Again, welcome everybody. Glad you are here. We got a couple minutes before we get started. Go ahead and share the handout with everybody in the
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we'll get started in about a minute from now. So good to see everybody
about a minute away. From starting here on plugin roundup for August 2022. If you are just joining us grab the handout that is there in the chat. It has our list of plugins for today. Welcome welcome everybody just about 30 seconds to go. Before we get started.
Great to see everybody. We are just about ready
to start. I'm going to share the link one more time for the handout. If one of you kind folks would copy that for any late comers that missed it that would be very helpful
to me. All right, it's three minutes
after so I'm going to officially get things started and
we'll look at some plugins. Well good afternoon everybody
and welcome to another live i iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here die iThemes Training and it is the first webinar of the month August the second 2022 and that means it's time for plugin Roundup. Once a month we take a look at the WordPress plugin directory and pull together a list of about a dozen or so. plugins that we find interesting to show you and we have such a list today. So if you are just now joining us in zoom, pop open the chat and you'll find the link to today's handout dropped in there once again. If you're watching this on the replay, click the Download handout button below and you'll have this great little sheet that we have in front of us here. Okay, well let's get started, shall we with the first plug in on the list. If you've been around for a little while, perhaps you recognize the name of this developer Alan Marku. Alan was the developer of the original Google Analytics for WordPress plugin that many of us really liked and used for quite a while before it was changed up a little bit and acquired by some folks but this is the same developer Alan Mark who has created the Google Analytics four version of this plugin it is now called analytics insights for Google Analytics four
or
a free for now it's that I don't know. Ai WP. So let's go ahead and activate this plugin here on the back end. We're working on WP nathan.com. And as we activate this plugin, it's basically exactly like it used to be so here in the General Settings I've already gone through and connected my Google Analytics accounts. Just like it has always been if you use this plug in in the past, you would first like the authorization that pops open the link to get the little code from Google and you paste that back in and it connects your analytics accounts. Just one little authorization gives you Universal Analytics and the GA for connection. So do that once and you can lock it in. And so this the great thing that I like about this plugin is that it brings a really nice Executive Summary of Google Analytics into the WordPress dashboard. So right here under analytics insights we don't have I haven't had analytics running on the site because it's a dev demo site. But we have this really nice little widget and it's all live data and so you can see a lot of interesting things. So it looks like it was measuring for one day, during which time there were three sessions or visits by two users, all of which viewed 25 pages so that was probably me honestly going through or Chris looking at clearing up some of the pages on the site. You get some basic statistics, you know how many pages per session what was the bounce rate? How long did they spend on each page? That's just the overview. But of course you can also grab different time periods. So for example, real time we'll show how many visitors are actually on the site. And you've also got some interesting stats like if you want to get some information about your users, you can do so here that's kind of what we were just looking at the organic search, get some information about that sort of traffic popping on down here to things like pages, which pages actually got some traffic during that time and you can list those and it'll tell you, you know, how did they come? These are actually typed in directly. What were the referrer errs or there's just not really good data here honestly, but it tells you are they did they come from social or direct links or etc. This is basically everything you've seen Google Analytics just brought to you right here and a nice dashboard widget. So it'll even show you the technology like is it mobile? Was it desktop, you know, whatever. So it's it's pretty nice. Now the other thing here that you can do, it's got some back end settings, where you can change what roles have the ability to view this dashboard widget as well as do we want to show reports on the page and post oops, page and posts list. So for example, if we go here to pages it's set to ON and so we can actually look right there, just click a quick link and it will show us analytics related to this particular page. Look at that. So if there was actually traffic data here, you can just real quick see what the traffic was like to this particular page or post it in the dashboard. You can turn that on or off, you can turn on or off the main dashboard widget as well. If you want to put a map in there, you can drop in a Google Maps API key and see where your visitors are coming from with a nice little map. Something else here is on the front end settings. You can from the front end of the site. Also up in the admin bar you can show people I usually keep that turned off. The last thing here is the tracking code. Now this plugin will actually embed your Google Analytics tracking code for you if you want. However, I don't recommend that I've had multiple times where if you rely on a plugin, for example, like this one to be the thing that puts your Google Analytics tracking code on your website, I have more than once and it's never a good thing. I've more than once had that plugin lose connection. And so you lose Google Analytics data because the codes not being displayed. And it's simple to go back in and reconnect but there's no recovering that lost data because the code wasn't there. And therefore the analytics weren't being tracked. So highly recommend using a Header Footer script plugin or the Kadence header footer code editor in the customizer to actually drop the code in manually or a G tag or however you want to do it just I don't recommend using a plugin like this to be the thing that adds the code. And so you'll see here I have the tracking type is set to disabled. So that's how I run that. Okay, I see that there's a bunch of questions that have popped in so let me scroll back up and see if I can pull those out.
