We'll steps involved and so forth but we're just about there and then we will kick off officially. Almost there
all right, transcripts should be working now.
Yep, there they are. Okay.
Well, let me start the recording. Let's get started. Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the October 2022 plugin round up here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host to die themes training and once a month we take a look across the WordPress plugin directory and we pull out about a dozen or so plugins that we found to be interesting. One thing I will note we added this I think a couple of months ago. Is that here on the iThemes Training site at training dot i ithemes.com. There is a link now to suggest a plugin. So if you've run across a plugin that you like that you'd like to suggest, it does need to be a free plugin in the WordPress plug in directory. Please just fill out the form and you can stack up to I think we said five different plugins so just give us the name and the link to the plug in and I will consider that for inclusion in the next round up. So we would really appreciate you doing that. And I'm gonna drop that link in the chat if you already have one you're thinking about. And yeah, so we'd love to have involvement from everybody and good suggestions across the board for adding things to the plugin Roundup. I bet you get a prize if I'll mention your name on the plugin Roundup, how's that? But many of you already get your names mentioned. So that's not much of an incentive. But this is here are this month's plugins if you are just joining us and you would like the link, let me share that one more time. Again, if somebody wouldn't mind copying that and sharing it later with anybody that comes in late. I won't be able to share that again after now because I'll be focused elsewhere. Yeah, so this is our we got a pretty good list this month. I was talking in the pre show chat just briefly about in the fall and spring plugins tend to get a little bit better as far as you know what's available out there developers doing some fun work and so let's get started with the first plug in on the list, which I believe was suggested by somebody in an office hours Does anybody remember who suggested this if members are out there and around? One of y'all suggested this one and we tested it and we really liked it. It is called Maven class. Yeah, it might have been class.
Somebody really smart and helpful suggested this great plugin from Cornershop creative called Media duper. And the question in office hours, as I recall, was about you know, how can you clean up an old media library like maybe there's a bunch of duplicate images that have gotten uploaded or images that aren't attached anything anymore? Like the post got moved or deleted or whatever, and you know, now the image is sitting out there taking up space. And this is a really good solution, surprisingly, so from Cornershop creative so let's just go in here and activate this and actually may already be active Nope, I deactivated it. So let's go in and activate this. And I find this to be pretty helpful. There's also a really good pro version that you might consider upgrading to if it's going to be helpful to you. So media D duper. Now as this is loading, just as always of course, with anything related to cleaning up the website, cleaning up the media library. Be sure you have a good backup before you do any of these things because gone is gone deleted this forever. And, you know, if you don't have a backup, you're toast. But once activated, what happens here is that we go under media and manage duplicates. Now we've already run our scan. So you can prompt it to manually reindex here, but we already have a nice little page of duplicates here. And the cool thing about this is it doesn't really it doesn't care about the name of the image or the title of the image in WordPress. It's actually looking at the image data and comparing that to other images. So we're looking for exact matches and images. So it's really interesting. It knows look, we've got all these various duplicate images that are here. It will show you isn't attached to anything. So these two images actually are not attached to any page or post on the site. So that's helpful. This one is attached to a private post. And this one actually shows us which post it's attached to. So there's two copies of identical images, and so forth. So Stacy is asking if it recognizes if alt text is entered and does not delete that one. The Pro version does recognize if there's missing alt text, but I'm not sure if the presence of Alt Text gives it preference as to which image it deletes that'd be something to talk to the developer about. And that would be pretty, pretty interesting to see. So does it consider the size? So I don't know the answer to that question. That'd be something you'd want to test and see how it's working. So again, there's a lot of great questions here and obviously we don't have time to fully exhaustively test all these plugins, we just found them interesting. So is it WP DPML compatible header? I have no idea. So this would be something to install and play around with. It's free in the plugin live plugin directory. And just Yeah, install it and play around with it. What we've discovered here is it will Bulk Delete. There's also there's the option to permanently delete, but then the smart delete feature is pretty cool. And that's where some of this alt text and questions might come in. But basically what it does is it goes in and like is this image present as the featured image of a post and if it is, we're going to if we delete one, we're going to swap it over like in other words, if the featured image is using the duplicate image that you're going to delete, it will put in the original image in its place so nothing gets broken. So again, this is a destructive plugin. Like you can really screw things up potentially. So you'll make sure you have a backup. Maybe do this on a staging site and play around with it. But it looks like a really good solution to a problem that a lot of us have, especially with an older website that's collected a lot of media over the years. Especially if you or your client is a media image hoarder. You know, like those shows they have on some of the cable stations of people who their houses are jam packed with things. Yeah, I mean, some media libraries look like that. Right. So this looks like an interesting solution. certainly worthy of testing and seeing if it works for you. Any other questions or comments about media Dee duper from Cornershop? Creative?
