Got all confused by the Zoom changes this morning. We'll have the caption set up and working here in just a moment.
Course they've now changed where the link is to do captioning in zoom. So pausing just for a moment
okay I think that should work recall seeing captions now someplace they move around on my computer Anybody seen captions another zoom. Okay, you got captions. Excellent. Excellent. So I don't know they're hidden under some window on my computer, but we'll just assume that they're working. get things started. Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the November 2022 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at I iThemes Training and every month we take a look out at the WordPress plugin directory and get about a dozen or so fun plugins we think are worth sharing. These are plugins that typically are had been added to or updated in the WordPress plugin directory each month. Generally speaking, they're all going to be free. I can't think of a premium plugin we've ever done. On the plugin Roundup. These are all free plugins. And by the way, as we're getting started, let me just remind you that you can submit your vote for a plugin if you'd like to do that. Let me just pull that up right here on the iThemes Training website. If you are logged in as a member, you'll have a link here that says suggest a plugin. If you're not a member of iThemes Training or you don't have the iThemes toolkit, you can just go into each individual plug in Roundup webinar and Click the Suggested plug in button. And that will let you suggest a plug in if there's a great free plugin that you know of. We'd love to take a look at it and potentially add it to our list for the next month. And while we're here by the way, let me just point you towards a brand new event that we just scheduled on yesterday. I think Timothy Jacobs is the lead developer for I think security who is also a WordPress Core committer and he's the maintainer of the WordPress REST API. Timothy deep into the WordPress Core community is going to be giving us the preview of what that really preview it's launching today. He'll be giving us a walkthrough of the WordPress 6.1 release, which again is scheduled to drop some time today. So next Tuesday, a week from today, one o'clock. we'd invite you to join us for this event. The link is there in the chat room if you'd like to do that. And Timothy has walked through the last several WordPress releases with us and it's always been a great time. He's a brilliant guy. And has he's one of those unique people who not only is incredibly intelligent but has the ability to explain things in a way that us normal people can understand. So it's always great to hear him talk about core WordPress and answer all the questions that come up. All right, folks, well, let's get started with plugin Roundup, shall we? We got a great list today. Let me drop in one more time. The link to today's handout if you're just coming in a little bit late. Let me drop that in. And then if one of you kind folks wouldn't mind just copying that link and sharing it with folks that come in late. I'd appreciate that. That link will give you this handout and we're gonna start off with a suggested plugin actually two of you suggested the same plugin. Ben Bradley and Karen green both suggested the Find my blocks plugin and we really like it. So let's take a look over here at WP nathan.com where all those things are set up and going. And let us get first of all our computer to stop wobbling around. Here we go. Let's get that plugin activated. And we'll take a look. Now this is a block editor plugin. So this is going to be very helpful if you're using Gutenberg blocks or Kadence blocks all those things and this is the block I find my blocks plugin. So let's activate that. And when that is active, we will see a really interesting little spot here down under the tools I always forget where this thing is located just a minute. It is under where is it
find my blocks under Tools. There it is. All right so what this is doing right now is it scanning the website and giving us a list of all the blocks that are used on the website. And it is 10 It will tell us what pages they are located on. So if you are building with the block editor, this is an indispensable plugin in my opinion. So for example here the Kadence advanced heading block is used in five posts so we can take a look at that here they all are listed 28 usages in this post in the on the webinar demos page here on this page. It's used three times. So we can actually edit the post from right here as well. And it will show us all of our Kadence headings and so forth that are used. As you look down here, let's say wherever we use the video pop up we'll click on that. Oh, it's right here under this particular page called Block styling back in. How about remember the short card that's interesting? So that's in one spot. Yeah, so there's all of our blocks that are in use on the site in total. You can also if you just want to find say, for example, just filter by Kadence. It'll just show those so you get a live preview of the blocks. And it's pretty nifty. So again, this is just blood. These are blocks. If you're using a page builder, this is not modules for your page builder. It's only your your Gutenberg block editor blocks that are in use on the site. So very powerful plugin if you're building with the block editor. Thanks Ben and Karen for submitting this. Any questions or comments on this? One? Really, really very cool. Yep. All right. Next one down the list is a plugin from my friend Scott Kingsley Clark, who is the developer of the pods plugin that we've liked