If you have a question I missed it might be just simpler to paste that in the in the chat again. Sue says if the GA four and GA three are on the slide already this works. Sure. Yeah, exactly. So in this case, the Google Analytics code is not being added by this plugin. It's actually being added here in the via the Kadence method in the customizer. Let's see going in here it is under General. And let's see, no I'm sorry. It's at the bottom here. It's under custom scripts. And see Kadence gives us the spot to add scripts into header. So all this plugin will do in this case, if you don't want to use it to add code, and I recommend that you don't, you can simply use it for reporting. It's really nice to be able to see that executive summary of Google Analytics. They're on there on the on the WordPress dashboard. Okay, any other questions that I missed about this one? So this is a great, it's a great little plugin highly recommend it. John is asking you about the speed impact negligible because this is only running on the back end of the site. Yeah. And you're already loading the Google Analytics script likely on the front end. So this is only affects the back end. And there you go. Stacy doesn't allow you to choose Universal Analytics for GA for to show monster analytic a monster insights only lets you show one or the other. So that's a great question. And if we look at the back end settings
Ah, that's a great question. I don't know which Oh, I'm not sure which it's using let's see tracking type. Have the
tracking code disabled altogether in the back end settings. It doesn't seem to give us the option to switch. That's a good question. Oh, right here. Yeah, right here. Use Google Analytics for data to generate reports and stats. So right here, you can toggle on and off whether it's Universal Analytics, or the GA for
so now we're looking at GA for tracking and let's see what that looks like. It's any different.
Oh, look, I've actually got some analytics running. So I had GA for analytics and not universal analytics running on the site very well. So we get a little more data here on page views and so forth. It's a great little plugin. It's the same code base that's been used for, you know, in this plugin for a long time. So a little bit longer than I wanted to spend on this plugin, but I think it's very useful and hopefully it's helpful to you. So let's move on, shall we to the second plugin on the list, which is image sizes controller by Grand plugins, image sizes controller so if you like me have WordPress sites that have lots of different image sizes define like WooCommerce sizes, or maybe you like to define your own custom image sizes beyond the standard WordPress image sizes. This is a great plugin both to allow you to set custom image sizes and to get control over what sizes are actually being used. So let's have a look at image sizes controller and get that activated.
And have a
quick look at what this is going to do for you. So if we go here under media under image sizes controller, the first thing you're going to see which is really helpful is the registered sizes in WordPress. So here are all the registered image sizes that WordPress is going to create. Now if you are this is another little hidden value of a plugin like this is that if you are if you take on, for example, a rescue site, some site you didn't design and maybe somebody wants your help to manage, and you this might be something you'd want to look at. I told the story a lot a long time ago how we took on a site that had 20 Something different image sizes defined, some in plugin some in the theme, it was just really weird. These developers had just defined all these image sizes and the site was gigantic for every image it was uploading, it was generating 30 Something images because of all these different custom image sizes. So this will show you right here's what we have actually these first few are these are the default WordPress sizes. These are ones related to WooCommerce it'll show you that right now. WooCommerce is active. These are the image sizes that are being displayed if we disabled WooCommerce these wouldn't show up. It's only showing you that at this moment. As you look at this list. These are the custom image sizes WordPress is going to generate. Now that's helpful just to see what's happening. If you want to also create a new image size, you can do that right here. Now, in the past in different webinars, I've shared code snippets on how to create your own custom image sizes. It's really simple. It's in the WordPress Codex, for example, but here right here without having to get into any code. Even though the code is not difficult without even having to touch code. You can just put it right here. So we're just going to call this sample and we'll say this is going to be 1000 or let's say something weird, right? Let's do 112 pixels by 213. I just made that up. And we're going to actually make that a hard crop right in the center center. So it's going to it'll card crop that image straight down and now we have a misspelled sample. But now here under
image sizes. We've got this one right here. So