Beth says the furniture client uses the same image for different sizes of mattresses. So bath, the pro version integrates with WooCommerce. And my guess is from what we've looked at, again, in a very cursory way. What we've looked at here is he would recognize that and let it use one image across all the things so interesting, Billy, I don't. I don't know. You'd want to test it with happy files. My guess is I don't think there would be a problem. But this is definitely something you're going to want to make a staging site, practice with it, play with it, see what it actually does. And again, I think it's a it appears to be a really good solution to this problem.
Anybody else before we move on?
Pretty good one right out of the gate. Right? That's media Dee duper. All right, next up is a plugin called stepper step contents by the plugins LLC. So we've done a number of the plugins, plugins over the last year or so they really have put out a bunch of things. And let's just activate this. So here's this is it's a really niche plugin, but have you ever created documentation for a client on how to do certain things? Or maybe your site is a document that has your site might be providing content that's like a step by step process for something. This is a really cool approach to laying out that sort of content. So let me activate Oh, it's already activated, stepped content. And we have a page set up for that, as I recall.
Something already set up so you can see how it works. So watch this. Alright, so
this is our step content. Let me actually let's just show you what it looks like on the front end.
Let's see preview in a new tab. All right preview in a new tab. So here's how it looks.
So each step you can actually put a time like roughly how much time you think it will take or you can leave that blank. But as you go through the steps, this is what it does. Look at that and you can put lots of things there. And this is all using the block editor you can put video anything you can put in the block editor, you can put something there. So it's rather interesting. And here's what it looks like on the back end. So this is one of those situations where I am really grateful for the list view that they've put into the block editor here because it makes dealing with this much, much easier because sometimes it's hard to get to exactly what you want here in the block editor. So if we open this down, step, step, step, step. Let's say we want to edit step two, for example, let's click on the second step. Problem is it's not I can't get wide enough on the screen to show off. Try that. So right here, this image just makes it easy to select which element of the step we're actually looking at.
Same for here. Like if we want to get to the spare on a swing, which is interesting. This gives us the ability to do all those things.
So again, you can drop video in here you can do all that is each step a separate post now it's all right here in one block editor layout. So in the main step content block, you have options for all the colors you have, you know option to set the title here, you've got the different settings and whether or not to show a done link. And you can link that to something like you can turn this off if you want to. So you've got some options here. And as you get into each step, you also can deal with the individual bits of content there. So it's pretty interesting, might be helpful on maybe you're running, you know, like a Help site for your clients. Where you've got your own documentation of step by step anything that needs to be explained in steps. This is pretty darn good. I kind of like it. So that is again step content, or stepper step content from be plugins any questions or comments about that one?
Roy gets a great question. Can they be rearranged? I don't know. But if you could, I'll look at that. Yep, sure enough. Right there. You have to read the title the step but yes. And by the way, if you want to add a new step, it's right here. This little plus button will let you add a new step down at the bottom. So yeah, you can rearrange. You can't do it here. But you can do it in the list view.
Good question. Alright, anybody else on this one before we move on?
It Yes, it is. A block editor. So this is this is a block that you drop into a page and then you can
edit the contents. Yep, a page or a post.
Okay, moving on down the next one. Now how many folks using WooCommerce here this is you're either gonna love this or you're gonna hate it. This is a an alternate way to view your orders in something like a Kanban board. It is called EZ order view from wooed delivery plugins and I've got it activated already. So I'm just going to click here and take a look at how it works. So it actually views it right here. Here's all our open orders from various webinars past. And if we want to process this order, we can just do it right here we can add a note to the order and save it. We can hit process and it's going to move it right over there. Boom.
So that one's completed. If I want to change it, I can do that. There it's completed.
So processing it moves it over to here and preparing and then completed it goes away.
We can also change the status here as well.
So it's interesting it's it's a visual thing. But if you have a client that's processing orders might be a little better than the standard WooCommerce order list. And again, it's going to be love it or hate it kind of situation. But pretty pretty interesting. Potentially. There's no settings it is what
it is that's it
that is easy order view from whoo delivery plugins. They say a pro version is coming soon. So we'll see. Beth No, it does not replace the standard order view. It just adds a new menu item here. But all your orders are still here under WooCommerce orders.
Like so.
Now know Paul, that was one thing that I had hoped you could do, which is click and drag. These don't drag No. But so you have to use the buttons to process
any other questions about this? Well, Paul, that
would be more Trello like but it is still a Kanban board essential. All right. Easy order view from whoo delivery. All right, let's move on to the next one, shall we another WooCommerce plug in this one I kind of like this is easy note for WooCommerce. And what this plugin allows you to do is very simply, which is why it's called Easy. Add a note either for internal or send to the customer use on an order so let's say you know something's delayed or shipment or whatever what this will actually let you do is did I think this plan I think this plugin is still actively make sure it was one of the last ones I tested. Yes all right. So here under orders.