for so long here on iThemes Training. Scott's a brilliant WordPress developer and he's come up with I think, a very clever, simple plugin that does something that you might find helpful. How many times have you been working on a particular part of the site? And maybe it's a site especially it has a really long admin menu like this. And you find yourself scrolling down to try to find oh, here's the menu of things I'm working on. And here's the sub menus, right? So, you know, sometimes you have to scroll down and find all those things or you forget where in the list, this particular custom post type is located. Well, what this plugin is going to do, it's a very simple thing that it does. If you're working in a particular area it's going to move that menu to the very top so let's just activate sticky admin menu right there. And notice we are in the plugins area right now. And when this page refreshes, look, plugins is now located at the top so we don't have to scroll down to find our plugin area. It just knows that we're in that area so it moves that portion of the menu to the top. So let's say you're working in Gravity Forms. So we click into Gravity Forms and now it is located at the top instead of having to scroll down and find that spot where it happens to be opened in the middle of a really long WordPress admin menu. So again, it's a simple plugin, but it does a very important thing. And it also of course, works for any sub menus like if you're working in WooCommerce and we go to settings, the whole WooCommerce menu item pops up to the top as long as we are in it. Melanie does it apply to all users? Well, it it's your user, right so like it, this plugin knows that I'm on this page right now for me in this box. And so it moves that whole menu all the associated items to the top in the Admin menu. So it there are no settings to this plugin. So if I'm logged in as another user, or you know, other user levels, editors, you know, subscribers, authors, whatever it will, it's going to do that. Yeah, so you can't restrict this by role, at least right now. Maybe Scott would do something like that. I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of one and done. It's active or it's not right. There's no, there are no settings for this plugin. But it's handy, right. It's really simple. But handy. Yeah. Devin, could you imagine a live search bar in the sidebar? We've actually done plugins that do that and matter of fact, there's a plugin in the list today that does something similar to exactly what you're describing. Alright, any other questions or comments on this one that is sticky admin menu from SK see a very brilliant WordPress developer All right, so moving right along. We're just making record time here today. I Stacy saying it would confuse your clients. Yeah, it may and so don't use it right.
But maybe, particularly if you're working on a site, this can be a nice little, you know, Quick Install and activate and you might find that it was easier. Okay, next on the list is a pretty nifty little plugin called hide any page from Luis Medina. mendillo, right so? You so if you've ever wanted to hide a particular page or post or whatever, from a search engine, there's a number of ways you can do that. You know, you might have a an SEO plugin, for example, like Yoast SEO that hides, pages and posts. If you go down to the advanced settings in Yoast and a particular page or post you can set to no index and so forth. But this is a plugin that's going to give you that same functionality on any page or post and it gives you a list of everything actually, pardon me. It only currently works with pages right now not post your custom post types. So this is going to give you a list of all the pages on your site and allow you to set those as hidden. So let's go activate this one. And before I go any further, I'm going to deactivate the couple of things that we have activated already like sticky menu also. And let's quick activate hide my page
Alright, so now that this is active, we have the ability to go down here under settings to hide any page. And what you're gonna see here is a list of pages. So let's just go to one of these pages for example, like say you might always want to hide a thank you page. So here's like a thank you page or redirected after a form or whatever. So let's just take a look at this page really quick. It's a very simple page. It says probably thank you. I don't know what this is about. It's something leftover from some demo we did a million years ago here. And if we go here and we check this box, and save what this is actually going to do now let's just take a quick look. All right. What this is going to do is on the source of this page, buried at some place right here, it adds are no index, no archive, no snippet. So it adds this meta tag on the page where the checkbox is located. So right here, you can just here's your list of pages. You can check check, check, check, check the ones that you want to turn off and the ones that you do so it's just simply going to add this no index, no archive, no snippet tag in the meta in the page. So search engines should leave that page alone. So that's pretty helpful. I think, especially as you're preparing a site to launch. There's a number of pages that you might not want to index the success page as being one of those or maybe terms and conditions or those sorts of things. To check check, check. Carry Great question. Do pages still show up in your website search? Yes. So this what this plugin does, is it gives you the meta tag to keep your page from being indexed by search engines. So it does not affect the WordPress search itself.
