Hey Vern West Virginia in the house. Welcome everybody if you're just now joining us I'm going to drop in the link bundle in the chat
glad everybody's here we are about three and a half minutes away from getting started with plugin roundup this month
All right, looks like captions are working so that's a good thing. All right, all systems are go. Again, right there in the link bundle. I just dropped in really cool webinar coming up on Tuesday with Beth Livingston, talking about right here the future of project management, integrating AI So Beth is going to be using chat GPT and talking through some project management processes. That ought to be a lot of fun. That is a free webinar on Tuesday, one week. From today. Welcome everybody. Glad you are here. Now see me too. All right, let's see who's here. Welcome Richard from Philly Chris from o que si su from North Carolina. K from Sweden. Doug from Toronto. Vera from Netherlands. Welcome Phoebe from New York. may drop in the links for today. One more time. Right there. You'll find the plugin downloads as well as the replay link and the link to register for bets webinar coming up on Tuesday. It's going to be a really good one. Also, if you haven't seen the latest from solid there is a new podcast that's dropped talking about the rebrand and public process really cool stuff. Those links are there. In the chat as well.
Vern, that is a great question. I don't know the answer when we will officially become solid Academy at some point. I've had number of meetings about that over the last couple of weeks. I'm gonna guess probably summer ish. Yeah. I have no hard timeframe on that right now. But I'm gonna guess summer, July June, July something like that. Solid Academy is coming. FVb I'll tell you GBT is so much better than Bard when it comes to code. It makes a big difference, by the way with paid membership with GPT for GPT. Four is so much better. I actually have a little bit of AI to share with you folks today. So for those of you just joining us Let me drop in once again, the link bundle. This has all the things right there in the chat as you're coming in. If you haven't done so already say hi. Tell us where you're logging in from we're less than a minute to go before we get started. Good to see everybody here. John from Florida. Awesome. Paul is here, Deb from Texas. Welcome everybody. Welcome Auxilium tech from DC.
So Auxilium. That's either your business name or you have very interesting parents. Who gave you that name. John, welcome, John. You're on the train. Also, by the way, everybody, check your chat and make sure that besides the two where you're chatting, make sure that says everyone and not just hosts and panelists, so everybody can see you. Hey, Elizabeth from Atlanta. Billy from British Columbia. Welcome, a Kiley from North Carolina. All right, y'all, we're just about ready to start. A Peter from Connecticut. All right, it's three after let me start the recording. And we will get this roundup underway. Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the May 2023 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host at I iThemes Training which will become at some point in the near future solid Academy so if you have missed the news so far, I iThemes is rebranding as solid WP. If you're just joining us in the chat, I'm going to drop in a bunch of links and at the bottom of that link bundle you will see the links to solid wp.com where you can stay up to date with the rebrand and public process that solid is in the middle off, as well as the solid YouTube channel where it's really the best place to find the most updates. So there's a few really interesting things that have dropped on the YouTube channel lately. And if you're interested in what's going on with solid follow that because there's a good discussion of solid security and the work that's being done there. to relaunch I think security as well as some of the branding questions and so forth. So really, really cool stuff. Maybe that's right, we are I'm working really hard to remove the term webinar from my vocabulary. I've been using it for 10 plus years here on iThemes Training. We were live streams, right these are training live streams and we have a lot of fun with that. Okay, so it is plugin Roundup, this is if you're just joining us in zoom, I just dropped in the chat, a link to download today's plugin list, which looks like this right here. And I always like to remind everybody at the beginning of the plugin Roundup, that these are not thoroughly tested plugins, these are plugins that had been added to or updated in the WordPress plug in directory in roughly the last month or so that we just simply thought were interesting and we mostly means Chris and I. So Chris is here in the chat. Everybody say hi to Chris. He does a lot of hard work helping to prepare for the round up every month. And we just think these are interesting and they're worth a look. You'll want to thoroughly test these for compatibility and accessibility and all of those things before you start to use these on client sites, of course. Alright, let's get started, shall we? We're going to be doing our work as usual over here on WP nathan.com. Let me move some windows around here. And we're gonna start with a pretty useful plugin, I think called Easy Featured Image manager. And let's get that activated. So easy Featured Image manager one of the things that I think could be better about the WordPress admin area is bringing featured images into the post list and page list because a lot of times it's easier to pick out a post from a long list when you have something visual there to cue you. And so if that is the case for you, this is a plugin that sort of does that. So right here it brings a featured image into the post list. Now these columns have gotten really skinny and so I usually like to go in and maybe turn off tags and turn off these Yoast items here Alright, so that makes it a little better. Alright, so we have our featured images like here's one that doesn't have a featured image which is interesting. And so let's say we want to go and add a quick featured image here. Now, the regular way in WordPress is of course, open up the post go down to featured image, add the image publish the post again, right or update the post. Here we can simply go into Quick Edit, and click Change Image and we get the Media Library modal and we can set a featured image. And that's interesting. That didn't happen before. And if there's something weird about that image well look at that failure right out of the gate. This did not happen when we were testing it. Isn't that weird? So if you're new to plug in Roundup, sometimes this does happen. This is really interesting. Try another image maybe there's just something odd. Now something is going on here. Look at that. Wow
