All right. I believe our captions should be working. Yes, we have captions
almost now we have captions. All right, sorry about that delay. We are now a minute away from getting started with plugin roundup for February 2023. Just about to get started. Yeah, we had the CART services at WordCamp Birmingham this past weekend, which are live captioners which it's really amazing. We actually had a zoom loop setup where they are watching the speaker and hearing the audio and then pushing back live captions to screens. They're pretty cool how they do that. Yeah, in real time, absolutely amazing. So welcome, everybody. Really glad you're here. We're just about ready to get started. I'm going to share with you once again, the handout link in the chat if you're just joining us. You can download the plugin list there and follow along and a bunch of fun things to share with you. I've spent the morning doing something pretty fun here too that I will mention as we get started. Alright, it's three minutes after so I'm gonna start the recording and we will start rounding up some plugins. Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the February 2023 I themes plugin round up here on I iThemes Training. We've been doing this series now for many, many years. I believe we started in 2014. We're just about to come up to nine years of plugin roundups pretty amazing. And we've done many hundreds of plugins. We usually feature about 12 to 15 every month. And these plugins basically come from the plugin repository, the WordPress plugin directory. So we take a look at plugins typically that have been added to or recently updated in that WordPress plug in directory that we can all look at for free and bring you a list of the ones we think are pretty interesting. So the caveat is, as always, right there at the top of the handout that we have not thoroughly tested these plugins okay, we haven't really looked at them very hard other than to say this looks pretty interesting and you might want to check it out for yourself. So we're not guaranteeing the code or guaranteeing that it's accessible or anything like that. But we just thought these are interesting and might be able to serve a purpose in the way that you use WordPress. So we've been talking in the pre show about word camp Birmingham. That was the success this past weekend. That is my local camp here in Birmingham, Alabama. And I was the organizer for speakers for this past weekend. And we had a great time above average content, I would say and several folks that are on the webinar now were there as presenters and attendees and it was great to see Sue and Beth and Paul and Melanie. They're in Birmingham, really great weekend together. I am wearing the WP y'all official t shirt from this weekend. That's what we call word camp Birmingham. WP y'all if you search the hashtag WP all you will find a picture of me dead on the stage because I was a murder victim this last weekend. In the VIP dinner. We had dinner detectives there at for our speaker sponsor dinner the night before the conference and I was the first victim and it was a lot of fun. So just search Twitter. You'll find me laying there I think it was Amber Hines, our accessibility expert took that picture. Anyway, we got a bunch of fun plugins to share with you and the other thing I'm gonna mention before we get to it is I spent the morning getting ready for our free webinar that we have tomorrow here on AI iThemes Training all about AI and I am really excited about this webinar that is coming up tomorrow. If you haven't registered for this, let me drop that in the chat. It's a free webinar. And basically we're gonna be exploring some of these AI tools that are out there a lot with chat GPT but also with a bunch of other free WordPress plugins that leverage AI right there inside of WordPress. So join us for that webinar tomorrow at 1pm Central this same time. If you haven't registered for it, you can do so right there at the link in the chat. Well, that's enough of that. Let's start talking about plugins, shall we? That's why you're all here. It is February 2023. And we've got 1213 plugins in this roundup that I really like and we're going to start off with a couple of WooCommerce plugins, and that I've gotten questions about this from time to time and office hours about whether there was a plugin that would allow you to do gift cards for your WooCommerce store or maybe just store credit and this is a plugin that does both of those things because really, they are kind of the same thing, right? Like a gift card is a thing. But it's really all about I don't have to pay as much when I check out right. And so that's what this plugin does and it does it pretty well especially for a free plugin. So it is called store credit gift cards for WooCommerce. And oh you know what I forgot to mention that we have a new version of WP Nathan out there so we've been talking about this for a while we were gonna have it live for last month's plug in round up but we didn't get it done. A lot of things going on and so this is our Marvel Cinematic Universe themed vert WP Nathan and so we've had the old web Nathan out for quite a while this one all the content is generated by chat GPT and really funny headlines you're welcome to just sort of take a look through some of these like spider man GoFundMe campaign breaks records obviously authored by John Jonah Jameson Jr. For J's that perhaps you recognize anyway, so this is all Kadence blocks all throughout the thing we got a WooCommerce shop with some fun and now gradually we'll build this WP Nathan up like we did the others but we have a few fun products in the store, you know to play around with and we'll be getting to that pretty soon. So anyway, that's out there, WP nathan.com And we're going to start by jumping into that store with this plugin from Pei credit Pei Web Solutions called store credit and gift commerce gift cards for WooCommerce. Let's go ahead and get in there, shall we? activating the plugin as we always know is the first step to success so let's activate store credit. There it is store credit for WooCommerce. So what this is going to do right here under our WooCommerce link, we now have an item for store credit. And this basically gives us some of the settings. So a couple of options here. Do we want to automatically apply the store credit so if this store credit is linked to an email address of a known user, and that user is logged in, do we want to automatically show the store credit there in the checkout process? I think so we should auto apply that. You also have the ability to customize the email that goes out if if and when store credit is assigned. Also, if the store credit or gift card has an expiration date, you can set it to send a reminder email Hey, your store credit is going to expire and there's all the things about that. Also, of course the author's pitching us some related plugins and so forth. But so where do you set up the store credit? It's set up like a coupon. So we're gonna go here under marketing and coupons. And what we will see is that we have a, a code set up as store credit. Let me just jump into this so you can see how this works. We set this up ahead of time just a random string. It's called store credit. And here's what the plugin does. So we actually right here have an option under the coupon data as this is a coupon that works as store credit. So there's the amount there's an expiration date, and you can say, you know, is it I'm gonna say it has to be on, you know, a purchase above $100 Or a percent you know, whatever. So you can actually set where those discounts can be used. For like the maximum percentage of the the order for which this credit can be used is 50% or whatever. We're just going to leave no restrictions for now. You can also just like any coupon, I set it to a minimum maximum spend it cetera. It also has. See here, there's our credit usage, that's this plugin ads where it links this particular code to my email address. And so I'm logged in and if I go to the store, it's set to automatically apply the credit. Let's find something that's about $200 in the store. I think there is something let's see, let's use it for let's use it for Thor's hammer