Yeah, any other questions or comments on this one? Yeah, Doug, it will really wish it would do custom post types. Yeah. Maybe the developer is going to do that eventually done. Oh, this is a brand new as I recall. Brand new plugin. Yeah, just launched a couple months ago. Very low install base. This is one of those little gems that we dig out of these plugin roundups that do cool thing they're brand new, they've just been launched. So pro version, is there a pro version? How not? They're not talking about a pro version. Yeah, but Melanie's being probably rightly skeptical about this one. Who knows? But it just reached out to the developer. That's what the support forums are for dropping a ticket and say, Hey, here's a feature request. Could we add posts and custom post types and so forth? There honestly, I mean, custom post types for sure. posts. I mean, if it's a post, you probably want it indexed. Right? And under what circumstances would a custom post type not need to be indexed? That's the That's the question. I'm sure there's a use case for that. Anyhow, that is hide any page, nifty little plugin. Any further questions or comments on that one?
All right, next up is a really nice block slider. So before everybody goes off about sliders, let me just say this. I am generally anti slider on the homepage and generally anti slider when it comes to you know bearing information on slide to slide. There are however, use cases where sliders can actually be helpful, like, you know, having something that's going to engage the user that they'll actually flip through, maybe not in the hero area of a website, but on some other page showing different options or different views of things or whatever sliders are not all bad, they're just frequently used poorly and bad places. So here's a great little plugin to do just that. Now. It is called be slider. And let's go activate that. It is really simple to use and pretty easy to get something that looks pretty nice. So we have a page setup for this. So you can see what it looks like. Here's the finished product. So you can imagine this could just be like a photo gallery. It could be features of something that you flip through. It's really easy to use. You've got the options for these dots or bars down here to show some navigation. You can change all of this stuff on mobile, it'll be a touch swipe. So it works really nicely. And here's how it actually works to put it together. This is what's cool about it. It's just super simple to actually create the slider. So let's go here into our slider and notice each of your slides are just right here. So let's add a new slide. And we're going to call this let's grab an image for our media library. who that guy is like he came in with a Kadence website demo. Let's put a space shuttle launch. And the title is going to be shown up here yet Yeah. There it is. Our card title will be mine march today, I don't know whatever. And you got your description right here. And there it is. It's on it's like it's ready to go right now. Now we have a lot of control over styling. As you know where's the content going to be? The overlay misspelled overlay color, we can you know you can match that to your site if you want
your title styles, colors and so forth to help with the description looks like the arrow style. You can change your sizes here. The indicators which are these are they dots or dashes. You can change that how big they are. When something is active, what color it changes. Yeah, so really simple. Yeah. Exactly. Melanie. It's so so simple and user friendly. It is accessible. As you can see I'm tabbing through the things right now. I'm using my keyboard now to tab through the slides. Yeah, so really simple to use, as far as sliders Go. Now. The Kadence advanced slider is even more features than this. It's also accessible it works really well if you're not using Kadence this is a good option. That is the B slider from B plugins, LLC. Any other questions or comments on this one? Yeah, the Kadence slider is just as user friendly. It actually has more features even than this one does.
Alrighty, moving down the list to block styling back end. Now, this is a plugin that I don't know that I would continue to use for a long time. But especially if I was just getting used to the block editor. This would be a plugin that I think I would like and basically what it's going to do is it adds labels to the different parts of the block editor so you can kind of see what's going on. It might also be something that you turn on and off depending on if it's a complex page layout or not, and it's easy to get lost in some of those navigations so let's take a look at block styling back end
and let's just jump into one of our pages here
All right, so I just downloaded into this page. One of the Kadence pre done page layouts for the about us page. And so there's a lot of stuff here. There's some rows and sections and lots of different you know, okay, so let's go in and edit this. And you will see that each one of these areas now has its own little label like that. So you can see you know exactly what's going on and how things are set up. Now. Again, once you get used to the block editor and how things work probably this is not something you'd want to keep on the site but as you're getting your feet wet and kind of seeing what's what this is, this is pretty good. So as I click section or row it is missing a I have in my constant load up here. That's weird like that. Something doesn't like something else. Let's see if I have something active that might be conflicting. It's not this block styling plugin because this worked just fine when I was looking at it. beforehand. Oh good. This is not good. Yeah, cuz what we need right now is a server error. During a plugin round up I'm not seeing anything else that is problem is the slider active? Yeah, be slider still active, but that shouldn't have caused that issue. Now let's just refresh and see what happens here. I don't know something's going on. That is weird. We can't blame WordPress six. One yet. No, we cannot. Let's see. This is disconcerting. Wow, so the server's going kaput. This thing is on its own VPS Okay, there are notices from cPanel that things are not functioning well. Interesting. Interesting something is breaking
Well, nothing like a live webinar to have something like this happen right? Look at this. Yeah, we're having some server issues. Melanie it may be under attack actually. And I can't remember if this is behind Cloudflare or not.
