Best of iThemes Plugin Roundup (January-June 2023)

5:30PM Jun 13, 2023

Speakers:

Nathan Ingram

Keywords:

plugin

wordpress

page

site

link

works

add

activate

post

block

good

calendar

cool

options

click

create

nice

admin

taxonomies

triggers

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Little technical difficulties. We're getting started today, but it's all good hope your week has started off. Well, we're about a minute and a half away from getting started with

this. Our biannual

twice a year best of plugin round up.

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mic than the other one. Which sounds a lot gloomier than normal because it's tucked away behind my monitor normally, but this one is really good.

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Yes, there was an

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Good afternoon,

everybody and welcome to the best of plugin round up here for January through June of 2023. Here on I iThemes Training twice a year we take a look at all the votes that came in from each of the months plugin round ups for that six month period and we take your votes and put a list together of the top 1214 15 or so plugins that were voted by you to be your favorites for each of the months. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat, say hi and tell us where you're logging in from today. Good to see folks from across the United States and around the world. The link for the plugin list which is here is also there in the chat. If you're watching this on the replay, you can just click the Download handout button right below the video. And there you go. Alright y'all so just as we always remind you at the beginning of these plugin roundups, these are plugins that have not been extensively tested by any means. Don't really have the time for that. But we do find them very interesting, very useful. So if you use any of these plugins, you want to certainly evaluate those for yourself as far as security bugs, privacy issues, accessibility, et cetera, et cetera, just to make sure it's a plugin that you'll want to use for whatever application you're going to use it but these are ones that we found to be pretty interesting for you to take a look at and voted by you to be the best. So once again, if you're just joining us in zoom one more time, I'm going to drop the slide link in and we will get started. Okay, so rewinding all the way back to the first of the year, January 2023. We found this really cool plugin called Tax suppress. So tax suppress is a really it's a full featured tool to manage taxonomies and their terms within WordPress and it's really, really excellent now, I actually found this plugin as part of a client project that I was working on. And I simply wanted something where I could just quickly define bulk define a bunch of terms for an existing taxonomy and it does that perfectly. And but it does so much more enough that it was actually voted the fight the favorite for the January webinar. This is perhaps one of the best full featured plugins of any kind that's free. It's really really pretty amazing. So let's go down here and activate, tak suppress. And by the way, they have a very good stack of documentation for this as well. So let's activate that suppress to do and no it does not do your taxes.

Not that kind of tax. We're talking about taxonomies here. Okay,

so tax suppress is now working and you'll find a new menu item here on the side of the screen. Now they've done a good job at splitting apart all of the different features of the plugin right here. So for what I did, I basically I just went in here to manage terms and just bulk added the list of all the terms that I wanted to add in just a comma separated list. And so if all you want to do maybe you've got a site and or you're importing some things or whatever, and you want to just define a whole bunch of taxonomy terms. You can just put them right there hit the button, you know, and it'll, it'll tell you, you know, where do you want it to? Add and so forth. So it works out really, really well for that. But let's just take it from the top here, and let me show you all the things that we'll do. So, first of all, it's really handy. This is like for example, if you are taking over a site, maybe it's a rescue site, and you're just starting to manage it or whatever. And you will just want to have an idea of what taxonomies are even defined on this site. If it's a really in depth site, you just click that link right there and it shows you all the taxonomies that are defined in WordPress, it just gives you a nice list there and gives you the ability to edit those wherever they may be. It will also give you a list of all the terms and all the taxonomies that are defined across the entire site, which is also super helpful if you just you know, do we have this term used already? Well, there's a list of all our terms. It will also give you the ability This is maybe not as useful as the other features but if you want to create a tag cloud with all the terms of a particular taxonomy, whether it's a hierarchical taxonomy like categories or a standard taxonomy, non hierarchical like tags, this create gives you a shortcode to display all the terms that you define them and you can stack these up, make a new display of you know, now you have to its pro if you want to do more than one but here's one. And let's say we want to display you know all the terms from any of these taxonomies how do we want them to display as a list as a an unordered list or as a tag cloud? You can do that it gives you some design options here and how you want them to display super powerful just to display a list for example, if you want to display an unordered list, bulleted list of all the terms in a taxonomy somewhere this would let you do that. Right here. This has some options for the current post. So again, it's a it's shortcode driven, but if you wanted to echo out on the purchase a particular post in any custom post type what terms are defined or added to that post. This gives you a shortcode to do that. It also has its own built in related posts feature if you prefer to use this one it would automatically select other posts from within the post type that share that taxonomy term. It does that. This is also one of the really cool features here of auto link. We've done some plugins like this recently where you know it would let

you

automatically create links, but in this case, what it's going to do is you know, look within the post content. And I want to look for all of the tags that are defined on my site or all the categories or product categories or whatever. And just it will automatically the so if the tag term appears in the text, it would link that term over to that category archive page automatically. So that's really cool and very helpful. And there's some advanced features there. This is also pretty cool this auto terms feature where it will scan your content and suggest new terms, which is kind of nice.