and we'll view our cart and we're automatically applying the discount. So notice what happens right there. That coupon is automatically applied. I didn't have to do anything it knows I'm logged in with the email address that applies to that coupon and it just works. So that's pretty cool. The other thing you can do is you can set up a gift card item we didn't do that. But you can set up a gift card item that can be purchased in the store and assign store credit to a person's email address and that would send them an email so pretty cool stuff. So that is store credit gift cards for WooCommerce from PI Web Solutions. Any questions or comments about that? A lot of chatter in the chat about people ordering the battle axe I mean you can do it. Paul, that is an excellent question. I don't know how you can ship Thor's hammer because only Thor can pick it up. This is going to be one of those things where it's a willing suspension of disbelief where we just gonna go with the flow. Okay, any any other questions or comments about this one? Pretty nice little plug in does what it's supposed to do, and does it pretty well. All righty, next up is another little WooCommerce plug in and I think this one is going to be popular for any of your clients or you that might have an order picking process. So you know WooCommerce does a pretty good job like you know, it shows you the the list of items in the order. But wouldn't it be nicer if like if you especially for orders that have a lot of different items. Wouldn't it be nicer if you it was easier to pick those items for certain orders. And that's what this is going to do it it sets up a I won't say it's perfect, but it's pretty easy to use in order picking process for the orders that come in. So let's go ahead and activate this plugin
order picking for WooCommerce and we have a couple of orders set up in here. Skip that and you have some options here like you can, you know the order picking what's the status for WooCommerce when the orders ready to be picked. And you've got some other things here. These are premium features for the premium plugin. Let's take a look at orders and you can see the process. Alright, so notice we have a couple of these that are set waiting fulfillment. So let's go up here to order picking this is where we kick off the process. Oh, please choose the orders. Yes, we'll select all of our orders. Order Picking. It's loading them ah look. Now we have this nice interface where we can say Got it. Got it marked as fulfilled. Boom in that cool. So you can even this won't even work on a phone and it kind of orient itself nicely to a phone device where you can pick pick it gives you the picture of the item and then mark it as fulfilled when you're done. Or you can just bounce out of the the modal window there you can see what's happening here. It's fulfilled ready to go. This one is awaiting fulfillment. You can actually access this too, from the individual order screen and go to order picking. Boom, boom, done. Look at that. Pretty cool. So if you have a situation where you have a client that is filling orders themselves, this is a great way to make it easier to just pick those orders through. So that is order picking for WooCommerce by powerful WP questions or comments about that now there is a premium version that has all the things starting at about 50 bucks a site per year
All right. Next down the list we have a couple of analytics options the this new, there's a whole new wave of privacy focused analytics that is surfacing because of the need that's generated by areas in which privacy concerns cause you to be very careful about what analytics platform that you're going to use. Of course, you know, the big deal is GDPR. And Google's Universal Analytics, which is being completely retired in about mid year this year in favor of the more privacy focused Google Analytics four. But a lot of folks are saying I'm just done with Google like I'm done with all of the privacy concerns. I just don't want to be any part of that whatsoever. And there's there have been a number of WordPress WordPress based analytics plugins that we've talked about. We did one at the end of last year called independent analytics. That is quite good. We really really liked that one. Now there's a couple I'm going to show you today. Maybe not quite as good as that one but they are nevertheless free good analytics plugins that work right from within WordPress. The data never leaves your WordPress install. And like this one is cookie lists. So it's not tracking IP addresses. It's simply giving you visitor statistics now, one of the things that you that you'll realize about in a privacy first analytics product like these are like independent analytics is that you tend not to get I mean it's not they're not as feature rich. As you know, some of the other, you know, like a Google Analytics for for example, but if what you're looking for is just, I mean, honestly, what many site owners want is how many people are visiting my site like this month? How many people took a look at my site, and maybe what pages are posted they visit? That's exactly what these do. They do it at no cost. And they do it in a privacy focused way. So let's take a look first at cookieless analytics. Now we've had this running for a couple days on the site, just so that we could see you know, kind of get some get some data. So this is actually going to show a dashboard widget and then there's a link here under the dashboard. So we'll click here and take a look here is our cookieless analytics. dashboard widget so y'all go on over there to WP nathan.com. And we'll get to check this live traffic. So it sees me on the site right now. There's been 42 page views today, all on the desktop, and here are the pages that have been visited. So that's pretty cool. How about the last seven days? We're thinking about it here. Produce still thinking about it. Wow, that's really taking a minute
Oh, we may have a problem
I wonder if I've got a WP Nathan problem. I think something has happened to WP Nathan. Okay, no. Oh Boom. That's not good. That my friends is a VPS problem. I don't know what's going on there. Okay, stop going to WP Nathan.