if you want to delete it, you can delete it right there. So you can actually define your own custom image sizes right there. If you'd like. Also, here's what's interesting. You can say, I don't want for example, for WordPress to create this medium large image or this 1500 image or any of these WooCommerce thumbnails for whatever reason you can checking on and save it and it will stop WordPress from that point. Forward. It won't affect anything that's already been created, unless you regenerate your thumbnails but from that point forward, it will no longer create those image sizes. If you want to go backwards on this then you would just use something like the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin with those image sizes selected and it'll get rid of all the old ones if you select that setting, in Regenerate Thumbnails and make all your images again, so pretty helpful. There's also some conditionals if you have the Pro version. You can also disable this big image threshold so you may know that several versions ago, WordPress instituted at the core level in image size restrictions so the size is 2560. And that 2560 With image is as large as an image can get in WordPress unless you do something to disable that large image size. So right just checking this box will disable that. So let's say for some reason on your site, you need a 5000 pixel wide image maybe in the hero or something like that for some crazy reason. You can check that box and then WordPress will stop image limiting those image sizes to those large sizes. So pretty cool plugin does a lot of neat things that's called image sizes controller from Grand plugins. So any questions or comments about that one? Pretty good stuff. And by the way, the plugin I just mentioned regenerate. Thumbnails if I can't really spell very well it's this one. Nope, that's not it. It is the one Regenerate
Thumbnails Goodness gracious Well, I can't seem to find it. It's here, this one. drop this in the chat for you. And now this is one
you ought to have in your in your toolbox. Anyway, it's really great. Automatic. Alex Mills, by the way, passed away a number of years ago and automatic. The company behind wordpress.com has taken over the management of this plugin. So it's a good reliable plugin to regenerate your thumbnails. Okay, so no more questions or comments about that? One. So let's move on, shall we into some WooCommerce plugins. This is an interesting little plugin WooCommerce, as you may know, still hasn't really figured out how they're going to handle the block editor. Gutenberg as it were. They've really been slow adopters of the block editor probably because WooCommerce is so very customizable and customize. And it powers such a great percentage of ecommerce sites around the web. And lots of folks have customized it and bringing the block editor in the WooCommerce could create some issues, particularly for highly customized WooCommerce sites. At any rate, they're still using the classic Editor inside of WooCommerce products. And I'm not sure that we've seen a timeline on changing that. But if you aren't using a site that you know, it's just for example, maybe it's a Kadence site and you know, it's running blocks everywhere else, why can't we use blocks inside WooCommerce this plugin is going to allow you to bring the block editor into a WooCommerce product. Now as you know this, as you may know is part of WooCommerce this area here the classic editor controls the long description which is in a typical WooCommerce setup at the top you got the thumbnail and the pricing. And then down below you've got that large product description. And if you'd like to have a little more control over how that looks, this is super helpful because it will let you do anything in the block editor right there. So let's go in here and let us add or activate this plugin which is called Block blocks product editor for WooCommerce.
And what this is going to do is bring
the block editor right here into our WooCommerce product editing. So we've got it active, we're going to refresh and you'll notice an immediate difference and how all of this looks. So yep, right there. We have our standard block editor view for all of this. And let's just actually let's go back in and edit an existing product. So we have something to show here. Let's go to our cool bicycle
product. And I'm
just going to drop in and I mean look you can use all of your predefined blocks or you know any design libraries you're connected to. I'm just going to put in a pricing grid
from the Kadence section and update this product. And now as we view this product there it is, look at that.
So anything you can do in the block editor you can now do inside the long description of our product so really easy to do. It's the block editor like it is everywhere else. So that is called Block product editor for WooCommerce. Any questions or comments about that one? Okay, moving on. Down to the next another WooCommerce products. We've done a few of these. Sue's asking is it backwards compatible. Meaning if you have for example, classic. Well that's a great quote actually let's before we go any further let's look at that, shall we? Because we have some of these that I think have some information
in them. If we edit the product that already
has a long description, for example, yes. So here's one that has a long description and you'll notice that just like if you use the block editor the first time on a page or a post that hasn't used the block editor before, you're going to find everything here in a classic block and you can just convert that to blocks if you want. So that's that's how that's going to work. That's a great question. Thanks. So now onward to our next plugin better wishlist from WP developer. If you are using a WooCommerce site, perhaps you have a wish list feature. We've done a number of these plugins over the years this is a really good one. It's very simple. And maybe if you're thinking about adding a wish list to your WooCommerce site, this might be a good one to consider. So let's activate better wish list and there gonna be some settings right here at the bottom of the WooCommerce menu.