If we let's just edit this order. Notice
that there is at the bottom here, see a whole bunch of notes have stacked up here. There is the option at the bottom of this column to add a note and you have an option of whether this is a private note or a note to the customer. If it's a private note, it just stays on the order like this one. So this is a private note. It's just right there so you could just leave little notes to yourself about this order along the way the customer called they did this you know there's some thing going on. So you can go back and refer to that within the order. If you change this to note to customer. Watch this. Sample for
plugin roundup demo, ad.
All right. So this just it shows up here. But I'm also going to get an email because it's going to send
to let me see if I can be able to copy this URL right there.
So this is just the Brett whatever branding you have set up for your WooCommerce site. Hi, Nathan, the following note has been added to your order. Boom, there's that and then it does also include a summary of the order down below. So whatever you enter as the note will go out to the customer in an email. So that's pretty helpful to keep just a very simple way of communication on the order with each customer. So that's what it does. That is easy note for WooCommerce either internal or external use.
Pretty cool. From the Big Ben team.
Any questions or comments on
that? One? Okey dokey.
Rolling on down the list to a plug in from Jeff star just star is a great WordPress developer. He's the guy that built the disabled Gutenberg plugin a long time ago that I know some of you use. And this is a nifty little plugin. It's very simple. It's called simple login notification. But basically if you want to know when an admin logs into your site, this will send you an email. That's literally what it does. That's it. It's simple. It's very light. It's just a few lines of code. And I totally work so if let's see if I can
I'll just come in here.
And there's really no sense in activating this because this is what it looks like. This is the email when we tested this this is what this is what it was. So when an admin logged into the site with this plug in active it says this is the name of the login whoever whoever logged in what the you know, where they tried to log in at which in this case, we use the passwordless login prompt from I theme security. What the referrer was then just some various user agent server, the host of all the various IP addresses and so forth. So essentially just a simple notification to let you know that an admin logged into your site right then and it has the email sends right upon login. So if you're watching my work, where this can be really helpful is for example, if you follow my process, which is the client gets an admin user for you know, for break glass in case of emergency situations. Maybe you want to have a plugin like this, that emails you when an admin logs in and it's not you you know you could right away say Oh, this is the client logging in with the email address. They're not supposed to be using to edit the website. You cannot exclude users this there's no settings here. It's just again, it's a few lines of code. The PHP code is basically if the user logs in and they're an admin send this email like it's it's it's teeny tiny code. So it's pretty, pretty cool. Simple. I mean, there's other plugins like you could use the I think stream stream or the stream plugin will allow we featured that one in months past stream will allow you to actually specify down to the username if this person logs in what the event is. There's other plugins that will do that as well, you know, one of the Zapier like WordPress integrations, but this one is just for everybody. Just a few lines of code very light, not going to slow the site down or anything like that. So activity log Billy is another one that will do that. Veera, great question Veera asks do you get emails when bots try to log in? Well, if they actually log in, yes. But wouldn't this is only going to fire if the person actually logged in not if they attempted to log in the good QUESTION
All right, any other questions or comments on that one?
Simple login notification
All right, we're rockin and rollin here. Let's scroll on down to what I am certain. Just absolutely certain is going to be everybody's favorite plugin of the roundup. We saw this one and we thought this has to go in the roundup because what every website is missing is a scrolling marquee. Am I right? Like that's, we've been missing these for years. Who remembers back in the day where you had the CGI script that would scroll a marquee across the website. And then it actually became an HTML tag like a marquee and you could scroll it. Heck yes. So you're waiting time is over my friends because now there is the marquee block from Kings kingdom. Let's activate it Challis. It does not blink. That's the only thing that would make this better. This is the marquee plugin and it's actually called the marquee block. Not a marquee block, but the marquee block. Let's activate this as you can see, you know I am highly invested in this plugin.
Oh my goodness. Okay, come on. Okay, it's wanting to I'm pressing the wrong button. So here's
the marquee block. And here it is an action because everybody wants to see it in action. Isn't this gorgeous? You can even set it to be the most obnoxious Google font of your choice. There it is. The marquee block right there.
Can you slow it down? Yes.
So let's edit this page shall we? It actually has a lot of settings. So let's, let's highlight the block. And look we have this typography so you can pick all you know whatever Google font you want. Oh my goodness, that is mighty scary. I don't know what happened. These are. But all the Google Fonts are here. Which by the way, if you can't use Google Fonts where you are due to privacy issues, then this is not going to be helpful to you.