Mass editing

terms have gotten to managing our terms. Oh here's like for example, here's all of our posts on our site. And if we want to add tags to them, you can select here products, you know what post type and then you know what term type. Let's say we want to change up the categories on posts. Look, this shows you what the categories are. And you can let's say this one's also to be legal for some reason,

oops. Comma.

You can just Bulk Add all these terms at once. And then update everything all at once. So it's really, really good, full featured approach to dealing with taxonomies on your website, and the documentation is excellent. So really good, searchable knowledge base here. So that is taxall press by tech suppress any questions or comments about this one really powerful plugin you can see why it was voted the favorite back in January 2023. Good stuff. Alright, moving out the pro version is available starting at $79 a year. Okay, another favorite from January was a plugin called click whale. Click whale, which is a short link type plugin. And this is something that will allow you to create short links that forward to other places really good for like affiliate links, that sort of thing. It's really built for that. And yes, the redirection plugin that we love does that as well. But if all you are looking for is something that will manage affiliate links or create some basic link tracking inside WordPress, this is a great option. And by the way, there's another plugin just like this one that made the June list that we just reviewed last week that we'll talk about that right toward the end of this list, but click whale. And the by the way, the plugin that we did last week for those of you that were with us is also very good. These are just slightly different approaches to creating these link shortening. You know, the short links for things like affiliate links like that, and depending on the features you want, one is going to be better than the other. So let's just activate click whale. We'll talk about the basic features and then show one thing that it does that the other one doesn't do. So activating click whale. And here is the Alright, so here's all the things. So this lets you create short links as you would imagine, it's very simple. The title of the link, what the slug of the link is going to be like that right there. Where does it go? What type of redirect? Is it? Is it a nofollow isn't a sponsored link which is very important for affiliate links. And then give yourself a description of it. You can also create categories to keep your links more organized this way. So that's pretty cool. And so here's where you can set up categories like hosting affiliate links, plug in affiliate links, etc. Now, this also gives you the ability but I'm not sure why they included this in this plugin, but they let you do it. It also manages the addition of tracking codes, like Google Analytics or social media pixels. It does that from within this plugin. I think that was new. And they've added that since we reviewed it back in January. Not sure I'd use it for that but it's certainly there. So here's our the global options like if we want all of our links by default to be 301 redirects, which we probably do, but you can change each individual one this is just like the default settings you can set all those up. And you know your tracking options. And then your link pages pretty cool.

This also,

here's where it gets a little different. This is the one feature of this plugin that is different than the others. And what this lets you do is create a link page like Link tree for Are you familiar with Link tree? It's the you know, the sort of, you see these a lot on social media BIOS where you know, you're only allowed one URL, for example and an Instagram profile and so people will use that URL to put this list of other links that looks something like

this. Right where you

can have you know your picture and change the colors like you want and then make your own group of links right here and it's actually very easy to create. And you can have multiple of these link pages. I believe.

And

we can just make that link, like page, whatever. We can put a logo in there.

There's a little cat

do we want to have any WordPress menus attached to that page? So let's just save this and get it set. Up. And here look we can do is it a click whale link like is it a link we've already defined or do I want to put a custom link over here and I can just keep stacking these things up and just make my own link page pretty cool. So that is click whale works. Really well. It's free. And yeah, very, very powerful. That was back in January 2023. Any other questions or comments on click whale

All right, well, let's

move along to the next one. I'm going to deactivate those two plugins

and scroll on

down to another one that's starting in February of 2023. This was a popular one called crop Express. Now this is actually developed by a friend of mine named Corey moss has done a number of different WordPress plugins. He's a really smart guy, great WordPress developer. And basically what he ran into is it's kind of hard to do cropping in WordPress, right? There's not a lot of features, and that's why we built this little plugin that really does some nice things. So let's activate crop Express. And I'll show you what

it does. So first of

all, it does create a Gutenberg block

got a page set up for this Express. All right, so we can

grab the crop Express block if we want open it right here. We're going to choose an image, this problem the other day, and it's my site and I don't know it's not the plugin. It's something on WP Nathan. Yes, something is no bueno. Oh

my goodness. Alright. Let's try this again.

All right, so

let's grab an image from the media library. It's just not going to open. Alright, and that is my site, not this plugin. So what we'll do, we'll let's just back up one, and I'll show you how it works on the featured image area. I was afraid that was going to happen because I hit that issue yesterday. We'll just open our featured image because we have some options in relation to the featured image

as well. Okay,

here's our featured image. Now with the plugin active if we go to replace the image, we get a new dialog so this plugin steps in and takes over the normal modal window that pops up when you do media. So let's just choose an image from the library. See it works perfectly here. I'm not sure what's going on there. And let's just grab this Ironman picture. Now how do we want this we want it square. Do we want it cropped? This way? Or whatever it let's do a circle

and hit crop it. Look at this.

