we go down here. And so you create an event and you can upload a CSV and it gives you the way that this needs to look. Some of these are things that you can change up what questions you're actually asking, but then you just upload it and that's the people that you can allow to register, right or you can simply go to settings and go down here and choose. Allow open registration right there. So that's how that works. Now I have created a page let's just get some RSVP, shall we? I have created a page right here. RSVP. It is very generic. drop this in the chat. And you can either register as a new attendee or if you have, if you have already RSVP, you create a passcode as part of your RSVP and you can go back in and edit it. So go in there, do this and we'll get some RSVPs and just make up something fake so everybody go to that address and submit it and then we'll get some RSVPs in now all these questions as you're doing that are defined right here in the settings where you can change up all of the things you want. If you want to hide it, you can hide it. Stacy, you make up your own passcode
that's the way that if you if you want to go back and edit your RSVP later you just simply enter your own passcode so let's see have we gotten any? Hey, look. Oh, that was from the other day
okay, what you need to do is don't do this. This is modify, click New attendee registration. That'll get you to this page
so here's our current attendees. You can also this is pretty cool. You can also go in and group people in like a family of people, which is kind of cool. There's a pro version that's coming.
Yeah, in that cool. So from this, you can export create custom questions and so forth. So pretty cool. Yeah, probably it's a little hokey, a little hokey, but you can hide some of these questions. You can create your own custom questions
you could actually even send people you know, if you're, if it's an open registration, you want people to register, just send it a link to this page directly. So anyway, pretty cool. For a free plugin. There's a pro version that's out there as well. $89 a year that gives you multiple events, the free version only has one. So there you go. All right, moving right along. What do you think about this one RSVP and event management plugin we don't like it. It's Ben's fault. is pretty cool. See if we have any speed check happening. Oh, no, something's broken. There's probably a problem with my API key with Google PageSpeed Insights. I bet I didn't restrict it well enough or something Google will sometimes if you don't set up the API key correctly. We'll go back and while I get and whatever, anyway, probably some reason something with my API key. But notice how it discovered every page of the website and so forth. So kind of cool. Alright, anyway, that was RSVP and event management from WHO? Alright, moving down the list. Now this is a niche plugin. If you are a block editor aficionado, you really might like this. Chris loves this plugin. Because what it does is it gives you access to certain dimensions in a block certain dimensions in a block Christmas chatting with me personally right now that are hidden otherwise. So watch for example, what you may find is the theme developer or the plugin developer of a particular block doesn't allow margin on this element. And so this is going to let you have access to those settings that were hidden. So I'm going to go in and activate appearance tools. Actually, I should probably just show you something the way it is normal. Let's do that. Alright, so I have something set up here. This is just a basic page with a heading and some paragraph text and then an image okay. So notice here we click, you know, we've got our link. We've got our heading. There's some typography settings that are here, which by the way, if you didn't know you could do this where you can actually add in things that don't show up already. There, right there. And you've got some dimensions for padding and so forth. So if we activate appearance tools let's refresh this page. Right here. Oh look, now we have the ability to change the link color. On this paragraph. And only this paragraph right there. That's kind of cool. Also, we have now the ability to go in and add margin as a dimension. So now not only do we have padding, but we have margin. This is just an example of some of the things you can do on the image. For example here. I didn't show you what that looks like. Otherwise, let's turn off appearance tools. The images are some of the give you some of the best examples. Yes, Ben, this is Kadence Alright, so here's an image block and notice how this looks in the block editor. Now, if we activate appearance tools, we're going to get the tabbed effect at the top. This is just a core image block.
All right now see we have a completely different interface, where now we have these styling features where we have border radius, where we can change things around put a border on the image easier. Now the Kadence image block does some of these things already but here this is in core WordPress. Now. So essentially what this does is hide or unhide some things that were hidden kind of cool
why are they hidden anyway, I don't know. Good question. So that is appearance tools. If you enjoy the block editor, install this plugin and play around with it. I think you might find it interesting. Other questions or comments about this? Paul? Yeah, can you imagine getting used to this and then go into another site that doesn't have it? Yeah. So can an admin turn off certain choices? Nope. What you see is what you get. I mean, you probably could by modifying code someplace but not in this plugin. Anyway, that's appearance tools by James Roberts. An interesting little add on for the block editor. While we're talking about block editor, you know, when I was just saying to myself the other day is the one thing that is missing from the block editor are a whole bunch of emojis Don't you think? You know, we need and we need emojis and the block editor clearly, clearly. But I like this one. Sometimes. I mean, a well placed emoji is not bad, right? The way this plugin developer has implemented emojis is interesting. I think you'll find it interesting. as well. The let me activate block editor Oh, it's already active walk editor emoji. And let's go back to the page already set up for that.