Interesting. Well, let's do some detailed analytics and go there
Yeah, that's a hard it should not have crashed but I've got to kind of take a look at this from the hosting perspective. So we have some more interesting things here. We have some desktop versus mobile over the over this period within which we can set pageviews sessions average time on the site. That refers so any referral traffic will be tracked here. That's just simply from the HTTP referral header that comes in with every browser visit. And then we have our top pages. So it's, again, very basic analytics, but honestly, for many clients, and just for Mitt for a basic site, it's might be all you need. So why bring in the weight of, you know, calling an external script from Google Analytics and who knows what's actually happening behind the scenes with privacy? I mean, you know, who knows? So this is a good option to you know, to bring in a privacy focused analytics to your website. So that's cookie less analytics. Now there's another one that is similar here it is called simplest analytics from Stefan place. Now, this again, it is a it does not connect to any services outside your website. It's all WordPress based, and it's going to track essentially the same things. Now one thing that this one does that the other doesn't, is it does include some WooCommerce data, which is kind of cool. It also gives you the ability on the free version to track up to five campaigns. So you can use a UTM code here if you know what that is and how to use it. You can also set up five different events. So for example, if you have a primary call to action button on your website, you can very easily set that up as an event to see oh, I had 50 visitors and that event of clicking my primary call to action is only you know, like it got five clicks or whatever. So yes, this is brand new. It is it was just released, like just released, like in the last few weeks. And again, this is this is the both the beauty it's a double edged sword of the plugin roundup right so we find these new plugins that could be rockstars or they might be trash. Yeah, we take a look at him and see, you know, see how they're doing. But again, this is one of those that's fewer than 10 installs. So that's that's a red flag. But again, it's brand new. So anyway, let's take a look at simplest analytics. Let's go it is down. It lives down here under the web analytics link. And here, look here, there's 170 visits in our time period, which is here. Visitors tracked events. Got a couple little graphs, it's gonna get better once we get some historical data in there. Here's our page views like that kind of nice. We can sort by who gets the visits. Kind of cool. When you go to WooCommerce and take a look at had a couple sales like that. That's kind of nice. The referrers that made a sale no refer because we went to the site directly. So kind of cool. raw data. This is all the actual tracking stuff. So you can actually get into it and see what's actually going on behind the scenes. Now here in the Settings area is where you can set up your, your campaigns or your events. So with a simple query string on a link somewhere just like you would use it doesn't have to be a UTM code. That's a Google thing. This can be anything you would call it campaign equals whatever like it says here, and you can start to that campaign will start to show up in your analytics. And so this is the URL parameter, campaign equals and then that so this would be campaign equals i themes. So you would link to this as they'll be nathan.com Question mark campaign equals AI themes, and any links that came through that would be tracked in our report. So it's pretty cool. Here's our events, where you basically set up just like you would in Google Analytics, find a class or an ID, that is your conversion metric that you're trying to track. So very easy to set up. You just put it in there and it works. And you get up to five of those in the free version as well. So questions about any of these do like syn client reporting, no, these are basic, basic basic built into WordPress analytics systems. So this is something I would encourage the client to go just jump into WordPress and take a look at so very basic, WordPress based privacy first analytics. Barney, how much of a load would this be? Not a lot because it's all happening inside of WordPress. It's not loading anything externally. When you load a page, it's when the page is loaded. It's doing its making some database changes to track the the view of the pages now this I would guess on you know, and again, I haven't like done a deep dive under the hood for the code of all these things probably, nor would you want me to, but like these WordPress based analytics, I would imagine are better on a lower traffic site. Like if your site is getting 100,000 visitors a day. This is I mean, that could quickly overload the database, right? But if it's a basic site, like many of us hosts, that's just it's a brochure site for a client or a, you know, moderately trafficked site, you know, 1000 views a day even maybe something like this could work really well. But I don't think if it's a super high traffic site, I don't think you'd want to use a WordPress based analytics. Does that help any other questions about these? Two interesting WordPress based analytics plugins All right.
Okay, let's move on to the next one, which is okay, this one's interesting. Now, I, I like and don't like this plugin all at the same time. Like it's a little tough to get your hands around. But how many of you have a client and they like to, you know, maybe they have just a few events every year. It's not enough to install, like the events calendar or some big event management plugin on there. And maybe they just want a blog post or landing page, but they would like the ability in an easy way for people to add that event to the calendar. Right? I just like to the like for a user to go on there they view the event, oh, I can add this to my calendar with this button. Right. So that's what this does. And it's interesting. Now you do have to kind of get into the weeds. This is not something that I would say a client, for example, could do by themselves unless they are more of an advanced user. This is something that probably you as a developer would would need to add and manage. But it's like once you see what's going on, it's fairly simple. So let me go in here and actually activate the Add to Calendar button and then I will go over to the page we have set up for this and we'll take a look. Okay, so here's just a page and there's a button. And this is this is a block by the way. It is Add to Calendar button block right there
and when I click this block, this is where it gets a little squirrely, okay. So I don't know that I would really trust a client to get in here and do this because you do have to manually add these things. So this is what's gonna go on to the person's calendar. The name of the event is MCU event the start date is this day, which calendar options am I going to allow these? The location is Stark Tower now where did all this come from? You may ask? Well, it came from the plugin page. And there is a see if we're here, or is it someplace else think there's a documentation is probably on the site.