Isn't that cool? Like you can drag this around. You can make it smaller if you want and it zooms way in

or we can zoom out in that neat.

Now let's not do a circle. Let's make it a 16 by nine, wrap it

and we can make this just what we want it to be and stay in aspect ratio. Maybe like that. Insert the image and it crops it

no it doesn't only work in blocks like I was just showing you it works with any featured image and the my block is for some reason having some sort of problem. So with this active it, it takes over just like you saw here. When you hit Replace or Remove the featured image. It takes over that process and brings up its own modal window instead of the standard add media window modal window here and I'm not sure what was going let's try it one more time with it. It basically gives you a block that does the same thing. It's like an image block but it takes over the ad media. I'm going to try this one more time just to see if it's going to cooperate. It's this site it is not the plugin. Yes just not wanting to work on the one. So the block on My Sites having problems but it works great for the featured image area. Pretty cool stuff that is crop Express,

by crop express any questions or comments on that one? Pretty powerful.

I love the flow of being able to edit the image. Over does it make a second file and media? Yes. Matter of fact, if you look at right there, there's the brand new one. It was just created a minute ago. And so it made a brand new image. So it kept the old image and here's one I made. I did a circle one when I was testing yesterday, just a circle crop around the cat from this original image here. So it does duplicate the image so you don't lose the original image, which I think is probably the best behavior for this plugin.

Any other questions on this one? Pretty good stuff.

All right, another one from February. This was the big winner of February is sure triggers from short triggers. Now this is another one of the shore plugins. That's a cooperative, cooperative effort between Adam priser who is a well known YouTube personality in the WordPress space and CJ pouvoir, who is the founder of brainstorm force, the company behind Astra and ultimate add ons and all those plugins. And so they've developed a number of things. Sure car. Sure there's a bunch of other sure plugins out there that they've developed. Sure triggers is like a WordPress based Zapier. There's a bunch of plugins that do this like uncanny Automator and there's some other ones. This is probably the best WordPress based automation tool that I've seen. And yeah, pretty doggone good. So let's activate sure

triggers. deactivate this plugin quickly first, and activate short triggers. Let me just drop an update since yesterday.

already. Okay, so the first thing you're going to have to do and I already have this connected to my account, but the first thing you're going to have to do is just step through the process of creating an account on the short triggers website. Now usually, we don't feature plugins that are simply a connector out to someplace else. This one is so cool, though, that we bent our normal rule for that because it's just really neat. So it's a simple process you set up the account, it connects up, then you're good to go. And once you're in, you have you start by creating a workflow. And so if you're familiar with Zapier, it's sort of an if this happens then do that sort of a situation but you can chain together multiple actions after something has triggered this process. And so you have a bunch of different options. Actually, what I'm going to do is go out to the website and show you all the connectors. This is really it's really hard to demo this without setting up a full chain but look at what all it will what all it talks to. So a lot you'll you'll recognize immediately a lot of very familiar WordPress products here like Well, here's like Active Campaign affiliate WP Amelia Asana Bajau SBB press Beaver Builder that's the Beaver Builder. Form Elementor is in here to the Elementor form talks to book like a boss I mean, look at all these buddy boss Calendly cart flows. So a lot lots and lots of we're only down to F and there's still more right click up Convert Kit convert pro Elementor add Dropbox, you see all of these things. And so basically, you could say, if I get a WooCommerce order, then I want to record that over in you know what over in notion, right like I want to keep a customer list and notion. Well, it'll do that. And you just set up the process to make that work. Does XML RPC No, this does not have anything to do with XML RPC. This typically uses web hooks to make all these things happen. They've built in integrations with all these. And so yeah, works really, really well. Right. This is this is a new addition, since we looked at it last, they have an open AI connector, which might be fun to play around with actually, I'm not quite sure what it will do. But like here's RCEP I mean, let's just say

you know, you have something that

happens in WordPress, and you know, somebody buys a product. Well, I want to give them a restrict content pro membership level, and I want to automatically create an invoice for it in QuickBooks. That's pretty cool. Right? I have a zap set up right now so that when something sells, it automatically generates a quick book invoice for me with Monster contracts. So it just saves time, right? So these are all the sorts of things you can do. And let's just, I'll just show you a very quick overview of building something. So when a what is the trigger we're gonna say let's say it's a I don't know

let's just do core WordPress.

A user allocate a user logs into a site, then I want to push that over to

notion, right and you can

like track a user log right there. Yes, the QuickBooks I was mentioning is only QuickBooks Online, obviously can't talk to your desktop software. So it does have to be QuickBooks Online. But these are the sorts of things if something happens here, then do something with it. Next, so if you're at all familiar with Zapier, this should be I mean, it just makes sense because it works just like Zapier, they give you 20,000 Free tasks out of the box, as I recall, let's see.