You can set the font weight I don't know now I'm
now I'm really invested in finding a good Google font.
Oh, that's it. That's gotta be it. Right there.
Because if you're going to have a marquee, it should at least not be readable. Right? Because it accessible. What do you think? Actually, I think it is been, I actually think it is. We'll look at that on the front end in a minute. So background and foreground colors. I mean, let's just let's I mean, this is too tame of a color. So it should be bright pink in honor of our professor from years past. And why not make it a yellow? A yellow foreground, there's your scrolling speed. Option. Can Do you want to stop the marquee when you hover? over it you can do that. You can reverse direction if you'd like to do that. It will also fix position to the top or the bottom although I had some trouble with this for some reason on the Kadence theme yet there's something going on there. Then you can set the margins you want to remove the top and bottom margin from the block you can do that. And then the regular just CSS classes. So with
with those settings made, let's be the front end.
And you just how do you not love this? I want four of those on a page actually is what I want. As far as the accessible. Let me put it this way. If you're worried about accessibility, I'm not sure I mean, you're probably not going to use this plugin anyway. Accessibility is not my first concern when it comes to this page. What in the world is all
of this? Okay, so it's literally just a series of spans for some reason. What in the world now this is not
it well it's accessible, but it's gonna read this 100 times each one of these spans seem to be identical. So I mean, strangely, this plugin has accessibility issues. I mean, I'm shocked, quite frankly.
So, you know, I'm disappointed.
Gutted. That's the word Ben, thank you. I am gutted. And you have to you can't say gutted with a southern accent if you're an American. You really need a British accent to say gutted properly, don't
you? Ah, okay. Look at those stop when you
scroll over it though. Anyway, that is the marquee block from themes kingdom, and you're welcome. Okay, moving down the list to off Canvas slash drawer plugin. Off Canvas slash drawer. This plugin actually allows and off Canvas drawer to be added to your website. So let's activate it, shall we? Yeah. Oh, it's already active. Okay, good. There's several I did not deactivate after I tested in the last time. Okay, so here it is. You click it. Oh, look, something slides over. That's basically what it is. It's an off Canvas content. Lot of things do this. I think we've even done some.
We've even done some
other plugins that do this sort of thing. Sherry says what do you put in said drawer? Well, it could be lots of things. It could be various content. It could be a call to action. It could be a newsletter, signup. It could be lots of different things. But everything over here is powered by the block editor. So let's take a look at it, shall we? Sue does this work at all with the canvas off canvas? The Kadence off Canvas thing? It's very similar. And if you have Kadence you already have this? Yeah, very similar. So you wouldn't work with it? It would be you would use Kadence probably in place of this because it's alright. Something like this is already included in Kadence blocks. But so right here when this is open, what you'll notice is I can now edit all of this in the block editor. So that's really helpful. You can put you know images, you can put videos you can put whatever you want. This actually happens to be a WooCommerce product block that is there
Yeah, so that is it.
And that's what it does. You do have some options here to the block, positioning it top right or bottom. But I like I kind of like the idea of a bottom tray. You have to play around with the layout just a little bit. I didn't play around with it really long enough to get it to work like I would want it to work. But it's still kind of cool. Like this would be an interesting thing for put a mark
Sue says put a marquee in that. I'm going to spare you all that. That whole experience but I mean we totally
could right didn't do any styling of the marquee but it should at least be text
Oh, it doesn't work. Look. It doesn't work. It just repeats 5000 times. I don't know what's going on there. Yeah, you'd have to troubleshoot that.
Heather, you are welcome. Yes. Do you have to be Yeah, these are all blocks. Elizabeth is asking if you have to be using the block editor. Yes, these are all these plugins the last few have been just blocks Correct. Is there a business to developing retro websites? Well, I mean sure, why not?
Why not. Okay.
And by the way, if you're not using block editor for things, there are off Canvas modules for most of the major page builders that do similar things.
Yeah, okay. Any other
any other questions or comments? If you if you're catching us on the replay, y'all just the chat alone is just worth it. You folks entertain me quite a bit. I believe he can you add this to regular Kadence off canvas and use it as a dismissable notification info modal, maybe that's an interesting way to look at it. Maybe you'd want to play around with that a little bit again, like that. I never want to give anybody the idea that we're sitting here and we've spent like an hour on each of these plugins, testing all the possible ways that could be used. That's just there's not enough time in life for that, but they're interesting, right? And so I've Leedy I would encourage you to activate it and try it and see where it gets you.