All right. So watch how this works. If I type a colon, boom, I get Smiley's. Just right there boom. But if I start to type wave I get access to whatever emojis that I want.
Kinda cool. Very easy way to get emojis into into your block editor. So Elizabeth is asking the question can you just not use colons? Well, sure.
Just keep typing. But when you type in a colon, it's going to bring up that list. I think it's interesting. If you want to use emojis, it is a great way to add those into the block editor. I mean, look, some blogs are informal and use emojis. There you go. All right. Any questions or comments on that one? That is block editor emoji. I'm syncing the love on this one already from the from the chat. Clearly this is going to be the favorite. All right, moving on to the next one. All right. This is the snow monkey editor. And this does some additional it's another plugin that gives you other things in the block editor. So let's take a look at this, shall we? If you're again, if you're a block editor person, you might find this very, very interesting, or you know not so we'll activate snow monkey editor. And let me show you what this will do.
So with snow monkey editor active there's a new monkey face right there in your hover of whatever this is called toolbar. And if we look what we can do, so let's just highlight this, and we'll click the monkey face. And we have some options here. We could change just the font size of that word. Ooh, look at that. We could change the letter spacing of that word. Isn't that interesting? We could go down and do some other things like there's this underlying
waiting week can do make turns into a badge which is like this. So it gives us some some typography elements here. The other thing it has are these predefined patterns. So let me
see if we highlight this, and we go over to right here. What's the monkey Wait a minute where is it? All right here it adds the styles. So look, it could be a post it. speech bubble to the right to the top to the left. And alert you know with remarks warning so it has these predefined styles. I think it's kind of interesting. The other thing this does is it even if you don't like any of that, yes, Sue is a yes. That's this right here. It can be a real problem. If a client that was an experience got hold of it. Right look here when you have highlighted an element over here in the side. This is interesting. Okay, you have animation options, which is kind of cool. You can change this to display. You know hide on certain screen sizes. That's kind of cool. We can also say you know, hide it by role. logged in or not certain roles, that's kind of cool. We got but this is also really neat. The Publish setting. I want this to appear at a certain date and time this is on any block. You can also do this to the row. This is over here in the sidebar. So it can be applied to any block, including rows, columns, sections, or headings, so forth. So it can publish in a certain time, or it could unpublish at a certain time. And also I found this to be very interesting. Lock the block by role. That's kind of cool. So it gives you a lot of different options here even above this kind of nutty styling options, which still could be fairly useful from time to time. So anyway, that's the snow monkey editor questions or comments on that one. Paul, is this all done with CSS? Yes. So let's just take a look at this page.
So see it wraps it in a span that has a predefined class many spans? Yeah. All right. Any other questions or comments on the snow monkey editor? We still have several to go. Not awful. Let's move on down to the next one. We have a few WooCommerce plugins to take a look at. The first one is called Visual WP collections. Now this is a self described groundbreaking plugin by the plugin developer. I'm not sure if that's legitimate, but it is pretty cool. So basically, the idea is this. Wouldn't it be neat to easily create a group of products that you predefined and then show those on the page? So here's our collection of everything. That's great. For on our site that would be good for let's say, Father's Day is coming up and you know, gifts that are hard for dads that are hard to buy stuff for or whatever, right? And so this is going to let you create your own collections, both manually and dynamically. And then lets you show that anywhere on the site with a shortcode so let's go in to visual WP collections and activate that.