So let's take a look. So it will
allow you for example to add a wish list in the My Account panel when if we were to pull up for example our
my accounts my oops I'm not sure what page My account is. I really have not any idea what that will be. Well.
I'll just read you the list and we'll go take a look at some of these features. So you can set it to redirect to your whatever the wishlist pages that you define with this shortcode if you add something to the wish list, you can go there you can redirect to the cart. It will allow you to remove items from this list in the cart. You have some control over how the button looks, what the text is going to say and some of the styling but that let's just take a quick look at how this actually looks and you'll notice that with no real, no real work on that part, I now have the ability to add to cart or add to wishlist now with the way that Kadence is displayed. This is the Kadence WooCommerce layout. I don't like how this is overlapping the title. So we'd need to address that a little bit with adding some margin probably at the bottom of these product titles that move up on mouse over but simply adding to wish list right here. Boom added to my wish list. So if I look up if I go to my wish list page, which I think I call
wish list there it is.
We'd want to put that in our menus. Of course if we were actually using this, here's everything on my wish list. And right here I can add it to the cart, boom. And so it is now in my cart right there. So if you notice you might have noticed a minute ago also that if we add a couple of things to the wish list
we also have the ability
to add all these things to the cart at once. So with one click I can add my whole wish list to the cart. And as I refresh my page, there they all are ready to go. So it's a really simple wish list plugin works really well. If I could find my account page, I'm not quite sure what we have that set for in this WooCommerce install.
To go dig that out. It'll be one of those tabs on the WooCommerce.
On the WooCommerce page, I don't think it's
the membership page that was that's a restrict content Pro. Yeah, I'm not this site is a demo site and I think we deleted the standard WooCommerce My Account page All right, so any other questions or comments on this one? This is better wish list from dopey developer and there you can change I see some some comments there. In the chat. You can change the verbiage around
what the buttons say for
example. This is where you can select your wish list page. Yeah, so you have some customization options there. Alright, let's move on to the next one which is comments WP. So if you have a site that does a lot of comments, maybe it's a blog or a you know, some sort of a community site where you're actually soliciting comments. This is a plugin you really might want to have a look at the traditional WordPress and this is what the author even says in the plugin description here. The traditional WordPress comments feature really hasn't gotten much attention at all in years. And as a result, comment heavy sites if you if you're really doing a lot of comments on your site, you may actually have already opted for an external commenting system like discus or some of the others that are out there. This is a really nice add on for core WordPress comments that gives you kind of a dashboard with some analytics and some other things that will make your comments a little more valuable. So let's go here and activate the comments WP Plugin.
So again, this is comments WP
so we will activate this and now under comments I've got a dashboard Look at that. So right here now comments are usually turned off on WP Nathan because I don't want anybody making comments usually on the dev site like this, but there are some historical comments from webinars over the years that you know that that have been left so we have some analytics here. They're 23 approved comments, we got this nice little dashboard. Some interesting features like time to first comment between the post in the comment how many posts have comments versus not where they logged in or logged out? Are they top level like first comment are they replies to comments in a tree? You can see the users and how many comments. You can also sort by IP address if you wanted to do that for some reason.
Any anomalies, which is interesting.
We've got total by time period. So yeah, lots of these comments came from a couple of years ago and you can see you can kind of see things like this. It's a really nice little dashboard. You can also change the filtering back to let's just do the last night in that there won't be any data here. But the last 90 days for example. It's not going to show anything here because we don't have data yet. zeros all the way through because you saw the last time period was 2020. But yeah, really nice little dashboard that makes use of the core WordPress commenting feature and gives you some helpful information about what's happening with your comments. So that is comments WP. Any questions or comments about that one?