Here's some good examples. Add commonly invitees

to convert hit share Google form responses on Slack add new WooCommerce customers to send in blue. So many different things you can do here. So that is sure triggers. If you're doing any sort of automation. And by the way, if you get good at this, this is a wonderful thing to be able to sell to your clients to make their website fit better into their business flow. This is a great opportunity for consultation and upsell to create these sort of automations to make the client's life easier. So any other questions or comments about this? That is sure triggers from the shore

team.

All right. Well, let's scroll down the list to stock pack stock pack. Now this is when we actually reviewed this several years ago and it came up again in a conversation and so we reviewed it because it's probably my favorite connector to outside free stock libraries. Doc pack there we go. So what this is going to do, if you are if you ever have clients or yourself and you know you want to go look for three images, three blog posts, featured images over and Unsplash or Pixabay, or Pexels. Wouldn't it be nice to bring those things into WordPress, and there are a number of different plugins like there's an official Pixabay plugin official Unsplash plugin that connects that library into the WordPress media library. And of course, there's the open verse library as well. That's connected into the images and core WordPress now, but let's say you know, stop what what start pack is going to do is give you the option to search a multiple image library. So let's take a look here. We have activated stock pack. Let's look at our settings. Now this this is another plugin that does require a token to connect. And by the way, if you don't want to type that whole thing out, you can but it's still missing about five characters on the other side there so it's not gonna work for you. Anyway, what this is going to do is what providers are we going to make available right now I just have the the three that are free, but take a look at these other options. Let's say you have a client that has an Adobe Stock license, well you can connect it to Adobe stock or deposit photos if you have a million credits that are like I do because of absolutely no deals, or getty images or eye stock. This will connect even to those commercial sites. And you can have multiple providers available which is kind of cool. So these are our basic settings. And now let's just go take a look. Let's add a quick new post and we'll show you how this looks.

So when we go over

in just a minute our featured image will pop in over here when we let's say we got to add a featured image now look, we have a stock pack tab here. And so right now we we choose our let's let's look for Unsplash and what are we going to search for somebody give me something to look for here in the Unsplash library.

Anything anything? A rhino Alright, so

we're talking to Unsplash and there's a bunch of options. Pretty nice. Oh, I don't like any of those. Let's check the Pexels library. Just simply changing the library just automatically runs your different search picks a

day alright, let's say we liked this one.

Let's download this so it brings it into our media library. And look, it puts automatically in all of the appropriate

information.

And we set our featured image boom and it lives in our media library now. So very simple to do very easy, particularly helpful if you have a client that's using Adobe stock or one of those commercial stock libraries. This would let them search that you do have to set that connection up for each individual site. And then you know if they don't find something there they can look at some of the free sites. Heather what happens if this is used on multiple sites so you would want to set up probably, I mean, you can set all the sites up under the same key, but probably it would be better to you know have each client set up under a different account

would be the simplest thing

but it works really really well. Let's see

stock pack. I forget the couple if I spelled that correctly. Start pack.co.

The free level gets you 50 requests per hour.

Right so that's a lot. If they hit the

credit limit on their account Heather's asking it's just going to stop until it recycles to

the next one. Yep. So I would

set up a separate account for each client or you know, just to avoid that happening and just let the client know there's a limit to 50 requests per hour. And that like Rhino we just took up three because we searched three different stock libraries. So that was three. A typical user is not going to probably hit

50 in general. Just a normal usage. All right. Any other questions

or comments on this one that is stock packs super helpful Media Library plugin

All right.

Next up another one from March March. March was a big month for us. It was one of the better plugin roundup months we've ever had. And another one we saw there was pi calendar and I really really like this plugin, because WordPress calendar plugins can be really really complicated. How many of you have run into that brick wall before where even the best WordPress calendar plugins can be frustrating, they can have problems. What this does is if you don't need all of the gigantic features that many of these full featured WordPress calendar plugins offer, then if you just need a simple calendar, this is a really really good option. So let's activate pi calendar because what this is going to do, it's going to let you turn any page or any post into a calendar item. It's really really cool. So let's activate pi calendar and we have a couple of things set up here. So a couple of different pages pre baked right here. The first is this event. Now, this is a page that we just simply called it plugin roundup marathon and notice over here, what this plugin does is add this little meta box over into the right sidebar of pages, posts, custom post types. And it's gonna say Oh, do you want to make this a calendar item? Show this on the calendar? Yes. Is it an all day event? Yes or No? Is it a you know, what's our start date and time and our end date and time so you can set that that's all you have to do. If you want to have you know, a register button we can just make that if you you know if you want a registration process, drop in the gravity form on this page or whatever. If it's some you know, like a paid for registration, make it a payment form with a gravity form or a WooCommerce product shortcode something like that. It's just using standard WordPress pages post custom post types. Now here's what it looks like on the calendar side. Now here's this other page we just simply called PI calendar. There's a shortcode that says pi cow that all just dropped the calendar in there. So let's take a look at this calendar. And it's a very simple calendar. So there's our plugin roundup marathon. We click it and it gives us a little white box that has the post content summary here starts and ends. Click here to view the actual event page. There it is where we can register. So it's very, very simple to use. And there's a number of different views, which by the way you can within the shortcode you can define which view it defaults