very interesting. All right. Yeah, this was literally working yesterday so I'm that maybe did we drop an update? Welcome to Live demo and I iThemes Training. We drop an update now two weeks ago. Look at that. I wonder if maybe there's some sort of plugin conflict that's happening because it was absolutely working yesterday when we tested this. Oh, here's something with media library. Let's deactivate that one. Maybe those plugins are bumping heads
I can't imagine that would be the case. But if this doesn't work, we'll move on. But isn't that weird? Now, there's a problem, and I don't know what it is. It's likely a conflict of some sort. So there you go. I still want this plugin. I'm not sure why it's not working right now because it was working delightfully yesterday where you can just select the featured image right there in the Post List. It's really helpful if you want to just skim your posts and see if any, you're missing a featured image. You can do that right there in the list. And yeah, quickly assign a quickly assign the the featured image very, very interesting. Yeah, we've done a number of these featured image type plugins, but this was one that just lets you deal with it right there in the list. So all right, let's move on to the next one, shall we and pretend like that never happened. All right. The next one is a plugin called Text. Oh, Elizabeth, try it on a different post. Elizabeth is smart. Shall we try that one? Let's try this image. Now. It's broke. Good idea though. Elizabeth. Something's wrong. It's likely a it's a conflict of some sort. I just don't know what with because this absolutely was working. Okay. So let's move to texture slicer, shall we? Let's go down and deactivate. This plugin and make it like it never happened. Yeah. All right. So text replacer this is a really cool plugin. Because let's say for example, you have something on your website. Let's just say for example, you've been doing training on WordPress. for a really long time. And for 10 plus years, you've called these things webinars, and all of a sudden, they now need to be called live streams, just hypothetically, right? How do you go through your website and make all those updates? Well, you know, if you're a developer, you know, you could go into a plugin like better search replace or something like that. And do and actually in the database, search and replace, find that term and so forth. If you have a client though, that, you know, this is not something you want a client to do, but maybe they have an event date or something like that. That's all throughout the website, and they want to be able to update that very easily. Will this is a plugin that will let someone from a very simple interface within the WordPress admin area, it would allow them to make that a quick text replace on the front end. So let's activate text replacer. Now there's one little thing about this plugin. This does sometimes happen with these brand new plugins where the developer pushes out a sort of a proof of concept. And you have that here where there is just one currently replace this text with this put with this text. It does appear based on screenshots and so forth in the on the plugin page, that there will be more options here, you know, add additional things to replace. So we've asked the developer about that. No response to that yet, but here's how easy this is. So let's just say on the front end this we have this Peter Parker's revealed as Tony Stark son in a shocking twist. So when I was playing with yesterday was let's replace Peter Parker with Dwight K shrewd, shall we, and we'll just save the changes and now everywhere on the site where Peter Parker shows up in the text. It's going to automatically replace it on the page with like a shrewd AI. It's a simple JavaScript jQuery function that as the page loads, it just does a quick search in your place. And updates your text. So it's pretty cool. For you know, a client, for example, that may have some dates to update or a term to update or something like this. Give them a very simple interface on the back end of the site to make this change. And, yeah, there it is. As soon as asking it's text only it doesn't change the function correct. So it's just find this text and replace it with this. And, Vern, yes, this is not a database change. Because no, this is just running like a jQuery simple search for finding a place. You know, you could do that if you made your own jQuery code. You could do this. But this is just gives you a nice little interface inside the WP admin to do exactly this. And I think there's some strong use cases for this. I think I would like to see more text replace lines in place. And that does look like it is coming from the developer. But super simple way for a client to Mass Update. Text throughout a site. Yeah. Sue says I'd like to see it choose whole words or Match Case. Great example, put a request into the developer on the plugin page. I think that's a really good suggestion. So that is called Text replacer. Any any other questions and comment? Oh, Elizabeth, can you go back and do another? Yeah, let's just say we want to change this to this is all dynamic, right? So it's just whatever's here is what's going to happen. So Peter Parker will make it say Elizabeth would Alright, right. This is gonna be awkward on the homepage. But there you go. It just whatever's there in the settings, is what as