All righty,
moving on down the list to if you're using the block editor. Here's a helpful little block that I find pretty interesting. This is the counting number block. Now you may know that Kadence in the Kadence blocks does have a number counter. And let's just take a look at that real quick. So Kadence has a number counter. Oops and I forgot to plug it in but the Kadence number counter only counts up. What if you also want something that counts down so this is a helpful plugin if you need a number counter block that counts down from a number not simply up. So let's activate this
and here are
our counting blocks. So really easy to use there is for this one, for example, the number value is 40. We could change that to something else. Starting counting from value one. How long is it going to take you know and it's a live preview there where you can actually see it happening. Like that it kind of eases in to the final number. You'll only want it to run once. Yeah, probably. So you can do
a prefix
and a suffix here. You can change the color. You can change all your typography, padding and so forth. So that's pretty nice. Now down here there's a second example you'll notice where the number we want to end on is 30. And look we're counting from a higher value. So you know here
you can set whatever you want
it to start from and where it ends up in the plugin figures out am I counting? Up or counting down or vice versa? Now the Kadence counting block does work very well. There's a count up block, but as you would imagine it in the count up block, it counts up it doesn't count down so works really well. If you just need a count up block. I wouldn't add this plug in if you're using Kadence. But if you need something it also counts down like a discount is helpful. This is a great little addition counting number block plugin. Yes, and it does have Thank you Chris. It does have a starting number. Count from value there. Yep. Oh, the Kadence block now has a star that's a new yes starting number. Look at that. So that's that's kind of cool. So you can now count from 20 to 100. Let's see if it does backwards. If so this I believe is a new
addition. We're gonna add accounts backwards now. So there you go. Just use the Kadence plot. Wasn't that great? So there's counting
numberblock which if you're using the Kadence if you're already using Kadence then use Kadence. Don't use this. It's already built in All right, any questions or comments about that one? All right, one more. Gutenberg block I believe and this is called image zoom on hover Gutenberg block so this is a you've probably seen something like this in an e commerce Store for example, where when you put your mouse over the product image, you have this like a little magnifying glass kind of thing that that magnifies that area of the image. That's what this does, but it works for any
block editor image
block, so it works with the standard core. It extends the Gutenberg standard image block and adds this ability to zoom. So let's have a quick look at this one. First, of course, we need to activate the plugin
All right, let's go into Image zoom on hover.
Alright, so here is our image. And this is just a standard image block. And you'll notice right here there's a toggle, I can enable or disable. So it's not going to do this on every image and by default that is off. But let's say we do want to enable zoom on hover on this image. And let's check out
how it looks. here that that neat so in the free
version of the plugin, you don't have any control over how large the Zoom tool is, or how much it magnifies. There is a pro version that allows that nine bucks a year and that allows you to change the shape and size of the magnifier. But this is kind of neat. Especially if you maybe you've got some little technical drawing maybe that you could mouse over or something like that. I think it's a neat little effect if you need something like this. So a clever little addition that extends the core Gutenberg image block image zoom on hover from Grand plugins, same folks that did the image the custom image plugin from earlier.
All right, any other questions or comments on that one? Pretty simple but handy.
Mani accessibility, well, it's really not doing anything other than zooming in. So there's not a way to interact with this with a keyboard. And if you're visually impaired, it's not going to help you zoom in on an image. So there's not really an accessibility concern with
this one. All right, next up
is interesting little plugin called Smart notification bar. Now if you're an iThemes member, there's one of the OG I iThemes plugins called Boom bar that does something really similar to this. And by the way, if you're a Kadence user, you can do this and more with Kadence conversions. But if you're not, here's a neat little plugin. Or maybe you've got an older site that's not using Kadence. And you just need something that's going to put a notification bar at the top of the screen. This is a great little plugin to do that. It's called Smart notification bar.
Let's get that active. And
take a look at our notification bars.
So we've got a sample bar
set up here. I'm just going to click into it. And you notice you get the preview right here at the top. And now you got your settings. This is what we're going to call it. We want to show to the top of the page or do you want to the bottom of the page. It's going to be sticky in either place if you want it to be. So let's just leave it to the top for now. And not sticky. Here's, you know view our latest deals. This is what's going to be here. Do we there are the ability to change for some templates that are pre done here. Let's click on that one. For example. Use that template
boom, there it is. You can change the height. So if
we want it to be really big, we can do that and you get the nice preview of how large it's going to be right there.
Make it a little smaller.
You can change your font colors and families it's going to inherit from your theme otherwise, change your background color.