Let's take a quick look. So if you tune in for the plugin Roundup, we are now going to troubleshoot a server and see what's going on here. Okay, actually, I do have them up. Nathan is behind Cloudflare. So let's put us under under attack mode and see if that helps. Doesn't look like it's really getting any tons of traffic or anything.
This is what happens when you put the site under under attack mode. You get that little JavaScript challenge. Isn't that interesting? Well, that seemed to help. Delightful. Ah, the glories of Cloudflare Yeah, maybe getting a bot attack so we'll just keep it under attack mode until we finish up today. And then I'll go wage war against the bots. Because you know, what else do I have to do today? All right. So let's, let's go back to this block styling back end. It's still not showing up look at this so weird.
Well anyway, you see what happens is you know you get the like all the icons are gone. What is up with this, y'all Isn't that something? I mean, the WordPress icon is gone. Ah, it's not the cache. Let's see what other plugins are active. Backup Buddy disable comments. Gravity Forms the analytics which we need to lie right now. Kadence stuff. Pods Regenerate Thumbnails. I mean, these are all solid plugins. Oh my goodness. How weird is that? The server ate too much candy last night. Maybe so yeah, good grief. Well look, it's the WordPress icon is gone.
I know it's back look it's back. All right, who broke my WordPress let's try this one more time and then I'm gonna move on. Like styling. Anyway, you get the idea. It puts labels at the top of the blocks and it makes them easier to work with. So there there he go. So weird. Maybe there's something in this plug in now. Because that seems to be this worked perfectly yesterday. It worked absolutely perfectly yesterday. I don't know maybe there's something like that plugin. It might wonder if it dropped an update today and there's an error. Yes, look at that. 19 hours ago. The plugin developer buddied up the plugin. That's it. That's what it is. Okay, so, you know, if you want to break your website, use this plugin. That's what I'm saying. Okay, I'll tell you which plugin is not going to be on the top list today. And it's that one all right, moving down the list. Let's just pretend like that. Never happened, Shelly. Let's go on down to a really fun little plugin. Now this was from Devon's in reference a Devon's comment earlier command bar for WP admin from Jared Luxenberg. So this is an interesting plugin. Commit, you're either gonna love this or you're gonna hate it. Chris loves it. So, here's the command bar. And at the top, Devin per your request, find anything. Anything Well, anything related to this WordPress install. Okay, so we click in here, and let's say I mean what is something that you always struggled to look for? What is something? It's hard like you forget where things are? Like, hello. Let's just say the car keys Thank you, Paul. Let's say site health.
Oh, it's content. So let's say we're looking for I thought this did everything didn't this do
does navigation here all right. Oh my goodness. This is the this is gonna go down as the webinar where everything went wrong. You can filter it by various types of things.
Users tools general. It's not finding sub items. Well well, what is also cool here is you can set up hot keys here. So let's say if you I set this one up earlier.
No
four forms. So let's just say that you you want to you're going back and forth in forums a lot. You can set up a hotkey here so like if I type G R, it goes to Gravity Forms just like that. G D, which, you know, okay, goes to the dashboard. Or it could mean something completely different. GP goes to posts, so it's a neat little way to
set up your own hotkeys. I thought the search feature was more more better than that.
Okay, anyway, that is Command Bar two in a row that have not gone as expected.