the page loads that's what happens. Right. So if we take it out completely, then it just goes back to what's actually in the database. So it doesn't was Yeah, so you know, it doesn't change anything in the database. It's only changing the text as the page renders. So it's really helpful. So maybe it's a temporary thing, right. Sally if you delete the plugin does the text revert Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just like when we deleted that line, it went back. Yeah. So if you deactivate the plugin or whatever, there's nothing there. Now that's telling you know, as WordPress loads the page, there's nothing telling WordPress just to search for this text and update it with this text. Yeah. So there you go. All right. That is text replace there any further questions or comments? Pretty cool, pretty useful. I would like to see more fields but I think that's coming. All right. Next up, is a plugin called automatic TOC table of contents. So this is a really helpful plugin. If you are either not using Kadence blocks, or you are, you know you're not you're gonna use it using the block editor at all. And so this is a plugin that will look at your page and pick out all the heading tags and create a hierarchical table of contents that's clickable to the to that heading on the page and it's dynamic. It happens automatically. It's very cool. Now there's a Kadence blocks, it's a table of contents block that does exactly the same thing as this, I think actually a little better. But if you're not using Kadence, or if you're not using block editor yet, this is a way that does that same thing with a simple shortcode called TOC. So let's activate automatic table of contents. Yeah, like Stacey, you're saying you don't use blocks yet. Awesome. So this is super helpful for that. So I have a demo page set up and right here under automatic TOC. Alright, so over here Well, I have both actually, I'm going to remove this Kadence blocks. I was playing around with that, just to show an example. Alright, so over here we have a sure why this is shown in code but we have just some simple text there's heading tags hierarchical headings H fours H threes. I started out with an h2. And then over here in this column, we simply have a shortcode block with TOC doesn't have to be a block. If you're just if you're using classic editor, you can just use a shortcode just anything. You know any any place you can use a shortcode you can use this if you're using an old school theme, and it has like the old school sidebar and you've got a widget. You just dropped the widget in there with a shortcode and it'll work just like that. So that's the deal. Let me show you what this looks like. Once it's rendered. And again, we've done nothing. Nothing here at all other than add the shortcode to see. And here's what this renders. Yeah, like I said, Stacy, this is a block because we're using the block editor on the site, but it's just a shortcode. Like, anywhere you could put a shortcode you can put this it could be right at the top of the post content if you wanted it to be. So here's our nice little table of contents. And it's hierarchical. And now notice the bullets are the same. That's just the CSS of this theme. You could change that to you know, if you want your bullets to be a little different or your indenting to be less. This is all tweakable but notice it just pulls it straight out of the page. So let's say we want to jump down to weight management and it scroll smoothly scrolls right down. Soon as asking, is there a way only to get for example H TOS that's a great question. Let's take a look. So I don't know the answer to that. Question How to exclude headings. Let's see. It would be great if we had more
now you can exclude specific headings. Let's see if there's anything that's going to allow us to for example, only show H TOS LS is going to be okay, they got a bunch of plugins. I don't see anything right off the bat su that says it's going to do that. Now if you're if you this is one of the benefits of using for example the Kadence table of contents so if we want to add another block here and go to Table of Contents, the Kadence block then here you can say I only want the H tos and we can pull it we can go here to this block. And let's just leave it for now
and you will be able to see the Kadence block right below it. So here's the one that was rendered with our shortcode and here is just the h2 is on the page.
So that is automatic TOC table of contents. We got a couple of options there if you like if you're using Kadence Kadence block is a little better, I think. All right, any other questions or comments on that? One? All right, let's move into a WooCommerce plugin. This one I think can be very, very helpful because sometimes you have a WooCommerce store where you there might be a product or two where you don't want to apply a coupon discount for example. Like you maybe you've have created a coupon code that's good for $10 off any purchase, but maybe you've got some products that you just don't want that to apply to. That's really that's a really difficult scenario to manage. Especially if you have lots of different coupons. So if we go down here under WooCommerce marketing to coupons, and we take a look at a coupon here, you absolutely can in core WooCommerce go through and remove a product from that particular coupon. And for some reason this has taken eight years to load. Okay, under this is just core WooCommerce right now, usage restrictions, we can exclude certain products from this coupon working. Now if you only have one coupon, it's not a big deal. But what if you have for example, let's just here's a scenario. You got to store it's been around a long time. There's 50 coupon codes out there, and you add a product that you don't want any coupons to apply to Well, now you have to go through every single coupon code and exclude that product and that is really annoying. So what this plugin I'm about to activate does is kind of goes from the other direction, and lets you on that one product that does not need discounting. You can check the box and say don't apply