to. You just want to list boom, there it is. Now this is a recurring

event. If we just if we want this to be a start date is tomorrow at 8am. And the end date is tomorrow at let's just say

five o'clock pm

just so that it's not it's not going to span multiple dates. We'll just update that. Take a look at the calendar

and now we just have it here on the one day. Look at that. And that neat. If we want to

view it on a list, it's just it's a very simple calendar plugin. Billy is asking does it work with the events calendar? No, it works in this you would choose this. If you wanted a more simple

calendar on your site. It would be instead of events calendar is super

broad field lots of features, lots of things. And if you just need a simple event calendar, you know, this might this might be a little simpler to use. Heather's saying any integrations possible like Google, I mean depends on what Google you're talking about. Exactly. Heather but you know it's a word this pi Cal is not going to integrate with anything. All pi Cal does is let you say that this page, this post this post in the custom post type is going to go on a calendar. That's it. And whatever integrations that you use, just go on the page that you create. So it gives it's a super flexible, you can use whatever you want. embed a Google form, you know, embed YouTube that it's a post anything you can do on a post or a page. You can do because it is literally a post or a page. The calendar thing only says we're going to add a date and a time to this and we're going to stick it on a calendar. That's it.

So very simple.

It has a great use case in certain scenarios.

Paul,

after June 14, your blog post will still be there just not on the calendar. That's a great, that is a great question. Let's see what happens with that. So let's make this. This was on Sunday, let's say so it is it is a past events. My guess is it will still show up on the monthly calendar.

Let's refresh. Yep, so it's still there.

But if we go to a

list it's gonna show up as a month list so

it's not going to fall off the calendar. In other words, if you want this page not to be viewed any more after the event is over, then you would need something like published press that would draft a post after a certain date and time to use a long Alongside this, but this again, this would be the case where you might want to move into a full featured events plugin like the events calendar. This is a very light plugin just to take page and post content and stick it in a calendar view.

Any other questions comments about this? It definitely has a use case. All right,

Scrolling on down another one from March. This is the official Adobe embedded PDF viewer now I'll tell you viewing a PDF inside of WordPress is far more complicated than it should be, in my opinion. It just seems like you should be able to do that and nothing's been able to just do that very easily. And so this PDF V there's a bunch of PDF viewer plugins out there in the in the WordPress directory. And they're the ones that I've seen are just kind of clunky and they're weird and they have problems. This one it just works. It works really well. And it's from Adobe. So let's go out here and activate the Adobe PDF embed. Oh, it's already Oh, I had to keep it active because if you deactivate it, you lose your API key. You do have to have the free Adobe API key. It's free. And you just click the link dropping your API key and you're done. Let's take a quick look at what it looks like. I have created a page

in which this month PDF appears.

Isn't this nice? Okay, let's just start over again. Let's remove it. And Alright, so here's our Adobe block. And yes, this is a block. It doesn't work outside of the block editor. We'll click this. And now we can either upload a PDF directly or we can look for an existing PDF in our media library, which is what I'm going to do. So there's the handout for today. And we'll just hit Select. Now this is the default view where you can it just went away. There we go. Where you can page through it just like this, which is kind of nice. You can zoom in you can make it fullscreen. There's also an you can also by the way,

adjust the height and width, which is kind of cool. And there's other

options here as well. There's a light box where you can click open and it will open up the PDF and a lightbox. There's an inline view where it just straight down so it's like you're scrolling through all the pages in the PDF one after another. That's nice in certain cases. There's also the full window which is here with all of the options and sidebars have the PDF reader and then there's a size container which is what the default is, that's a little more compact. So looking at this on the front end of the site looks really nice, and it's nicely responsive. So you can drop this in row layouts and so forth. You can click through your pagination, you can do a search

and it works quite well. When you get to responsive

Yeah, it's gonna fit inside your window. So that is the Adobe embedded PDF viewer it does not have a flipbook mode. No it does not you turn pages, but there's no Flippity animation. Works fine on mobile accessibility. I don't know. You have to test it.

I haven't tested it for accessibility

so,

this, the navigation here is accessible. I'm using my keyboard right now. But it doesn't look like I can interact with the content

of the PDF.

Any other questions about

Adobe embedded PDF viewer that don't involve a flipbook? which some of you already know? Gets me on a bit of a soapbox about things you shouldn't ever use ever.

Okay. All right, let's move to the next one. And that is,

this is probably my favorite plugin of the roundup. Maybe it's definitely one of them. Admin and site enhancements by Bo. This plugin came up again in the admin bar a couple few several weeks ago. And this developer is actually in the admin bar, which is kind of cool. Anyway, we ran across this one and really, really liked it. I have it actually, in my description. This is the kitchen sink, easiest Kitchen Sink admin plugin that I've found today. So I usually shy away from these and what I call a kitchen sink plugin, it means that they've thrown everything into this plugin, but the kitchen sink, which is just a if you're not in the US, that's just a phrase that we use for all of the things. And I usually shy away from these because it's like, why would you? You know, this is like the developer put all of his cool code snippets into one plugin. And usually it's not great.