There's some other things I'm going to keep moving on here. All right, this is one we actually they are the Estera Gremlin is about indeed. Yeah, Peter. Maybe it's the pro version that does that. This is a this is actually a a plugin that we like internally at the agency, bulk page generator by geek code labs. So this month, and next month, we're talking about building a Starter Site for your development to spin up for every new site so you don't have to do everything, just starting from scratch each time and this is a great plugin to generate multiple pages all at once. So in our process, for example, we start off me I'm gonna make a list of pages we gather content from the client, and then when you actually move into building things out on the website, instead of having to add new page and publish add a page publish, add a page publish. This is a plugin that will let you just stack up a list of pages and hit the button and it just makes them all or custom post types or posts or whatever. So bolc page generator is the name of this plugin. Let's activate it. The UI is really nice. And it does a lot of things that we really don't even use but it does create its own top level menu item. But this is not a plugin. We're going to keep active after the site goes anyway. So posts with the same content. You can add a prefix for a post fix whatever that is. What is this going to be? Let's just do this. Let's say we're gonna make this by the way can also be done set up to generate WooCommerce products, custom post types. Let's just do some pages. I'm gonna put a prefix of test space so I can go delete all these later. Actually, I'm gonna make it an exclamation point. So it starts at the top and then we're just gonna make a list of pages and posts. So we're gonna call this test, one, separated by a pipe, test two
you can add content to the pages if you want. I'm just gonna drop some ipsum text in there. You can put featured images on it if you want, you can set all these other options. I'm just gonna hit save and this is gonna go generate those pages for me. Nope, status is published. And boom, done. So we go over here to pages. And look there they all are that fast. Super, super super fast.
So that again can be used to generate content in any post type any standardly defined WordPress custom post type. And there they are. We drop in here. All the content is there already. Now it does some additional things as well. It will all you can also have it set up. Like if you have a bunch of posts to set up all at once. You can actually do that all right from here. Post let's let's say it's your client gives you five posts to add there's a post it's going to be published. You know we're going to close our comments we can say you know select an author, title content excerpt featured image, add another one and so you can actually stack up the content of all the posts, hit the button once and boom, they're all published at the same time. So pretty cool. We don't use this very much, but the actual bulk publishing of the pages is pretty nice. You can even do post with a dynamic title. Not quite sure. Like you can get really creative with this. I don't know why you'd ever use this. You certainly could. But there it is. It'll create a bunch of different posts with variable dynamic content based on what you set. So that is the bulk page generator from Geek Code Lab. Questions or comments on that one? Oh, John, so you're saying this could be gray hat SEO? Yeah, I mean, the the way I would use this plugin is you know if I know I've got this ad I've got to set up 12 pages on this new site that I'm building, rather than going ad page, new page save published at a back and forth, I would just stack them all up here, hit the button and they're all there. Then we can go in and build the pages. It just saves time. generating multiple pages all at the same time. This lets you put in, you know content if you'd like it, but you don't have to do it that way. Yeah. All right. Next up, while speaking of cats as Melanie's cat apparently typed in the chat for us that was awesome. This is a plugin called Cat folders. Now we've done a number of different media library type folders over the years and this is certainly one of them. It works well. And it's especially good for sites that have lots of different photos. Now, this plugin does not affect anything on the front end of the site. This is not like a director you know get folder ring Media Gallery. For the front end. It's not about that. This is only for convenience on the back end of the website. I believe this is pretty well. It is called Cat folders and it will allow you to put your folder put your photos in the media library or other any media type in the media library into folders that you set up. So we've activated the plug in. Let's go over here to the media library and you will see the new beautiful UI like that. There's a folder called Test folder isn't that nice? I think I have some PDFs in here. Let's see. Aren't there PDFs in the media library? This would be another Okay. Well, there's just one. But let's make a new library. Let's call this PDFs. Look at that. And I'm just going to drag this right into there. And boom, done. So you could for example, put all your PDFs in a folder or mp3 or you know, whatever. So no, this is not as soon as asking does it change the link? No. It doesn't do anything about any of this to the front end of the site. This is simply a UI for the media library. To make it easier on you to find things so you can set up you know, here's things that are Uncategorized it does work in either grid. Or list mode. Like here's a bunch of logos we could say let's make a new folder. logos to get back to I think I can multiple drag these. Yes, boom. And just have a nice little classification. So you just click on it and there's all your logos in that cool