configuration there it is. Okay, so here's all the values that you can put in there start time in time, you know, location status, is it confirm, cancel and whatever. You can do all sorts of things in here to fill out all the forms in the calendar. So let's see what this looks like on the front end. It's going to look like probably how you would expect it to look boom. A mouse over and look at that. I can just select the calendar I want to add it to so if I want to add it to my Google Calendar, look at that. It filled in all the things start tower all day event. There you go. It just knew what to do with it. So it's pretty cool. If you know if you don't need a full event calendar, but yet you still want to add an Add to Calendar button somewhere. This is a really easy thing to do. And like I put a little checkmark there because I did it. That's kind of nice. Christine is asking Can this button be tied also to send an RSVP. Now this is only to allow a user to add whatever data is in here to their calendar. Now what you could do is you know if you wanted to a person to sign up for something I've got a plug in for that in this round up. It's not it's simple, but it might work for you. Or you just use a form. Doug Yeah, like for an annual festival website, add this to my calendar or it's up, you know, a company that hosts a quarterly something or other and they got a blog post about it add this to my calendar, boom, there it is. It's just really easy to use. So there you go. That a save the date is Yeah, exactly Melanie, so Add to Calendar button by gins and very easy to set up and use. It's a block. Pretty cool. Any other questions or comments about this one? Let me remind you if you're when you're chatting in the chat, look right above where you type the message. And some of you are chatting only to me it'll say host and panelists that just comes to me. But if you'll drop that down and choose everyone, then everyone in the chat can see what you're typing. Okay, let's move along to the next plugin in the list, which is called Site toolkit site toolkit. Now, those of you that have been around the plug in Roundup for a while, you probably know that I am not a fan of what I would call a kitchen sink plugin, which is I would call that like a plugin that does 8000 different things, none of which might really be related. It's like the developer took all the snippets they could find and just put them into a plugin. Like I'm not a fan of those. And this is kind of a kitchen sink plugin, but I kind of like it. So I will mention that a number of the items in this plugin are also some of the custom snippets that I provided to you as members in the Starter Site course last year, and I've not tested to see if there's any conflict between using this plugin and using those functions. I don't think there will be but there might be so just be aware of that. But this is a plugin that gives you a UI to do some of those things that those custom functions, those snippets that I gave you last year, do so let's just activate it and you'll see what I mean. So we activated the plugin and down here at the bottom with the hammer icon, and it is called Site toolkit. So let's just walk through some of the options. You may remember that some of the snippets I gave you were to clean up the WordPress head and get rid of a lot of things that WordPress loads by default that really aren't useful, like emojis I mean, do you really like unless you're using comments and you want emojis in the comments of WordPress you don't need that. And by default WordPress loads like 50k worth of emojis on every page load because it's part of core WordPress. Like we can disable emojis, we can remove RSS feed links, we can disable the REST API. We can remove all of these other like RST the really simple discovery links and others, you know, header links from there, we can remove the WordPress version from the page meta. We can also replace the style and JavaScript version with the file version. Now why would you want to do that? Well, that can help with caching. So something like like if you ever go to your site, and you find that the CSS is kind of wonky, because of the page caching problem, this might be able to help that because it's going to append a version number on the end of the CSS file. So that's some of the things there that's kind of cool in the SEO area. Take a look at this. You can do we want to use a pretty permalink for search. That's kind of a nice thing. You can do and if modified since header, in other words, like modified date up in the header to help search engines know when the page is modified. And you can also force all images to have an alt text here by that I have some options for the archives of the site. We want to get rid of the type that prefix of archive and the title of the page. We want to redirect attachment pages, redirect author, date and tag archives you have the options to do that. In the Dashboard. Do we want to get rid of all the WordPress dashboard widgets? So all these things that are in WordPress by default, many of which I've hidden here and you probably hide too if we hit yes he gets rid of those boom. So they're gone gone. They don't even show up here anymore. So all the like news and that's what's things that it hides those right there. Also, we can create our own custom dashboard widget. Hello World. I can type and then some ipsum text just to have something to put in there. Well, that's a lot it's probably way too much. Let's just put a picture in there
Oh, it didn't take the image. Bummer. But it did take the text. You can probably put HTML on there too. So easy way to create a dashboard widget kind of cool.