This one is fantastic. And it gives

you so many options. It's basically a library of code snippets that you can toggle on and off at will. So let us activate admin and site enhancements, and they dropped a new version since yesterday.

Let's see what they did.

Several fixes

and a security issue okay. So it's under tools as I recall tools and enhancements. Another thing I really like about this is it doesn't get its own top level menu item. It is where it should be under tools. So we open this up and my goodness gracious. There are so many options here. So let's just start at the top.

Look at all.

Actually, a lot of these toggles are like other plugins that you might want to install instead, like content duplication. You don't have to install the duplicate post plugin. If you simply toggle this on because now you have the ability to just duplicate a post. Do you have to save now it's automatic. So right here under posts, I now have what

I did save changes yesterday. There it is. Big Blue Button right at the top. Now I have the

ability to simply duplicate right there, boom, duplicate, so you don't have to install that plugin. It's all right here. Content ordering so you can change the ordering of your content replacing media so like that enable media replace plugin that I love. You could possibly get rid of it just by toggling this on allowing SVG upload so you can get rid of that plug in external permalinks. So changing the automatically the REL equals nofollow to external links. That's pretty cool. Open all external links in a new tab. Like there's plugins for this. You don't have to use it. Auto publish posts that have a miss schedule that happens from that we've actually had plugins on this roundup that do that. Oh, my goodness, like the post was supposed to publish and it missed it. And in the cron it shows the Miss schedule. This fixes that. Here in the admin interface, look at this hide the admin notices so all the garbage and the had that stuff. Make the Admin menu wider like this. This is kind of cool.

Make your bar wider over here boom.

The admin menu organizer to change the order of the items, disabling dashboard widgets, cleaning up various elements up here in the admin bar, hiding the admin bar for some user roles. Login logout menu. I mean, so I have two separate plugins for many of these and this is all in one. And it's not going to bloat your website because none of this stuff works unless you toggle it on which is kind of cool. last login column for users redirect after login and logout custom code. You want to add admin CSS, you can do that right here. It gives you a little window to do that. Custom front end CSS. You want things to go you know this is like adding Header Footer type code right there. A custom body class which is useful sometimes, robots dot txt, disabling components, disabling Gutenberg block based widgets. disable comments, disable rest, disable feeds, all that stuff. Some things for security turning off XML RPC, getting rid of the author slugs, limiting login attempts, some optimizations here. This has an image optimizer and not sure really how good that is you'd have to test it. Revisions control, the WordPress heartbeat control and some additional utilities. A built in post SMTP type function having multiple user roles, view admin as role so this is kind of nice to see what the admin pages look like as other roles. password protecting the entire site maintenance mode and redirect all fluorophores to the homepage. So all that's in one plugin. Each one of those are like their own little separate plugin that are just sort of they are modular, you can just toggle them on and off. I've heard I don't know if he's documenting the original source of those. You'd have to take a look at it. Man, is it more efficient plugin than the plugin you use? I don't know. I have not thoroughly tested this. It's one that now I'm seeing it again. Makes me want to go back and do some more thorough testing on when this came up in April. We were super busy with client work and I just didn't get into it very much. But this is gonna make me want to go back and relook at some of these things. Billy, I have not used this on a live site but I would not be opposed to it. I you know, I want to do a little bit more testing but it's got a decent user base. Now he's got 2000 Plus users, so it's a pretty good user base and it's being updated frequently. Heather does it do white labeling? Not that I've seen but it depends on what you need. What do you want white label is the question I guess. You know, you want to just get rid of this or like what what do you want white labeled? Beth, does that duplicate work with custom posts? That's a good question.

Um content management,

content duplication. I bet it would work with custom posts. Let's just check. Here in our here's our custom post. Type. And yep, it works with custom posts. It also will likely work with WooCommerce products. Yep.

It works with WooCommerce products as well. So pretty cool.

All right.

Heather saying branding as Yeah, so what do you want it to do? You want to rebrand the name of the plugin? Is that what you're

after? It doesn't it doesn't do any white labeling. But it depends on what you

what you want change but there's no settings in here for white labeling. Beth, does it work with the LearnDash posts? I would imagine it would it looks like it's working with every regular post type and LearnDash lessons and courses. Those are all standard post types. Yeah,

so give that a try. Heather,

if you're looking for like branding for like the bottom of your site, maybe that's what you mean. It doesn't do that. You'd need a code snippet for