there are some settings where you can decide you know what folder you want to start off in when you open this thing up. Everything else is kind of pro version related. You can nest the pro version lets you nest folders and do some other things. But yeah, pretty cool. So it is similar to the old the file file bird plugin that we reviewed does a very similar thing. There's a number of plugins out there that do something like this. But I like this one. It works really well. It's the latest one that we've seen in the media library or in the plugin directory and it works really well. It's like happy files as well. Happy files is a good premium plugin that does the similar thing. So let's cat folders. You got a big media library, or you know a client might like this to find the things we're looking for. Works really well. All right, let's move to the next one which is this is kind of cool tabs for WooCommerce. Wouldn't it be nice? You know how WooCommerce has the little tabs for additional information? Wouldn't it be nice to quickly and easily set up your own tab with some particular information about a product? Well, this lets you do that. Yeah, if only there were a plugin for this. Yes. So there is one. And it is called ironically tabs for WooCommerce. Yeah, so sue, you used to have to use like a code snippet to do this, right. This gives you a UI to do it right within the product. So tabs for WooCommerce. Let's get it active. Now. This is per product. Okay. You have to set it up per product. So let's go into our amazing car. Ben I is this is a new Kadence shop kit. I must confess I have not played with the new Kadence shop kit or had time to do so as much as I would like. Yeah, it may be in the new Kadence shop kit. So here's our custom tab. This is what it does. It puts us right here. If there's no title, the tab isn't visible. But if it is if it does have a title, or just for example, we can take this out. Well, here's the tab. This is the custom tab boom. If we take out the title, it won't show. Right. So the putting a title into that area is what turns it on and off. And you can put whatever you want right there. I mean it's plain text, but you could put HTML or whatever you you know you want to do. See, does it rename existing tabs? Nope. It creates a tab. This is what it does. This is you're looking at exactly what it does right here. It adds a custom tab option here. And if you put something in here it will show up and then it will show whatever's under here. Very simple, very simple. But this will do shortcodes like you can put it you know, put a shortcode there. It'll whatever renders out it just renders out HTML should work. Yeah. That is called tabs for the for WooCommerce from WP branch. multiple tabs will be supported in the pro version which is yet to come. But there'll be multiple these options. Karen can it replace existing tabs? No, it this. This is exactly what it does it it gives you the option to put in a custom tab. And if it's there, it shows up. If the title is not there, it doesn't show up. So it's very simple. Maybe the pro version when the developer gets that out maybe it will do some things like that. Yeah, Melanie great for instruct for videos and things of that nature. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Any other questions or comments on this one? Pretty fun stuff. All right. Here's another one that we use all the time. on the agency side it is called export all URLs from Atlas Gondal. So this is a great plugin if especially when you are getting ready to rebuild a site, if you are so you've got a site with lots of content and you want to kind of get it structured or even set up a redirect this export all URLs is a super helpful plugin, because it lets you believe it or not, export all the URLs out of your WordPress site. Isn't that clever? Yeah. So let's go into export all URLs. It's more powerful than the previous plug in called export some URLs. This does all I'm just kidding. So this is what it lets you do. What are you What are you wanting to export everything or just the particular custom post types on the site?
What do you all want to export? We want to export the URLs, the post id like you can export all of this stuff. What post status, you can filter additionally between just date ranges and by author. There's additional advanced options like do we want all the WooCommerce stuff in there or not? Do we want to exclude the domain URL? This is really helpful. So do you want it to be you know.com/sample posts or just sample posts? So are we showing the domain or not? You can set up the name of the CSV and then what are we going to output so if it outputs here, it's just going to show on the screen that's not really helpful, and I really don't understand why that option exists. I'm going to say Export the CSV file, so we're just exporting everything. I'm gonna hit export now. And it's going to reload this page and look click here to download. So I'm going to download this. And let me show you what it just generated. Excel is opening. And here is what it gave me. According to my settings, there's my post id, my page titles, my URLs, and the category that it's in if it's opposed, right. So there it all is. And so you can do things with this. You can set up real easy redirections and whatnot. Super helpful. And then when you're done, you click here because what it's done is it's actually created a CSV file in the media library and in a folder in one of the uploads folders. Click here to delete it and it just cleans that file out. It's gone. So now there's nothing left other than what I have right here open. So this is a great plugin. We use this frequently. Again, when we're you know, taking on a site or we're about to rebuild a site or whatever, John Yeah, very similar to Screaming Frog except from within the site itself. So you export all the things out of WordPress. Yeah, all the URLs. So super helpful. Really liked this one. That is great plugin any other questions or comments on this one?