Now this lives under WooCommerce settings I don't know it's here. It's right there. All right, here's our collections and we have something predefined. Yes. Okay, so here's Christmas pics. And so Chris did some things. And so over here for example we can say I just want to add an individual product product title is equal to
an actual product title
have some options on how you find these I guess I have to put the whole title in
yep, there it is. You can also make things dynamic, like if the category is something or whatever. And neat and so they had to match all the conditions that are in the list or any of the conditions in the list. That's kind of neat. You have a description that's going to show up right here and you have a shortcode to drop this anywhere that you want on the site. So if we go out here and look at the page where this collection lives
you will see this collection once I save that and notice the collection behaves like all of our WooCommerce Settings throughout the site. And so with this for example, you know you get you get a slug. You set up your page and add with the shortcode is basically what's happening here. This is simply a WordPress page with a shortcode. Now there's something else going on here with a slug and it just doesn't work right now. And I mentioned that to the developer in the support. plugin support. Not been a reply just yet. But it looks like a lot of times what developers will do is they'll put the plugin out there and then gradually fixed features and added as they go and develop kind of develop live. And what it looks like here is you'll eventually be able to set the slug for what you want this to be. And then you won't even have to create a page to drop the shortcode into you'll just use the slug and that's where your collection will show up. So let's just let me just there's something I didn't think about maybe that was bumping heads with that other URL. Not that it wants to work but it's not there yet. So it looks like it's something that developers currently working on. It's pretty cool. So you can even say for example, you know, create a Red Shoe sale collection based on items that are in the category shoes that have the red attribute in or on sale so you can combine things and have not only a group a collection that you hand select particular items for but also one that dynamically fills based on the settings here so anyway, pretty cool plugin if you're a WooCommerce person, this could be a super great way like if you do an email marketing and you have products for the month or whatever to send out a particular page that has this collection that lets people buy things but you could also track analytics on for example, so kind of cool. Anyway, that is visual dopey collections. Any questions or comments on that one before we move on to the next getting really short on time today? John, yes, staff pics. Very cool. Okay, moving down. All right. This is one of my favorite plugins in the roundup. It is 360 product viewer for WooCommerce. Now, you've probably seen things like this out there. It these sort of 360 views have become very popular, for example, on car buying sites like Carvana if you're in the States, they're one of the first big companies to use like the 360 rotating view of a car, that sort of thing. This is gonna let you do that sort of thing inside of WooCommerce. So let's take a look quickly at the 360 product view
for WooCommerce and as all of these things are loading go ahead and get to the product. All right, there's a snazzy blue helmet that's been added. All right. So this works just like our regular product does. But it adds look a 360 product view link and when we click this, we get a modal and we can drag like that. Oops. So on a phone, you can swipe with this. Pretty nifty you can also rotate it using the button or animate it like this. Isn't that cool? How you ask are this is this image generated? Right here many different images, right? So it's about 30 images in this one. This was a very smooth rotation. So you might not you know you could probably get by with half this many images. Yeah, so there's a plus and a minus to this right. This could be a really good way to sell certain products. You know, like if you're selling collectibles or whatever, and here's this collectible and being able to see it in 360 is super important. So yeah, that this is a really good thing and yes, WordPress is going to create all the images and the image sizes and space is going to be an issue if you're using this but if this sells more stuff, what does it matter? Right? Like it's, it's a good good way to sell product. What happens if you delete some of these, it'll just be a little more jittery that what we just saw that 30 images was a very smooth actually animation of things. You know, if you had half that many it would be slight bit of work. So yeah, this is kind of an interesting little tool. You know, the downside being, of course, disk space and so forth. You can there settings in there to change frame rate and speed and so forth. That it also automatically creates a shortcode for each of the items. It's kind of neat. You can put that anywhere. Like for example on a blog post. Where you're talking about that it's a sales page for the item from a blog post been you have to generate those images or you have to take pictures. Yeah, for sure.
Yes, and there is software that would allow you to put something on a turntable, take a video and then export that video, export keyframes out of that video. So again, this is not for every website, obviously but in certain cases where a product is going to sell better with a 360 view like for example, maybe it's jewelry or something like that. You're going to want a 360 view of something or a car. This is super cool and it works really well inside of WooCommerce. So that is 360 product viewer for WooCommerce any other questions or comments about that? No, there will be no 360 view of Nathan on the solid Academy page. Thank you for playing Oh, no. Again, we want to sell memberships. Okay, last but certainly not least, is a plugin called Tiny press. Now just the other day on an office hours How many of you recall me saying Nathan, you said you would always use redirection for things like shortening URLs and tracking you know affiliate links and things like that. You would always use redirection unless there was a good reason not to. Yes, I did exactly say those very words. But I'm going to refer you to the final phrase of that which is unless there was a reason not to, and this might be a reason not too okay. Now I love the redirection plugin by John Godley. I've been using