This is for our button here. Or actually that may be the
background of the bar but we we've applied to themes that's not going to help our here's our call to action style that I was just looking for. You want to any sort of animation on that it will apply. Here's our text of the button and where it's going to go and so forth. Let's just take a quick look at how this looks on the front end of the
site. And it looks like
our admin bar is interfering with it but now you can see look at that nice little bar. It's not sticky. Now if we go here and we make it sticky,
of course it will stick and stay put right there at the top. You can also put that at the bottom if you'd like
a little interference there but you see how that works. So that is our nice little notification bar really easy by the way you can schedule it as well. The from and two. There's not a time that you can set for this. So it's going to be at midnight o'clock on either of those days. But you can turn it on and turn it off at certain times smart notification bar from E commerce platforms. Any questions or comments on this one? By the way, with Kadence conversions, you can do a lot more and even use the block editor to design the content of the notification bar. Don't have really time to get into Kadence conversions but I've linked in a really good help article here that talks
about it. All right,
next one up is a plugin called jumper which is the ultimate WordPress plugin. That gives you a little button that sticks on the side of the screen now, I kind of shy away from these but this one is a little more clever than some of these that I've seen in the past. And you might just find a situation where this plugin would come in handy. So it's called jumper let's activate that. Actually, I'm gonna run through here and deactivate some of these plugins just so we don't get any weirdness happening here. I don't think we will but never can tell when you get a bunch of bunch of plugins running that you're not super familiar with. I don't want anything weird to
happen. So the next one is called jumper and
as soon as I activate it, you're going to immediately see what this is going to do. Let's just go to the homepage. It's a plug in that adds one of these things right on the side of the screen. And sometimes those can be annoying. They are very effective though. If you read the stats on these. This was nice though. You click it and it gives this nice little pullover of information. Very friendly. And the ability to edit these is pretty cool here. So notice what you can do here you can set your width you can see how long is it going to take to slide in. You got your theming colors here and overlay for the rest of the screen that kind of fades out. You can set your typography all the things you'd expect are here. But let's take a look over here at the blocks. So you've got a preview of how this is going to look over here. Starting at the top with a logo block. By the way, you can rearrange or delete these if you'd like. But let's just grab an a logo.
Actually, there's one in here that's small and transparent. I think I want to grab is our logo. Oh my goodness, my image searches slow. Let's just use that one.
So obviously we would need to do something with our logo but it's really easy to add
and tweak your logo sizes here.
It needs something right there instead. Notice here you can just edit the text and it shows up right over here in our editor
links.
We can choose how this looks on various device sizes as well. If our pardon me, how does displays on various devices isn't on all or just desktop, mobile and whatnot. Checking on means turning off. So you have the ability to move all these things around. Adding blocks social networks. That's all right here real easy to manipulate. I see can you remove parts? Yeah, so let's say we don't want this
what's app
I think it's this one. Yep. So that's the WhatsApp block. I'm going to click the trashcan and it's gone. Yeah, so you can change things up. You can move things around.
Like so.
I really friendly to edit to be honest. I kind of liked this one. So the other thing I like about this is you have the ability to you know, how big do you want this button to be? Teeny tiny, medium, large whatever. Is it a vertical button or horizontal button where's it going to actually the positioning you can change the sizes this way let's let's control over how and where this displays. But also what's really cool is down here at the bottom I wanted to show you
you can add a custom
trigger selector. So for example, let's hide the button itself and make it trigger on a menu item. Now this menu item happens to be the contact link at the top of this page. So we'll refresh the page. Let me just click this link and look at that isn't that cool? So if you don't like the the thing hanging off the side of your screen, you have other options to make this display. So in this case, I just use the ID of this menu item right there. So there's some things you can do to tinker with this and do some interesting inner interactions. So kind of
cool. Beth is asking
is it accessible? Melanie just answered you can keyboard navigate to it but you can't
escape it. I just hit escape and it was there so let's go oops stuck down here
Wow, for some reason, I can't get to my Contact link. Oh, you know why? Because I pulled the link out of it. But here I hit escape and it went away. I don't know. So I think you would you want to test that for sure it appears to be rather accessible but you definitely want to test that. That's I did not look at accessibility when it comes to this plugin but it's pretty interesting. It's easy to edit.
Pretty simple. All right,
any other questions or comments on jumper
do some neat things with that.
All right, next up is a plugin called admin bar fix now I'll tell you every time I see one of these plugins in the WordPress plug in directory and there are many that try to solve what people think might be some problems with the WordPress admin bar here on the front end of the site love it hate it whatever people you know, it's sometimes it gets in the way with absolute positioning. If you're trying to do some custom development. You know, the admin bar has been a love it or hate it ever since it was added many years ago into WordPress. This is one of the better approaches to making the admin bar less obtrusive, and it gives you a lot of options to do so. So let's jump in an activate admin bar
fix. And I'll show you some of the things that it can do.
Alright, so admin bar fix, and once we get that active let me open up the settings where does it hide? I've forgotten where it hides
let's see. Well, I'm just going to click Settings.