It's pretty interesting. Okay, next up
here is scrolling scrolling, scrolling, another nice little blog called The Butina lightbox so there's a bunch of Catina plugins out there by Express tech. We got a couple of them here on the plugin roundup this month. This lightbox is actually one of the nicer video lightbox plugins that I've seen. So let's get that one active, shall we? Actually, I'm going to go through here. It's about the time in the roundup where we should be deactivating a bunch of things. So we don't get inadvertent bumping of heads and clashing.
Because clearly, all of these are incredibly high quality programming. And most of them actually pretty good so far this month. Okay, good Tina.
lightbox let's take a look at that, shall we?
Alright, let's open up the lightbox page here. And we have a lightbox set up. Here for you already. It is a block let's just add a new one just so you see what it looks like. Video lightbox will add that you can choose a style whether it's a round button or a square play button and it already provides that you can change the image of course, by clearing the media you can add an alt text if you'd like. You can change the focal point of the image like a cover block. It's basically this is kind of like a bit it's a cover block. You can fix it you can repeat it. You can do various things with it. And then you can type you know whatever it is right here and then on the play button you have control over the style. And you can paste a location from either YouTube or Vimeo such as this one.
I hit the button hang on a minute. Oh, maybe it's is it to lightbox. Alright, hang on. Maybe it doesn't like it. There's two light boxes on the page because I didn't test it with a second light box. Now there it is. Boom. So yeah, there we go.
Sue does this get blocked by popup blockers? I don't know. You'd want to test that. I'm running a pop up blocker and it didn't block it. So I think this is probably a lightbox like this oftentimes because it's triggered. I don't think it's a popup blocker is going to catch that it might. It's not really a pop up window. It's a modal. So yeah, you'd have to test it but I think you might be able to get around
those. That one didn't have a link in it.
So really easy to set up and use simple styling. Yeah. So that is the good Tina lightbox from Express tech. Any other questions or comments on that one? Okie dokie next one down the list from Butina is the Butina forms plugin. And that's a good basic form block. Now if you are using Kadence blocks Kadence of course already has a really nice form. Simple, easy to use. This is one if you happen not to be using Kadence for whatever reason. This is a nice little forum plugin that does all the forum type things right there in the block editor. So if you've if you're not familiar with a block editor based form like the Kadence form, it is a little bit different than say Gravity Forms or any of the other types of forms. that are out there, which you know, you'd have you design the form within that plugins interface, then you just sort of drop that in as a block with a block based form, like the Kadence form or like this Butina one, you're actually building the form right there inside the page. So let's take a look at that. It's a little bit of a different experience, if you've never seen that before. So here's the actual sample form we had set up and all of like we're actually in, we're on a page.
So you know this
you know we can drop in whatever we want here. This is just the block Editor inside a page. And you just click in here and type you know you know, you just type whatever you want for the labels. You can type whatever you want as the the placeholder item right there, whether it's required or not. If you want to add more fields, you literally
you add Yeah, you add a field group.
And then you can add additional fields in there if you want to one nice thing about this is when you drop in a field here, you can decide is it text a simple text? Is it a text area? Is it an email field or is it a select field so it doesn't support checkboxes or radio buttons? It does offer a drop down and you get a live preview of that right here. But then you can set up the various options of what it's going to be. All the styling stuff is over here. Yeah. So this is your typical block based form builder. Works really well. You're not using the Kadence block already. This is a good one. You know if you if you have some site you're using building it's not running Kadence blocks this is a good option. Barbara does it keep it as a form keep a copy of the entry like Gravity Forms? No, it does not.
It does not.
And Billy, I agree with you. I am a longtime Gravity Forms user and will continue to be all right. So there's a good example of a block based form creator, which will start to see more and more of those things as the block editor continues. To grow. Scrolling down the list is my one of my actual favorite useful type plugins of this roundup, which is called merge menus, and it merges menus. This is one of those. I'm certainly not going to install it on every site, but Good grief. What a great plugin for my toolbox. You know, menuing and WordPress and building menus. It's not hard to understand, but if you've got a menu with like 40 items in it, and then you need to duplicate that for a mobile menu and do some things with it or you know, whatever. Like it's I don't want to have to reset up all of those fields again, merge menus takes care of that. So basically what it's going to let you do is whatever menu you have open, you can merge the content of another menu into that one. So you could take an existing menu and merge another menu into it. You could start with a blank menu and merge a few different menus into it and it's really, really easy to use. So let's activate that plugin merge menus. It's already active. We'll go into menus. And I'm just going to actually I'm going to start with a new
menu. I'm going to call it merge menus demo.