that. I don't think it does anything. I mean, you could

use the the admin CSS to add some branding. Oh, the whole back end. No. It doesn't do that. I see what you're saying. Yeah, there's there are plugins that do that this doesn't do that. Any other questions or comments on that one? Really, really cool plugin. I like that. Like this one. Admin insight enhancements by Bo Whoa. All right, next one up April 2023. This is a simple plugin but super helpful. This plugin simply turns a Yoast SEO FAQ block into an accordion. So this is something that gosh, Ben was that you? Was somebody actually asked was wondering about and then we found a plugin that just did it just coincidentally recently at right after that, but let's go into Yeah, it was Ben or Ben, did you find this plugin or did we find it and go hey, look what we found. I can't remember. By default, Yoast SEO has a block. Now it is the Yoast SEO fac. And it just lets you it's a very simple FAQ. And the reason you'd want to use this is it wraps the correct schema around the items and just makes it very Google friendly. But it's just it's very, very simple. Like it's just a list of things on a page just like this. And so it's kind of boring, and it would be nicer to have those in an accordion. So let's just activate this plugin. So we've already pre baked you know, these two

FAQ contents. And let's activate

the plugin and basically it is going to add some code that rather than just just that rather than displaying all this text as a block, it's going to make it an expandable accordion. So plugin is activated. We're going to refresh the page. And now we have an accordion just like this. And so it is by the way accessible. The I'm now tabbing through and if I hit a button on my keyboard, it expanded so it's nicely accessible. And it just works. So if you're using the Yoast FAQ block, this is just you know, install activate. Boom, done. Now you have an accordion, and I like this better on an FAQ page and I would 8 million blocks of text

like that. That's it pretty

straightforward but powerful turn the essay, Yoast SEO fact block in the recording any other questions or comments on that one?

All right, next

up moving into May 2023. This was this is I will probably never use this plugin ever. But I think it just captivated the imaginations of all of us geezers that have been around the tech world for a long time. And remember the good old days of MS DOS and the DOS dialog boxes, and now there is a block that gives you that styling. And, you know, I would probably never use this on a site. I can't imagine a case where I would but I just really liked this this plugin.

So let's take a quick look at the DOS dialog block. It's just delightful. Here it is.

So there's the there's the block. This is just some text that we put in there. And it it gives us this font and it looks just like this on a page and it's not updating for some reason.

Oh my Here we go.

That's how it

looks just like an old MS DOS window. And these are all divs in text so it does

move to mobile nicely. What's crazy so when you go to add another one of these blocks

MS DOS dialogue block

here's my title.

And there's my text just like that. Yeah, gotta love it. Oh, there you go. You can put your legal pages in a DOS box How great is that? What a great idea. You could use it for Yeah, pre coded stuff. That'd be interesting.

I mean, this is a it's a monospace type. font. Yeah.

Crazy.

It does have some different styling over here. So there's the old blues classic dos install dialog. It also has an error dialog. There you go. So probably the most useless plugin but nevertheless interesting and gets my applause The DOS dialog box by Dan Ruscoe. Thank you Dan for making us all smile.

Any other questions or comments on this one? Yeah, it

was actually the second highest voted in May. All right, Scrolling on down the list to another one in May. This is we've done plugins like this in the past these file manager type plugins. This is one of the better ones. It's one of the it's one that we have. We haven't done one of these for a while but this one we did because it works great. And it's by the Softaculous team. So if you've been in the cPanel world, you likely recognize the name Softaculous as one of the cPanel based app installers like an app store for cPanel for various you know, PHP type apps, including a WordPress installer that works really well. And so so tactless has built this WordPress plugin, it's a file manager. And it's just basically like a Windows file manager or a Mac Finder for WordPress. So let's open that it's activate this and there are definitely some downsides to this. But right here in the sidebar is the file organizer. So this is just like your classic you know, let's dig into you know, let's say we want to take a look at our I should have done this let's take a look at our

error logs oops

No, I have any errors. Oh, no error log really.

WP Nathan, that's unheard of. Check here.

No error. Well, I must have just deleted those. Let's just say you needed to edit your WP config. I would never recommend this doing this from inside of WordPress. But you can right here we can just click text area and that will open it up. And you can delete, cancel, save, you know edit files right here. You can upload plugins from here if you needed to.

They'd be content plugins. You could right here. Upload files

here, download files, delete things. If you wanted to. Grab a copy of a plugin, you can

where is it? Where is the zip command right there,

terrible icon. So you can create a zip file right here and download. Yeah, it's really cool. It also has a number of different themes. So if you are in dark mode, if you like a material, this is actually nicer. Like a material icons. I like this better. Material dark. Some really yeah, there's some really nice things here. And also if you're a Windows user, there's a Windows 10 interface as well that looks very similar to Windows File Manager.