It hides Oh, it was there. Okay. So here's just take a look at some of the settings and you get a good idea of what it can do. So first of all, do I want to hide the admin bar from certain user roles? Yes. So like if you're an editor or if you're, you know, just a subscriber to the site I don't want you see in the WordPress admin bar. Like if you're a customer in WooCommerce, hide the admin bar for heaven's sakes, I don't want that showing. So you know, any if you have a customer site with roles and views and things, this is a great way to hide the admin bar from people that don't need to see it just check on the roles you want to hide it from. You can also look at this hide items from the admin bar. So let's just say I want to get rid of the WordPress logo. I can check that save and the WordPress logo is
oops Hang on.
I have some settings leftover from the last time I was playing with this. Okay, the WordPress logo was gone. See that? So you can turn turn on and off various things. In the admin bar, which is kind of cool. I want to show the admin bar only on screens that are bigger than let's say 1000 pixels just for the moment. So let's say 1000 pixels and we'll refresh and if I get this below 1000 pixels look boom. It went away. Ah,
we did that. So it doesn't show but for some reason, it's still giving us wonder if it's chrome caching. It did itself but now it's giving us top margin not sure what's going on. That might that might need some investigation. But you can hide it under certain under certain levels.
Now here's the other thing. Do I want a floating admin bar look at the first option it is ghost. You have some settings here. The ghost admin bar looks like this. See that little strip you mouse up to it and boom it appears so it appears and disappears. So that's one option for hiding the admin bar that this plugin allows. Another option in you can have settings on opacity and how long the animation takes and all that. Here is the vertical, which you just saw a minute ago. we'll refresh the screen and so it puts it over here. Now,
I don't know about this. I kind of don't like this at all. But it's an option, right? It's an option. And let's see it has various places where it could go. Like the center of the
side of the screen. This would drive me absolutely crazy. But the option is there. The other one here is just simply an icon. And so and the icon view like this just puts the icon right up there. This one I like more than the others. So like there it is. It's pretty instantaneous. Notice it doesn't have absolute it doesn't get in the way of things with absolute positioning. So it's not actually bumping things down. This is kind of nice. And you have some settings for that as well. You could do it in the center, which would put it vertically centered, which I think would again
where did it go? It's gone. Oh centered at the top. Ooh, I hate that with a white hot passion. Yeah, let's try a different one.
There's also the end which I'm assuming would put it on the right
side. Yeah, I don't like that either. But there you go. Kind of cool.
So a number of different options to customize your WordPress admin bar here using admin bar fixed by cubic. Any questions or comments on this one?
The few likes in the chat. Interesting Interesting.
Okay, next on the list is a plug in called error log monitor error log monitor. So have you ever gone into a site that maybe you launched two years ago let's just save as a round number and you happen to be looking around inside the file structure in a file manager or your SFTP plugin or whatever? And you notice that oh my goodness, there's an error log, the PHP error log, and it's big and there's lots of stuff in it. You ever find that? You know, I probably should have realized there was stuff in there. Or maybe you're trying to debug something and you're constantly having to open up the error log inside the the file structure. Well, this plugin is going to bring the error log the PHP error log into WordPress in a way that's actually helpful. So let's go in and use this that this is probably not something I use on every site, but it's helpful, especially in a debug situation. So let's activate error log monitor
and watch what we get
besides the Freemius skip. Here on the dashboard immediately what you're going to see is a look a PHP error log. Here's a couple things just from the last day or two that showed up. So here's something in the aerelon
Now watch this. This,
you can say I'm gonna mark this as fixed or I'm gonna ignore it. It doesn't know this is a good question. I don't know if it actually deletes this from the error log itself. Or whether it just
hides it in the plugin so we're going to test this really fast checking on here
I can't get I'm sorry, I can't log into the site, take a look. But we can mark it as fix we can ignore it and it brings these error notifications right here into WordPress. So that's pretty cool. We can also clear the log from here. But watch this if you this took me a minute to figure out. But when you mouse over the title bar, there's a configure link. And when you click that it reloads and look oh you can change how many entries you want to show in the log. You can also set the plugin to email you if a new error is logged. I think that's pretty cool. So we can you know how often do we want to check the log every so often? How often do I want to send emails? You know, you can filter out the things you want to deal with here. It's really, really cool, especially if you're trying to track down a weird bug on a site. And you want to know if an error gets logged, for example. So again, not something I use on every site but for troubleshooting and debugging those sorts of things. This is great. This is error log from Genesis
else. Yeah. So any any other questions
or comments on this one pretty nifty
stuff. I think. Stacy
says how often do you want to be freaked out by how many errors your site logs? Yeah, right. Yeah, Tom is saying it. You can check logs pretty easily and usually can I think I just have the wrong password for them. P Nathan, for some reason in my text editor. But yeah, this is just remembering to do it. Right. So pull it right into the dashboard and there it is. Okay, next, let's see this. Yeah, this is last but certainly not least, is a plugin called random post plugin. Now we did something like this last month or the month before that give gave you a consistent URL for your latest post. And this one does something a little more than that. So this is called Random Posts Plugin by what I think is the most interesting developer name of all this month chatty mango. It sounds to me like one of those randomly generated, you know, bought whatever it names the chatty mango anyway. So this plugin does some neat things. Let's just activate random post plugin.