Okay, moving down the list to potentially the most fun plugin of the Roundup, which is called independent analytics. So there's quite the kerfuffle about Google Analytics and privacy violations and all those things. By the way did you see the news story? Just last week that as I predicted, Google would delay the sunsetting of Universal Analytics for another year, and they have, it's going to be 2024. Now it is not going to come to an end in 2023. You can Google that it's out there. Anyway, but it's, you know, we're all kind of starting to move towards privacy for analytics. It's become a real thing here is and really let me back up a second. Google Analytics doesn't have to be on every site, right? A lot of sites don't need all the detail that Google Analytics offers. It's part of designing sites for privacy first, like what does the site owner really want? They just want to know how much traffic is coming to the site and what pages they visit. If that's the case, which I mean for many of us. That's all our clients want to know. I want to know that 512 people this week, visited my website or whatever. This plugin does that and it does it for free. And it does it with with a privacy first mindset. Everything stays on the site. So it's called independent Analytics, Google Analytics alternative for WordPress. It's a free plugin. You don't have to create an account anywhere else. Everything stays on your site, and it is tracking just in the database. And all the analytics show up here. So let me show you. I've been running this plugin for a couple of weeks on this site just to try to collect some traffic and I realized just yesterday that I had it turned off, it wasn't checking logged in. So it wasn't really there's very little traffic to the site other than me, but you kind of see what's going on here. It's a nice little look at this. It's a nice little graphic views and visitors. Let's take a look here under the actual menu. I had there it is pretty lightweight, actually. Yeah. So it's kind of nice, sort of this kind of feels like Monster insights to me. The GUI here is pretty nice. We can see here, our pages and how many times they've been viewed and how many visitors viewed them. You know, what kind of page is it? Yeah, so it's very basic in the free version. But for many folks, this is really all they need. Right? Interesting. You can also get the refer errs. So what sites are linking to me? These came from a Google search the scammer wonder who found me on a Google search. That's weird. For David P Nathan. And most of these ones, most of the traffic is direct. We can also take a look at geographics. So we'll see where they came from. Three views from one person in Canada and 33 views from 14 folks in the US, somebody over here in Sweden. I wonder who that was Ben? Yeah, so it's all it's showing up right here. Right? Pretty nice. There's me. So we're not collecting IP addresses. We're just collecting geo data. So it's not personally identifiable information. Yeah, some other things here. What day of the week the week starts track, do we this is what I should have turned on. And it would have tracked all our work. You can also block IP addresses if you want. which users can view the analytics you can set by role there. This is kind of cool look at this enabled the public view counter. So we're gonna party like it's 1999 and put analytics on the front end of our site. Let's just say let's just show our view count on pages and save settings. And look here at the bottom of all of my pages now isn't Lee that we're gonna views 30 Interesting. Isn't that something, you can put your little view meter down at the bottom. And by the way, you can even do it by a shortcode only on certain posts or pages or whatever. You put it just right there at the bottom. You know, there's maybe a page that your client just wants to have something hidden at the bottom, that teeny tiny at the bottom that shows them how many views were there. So it's interesting. This is an interesting plugin for free it is quite good. It does have also some posts and you know how to use and so forth here. Yeah, so the pro version ads campaign tracking, it starts at $39 a year per site, or $119 lifetime per site, all the way up to you can buy it lifetime $599 lifetime unlimited sites right now during the early adopter discounts. So pretty interesting. I don't know anything about these folks. Other than pretty cool plugin. That's a privacy first analytics focus. So
I don't know what do you think might be worth playing around with put it on a put it on a site, put it on one of your own sites and just see what you get? Very, very interesting. Class says he's just talked all of his clients out of displaying visitor counts. Okay, he was old enough to remember who do you remember the little black and brown the little black number counter back in the day that had like the LED bright green numbers at the bottom? Oh, yeah. Back in the day, you know, you're an OG web person. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Anyway, so this isn't that, but it's a WordPress based analytics pretty nice. Yeah. Okay. Elizabeth said she's one Lizabeth there is a plugin and we did it one time in this plugin Roundup. That was one of the OG green LCD looking display page. counters that you could drop on the bottom of a site with a shortcode I don't remember it's been a long time ago, but it does exist and it's probably still out there. If you look hard enough for it. Yeah, it's the old MySpace counter Joe. That's it. I think it was actually in back in the day it was like a PL script. There's a Perl script that you had to fake run all your site and get it to work. Oh, well, anyway. Okay. Last but certainly not least, is a plugin called ally buttons or accessibility buttons a 11. Why buttons. This is this is a fun little plugin. So those of you that are really designing for accessibility. Now, this is a little suite of buttons that you might want to be aware of. It's pretty cool. I just have them dropped across the top of the page, but you can do them individually. They are block based. But let me show you how this works. I got to remember what page and I put it on. I think it was my Gutenberg test page. Yes. Okay. So here they are. Now, you can only do some of these. You don't have to put them at the top you can put them like for example, they could be in the Kadence element at the top or the bottom of the page. Or off to the side or there's lots of options here. But look what we can do here. We've got a skip to content button. Pretty nice. We've got a high contrast mode. Yikes. But it works. We have a toggle a readable font. So this is a particular type face that is apparently more readable to people who have dyslexia or other some sort of a reading difficulty. This lets you bump up the font sizes, decrease the font or just reset the font sizes. So it's a set of accessibility buttons, which honestly is very similar to some of those overlays that you know just drop stuff onto your site. A lot of the functionality that goes along there. This is something built into Word. It's a WordPress plugin. You can drop it wherever you want.