So the question is can

this work if you have the no file edit option? Yes. Because what the no file edit option and I think security or if you have that constant defining your WP config that is for this appearance and editor or plugins and editor where it lets you edit that's core WordPress, you know, but that has nothing to do with this is a whole separate plugin that embeds this file manager now this is helpful if you have some urgent situation and you don't have FTP access to a client site or something like that. This will let you get in and tinker with things. This is not and that's also a downside because let's just say I accidentally, don't add a semicolon on a PHP file I'm editing or if I goof up something in the WP config and I get a white screen. I can't fix it because I'm locked out of WordPress and I can't see my file manager interface anymore. So it's you know, use with caution for sure. Just like the WordPress based file editor, it's also potentially a security risk. So you know if you can

by the way, here in the settings

you can okay right? Oh yes, I have the Pro version. This has changed I think since the original time we reviewed this because you can restrict this by role, but only in the pro version. I would not leave this on a site simply because if somebody were to get access to the WordPress site, my goodness now they can put files everywhere. You cannot get below the PA public HTML is the root folder here because this is a WordPress plugin. And that's the lowest folder that WordPress has access to. So you can't get up into the server folders underneath public HTML. But anything inside of public HTML is fair game. So these I've used these plugins in the past in an emergency situation where I needed to upload a plug in or download something or something you know, I didn't have FTP access. They're very helpful in that scenario, but then you delete them right away. So this is probably the my go to one of these types of plugins now. File organizer beisbol tabulous Questions or comments on

this one. Before we move on. All right.

Moving into this month's plugins just from only a week ago, the top two from the gym plugin roundup first, the snow monkey editor now this one if you're particularly well, only if you're using the block editor will you like this one, but it adds some really nice features to the block editor that do not currently exist. So let's activate snow monkey editor and take a quick look. It gives us some ability to it gives us some styling options in the block editor, which we just totally garbled this whole page up but you know, it gives you the ability for example to WIPs

to create these little

tag based things there so you can set your colors on these sorts of things. You know

snow monkey make it a badge. Boom. really easily. You can change letter spacing all within the same paragraph or div. You can do underlines you can set apart paragraphs with this option here of all these prebuilt styling.

That are kind of nice.

The other thing it lets you do is

over here let me get a block.

It gives you these additional options here of displaying by window size by role at some animations, publishing the block and unpublishing the block so basically scheduling blocks let's just do unpublishing settings, we had to turn it on and now we have this option where we can unpublished this block on a certain day and time which is kind of cool. So we just reviewed this last week so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that but very powerful plugin that expands the capabilities of the block editor that is called Snow monkey editor by Inc 2734. And last but not least one more of those link management plugins. We kind of started the best of Roundup with one of these and we're going to end with one of these. And this is tiny press does very similar things to click whale. But there is something that it does that click whale doesn't and vice versa. So click whale, of course gave us the ability to create those links and automatically link things throughout the site and so forth. This does that but also it the the tiny press does not give us the ability to have that link page for social media links, you know the stack of links. So if that's what you want, choose click well, but what tiny press does which I really like is it gives you a QR code built right in. So we activate tiny press and where is it right up here.

So here's just our basic link that we set up.

And right here on the link information. We've got a QR code that is a graphic I can just drag off or click download or whatever. It also has categories like the other one, we can enable or disable a link.

You can oh this

is our pie calendar. We're gonna leave that alone. We have all the options for links like we would expect this one though, does let us password protect link. So let's say you only want this short link to be used by certain people. So here's the link and use password blah, blah, blah. In order to access that link you have to fill in the password which is kind of cool. It you can have expiration on these also and it does give you basic link analytics like the other plugin does as well but really the QR code is the thing that makes this one stand apart. Which is kind of nice. So that is tiny press by plugin bizarre. And that brings us to the end of our best off plugin round up. What do you think y'all let's do a best of the best. Job. What's your top favorite plugin of this best have round up? I don't know if we'll ever do anything

with those but admin side enhancements, pi calendar,

another admin other admin

admin. Let me hear from you one vote one vote only please. Looks like admin. Site enhancements. Pin likes the fact block. Yeah, it looks like admin side enhancements is the runaway winner sure triggers. Well, yeah. Oh, the question in the

chat this. I mean, I haven't tried it but at you. I would imagine this is going to the short link and not the actual link

stock pack.

Yeah, looks like admin stuff. admin site enhancements is the clear winner of the Best stab Well, thanks for hanging out with me today. Tomorrow for members. We have the fly course on finances and we'll be ready for that. Pop open the slack and make sure you just watch out for that link. Join the special channel for the finances. talk tomorrow. It'll be coming at one o'clock for members and of course office hours on Thursday for members as well. One thing I will mention I mean me dropped in the slide link one more time here on June the 21st. So that's a week from tomorrow. We do have a town hall coming up for solid WP Matt Cromwell will be with us for that where we will be talking about Oops, didn't get all of them here. We'll be talking about the thing all the things that are happening with solid Academy and the solid WP rebrand that will be launched later this year. Solid Academy is coming probably. I'm gonna guess, August September timeframe. So we'll have a town hall to answer all your questions with Matt Cromwell. That is a week from tomorrow. Make sure you sign up for that the link is there in the chat. Well, thanks again for hanging out with me members. I'll see you back tomorrow for fly talking about finances here on iThemes Training where we go further together.