And so it's just a brand new blank WordPress menu. And what you do is you go down here to the last option which is merge menus, and pick one of your existing menu so here's my mobile menu. I'm going to click that one and click Merge. Now what it's doing is it's pulling all those items out of the mobile menu, boom, and it dropped it in right there. So if I go, let me save this. If I go to my mobile menu, you'll see that it's identical
it just took
the contents of that mobile menu and dropped it into the into the one I just created. So there's also I have a menu here called member menu that just has a few options from some webinar we did at some point member. Let's merge that one in as well. So there's my merge menu demo. Let's go to edit that one. And I'm going to merge into this my member menu as well. And it's just going to drop those in down there at the bottom. Boom, there they are. I mean How easy is that? Super great, you know, simple like, I love plugins like this. These are my favorite kinds of plugins. For a long time on plugin Roundup, we call those our toolbox plugins or simple but useful plugins. And yeah, they it really is a super time saver. There are other plugins and we've done plugins called like duplicate menu is one if you just need to duplicate a menu. Great. This does that. As you can see, you can just duplicate it into a blank menu but also merge other menus into it. Should you need to do that. So yeah, I like that. A lot of times we'll use this on a site that has maybe multiple tiers of menus like a top level menu with some basic nav and the main nav under that and for the mobile menu, this would be a great tool for that because you could duplicate your primary menu into the mobile menu and then merge in that top level menu that shows up there as well until maybe the bottom of the bottom part move it however you want to do it. So really helpful that is merged in us from WP Help Desk UK. Any other questions or comments on that one? Pretty good stuff. Okay, the next plugin is the controversial plugin of the month. I at first when we discovered this, I said, Nope, no way. I just realized there's a funny joke I could make about that. And some of you upon reading what's on the screen will get that I said no way. And because this just did not sound like a good idea to me as soon as I realized what was going on. However, having actually been back and forth a bit with the developer on this plugin. I am interested. And here's what this does. How many of you have ever maybe you've used the WP rollback plugin? Are you familiar with that? WP rollback is a plugin from the hang on let me actually just get it here real quick.
Do attack it? Yeah, if you type WP rollback
it's from the word impress team which is the team that created give WP Oh, it's actually by give WP now which is now of course a sister brand. I think that actually the developer this plugin is now my boss and I themes, Matt Cromwell and that'd be rollback is a great plugin and it lets you roll back versions of plugins that are in the WordPress plugin directory. Let me just show you how this works. If you don't know about DDP rollback, you should and so I'm just going to take a moment to show you that like for example here, this auto delete post with MP rollback active you can click rollback and it will show you all the versions of that plugin that exist in that plugins history on the wordpress.org plugin directory. And you can select a version and roll it back. So if a version has a problem, you can just roll it back. It's really easy to do. Now the problem is this doesn't work for DEP rollback doesn't work for plugins that are not in the WordPress plugin directory because it goes back to the WordPress plugin directory history to pull the versions that you want to load. So it's not helpful for example, if you want to rollback Backup Buddy or like Beaver Builder or Gravity Forms are those right? This is this is the problem the developer behind plug versions Jose Morton lot moto Yarrow was trying to solve and he's done it in an interesting way. So what he's actually doing is he is whenever a plugin updates, he saves the last three versions in the plugin list.
They're just hidden. They might go
they're just hidden. And let me show you what that actually looks like. So you may notice that there are I think I did it with the beaver plug. Yeah, okay, so here under Beaver Builder, there's this thing called revisions. That is from plug versions plug versions is active. You'll see. There it is. Actually, let me remove the P rollback. Just so we don't have any confusion here. All right. So we have these revisions. And notice Oh, I can replace this with a previous version like right here. Beaver theme or for example, is it 1.4 dot 3.2 I can roll it back to this plugin.
Okay. So
here's what it's doing. I really Yes, I all the things you're posting in the chat. Yes, I've thought about this as well. So here's what it's actually doing. Let me just go to the cPanel for the site. And I'm going to log in to public html and I'm going to log into Adobe content and plugins and scrolling down. Okay, here's what it's actually done. So, it has created folders named PR dash eight random characters, dash, the version number, dash vert dot and then the slug of the plugin itself, because this is where it's going to pull the revision from. Now this is interesting, okay, because it does allow you to rollback premium plugins which sometimes you can't find the old versions of things. Now Stacy has asked the question that made me go No way. Because what happens for example, and this by the way, this works for all plugins. So you can see here for example, that I have rolled back another plugin here, which one was it?