Also, we have some additional options here. Let me get over to there. Do we want to add a thumbnail column to posts meaning? Look, we can see the post thumbnail over here. That's kind of nice. Same thing to pages What about our login area? This is where you can change the WordPress login URL which I think security does as well. It doesn't really help for security to do this. But instead of your client having to remember WP dash admin or WP dash login dot PHP. You can just call this let me in or something right there and give them a quick link to log into their site with this. Also you can restrict the upload size on this final tab. Or I'm sorry, it cleans the file name so if there's any weird characters in the file name that might have an uploaded file that might cause WordPress some trouble this will just sanitize that right away. So lots of different options. bunch of different snippets all contained in one plugin. Not bad. Honestly, there's some pretty useful things in there that is site toolkit. Any questions or comments about that one? It does some things right
all right. Let's move down to the next plug in which is called when last login when last login so we there was a question in office hours in the past month or so I think it was Beth Livingston, who talked about can I see when people are logging into my site? Was that you Beth? I think it was Yeah. And we did a plug in last month called user toolkit. I think it was called. That drops in the x I think that plugin is active on this site right now. Yep. So
no, it's not. That's the plugin I'm about to show you. But that user toolkit drive, it does other things, but it also drops in that login date, which is helpful. This plug in actually has this as its core plugin has a couple of add ons that are also free called Export user records and welcome emails that do that and a little bit more but it's really just focused on this last login so I have all three of these plugins setup. I've talked primarily about this one when last login, that's the core plugin. And if we go down here to win last login, it does have a couple links to add on these add on plugins, the two free ones and they have some premium ones as well. We're just going to focus on these today where we can go in here and we can export our records. So I want to know who's logged into my website and what and so forth. I can export my user records and my login records either to a CSV or a JSON which is kind of nice. I also have the ability here to create a welcome email. So the first time they log in Hey, welcome to WP Nathan put a logo in there and put some text in there and then you know if there's a footer, whatever, it will send them an email saying hey, glad you logged in bla bla bla bla bla. So a nice little option here. If you need if, if you want to track who's logging into your site. You can do that right here. And it sorts by the latest time. It is also tracking IP addresses. You can turn that off if you want to. Right here, so if you uncheck that it anonymizes their IP address so that you can comply with GDPR. So I don't think we I mean, I don't really care about their IP address. So I would not just as a matter of best practice don't track any information that you don't actually need. So I would probably turn that off, but you can pull in their IP address if you want to. So that is called when last login by you who plugins when I saw the name of this plugin developer I was suddenly thirsty for a cold chocolaty drink. Anybody else know what I'm talking about there? All right. Any other questions or comments on that one before we move along? Okay, then moving along. Okay, this is a toolbox plugin. And for those of you get a relatively new to plugin Roundup, a toolbox plugin is something we call a plugin that you might not use immediately. But it's one that has a very particular task. It's usually a very simple plugin, and it's just one that I want to keep over in my toolbox because one day I might need this and this is a really helpful one, it is called Media count. Now, as the name indicates, this is a plug in that counts your media files, and that's all it does. But have you ever logged into a site maybe one that you're evaluating of whether or not you're going to support it or not, or it's the first time you've looked at this and you want to know, all right, how big is this media library? How many images do we have? I mean, you can see the total number but wouldn't it be nice to know oh, do they have any word docs or PDFs in there? Or is there any video or audio in there? This does that real quick one page boom, there it is. So let's activate media count is and it's gonna give us a menu link right over here. And there it is. So here is the current library of WP Nathan 13 JPEGs, three pings. 25, web BS one GIF to SVGs. No documents uploaded here. But we can see if there were docx or doc or all these different file types PowerPoint, zip files, tar balls. Down here also the various types of media formats mp4 mp3, WAV, blah, blah, blah, blah. Took with a total size of 419 megabytes. That's a big media library actually for 50 files. Wow. That's a lot. I'm not sure what's going on there. That's a really heavy media library. But there you go. A bird's eye view of what's going on in the media library by file type. So, you know, sometimes it's hard to know if they've got giant PDFs sitting in their media library. This will quickly let you see if they have any at all. Stacy says she has a couple of sites that might crash if something counted all the crap that was sitting here. Love that. That's great. Anyway, that's Media Library count. I think it can be quite useful and it's one that I have remembered that I am remembering for the old plugin toolkit at some point in the future. Any other questions, comments about that one before we move along? Right. Next up is a very powerful little plugin that solved a very particular problem for me a few weeks ago. It is called simple Cloudflare turnstyle by Elliot sewers be in rely WP now Elliot sores B is a very well known UK based I believe WordPress developer. And what he has done is taken the new Cloudflare turnstyle CAPTCHA alternative and built a plugin for it and WordPress now, just as a note Kadence forms and I think security up include turnstyle so if you're using Kadence you'll note in the new Kadence form block there's the ability to drop in a Cloudflare turnstyle CAPTCHA. It is way better way better than the other CAPTCHA alternatives out there. Because oftentimes Cloudflare knows right away just by this person's IP address or their their behavior, that whether this is a bot or not it even without presenting a CAPTCHA challenge. I can frequently deal with bad with bad traffic. If you've been testing turnstile at all like I have I like this a lot. It is so much better than the other CAPTCHA alternatives. I think security also includes turnstile as a CAPTCHA alternative, and it can be embedded on the login page and on the password reset and on the comment form and on a new user signup page. So why would we feature a plug in on iThemes Training that does something similar? Well, because this does one thing that currently I think security doesn't do. And that is WooCommerce forms the checkout process of WooCommerce I found this plugin when I had a client site that was under attack by the WooCommerce bot spam where they you know they'll place 1000 orders in five minutes trying these different credit cards to see if one of these stolen credit cards will process using your WooCommerce site. This stopped it in its tracks. I had just stopped it. And it's fantastic. Now by the way, I have talked to Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer providing security and the the WooCommerce function will be coming to IP security it's on the map in the near term. So here in the next few months we'll see this feature also added to I think security, but in the meantime, this is a great plugin to be aware of. It is simple to set up let me just show you the settings. See, simple Cloudflare turnstyle Well, it's not in here let's add it by the way, if you're new to the plug in round up, sometimes you can't find exactly what you're looking for in the plugin directory even if you search by the full plugin name. So a hint is to also copy the byline of the author and that almost always gets you the right result. Boom right there.