any coupon code to this product. And that is called disabled coupons at the product level. So let's go to that plugin and activate it. As we learn quite frequently here on the plugin Roundup, activating the plugin is really important in order to get it to work. So here is our coupon is active. Now let's go to a product. And let's just say here that the Iron Man gauntlets for whatever reason we can't discount those, you know, cost of goods sold or whatever, whatever reason. So down here I look there's now a new option here on the product data called coupon options. Boom display coupons. On this product or disabled coupons on this project a product which means no matter what, no matter the coupon, even if the coupon applies to every product in the store. It doesn't apply to this one. It'll apply to everything else in the cart, but just not this product. So this is a really helpful way if you get into a situation with a store it's gonna save you a lot of time of turning on and off coupons for certain products at certain times. Oh my goodness, it can be really complicated. This allows you to disallow that product from all coupons period with a single a single check. As soon as asking does it mark the product is no coupons. No, but that's something I'd add probably over here in the short description of the product, right? No. Something like that. It doesn't mark it that way. But that's something I just dropped in, you know right there. Because likely you won't have a ton of products that are this way. But that'll make it easy. Any other questions or comments on this one? That is pretty straightforward disabled coupons at the product level. I think it can be really useful if you get into that situation. All right. Let us move on to the next one. Okay, y'all. This is Chris's favorite plugin of the Roundup, because he liked me is an old computer geek. And how many of you remember dos? Anybody else cut their teeth on DOS, DOS 6.2. Why? Oh, it was great. All right. Elizabeth Edlin. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yes, so dos lovers unite, because now you have a DOS dialog block. So those of you on the fence about the block editor, let me just tell you, this may win you over especially if you're an old geezer like me. And yeah, so let's, let's activate the DOS dialog. And wait till you see this. I just love this. It's classic dos. You're gonna feel like just get ready for a blast from the past. Y'all because here it is. The DOS block. Look at that. Does that bring back memories or what? So this is just a it's a it's simple text. And you got a title here. Oh my goodness. So and you have different options here. Install dialog, and error dialog. The default dialog can add the question is can you bold it? Thanks. So it's just like text. No, it's got the option here, but I don't I don't think so. I don't even think I mean, this is a monospace font. I don't even know how this would italicize Oh, look at that. It gives ugly metallics. So there you verse that? It'll do strikethrough as well. But that's it. That's all you get. So here's what it looks like on the front end. I mean, you gotta love me. How can you how can you not like this alright, there it is. On the front end. There is your dos dialog. Isn't it gorgeous? So yes, this plugin will fill your hearts entire 32 megabytes of free space with joy. You gotta love it. For those of you wondering, yes, the developer says a future improvement is blinking text. So you know, I can't wait to be honest. There you go. That is the the DOS dialog block from Dan Ruscoe. Thank you, Dan, for that beauty of software engineering. All right. Scrolling on down is the next plug in in the list called file organizer from the Softaculous team now we've done a number of these plugins that brings sort of like an old school windows 3.1 File Manager dialog into the WordPress admin. And this is another one. The thing that sets us apart it is by Softaculous. So if you're familiar with cPanel and you see Softaculous, they get all these installs. It's the same team. You know, so it's a good development team. And this is a really helpful File Manager for WordPress. Some of the file managers that are out there. I mean, we've done two or three of these over the years on the plugin roundup and over time, they've pulled some features out like for example, editing text, like I don't know like that's one of the main reasons I would want to have a file manager in WordPress is to go in and edit a file or upload or compressed zip file or zip. They pull those out and put them in the premium version which really renders the free plugin useless. This one is not that way is a fully featured File Manager. Now let me tell you this. This is something that you would use with the following caveats. You do not want to leave this on a site for a lot. This is like something I've got to do some quick work I don't have FTP access, I can drop this plug in and do some quick work and uninstall it. Don't leave it on there because if someone you know gets access to the site, they now have access to the file system which is not awesome. So make sure you know that you want to use it and pull it when you're done. The other thing is if you really really wanted it this is the same as like the WordPress file editor for like the theme editor and the plugin editor where you can actually edit php files from within the WordPress admin. Be very careful with that because if you break something, if you get a semicolon out of place, or you miss a squiggly bracket or one of those things, then you know you've you have a white screen on your WordPress site. And because you were using the WordPress interface to do your editing, you've now lost access to fix it. So that's not great. So just be very careful use this sort of thing sparingly. But with all of that said, there are times where I've used plugins like this because I was it was there was really no other way around doing what I needed to do because the client didn't have access or whatever. So that was a big intro. Let's talk about website files and activate this plugin file organizer from Softaculous.