It was would have been nice if I had remembered which one that was. I think it's very tough. Now. Well, this works for
free plugins as well. So it's, this is for all plugins. Basically, if you have this, if you have if you have the plug versions active. It works for all plugins and you'll see a revisions here. So what happens if a plugin is vulnerable? Well, it's going to keep a copy of the vulnerable plugin right here in a folder but and this was the argument of developer. What are the odds that a hacker can actually guess? I mean, they would have to know this exact name of this folder to access the the vulnerable scripts and while I don't like the idea of having vulnerable plugin on my site, the chances of it being accessed or just like, you know, they would have to have file level access to my WordPress site. And at that point, it doesn't matter for them really to guess this. I mean, it's an it's an eight character random string. I don't know so it's an interesting approach to solving a problem that many of us have run into, which is how do I roll back a premium theme or plugin that's not in the WordPress directory and they'd be rolled back doesn't work. So this is our controversial plugin of the of the day. What do you think? What do you think Bonnie Bonny saying, If my clients had this, I would have to start drinking. Well, they can update plugins already, right? I mean, if they have access to rollback I'm not clients don't get access to the plugins unless they log in as their admin user anyway.
So anyway, what do you think
super powerful. I can be like, what if it's only for your site? That's Oh, that's like literally your site.
Interesting. Interesting,
right. That's why I went away. And it's from saying NO WAY too,
huh. There you go. So that is plug versions. And there you have it. Oh, by the way.
One thing you mean. One thing it's actually very cool is if I go in here and deactivate the plugin
and delete the plugin let's delete. Now it's still deleting.
I had this problem earlier. I think I've got a permissions issue. What it's supposed to do is go it's still trying to delete here. It may just take a minute, but it's gonna go in and clean up all the stuff that it added
let's have a little bit of trouble. I think I've got some security issue preventing it from doing that. Anyway, that is plugged versions. There you have it all right, next up.
Okay, this is also potentially my favorite plugin of the round there. I've got a few that I really liked here. I just this is one I don't know. I don't know if I'd ever use it. But block diffusion is just fun. Okay, it is just fun. How many of you seen these new AI image creators alike where you type of thing and it creates an image of that? That's what this is. So blocked diffusion. Let me activate blocked diffusion.
And
let's just jump over to that page. I think we have an example there. And I want somebody to give me an example of something to make an image of
a horse. Okay. A horse on
an asteroid with a wolf. Okay, I'm combining a mashing up Elizabeth's suggestion with Stacy suggestion. And so let's do
block diffusion. It's a block. And we Whoa, what just happened?
Oh, here we go. Okay, something was taken forever. Okay, so we're gonna prompt to image and we can set our size let's do 1024 by 768 one and this is going to be a horse
and Wolf on an asteroid. Submit. Gonna take a minute because the AI is AI saying
it is processing. It is thinking really hard about this and wondering who in the world wants
a horse and a wolf on an asteroid Oh, look, it's it's a wolf horse. Wow.
I don't know what to think about this. So yes, let's import this into the editor because why not? Yes. Okay. Melanie says Tinkerbell with a purple hat. And I don't think it's going to work with Tinkerbell because that is a
a like a.
A copyright thing fairy Okay, let's do fairy with a purple hat eating ice cream. Was that it? Okay, let's try that again. And look, it actually pulled in the alt text for me. It's there we go.
This is just so much fun. Okay.
All right. So we said fairy
with purple hat. Eating ice cream. So we're talking we're talking takes a minute now we're processing Look at that.
I mean, that's although she has a wing coming out of her head. I don't know about that. But
there it is. Creepy. But it's aI What do you want? So somebody let's do one more.
A bulldozer in sand dunes from Mr. Talman earlier.
Chris
is asking when would you ever use something like that? Well
what the heck? I I'm not sure what's happening here. Oh bowled over Paul didn't spell it correctly. Bulldozer so
hey, if you don't want to pay for stock art, here's what you do.
When you had Yes. So you can make your own stock art right nice T on a rocking chair
Nathan with hair those pictures exist. It's been a while but they do exist.
Oh, I see. I see a T that's not going to be helpful. Yeah,
oh Ben, if you submit it twice, does it show a different image probably because it's generating it
let's try it again. It's gonna be a different image. John, yes,
you can. This is absolutely a time suck. Well, look at that see completely different image. I could see this being used in a blog post. That's a pretty darn good picture.
Right. Kind of also, it kind of looks like a might be a drink beverage of another kind.
Okay, anyway, you get the idea. You can import that right into the editor. And it's going to be in your media library and so
forth. Yep, so it's going
to be in our media library. Just like any other image just pulls it right in. There you go. Except it calls it AI prompt boo boo boo bla bla bla bla. And there you have it. All right, that is blocked diffusion. Any other questions or comments about that
one? Okay, moving down the list to today's final plugin and the one that I think might make some of you who understand the power of this go wow, that's amazing. It is called Gold tracker from pine. Why's gold tracker from Pine wise. Okay. How many of you after the Google Analytics bootcamp a couple of weeks ago or whenever that was no last month? How many of you have gotten into setting up goal tracking with GA four?