Now by the way, Elliott also has this reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce that will let you add the google recaptcha to the WooCommerce checkout process. This is the same functionality that WooCommerce itself charges $29 per site for a core plugin which just infuriates me but anyway, there if you want to use reCAPTCHA you can do that here. But here's the turnstile and it's very, very simple to set up in use. Right here at Cloudflare turnstile, you simply go into once you have a Cloudflare a free Cloudflare account set up you go to this link, you add your site key and your secret key. You can pick a dark or light theme. You can put in a custom error message if it fails. And here's where you can put it WordPress login, the WordPress registration page Reset Password comments various spots on the WooCommerce. And because I have Gravity Forms set up, it knows that I can also enable it right here on all the Gravity Forms. So I don't have to go through and set up turnstyle separately on gravity form. It works really really well and like Doug is saying in the chat it does work on Elementor forums, many other form types works really really well so great plugin from Elliott source be the simple Cloudflare turnstile. This will stop that WooCommerce spam in its tracks. We had no more problems once that was set up all right, any other questions or comments on that one? Ruby, does it work with Elegant Themes? I don't know. I guess are you talking about Divi? I don't it doesn't specifically say divvies form. You'd have to test it. I'm gonna guess probably it doesn't unless it says that it does. Barney, can this be added to a Kadence form? Well, this plugin you wouldn't, you would just use the Kadence forms own Cloudflare connector. So if you're using and this goes for any reCAPTCHA so let's say Barney you want to you have this plugin set up to protect like the WordPress login page and everything else. And you also want to have turnstyle on the Kadence form. Just use the same keys the site key and the secret key, put it in both this plugin and the Kadence form plugin. So it's connecting the same way and you're fine. Elizabeth you have to have a Cloudflare account. Yes, you have to sign up for a free Cloudflare account in order to get the the keys to connect this to the WordPress site but it's the free level of Cloudflare works just fine. Great questions anybody else before we move on?
Yes, it does work with fluid forms. Okay, moving down the list to a plug in. I was on the fence about this one. John, John is asking how much of that Cloudflare webinar do you have to get through to use this? John just for those of you that missed it, I had a thorough I'm gonna use that word. Specifically a thorough Cloudflare. But our last week where it was I should have given this a duct tape alert, right? Because there was a lot in that I'm dropping the link in the chat. If you miss that, that I mean, I presented the webinar so I'm a little biased but I think that was probably one of the most information packed webinars we've had here lately. I think it was really helpful and many of you may have to go back and rewatch it because there was a lot and I was talking kind of fast. Yeah, I was because I had a lot to get through. But you can slow down the speed right? And so all you have to do is create an account and follow the link in the plugin to generate your API key and you're done. You don't have to do any of this. You don't even have to set up a domain in Cloudflare. All you have to do is have an account and that lets you create the key Okay. All right. So here's the next the next plugin. It's called sign up list by the Internet managers. I think these guys win the award for the most creative plugin name of the Roundup, the internet managers. So here's the thing. This is I think, potentially a very helpful plugin in certain situations. It's going to be a niche plugin. Because what it does is it allows you to add a sign up list on your website. It's not protected. So you might have to have a protected page or a members area or whatever. But it's only one form per site. Now they may add more later. This is like the the beta release of the plugin but it lets you add a sign up list. So let me go in here and activate the plugin called sign up list. Because it's brand new, it's the one dot O dot o like it is the raw version of the plugin and I have a page set up for this sign up list and here's what it looks like. Okay not be displayed. Oh this is by invitation only. Let me just look at the block. So here's our block. And here's our form options. Things to hurry up and display. I think I've got speed issues on the BP Nathan ever since we moved this over and I don't know why that is
there it is. Okay. There's our signup list form. Okay, you have to visit it by this URL. So that that was in the settings of this form that we set up let me let's look at that first Shall we
signup list Tony Stark signed up. So all right, it is a so if we go to that page using that specific link that we got. We should be able to fill out the form Yes, there it is. So you do have to come to it through the the specific link that you get when you add the form to the page. This is obviously only shared only you as the administrator see this. So you send the link and you can get a signup form and we'll say Matt Murdock.