Pardon me, and it edits in the block editor. So let me just open this up. And you'll see right here, this is our accessibility buttons and we have lots of different styles of how this can work. You can actually change you know, you can change the titles of the buttons right there. You have options to change color and the background of the button. If we want it to be something else we can do that. Yeah, it's pretty nice. Melanie doesn't the theme have skipped content. Kadence does Yes. But maybe your theme doesn't and here's a way to drop it in there if you want it but so these can be put anywhere. It's just a block. It can be a reusable block. It can be in a Kadence element and hung on any hook anywhere in the site. It could be in a sidebar if you wanted to do that. This gives you the ability to orient vertically like this for example. So you can do a lot with this pretty interesting
thing I'm still having server problems something's going on the server still. My goodness. I know something's going on in the server. But that's accessibility buttons.
It does some fun stuff. Here's the name of that typeface. The Atkinson hyper legible font. So doesn't replace the need to make the site accessible any more than dropping over, you know, one of the one of those overlays that are marketed heavily to web developers that are not solutions for accessibility. You still have work to do. This is just a suite of buttons that might make your site more, you know, accessible than by default. So anyway, that is accessibility buttons, any further questions or comments about that one before we wrap this up?
All right, folks. That brings us to the end of the November 2022 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. So it's time for your vote one vote one vote only please What was your favorite plugin of the month? Next month is the best of plugin roundup so we'll be tabulating all these results and giving you the best of the best for the last six months. Let's take a look Bob page generator export URLs, independent analytics, find my blocks independent analytics, find my blocks admin export. In analytics find my blocks folders. Oh my Yeah, this is going to be hard to Okay. It looks like no clear winner. Okay, independent analytics definitely has a bunch of votes. Find my blocks has a bunch of votes. Chris, you're just gonna have to look at the chat log. Because this is there's there's way way way a lot of votes here. Independent analytics is definitely on there. Joe says all the broken ones so we're going to forget he said that? Because I'm already regretting half of the plugins on this list. That worked perfectly. Just yesterday. This seems to always happen. Ah, yes. All right. So folks, that is gonna wrap us up for today. There is no webinar tomorrow on I iThemes Training but as I mentioned, if you missed it, if you joined us a little bit late. Office hours for members is on Thursday, but we just added this one. Be sure to register for the WordPress 6.1 launch event with our own Timothy Jacobs WordPress six one is due out today at some point. So if you're like me, you kind of wait for a couple of weeks usually after a major release before you update, but so next week, one week from today, one o'clock, Timothy Jacobs will be taking us through all the features of WordPress 6.1. And that's going to be a great, great event. He's done the last few of the WordPress releases for us and they've always been very, very exciting. Melanie Yes, tomorrow is accessibility day. If you are interested in accessibility and I hope you are Isn't it this what is the link for WordPress success? I think WP accessibility that day. Yes, there it is. If you would like to learn about the WordPress accessibility this there's no better event than this. It's a free 24 hour conference tomorrow, sponsored by Amber Hines have equalized digital and Joe Dolson who did the WP accessibility plug in is on the core accessibility team. Both of those folks that presented here and they're brilliant. Lots of lots of great speakers are lined up over the next couple of days. So check this out, get your ticket if you haven't done so already. It's gonna be a great day of training about accessibility. All right, everybody. I just realized I was sharing those links to not everyone. So there is the link to sign up for the 6.1 event if you haven't done so already. That's going to do it. Alright. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour sorry for the weirdness and server issues and whatever else was going on there. I'm back Thursday for office hours for members and again free webinar next Tuesday about WordPress 6.1. Join us back for that here on iThemes Training, where we go further together.