All right, it is now active and is right down here. Under settings you'll find file organizer, and this is a blast from the past as well. This is old school file management and right here look you're accessing in the public html that's where you start your access. You have access to all of the WordPress files so if you needed for example to make a WP config tweak, you can this is weird. The Edit feature they call text area, that's weird. But clicking here that will actually open the file where you can actually do some editing and save it. So you can do things like that you can look at your PHP INI if you need to upload a plug in manually for example, you can do that here. You can right here. Let's see upload upload Where's upload it Oh, you can just drag and drop. Let's just say you want I've got something here. Let's see what can I drag and drop? I forgot to get a demo for this. Okay, here's here's our, well, no, let's see. Alright, here's the PDF. If we want to just upload something right here. We can drop it. We'll need to put it down below these folders. Otherwise it's going to drop it in a folder. We can just drop that right there. And it just drag and drop upload. And there's today's handout right there. And we can delete it. We can also if we highlight it and we can right here we can compress it that's it's a really hard to read icon we could create an archive with this like a zip archive
there it is. And then if we want we can just delete both of these things. So it's pretty helpful to move things around and whatnot. The question was can you go up a level No, you cannot. So it's this is an it makes sense if you think about it, because this is a WordPress plugin. It only has access to the folder that WordPress starts off in. Right, Stacy, this is work if you don't have access to cPanel File Manager yet. Yeah, this has nothing to do with cPanel. This is a file management interface built into WordPress. That's like why you would want a plug in like this just be very careful when you use it. So can you download from here? Sure. Like if I want to grab this index dot php, I can click on Select and is it here? Yep, download. So there's some there's like mystery meat navigation up here. You kinda have to wait for a tooltip but that index dot php is now on my desktop. Yep, so you can download and so forth. Pretty, pretty helpful. Again, just remember the caveats. Don't leave it on a site. Be very careful about editing PHP files that can break but pretty helpful and from a good team. So that is file organizer from Softaculous. Any other questions or comments on that one? Pretty good stuff. All right. Following my own rules, we will now go and deactivate file organizer. And delete. File organizer because we're not going to leave it on our site at all. Okay. Next up is limit registration by mail domain can anybody guess what this plugin does? It's really hard to figure it out. This plugin will actually limit the registration on your website by the email domain. How about that? So why in the world would you use a plugin like this? Let's say that you are building a site for a specific company. And maybe it's an internal site and LMS or something that only their folks are going to need access to. Would it be great to limit the people who can register as users on that site to only those that have a specific domain name in their email address? Well, that's exactly what this plugin does. So let's go right here settings and registration limit by email domain. Pretty simple dialog, you can allow a comma separated list of domains that are allowed to register. If they cannot, if the user as they registered doesn't have an email address in the list of domains that are allowed here. They're not able to register. So this is from a niche use case. But this is, you know, this is something that I can assign where we could we needed something like this, and this would be a great way to do it. So questions or comments on this one limit registration by mail domain. Pretty straightforward right? Now, the couple of caveats with this one, if you're using something other than core WordPress registration, like the way BuddyPress does registration, or WooCommerce, or something like that, that works outside the core WordPress registration behavior, this plugin isn't going to work it only affects the core WordPress registration feature. All right. Next on our list is media library file size. Now this was pretty helpful. How many of you have taken on a site and you realize there are many things in the WordPress media library like and you're wondering, how big is this and how many large large files you know are out there. Alright, so this is pretty helpful. Media library file. Size. Let's activate that. Sue says is 1100 considered a lot? Yes, it is. Okay. So first thing we need to do here. If you haven't guessed already, is we need to click the index media button. So we're going to click it it's going to tell me there's nothing new because I did this yesterday. There's no files. So let me just reload the page here. Now it knows Okay, so look what we have here. We have File Size column. This is how big the original image is. The image is and look at this with all of the other image sizes that WordPress created for all the little file sizes. There's 140k for the original image plus an extra 125k for all of the other image sizes it created. Isn't that cool? So not only do you get to see how large the primary image is, it's also going to give you the sum total of all the other image sizes that were created related to that image. That's pretty cool. Now here's where it gets better because this is sortable. So there's our teeny tiny one and let's go to the largest. Alright, so this image is four megabytes with 283k of other oh because it's a GIF. Okay, but 283k of other image sizes that were created and so you can see the others right there. Pretty cool. This is really helpful you know, if you're wondering, Where is my server space going, you can add this plug in and just see how many you know what the media files are. And this of course works for anything in the media library, including PDFs and any audio video media type files. If it's in the media library, it's going to show in that file size column, how large that is. Ben is asking does it give you a total Media Library size? I know it does. I don't believe it does that. Is there a dashboard widget? I don't think so. No. So you got it. No, actually okay. If you are using Backup Buddy. There's a great little tool hidden here under diagnostics. That will it's kind of a browsable dynamic file tree. And we're slow again here