Sign up them added to the list, and they'll show up on the attendee list, which you can export to a CSV and also you can invite people directly if you want. But again, it's one list per website, only one at a time. So you can set this up where who can sign up anybody, but it's going to put a CAPTCHA only the invitees or anyone with the special link. So you can choose any of those options on who's gonna see the form to actually display and you have some other options here, some styling, and so forth. So, that is a again, it's kind of a niche plugin, but you might have an event or something like that. I could see this being used for sports teams or nonprofits or you know, places where people are going to sign up for things and then take it down and use it somewhere else if you want to, but sign up list, one list per site, but pretty powerful if you need a sign up list. There you go. Questions or comments about that one before we move along. We'll see who could be there to maybe who knows. Okay, next to the last is an interesting little plugin called convert to blocks. So if you like me have begun the journey of converting some old WordPress sites that were created a million years ago in the classic editor and you've got a lot of blog posts, and gradually they're getting moved over to the block editor because it is far better, especially just for blog posts and orienting content then the classic editor was then what happens is something like this actually, let me just go to a page and so we have the block editor working and let me go and edit did not set up that page again. I did this in a demo and then deleted it. So alright, we're gonna we're gonna have to do make setup our live demo here live. So I meet with a quick classic editor. I'm going to create a page for demo called convert to blocks. Did this I'm sure I did this. Hang on a minute. Oh, I did. I just didn't. There it is. I didn't put it underneath the demo. Parents. There it is. Okay. So let me get out of well. Let's just go to convert blocks. So this is a page that's just designed in the classic editor. Right? It's a page. It could be a post, whatever. There's some text, there's an image there's some headings a list, blah, blah, blah. And what happens when we deactivate the classic editor? What happens the first time you go into a page like this? So classic editor is off. I'm going to refresh the page that brings it up in the block editor. And it comes up as a classic block right. Which you can keep in a classic block and edit or you have to click Convert to blocks. So not a big deal to click Convert to blocks. But this plugin makes it even a little bit faster. So let's activate. Convert to blocks. Leave this page for a moment and watch what's about to happen. So we simply activate this plugin. We refresh the page. Now notice also what this plugin does is it tells us in which editor these things are created. So here's our classic editor page and you get to watch this quickly. Now, remember before this plugin was active, it showed the content of the page with a classic block. When we open this page, it's going to automatically parse everything out into the appropriate blocks. Let's click Edit. And watch. Boom done. Now there's a heading block, paragraph paragraph image block, heading List block. Everything is as it's supposed to be. And we'd have to do anything. So all I have to do is update that. And now this page is in the block editor. So there isn't anything that's going to OT like go through your site and automatically convert all the pages and posts from classic to block. Classic editor block editor. There used to be a plugin like that. But it stopped working a while ago. Christine is the classic editor a plugin that is part of the install. Yeah, it's just the old classic editor plugin. It's the one that's been around since they introduced Gutenberg classic editor. So I had it active in order to create the page in the classic editor then I deactivated it so we could show this and it does yes you do this manually one page at a time. So here. If we look back at our page list, everything is in the block editor, except for this webinar demo page. So I just go in there and hit edit. And it's going to convert it. Boom there's no content not just converted to the block editor I hit update and it's done. It may actually have to have some content in it for that to work.
So you can kind of go through and see what's been added and what hasn't.
John, what would this plugin do to builder pages. John, do you mean I themes builder or do you mean like Beaver Builder elements or a page builder? Beaver Builder nothing, because that's actually a good question though. It sees Okay, well, you can see right here we have the Beaver Builder test page set up that it sees in the block editor but Beaver Builder don't have Beaver Builder active Beaver Builder supersedes the block editor so even if the block editor is active Beaver Builder is still going to supersede it so see that goes away and we can launch beaver builder so they won't do anything to it. Christine for I think builder this would be the WordPress editor works inside the Content Block in Beaver Builder. Pardon me and I iThemes builder. So it's just going to affect the area where you have page content and not any of the other layout modules or anything like that. Peter if you have the classic editor editor active create content in it and then deactivate the plugin. The block editor will still show the content in the classic block Correct?
Yes
so pretty good plugin and by the way, this is from tin up which is one of the premier development shops in WordPress like these are the people Google hired to build the Google Site kit plugin. Like big stuff. So great plugin by good folks. One thing I will note and I actually started using this plugin on a site we have some stuff that convert. This does not work on. It only works on pages and posts. It does not support custom post types by default. But I got a little snippet put together that I've shared with you here and this just to add support to this plugin for particular custom post types. You do have to define your code your CPT slug in the snippet so if you know what all that means, you know what this does, and you can make it work. So that is converted blocks by 10 up any final questions or comments about that before we get to the last plugin of the round up I think
all right. Oh, John has a question I just saw on q&a. If we get the Save HTML, what should we do? Oh, so the reason I got that save HTML on that page was because there was Beaver Builder content on the page, but Beaver Builder wasn't active. So that wouldn't be the case that we were just trying to demonstrate. I just forgotten to activate the Beaver Builder plugin. You would not normally see that. Okay, oh, we have two more plugins. We're at time so I need to go quickly. Okay, this next one is by my friend Cory Moss who goes by gel form in the WordPress plugin directory. Cory has built an interesting little plugin called crop Express. And what he's trying to do here, and this is the first version of this plugin, and what he's trying to do is make the process of cropping images easier for users. Now, you probably know like, if especially if you work with non technical clients, they're always asking, Well, why can't Why is this image bigger? Than this image in this blog grid and blah, blah, blah, and why is it so hard? And they're not wrong? Like it? It can be complicated. And a lot of times we as developers have to do some things on the back end to make sure the right image sizes or you know, are indifferent or in the right spots and all of that so what Corey is trying to do here with crop Express, is to make that whole process easier. Now, the way he's approaching this is from a very opinionated way. In other words, he's he is prescribing some built in image sizes for the most common aspect ratios. Now, this is the first this is 1.0. This is the first version of the plugin. He has asked in the plugin description, too. I want I want input, we're going to improve this it's going to get better, but right out of the gate. What this plugin is going to do is make it easy for non technical users to get all the images the same size when they upload them into WordPress and that's a good thing. So let me show you how this works. There are some drawbacks which I'll get to as well in this early version. So let's activate crop Express