Have you done that yet? You may
discover that getting those things to work with Google Tag Manager and all of that is a little you know not okay, so Stacy, you tried Were you successful? We're all one so far, right? But it's a bit of work, isn't it? So what this is going to do, I forgot to sign into my analytics account. So I'm doing that now. Okay, what this is going to do is make that a lot more easy, more easy. It's gonna make it easier. So I'm trying to say so let's activate gold tracker. It is not currently active.
Goal tracker and let's
go down here we have what I've done is we've set up a page
that has a couple buttons on it.
Let me get that open so you can see what's going on. And then let's open up goal tracker. It gives you a UI to make this really, really easy. And goal tracking meaning they click this button for example, whatever the goals of a site are, you know, they click this button, they view this page they did whatever. So we have our GA account already connected here to simple process just took a second and you know there's some other options here to click on but I'm gonna go specifically to click tracking and I'm going to edit this one. Oh my goodness. Did it go away? Oh, no, here it is. Okay, just took a second to show up. So we've set up actually to click tracks. And look at all we had to do. We gave it a name. That can be anything you want it to be. We have put in whatever the class or ID we want to track, which in this case is while there's tracked button the second and we've given it a property of CTA but really we're just going to fire this. So it's this event on a class like this. The other one is similar. It is button one and tracked button. Okay, here on a page. We've got one button right here. And if we go down here to advanced you'll notice that it is has the class
tract button
and a second button that has the Class Track button the second so they match these two click tracks. And literally all we had to do was add the name of the button, the ID, that's really all you have to do. But you can also add additional properties here if you want it that's what this down here is. Now once we did
that, we are now tracking in GA four on the site
to acquisition. No, no, no. No, hang on. Hang on, I gotta remember where this is and I know it's here. events there it is.
Let me just go to home. It's down here at home. Okay, this is not showing what it showed her. Just a minute
I should have left that window open under here it is behavior and events overview. Sorry about that.
As we scroll down we should see day week. Oh this is Hang on. It's the roll. I want her on site.
No wonder I'm like what the heck. I was looking at the wrong website. And I still think I'm on site. I'm signed into the wrong account just a minute.
This is what happens when you run Google accounts and multiple tabs. Anybody else have that problem? Like I'm running Google Analytics in too many places.
Up Nathan, GA for
There we go. Now now we have analytics that means something Okay, so we want to go to its reports. engagement events? Yes. So now as we look at this look, we have buttons showing up. Now GA for is not real time. But it about every half hour or so that the analytics refreshing you'll start to see these clicks. So there's our two events that have come from button one and button two that we just set up right here. No Tag Manager no extra stuff. We just set them up right here with this codeless and it just knows to show up over here. Once I've attached my Google account my analytics account to it. It starts showing up over here as an event and it totally works. So for those of you who have tried and had struggles with setting up event tracking in GA for this makes it so easy. I mean y'all It is literally it is just put the name it, put the class in and you're done. That's it. That's all you have to do, and it just shows up. So g4 is getting better it's not nearly as robust as ulana Universal Analytics yet. But this big hurdle of making all the events work. It's not easy. This makes it a ton easier. So that is gold tracker from Pine wise any last questions? Or comments on this one before we wrap up? All right, folks, that brings us to the end of the October 2022 plugin round up here on I iThemes Training. And as always, we're going to take a vote to see what is your favorite plugin of the roundup one vote, one vote only please and that will tabulate these going forward for the best of webinar in December. So let's see gold tracker block diffusion medium or merge mini merge menu goal tracker stepper goal tracker Marquis Paul Cole track Okay, goal tracker is definitely it looks like menu merge and stepped content also in their media Dee duper gotta votes Alright, so it looks like media merge and gold tracker that should be many emerge in gold tracker for sure step content also those three. Yeah, very good. All right, everybody. That's gonna wrap it up for us today. I will share with you what is happening this week on I iThemes Training. Let's see there is no webinar tomorrow. However, we do have office hours on Thursday. And let me just remind you that we just scheduled this webinar last week before last. If this is a great webinar, you'll want to say even if you're not a give WP user this is something you want to be aware of because it's a really interesting way how the gift team has started to use the Kadence cloud. So they've actually set up a free cloud Kadence cloud of give WP patterns that you can just drop right in your nonprofit websites. It's super easy to use, and it's available for everybody that is the gift that up cloud and Amanda Gorman from give that up who was with us lad last month wasn't Yeah, about preparing your nonprofit site for the giving season. She was awesome. She's going to be back with Kathy Zant talking about that along with myself next Tuesday. We also have proposals and contracts for the fly course on next Wednesday, and then of course office hours on Thursday, and the news roundup coming up on the 18th. So with that I will wrap it up for today. Hope you have a great rest of the day. I'll see you back here Thursday for office hours here on I iThemes Training where we go further together.