all right. So we got to size maps. If you have Backup Buddy this is under Backup Buddy diagnostics. In this interactive graphical directory. Click that and it's gonna give me an interactive file size. So here's the full size of the WordPress site. There's wp content. Here's my uploads folder. If I click that, it's going to open that up to the different year folders and I can even browse down to the months there's nothing under that so I'll go up a level so this can let you know you know what with this this is again built into Backup Buddy. You know how big my uploads directory is for example. That's pretty cool All right, Dave I don't think I understand your question. How are you seeing the whole image in your lab? Oh this this here what are what what do you mean by whole image in your oh this is the media library and so it it gives you the thumbnail Oh, these are square images. These are the reason it's the whole image is these are literally square images. And J J J laughs Yeah. Okay, so anyway, that is media library file size. Not bad, right? pretty helpful, certainly in certain circumstances. All right. Let's move down to the next one, which is called sort settings menu. I'm going to call this the plugin that I never thought that I needed before. And really, as I looked at it, I don't need it now. But it's solved a problem for me that I've never thought to solve before, which is this. How many of you like me are incredibly annoyed that you go into the settings menu and everything is out of order? Like why why are these added down below here? Right like why is Active Campaign postmark way down here? And the reason by the way is that when you activate a plug in all your plugins load and they're adding their settings menus with a priority number So wouldn't it just be nice to have these alphabetized just because why not? That's what this plugin is gonna let you do. So let us activate sort settings menu, which does exactly that. All right, activate now we look at our settings menu and everything is in alphabetical order and the only one that didn't know All right, that's we got one straggler down here. That's apparently adding it's apparently the sort this is where it gets a little confusing. And maybe you've seen this in PHP code where there's like a function name, and a comma and a number beside it. That's the priority number. And it may be that the iThemes licensing code is injecting after the alphabetizing has run. So we have a priority change there and that's so it doesn't oftentimes, I don't think it's an uppercase lowercase thing. And they may be but here's the thing. I looked at this and I thought well that's really cool. And I really now now that I've seen it, I want my settings menu. alphabetized right. Are you like me? Okay, now, I can't unsee this. I now must have my settings menu. alphabetized Okay, so however, I don't want to install a plugin necessarily just for this and just have it sitting here in my plugin list. So let's do this. Let's deactivate sort settings menu. And what I did was I went to chat GPT and I said I want some code that will sort my settings menu like this. Here's the chat GPT thread I've given you this in Alright, here we go. Here's my prompt, create a WordPress function that sorts the items under the Settings menu in the WP admin area alphabetically. Boom, there it is. You gotta love chat GPT. Now, by the way, I am using GPT four, I have a paid account GPT four is much better with code writing than 3.5 which is what's available in the free version. So if you're going to do code creation, use GPT. Four, it's wet like it's so much better. Anyway so I got this code that's pretty cool. And then I usually refine it with a statement like this hack is the WordPress PHP security expert analyze this code for total compatibility with 8.2. PHP. Also identify anything in the code that might conflict with other things or plugins installed prefix the function with the WW which is brilliant web works my company and identify any potential security issues in the code and it changed it a little bit and told me what was going on with each of those suggestions. But this code I have now given you as a gist if you want to use it. So let's use this real quick. I am going to oops, copy this bit of code. And I'm going to go over here to my snippets plug in. You can also put this in your child theme functions dot php, or in a custom functions plugin or something like that. Let's create a new snippet. This is we're gonna call it alphabetize settings and just paste in the code. Run the snippet really only in the administration area. There's no need to load this on the front end of the site. And we're gonna give this a priority of a very low priority. So that one set for 999. Let's just match that. That means it's going to load at the very end to hopefully catch like that i themes thing. So let's save our settings. And now this snippet should be working. Let's look at our settings menu and look at there boom, we got our themes in there now. And it works. Oh no, it doesn't. Hang on it. Oh no, wait, this is this code snippets thing gets me every time. Save changes but gotta activate it. It's like a plug in. Got to activate the code snippet. Now. Our settings work. Look at that. I think there's an order everything's in order. Isn't that beautiful? This is now in the custom function stack of our base site. Because now that I've seen it, I must have my settings menu alphabetized. Isn't that cool? So I've given you the snippet. And I've given you the chat GPT thread if you want to play around with stuff like this in the future. So there you go in that fun. What snippets plugin is that this that's a great question. What do we have installed here? I think it's just web snippets. It's code snippets from code snippets pro this one. There's also WP code. I think it's called I mean, they'll do kind of the same thing. Yeah, you could do the same thing with tools by the way. Does clicking on settings go to general it should? Yeah, no. Oh, wait. Great call Paul. Look at that. If you click on settings, it goes to the first link, which is now active. Active Campaign postmark. Okay, so just don't. Now, you could you could, you totally could to ask chat GPT to make sure that the Settings link goes to this general URL. Yeah, just tweak it right. You can also add code to do the same thing with tools and just have one snippet that does it all. Anyway, so there you go. That's fun, right. Things that I didn't know I needed until now but now I have to have some questions or comments about that. Was a fun little stroll down the AI lane. Okay, moving on down the line to the next plug in, which is not one that I would ever use. But I have it in the ground up to demonstrate to you, one of the first AI blocks that's actually integrated with the block editor and is a sign of things to come when it comes to how AI is going to work in WordPress. Now this is very, very, very early. Okay. Like this is not going to impress you much at all. But if you have a dev site you'd like to play around with things on, give this a try, because this is something this is something that you're going to I mean, I would say within months, you're going to see much more functional AI content block creators that work like this. So we're just going to open up this page. And the plugin is already active. We did have to go in and create an API key with open AI to connect the two because this is talking to open AI. And but now we have an AI block. So there's an AI block that this plugin creates and it's just it's like the chat GPT interface. And I could say give me a list of the top five most top five most popular Avengers characters and it's this is slow, and you can't get like you can't give a lot like it doesn't give you a lot of detail. It's a very small bit of text that can be returned. It's the beginning. But from right here, think about this right here in the block editor, being able to create and modify like right now. You can't say okay, add a description for each one or something like that. It won't do that yet. Maybe we'll see. I didn't try this yesterday.