And I
accidentally deleted it. So
let's add Challis random host plugin. And this will give me a moment to also remind you that one of
the easiest ways to find these plugins sometimes if you just search for the title, it doesn't pull the plug in up. Make sure you're grabbing the title and byline out of the handout, and virtually always it pulls it
up. So let's activate this one right there.
Random post plugin and what this is going to do. And by the way, there's full documentation. There's lots of things you can do with this plugin. But it will do things like actually, we pull up the plug in page to get some examples. So redirect to last, latest first, oldest, random,
whatever, right? So let's say
let's go we grabbed this query string,
and we put it right here. redirect to last. And that's going to automatically pull up the last posts that we made on the site. Isn't that interesting. Last and
latest are basically the same thing. Let's go to oldest
Wow goodness. This will pull up
the original plugin that was ever made on the site or the the earliest one right there. So you got a lot of options here. So think about this. Here's some use cases. Maybe in your signature of your email, you say click here for my latest blog post, and you use this latest link and it automatically will pull up whatever the latest post is or you know, you could make a QR code out of you can do a lot of different things with this. And here in the documentation. There's actually a ton of
Oh dear, it broke. Let's go. base in that link.
There's a full bit of documentation here. You can do a lot more than just a simple latest post with this. There's a lot of cool things you can do. But that is the random post post plugin from chatty mango All right. Any other questions or comments about this one? There was a question I missed earlier from Sue talking about the I theme security error log and Sue that's only related to security scans or things specifically about I think security as a plugin. The PHP error log is whatever's in the actual PHP error log that all WordPress plugins are tracking. So there's there is a difference there in those logins. I think security isn't doesn't track. PHP. Errors, per se. That's really a technical thing versus a security thing. All right, that's we have reached the end of the August 2022 plugin roundup list. So we ask the question that we always end on which is one vote. One vote only what was your favorite plugin of the month favorite plugin of the month? We always tabulate these and every six months we do a best of so let's see we've got here error log monitor jumper image sizes, jumper admin bar jumper jumpers, taking it away. Here many many jumpers. Lots of admin bars.
Jumper jumper jumper
let's see. It looks like jumper is the clear winner. With the admin bar fix a distant second All right any other anything else in
any other votes? All right.
Well, thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour or so. We do have several webinars coming up this week on iThemes Training. Let me bring those
up tomorrow my
friend Maddie is going to be with us talking all about content. She just published a new book by the same title writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. So make sure you join us for that webinar. Maddie is really great on anything that has to do with content. She's a fantastic writer and has assembled a great team at the blog Smith and she has always has a great style of presentation. So highly recommend that you join us tomorrow at one o'clock for this content webinar. Office hours of course is coming back on Thursday. Next week we have Elizabeth Pamplona is going to be with us talking about website usability and a very simple but effective website usability test to see how people are actually using your website. That's going to be great. Next Wednesday we have Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for I theme security talking about the new biometric logins that are coming to I theme security, some really cool stuff. To get rid of passwords forever in WordPress. It's going to be really cool to talk about office hours on Thursday and the news roundup coming up on the 16th Well, that
is it, folks. Yeah, that is it. Dave is saying about Google Drive
going away. I think that's Amazon drive you're talking about there. Dave? I don't believe Google Drive is going anywhere anytime soon. If it is, and I've got some
problems. Amazon drive is closing.
Yeah. Dave, I haven't heard that about Google Drive. If that's the case, then we got some issues. But we'll have to look into that.
Alrighty, thanks for hanging
out with me. For the last hour. We'll have the replay up in about half an hour or so. And until then, have a great rest of the day. See you back here tomorrow on I iThemes Training where we go further together.