and let's just go in here and edit a blog post and let's just change out a featured image so you can see how this works. Yeah, there's something going on with the VNA thing because this stuff is starting to take a long time to load. Alright, so notice this is a brand new blog post that does not have a featured image and see this is setup now to see select and crop an image. So let's select our image. Oh look, we have some pre prescribed, opinionated image aspect ratios. Let's get an image from the media library first. We'll just pick one I think it was this one that was the original one. Now, is it a square 16 benign nine by 16 four by three or three by four? And are we going to crop it as a square a circle? So let's make this a 16 by nine square. We'll hit crop it I look. I'm going to zoom out until my image fits. Set the image wasn't that easy? So you said what I wanted a different size and I want it big you know panorama or whatever. Now I didn't select square Christine I select 16 by nine and a square image on the ends, not a circle. So if I wanted it square, there was a square selection on the top row. I wanted it 16 by nine. So there's only a few image aspect ratios right now. I can imagine there'll be more or maybe there'll be a settings page where you can turn on certain predefined things. But it's super easy to use. And that's what he's going for is I want to make this as easy to use for non technical users as possible. And I think then that so especially like I want you know how many of you have a WooCommerce store and the images are all over the place in image sizes. Like they're everywhere, like some are this way and some are that way and some are you know, and I just want them all to be square. Well if you would put this in at the beginning and tell them to select square when they upload that featured image. Boom. They can put it in the square hit the button and it's a square. Yeah, very handy for non tech people again, the downside, very limited and choices right now but this is definitely going to be one to watch because Cory is a brilliant developer, and I believe he's really going to build this into something cool. So that is crop Express from crop express who is my friend Cory moss All right. Last but not least a another very interesting plugin. This is a combination of work from Adam priser WP crafter and CJ pouvoir, who is the founder of brainstorm force, the team behind Astra and the ultimate add ons plugins. They have come together to produce a service with a plugin called sure triggers. So this is aiming at replacing Zapier for WordPress users. And they are they're doing some some good work here. Now, usually, we don't do plugins on the plugin roundup that require the connection to some external service. This one though, was so cool that I thought you would be interested in it so we've done similar plugins like uncanny Automator and other ones like that, that run these automations within WordPress, like when a post is published, then put it out here or put it in the spreadsheet or do you know update this whatever, like Zapier, but for WordPress, and this is a really really well to me, from what I've seen and again, I haven't spent hours in it, but as I was clicking through and kind of evaluating this looks very, very promising. So let's just activate this and I'll show you how it works. Sure triggers is the name. It's of the same family of products like shore. CART, maybe you've seen that from Adam priser and Sujay and their teams. So this is short triggers.
So we'll activate this I think I already connected this to an account see if it comes up. Yes. Okay. So this is not what you see when you first turn on the plugin when you first activate it for the first time. It's going to step you through a hey, go set up your account on shore triggers.com And then we're going to connect it all up. It takes it's really quick. It was no problem whatsoever. Then you pop back on this dashboard. Where your account with your triggers is connected to this WordPress site. So they give you I'm on the the the the Pro Plan is free for 28 days. So you get 20,000 tasks and 100 different automations at the Pro Plan. The pricing details I've given you a link to that. When it rolls back out of pro and into free it's going to be five automations 1000 tasks a month with three days of logs still pretty good for some basic automations this one is going to be on a monthly basis, you know 10 bucks a month like not bad. $99 a year. I mean very, very affordable. A lot cheaper by the way than Zapier. Zapier is three times this cost. This might be able to replace Zapier for you. It just depends. So if we were going to create a new automation if you've used Zapier in the past, this is going to be very familiar. So we're going to add a trigger and we can connect all of these things like look at all these WordPress properties like beaver this is for a beaver builder form you know affiliate WP the shopkart things Amelia if you're using that calendar, current flows, Edd Elementor forms fluent CRM, like all these things, even external thing there's memberpress For those of you that memberpress notion, Stripe, you know all of these different things right then these are going to be these are not a trigger, but a next action where you can connect to some of these other things here. So lots of different things. Let's just say if WordPress, if there's a common upgrade, if a new comment on a post, if the post status is updated, you got all these options. So it's like an If This Then That. It'll fire it off. Oh, can you add a Zapier trigger Zapier in here? No, but I think a web hook is yeah, you can use if you you can have this fire on a zap your web hook. Yeah, that would work. So it's basically when something happens then do something else. Just like Zapier or uncanny or some of those things. So this is definitely one to play around with. I've got some ideas for how I might use it and some sites. Yeah, pretty generous free level for some basic automations and then the paid versions aren't that bad. So Oh, and also the neat thing about those paid versions is you could use it on five websites. So $100 a year is going to cover five websites with these with a with a total tasks for all those websites of this amount. Pretty interesting.
All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the plugin roundup for February 2022 and 23, February 2023. And we end as we always do with a vote, one vote one vote only please what is your favorite Roundup, plug in of the roundup turnstile triggers. Let me hear from you in the chat. What is your vote for the best plugin crop crop? Blocks, crop triggers, triggers triggers, Add to Calendar, store credit triggers to crop crop, crop crop turnstile triggers looks like crop is definitely the winner, turnstile, a second, turns that will triggers in turnstile, the three of those? I'm saying this out loud because that way we can remind ourselves what's the vote what the votes are when we go back and compile these votes for the best of which will happen in June. We do that every six months. If you're new to the plugin Roundup, we take these votes and that every six months we do a best of the previous six months best based on these votes that come in at the end of each webinar. All right, folks, that is going to wrap it up for us today. Do not forget that we have a great webinar coming up tomorrow which I talked about at the top of the hour. It is a free webinar about using AI tools in WordPress. It is going to be a lot of fun. I spent the morning preparing for this and having a lot of fun with chat GPT and I think I'm going to show you some things either you haven't seen or you might not have seen this way, give you some ideas on how to use chat GPT and other AI tools inside of WordPress be sure to sign up for that. If you haven't, I'll see you back here for that one. Tomorrow at one o'clock central time here on iThemes Training, where we go further together.