Let's see what it does here. Okay, it just hallucinated. So I don't know what this is about. Yeah, this is AI hallucinations. So it just isn't that funny. So whoever I don't know what this is all about, but what it's doing here, it actually created a group for the response with separate paragraph blocks. So it's actually chat GPT is it speaks Gutenberg now with this plugin. So it's actually pulling the content in for open API. Creating a Gutenberg block for a paragraph and it's listing thing so again, it's very early, it's very slow. But this is like I'm gonna remind you months from now, hey, do y'all remember that plugin round up when we had that really poor slow AI block, and things are going to be so much better? Yeah, this is the beginning of many things to come when it comes to WordPress and the block editor. So play around with it if you want to. It is this plugin is definitely not there yet. I would not use like it says I wouldn't be using that a lot. But other than just play around with Stacey or the API keys free. Yes. So you can create this is not it's this is different than chat GPT. So you've got open AI, which is the source of all of the the machine learning and the artificial intelligence. One of the applications of the GPT protocol, the GPT learning model that open AI created is chat GPT. But there's not now you can tap into that model with an API key. And that's where all these apps are coming from and plugins that are using open AI chat GPT it's really not specifically chat GPT. It's open API. It's another interface to open API wide chat. GPT is an interface to open API. So you go to Open API use. You set up an open API, you set up an account and you can get an API key and there is a per it's a metered usage, but it's really crazy inexpensive, like, you know, hundreds of you know, hundreds of hundreds of words or like two cents or something crazy. It's very, very cheap. But you do pay for it. It is metered. Okay. All right. Next on our list, this was pretty cool. This is called extend search block from web and design. So extend search block. A great Have you ever created, for example, a, a page that's maybe an archive page for a custom post type or a place where a bunch of custom post type posts or there are a section of the website that's related to the certain thing in a custom post type? And gosh, would it be great to have a search block on that page that only searches that custom post type, for example? And so that is super helpful to have, and there's a number of plugins that will do that like relevancy for examples of longtime plugin, and there's others like it that you can restrict the search to only a particular area of the website or content area. But what it's that's a huge plugin. This actually is a block that uses the standard built in WordPress search function. But on the settings of that block, you can say only search this area. Let me show you what I mean. So let's go down to extend search block and I think I have a page for this.
Now I didn't, but we'll just go back into this automatic to six. I have a column over here that we'll use. Alright, let's delete some of this over here. Let's delete this and over here, let's just put a standard WordPress search block. Oh wait, I think I didn't activate the plugin. Let's just go ahead and add our search block and then update it and let me go activate the plugin
extend search block. Oh, I did activate it. Okay, good. So now when we look at this block, this search block over here look we have an advantage on no search modifiers so now I can say only search the characters custom post type or only search products or I want you know maybe this you know this Davy Nathan the content is, you know, the Marvel Universe. Let's only have this search characters and movies. Right? And I'm holding down my command on Mac or Ctrl for Windows to select multiple post types or I want the search results to be from characters and movies with only certain tags, for example, or whatever. So like you can match. There's your right there and you can update. And now this search block only searches those areas of the site that you specify. So it's not going to match pages or posts. It's only those post types that you suggested in that cool. So this could be really useful for creating little sub areas of the site where especially if you have custom post types or specialized content, really, really cool. So that is called extend search block. And again, just using the standard WordPress search block and giving these extensions over here for search modifiers. Any questions or comments on that one?