it forever and ever and ever. And it's great. It is reliable. It's rock solid. It just works. This if all you're doing is affiliate links. This is better. And it's really cool. Let me show you tiny press. All right, tiny press and activate. All right. Tiny press is going to give us a menu link. All right. And I've set up a link here here's what it looks like. All right, solid WP is the label. Here's the target URL. Here's the Go link, slash go slash solid WP, you can change that right here. Make it whatever you want it to be right let's get by the way. Some of y'all I'll click on that William. And let's get some analytics going. So just click on that link. It's simply going to take you to solid wp.com. Let's and while you're doing that, let's take a look at some of the other things here first, does it work or not? Right active or inactive? So you can toggle on the status of whether this link works right now or not. You can add notes to yourself because whoever forgets why they added this link. Yeah, that's great little notes section. Details about the redirection. What kind of redirect is it? Is it a sponsored link, which you would need to do if this was an affiliate link toggle that on? Is it a nofollow link? Is it a parameter forwarding? So if you're passing on query strings, security Look, do you want to password protect that link? Isn't that awesome? Like you only want certain people here's the link but you got to use this password in certain like if it's for a membership or whatever. Is it going to expire on a certain date. Look at that. And boom analytics. Let's refresh the page
Yeah, we don't have a lot of tracking here. But you have you'll have a bar graph as it's working for time periods, which is kind of cool. Now also you can add category so you can keep links together. It'll show you your most used links. And then as you all saw here, there's a QR code which you can just download just like that and put it wherever you want it to go. Isn't that cool? So I really liked this. I like it better than pretty links for affiliate links. I like it better than redirection. It's got lots of things look here's a look at even gives us a location from where some for some of you are located. There are some additional settings here as well. Where you can change that go link to something else if you want. You can view creates the analytics based on role. This is cool. I didn't look at this earlier. There's extensions where you have looks like you. I haven't tried this yet, but what it looks like is go to a web page. With the browser extension you could create a link I don't know if that's something that's worth testing. I haven't I didn't notice this earlier. So yeah, this is pretty darn good in my opinion. It is called Tiny press and yeah, it is pretty pretty good.
Paul, so when would you use redirection now that you have this Okay, great question. redirection. So I would I would use tiny links for like affiliate links and things like that. This is made for sharing jump links, like a quick link on your site with a friendly URL that goes to some gigantic, you know, blown, like an Amazon product link that has 8000 characters in it. That's where I would use this to make a nice little short link to share some place or put on a QR code. It's great for just for a general QR code, just like pretty links Exactly. Whereas redirection is more for like, I'm moving a site to a new thing and I've got all these URLs to update. I wouldn't try to probably use this for that. Like I don't think there's like you can't import links into this. Like you can redirection, so it's the same thing but it's these these plugins are built for different purposes. Pretty cool, though, right? And thus ends the plugin roundup for June 2023. So we asked the question that we thought we always ask which is what was your favorite plugin of the day one vote one vote only please, right there in the chat. We're gonna use these for the best off which is one week from today, one week from today. All right. Don't be wind 360 video collections snow monkey snow monkey. The second AI plugin timey appearance tools RSVP. Oh, we're all over the place today. My goodness. We are so all over the place today. More of those please. There's like five favorite plugins oh my goodness gracious. There is no clear winner today. Wow. Okay, I we're gonna have to look at the chat on this one. All right, Chris says it snow monkey and tiny press. We always trust Chris with what he says. Okay. Oh, he's actually counting. That's awesome. All right. All right, folks. No webinar tomorrow, but I'm back with office hours on Thursday for members and make sure that you've signed up for the best of plugin round up, which is next Tuesday, next Tuesday, where we'll do January through June. We've had a lot of good plugins over the last the last several months here. Next week. Of course, we started out with best odds and it's the Finances section of the fly course. And of course office hours. Now also for those of you who are members, don't forget that we have this month's premium course. The local SEO workshop with Trisha Clements that is coming up on June 27 and 28th. Trisha, all she does is local SEO helping people get set up and optimize. She solves problems for local SEO using Google business profile. And this is what we're going to be covering over those two days. The ranking factors for local search, what drives conversions, how to measure and what might get you suspended on Google business profile. And then day two, she's gonna take all the stuff she taught us in day one, and then teach us how to make money from it which is awesome. What is the must have content on your clients websites, troubleshooting Google reviews, differences and local SEO to focus on and how to do this on a long term. So this is going to be great. Trisha is she's awesome. If you've been a word camp person, chances are you've seen Trisha, she always has purple hair. And she's really a great person and a great teacher and she'll give a lot of fun. Have a lot of fun for us learning all about Google Local on this event. All right, everybody. That's going to wrap it up for us today. I'm gonna side drop in one more time the slide bundle right there in the chat. If you didn't download the list of today's plugins, it's there. Make sure that you have also signed up for that townhall meeting with Matt Cromwell and myself toward the end of June. That's June 21. That link is there in the chat also, until Thursday for you members. I will see you then have a great week. And I'll see you back here for Office. hours on Thursday on I iThemes Training where we go further together.