Okey dokey. Next up we've done a few plugins like this but I really liked this one I just called WP online active users so we had an office hours question not too long ago about you know, how can I see what you know who's online like on a membership site? You know, how can I tell if any of my users are online well this plugin will do that. Let me activate WP AP online active users where is it? Ah, online active users that's what it's called here. Alright, so now a few things are happening. Look up here in our admin menu. We have one active user and if we click on that, it takes us to our user page and we can see that this person's offline. This person's offline. Oh look, I'm online. Green Dot. Pretty cool. Also here on the dashboard. I have a widget that shows you have three users and one is currently active. And we can click that and go to our users page and see who they are. But it will also give us a shortcode which I neglected to put on the handout because I'm awesome. Right there were be active users. So if we put this on the front end of the site, I'll just show you what it looks like. It looks like this. Now they're very opinionated about the styling here it is green, like this, I would probably change that. Just if you have a community site, you know, currently active users so many, right? It doesn't show you who but it shows you the count of users that is online. So very simple plug in. Pretty cool. These are users that are actively engaging with the site. I don't know what the timeout is on how long a person has to be inactive in order to be considered not counted anymore. I don't know. But yeah, pretty cool plugin that will let you see who's online. So any questions or comments on that one that is WP online active users
alrighty. Last but certainly not least, is a plugin called Peasy front end manager. Now. From time to time, it might be helpful for especially if you have a non technical client to give that client access to just a sliver of the WordPress admin features in a less confusing format than the WordPress admin area is and that's what this does this space. This plugin will actually take the just a small segment post management for posting user management and it brings it out to the front end of the site. Let me show you how this works. There is a login that's required, but it has its own little friendly login process. It's actually a pretty decent UI. Let's activate this and as you see here if you can get to the dashboard at domain.com/dashboard. Now I'm going to open up a new incognito window here
and here's what the login page looks like. Now that login page you can control see where is the settings for this forgotten where the settings are?
Oh no, I have to go to the actual page itself when I'm logged in. There are no back end settings for this. Okay, so here's the dashboard if I'm logged in, and down here I have a settings area where I can control here's the logo that appears right here. Here's the background image that appears right here. I can set my colors and so forth. We can do some basic things like do I want to let people register? What's the default user role just as some of the basic functions of the admin area out here I can change the the user activation email that goes out. So it's a it's a simple user management group of functions. It's there for the on the front end but I can also go in here and manage my posts. And so right here, I'm out again, I'm outside the WordPress admin area. And you know, I've got I can't control the permalink here but I can control the title. I have, you know, if you're using the block editor, this won't work. But I have the post content here I've got excerpt. I've got some publishing abilities. I've got categories featured image, the author, any tags, so it's very basic access to the post features and that can also go through and look at all of the author users that have access to this dashboard. There's a log out here, I have my own profile that I can edit. And that's it. So it brings just some basic features. I can set my password here. Like a very basic admin dashboard to the front end of the website and that is Peasy front end manager. Questions or comments on that one? Does it allow custom post types no matter of fact, it doesn't even do pages it this is just for posts. So this is an ideal situation. For a non technical client, for example, that only needs this for blogging. And so you know they have access to blog right there and you're good to go. Also, you can turn off areas, mentors showed this earlier, right here. There's capabilities so if you have a client, for example that you have set as an editor, you can turn on and off things about this dashboard. So if we don't want them to manage you, all they can do is manage posts. We can toggle off all those abilities so that they don't see any of that. So the all they can do when they get here is manage posts. So if you have a client that only wants to blog, this is a great way to give them access to the post interface using the classic editor and you know, completely outside of the WordPress admin. Pretty cool. Alright, any other comments questions about this one Peasy front end manager All right, it is straight up to the clock. We finished just in time plug in Roundup is now complete for May 2023. Which brings us to the question we always end with which was what is your favorite plugin of the day one vote one vote only please. Chris of course has the DOS dialog couple of votes for front end manager. Disabled coupons File Manager. The file organizer several for that one. The SU likes the one that didn't work. Thank you. So sympathy vote. File Size File Manager.
Pack code snippet. Not particularly not officially a plugin. Alright. So I think the File Manager plugin is number one with the front end manager as a number two looks like and also media library file size is the number three. There's a whole lot of votes for the DOS dialog too. So we'll have to count those up. When it comes down. Now the reason we do these boats next month will be the best of every six months. We do a best of plugin roundup if you're new to the plug in Roundup. Every six months we do a best if we tabulate the votes, and it's the second week of June. I believe it's on the schedule now. Or we go back and do the best of the best all the top votes to show you know, just to remind us a lot of times in these best I've roundup for like, oh yeah, I forgot about that plugin. So just a recap of the last six months favorite plugins of each of those Roundup. So that's it. We're gonna wrap up for today and let me just if you were late coming in today, let me remind you that no webinar tomorrow if you're a member, there's office hours on Thursday as usual, but we just scheduled this webinar with Beth Livingston one week from today talking about the future of project management using chat GPT alongside your project management process, she's going to be talking about assisting with proposal creation project plans, discovery and functionality requirements and creating all those little bits of the project management process using chat TPT that's going to be a lot of fun. That is a free webinar. I'm gonna it's here in the link bundle, which I'm going to drop in one more time for you there in the chat. Register for that one. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So I will have the replay of this up in about an hour along with the all the chat log and the transcript. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. Hopefully you had some fun and picked up a couple of interesting tools. I'll see you back members. See you back here on Thursday for office hours here on iThemes Training, where we go further together.