Happy Tuesday everybody if you're just joining us, welcome, welcome. We are glad you're here. The link bundle is there waiting on you in the chat if you're just logging into zoom, pop up in that chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. You can download the plugin list that is there waiting on you. And I'm just about to finish with our caption setup.
All right, captioning should now be working for all
right, just about four minutes to go before we get started. Glad you're all here. With us today for the plugin round up here on solid Academy. Got a pretty good list for you this week. excited about this one? Good to see everybody coming in Vern from Virginia, West Virginia recinto from Kingwood recinto is that Kingwood Texas right outside of Houston. Can ask from Florida welcome Richard from Philly Tammy from Oklahoma. Ronnie from Tennessee. I know where Athens Tennessee is not too far from me. Actually. Heather from California. Welcome Helen from UK. Excellent Rosendo. I have some good friends who live in Kingwood. Bonnie from Colorado. Welcome Geoffrey from Guatemala, Vicki from middle of Illinois. Good to see everybody. Glad you're here today. If you're just joining us open up the chat and say hi, I'm dropping in the link bundle for today we have the plugin list download that you can grab Tanya from Finland Welcome. Good to see everybody. Niles from Faroe Island. Deb from Texas good to CFPB from ny s. In Ys helped me Phoebe. Oh, New York State obviously. Yes. This is a day where there's not enough coffee in the world. Yes, yes. All right. Welcome, everybody. We're about two minutes away from getting started. Let's see. Yes, as opposed to New York City. In other words, Phoebe the real New York right. Hey, John, welcome from Chicago. If you're just joining us, I'm dropping in the link bundle for today that has the May plugin list you can download as well as the replay link. We'll have that up about an hour after we're finished today. Hey, Tanya, oh, boy. Okay. Oh, CMD. Something Central Maryland ocean Ocean City. Okay. All right. All right. That's that's not fair time. This is not fair. About a minute and a half to go everybody any other weird acronyms for your location. You are welcome to drop those in the chat. A guy from Tenerife. Several of you, by the way, are chatting chatting just with hosts and panelists. So make sure in the chat area of zoom, the little blue drop down says everyone and not just hosts and panelists. If that is you want other people to see your chat. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Just about a minute to go before we get started. Once again, the link bundle dropping in there in the chat. So if you don't have that yet, open up the chat. Right there. It is waiting on you. That's fantastic. I love that word. Yeah. Hey, my name from San Jose. Got a pretty good list. Sue that new plugin from gravity wiz depends on which one you're talking about. So it might be on the list. If you're talking about Gravity Forms feed forge it is in fact on the list. That's the one and it's pretty good. It actually violates one of the cardinal rules of plugin roundup and we put it in anyway pretty good. Yeah. Alright folks, once again, just about ready to launch the link bundle is in the chat. The May plugin list is there ready for you to download and we're just about ready to get started. All right, I've got three minutes after so Let's light this candle and we'll get started. Well, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at solid Academy and it is plugin roundup time. It's usually the first Tuesday of the month and that is today it is May 2024 And we've got a pretty good list of plugins for you. If you're just now joining us in zoom open up the chat and say hi there and you will find the link bundle which includes the plugin list download. If you're watching this on the replay just below the video, you'll see a link to download the plugin list as well. The replay link for those of you on Live is there in that link bundle as well. If you want to go back and rewatch anything or share that with somebody, you can that link will be up in about an hour or so after we wrap up today. It will have the download and the chat log and the transcript that we are that we have recording right now. Alright, so let's get started shall we a pretty good list for this month. As always, the disclaimer is there at the top. These aren't plugins we found interesting they are not necessarily recommendations and we have not thoroughly evaluated these plugins for security and accessibility and code quality and all of those sorts of things. So you'll want to test those and use them at your own risk. We just thought they were kind of interesting. Also if you are a solid Academy premium member you have the ability to suggest a plugin. So let me just show you how to do that. If you once you log in to the solid Academy site, right here at the top under your avatar you can suggest the plugin to be included in the round up and that will this form will let you do that that comes straight to me. So do that please. We'd love to have your suggestions, just to make things a little better. All righty. Well, let's get started with our first plugin of the round up. It is called serve static serve static. Now this is an interesting plugin because what it wants to do is take a WordPress page or post or all of them or none of them or whatever, and actually make a static version of it. Now you may know that the way WordPress works, it is the combination of PHP and MySQL so for every page load, it's going to go out to the database and fetch the information that's required to create this page along with the images and JavaScript and all that other stuff that has to go into rendering the page right. So that back and forth time from the database can take some time to render the page. And that's what will show up in your speed tests are initial that initial server response time. And often that's the biggest chunk of your load time is waiting for the server to actually assemble all the things out of the database to give to your browser to then render. So if you can figure out a way to reduce that server response time, it's going to make the page load quicker. A lot of times that's done with a caching plugin. So there the number of calls out to the database are reduced and you can serve a flat cache file. This plugin does something like that, but it just takes the whole page and flattens it and makes it a static HTML object. So that will make things load quicker. So let's take a look at surf static and it's pretty good. I've done a little bit of testing on it and I found it to be pretty good. The settings are fairly simple. You've got an enable disabled button here. You can make all the pages static or maybe just certain post types. You can do it that way as well. Or, as we've done for the demo here. Just a couple of URLs from the site, you can make just these static. So a lot of the problem with the static type plugins that had been out before is that it wants to make the whole site static and in some cases, that's fine. But you know what, if you've got a form on the page, or what if it's a dynamic page, that is all you know, you can't really have a cached version of the page because it's fetching dynamic information that always needs to be live. So it helps to have a plugin like this where you can just say certain parts are static like maybe you've got a landing page that's going out to a Google ad campaign or whatever. And that page needs to be super fast. Well, you can just have that page static. So we've got the ability to make those URLs static. We've gotten minification you can X so for example, you could say make everything static, except for these URLs, which is helpful. And then you can decide how often do we want to flush and regenerate that cache. We've got some options there. And then if I save the settings, it's going to flush the cache right there as well. So anyway, it's really simple for the all the technical things that this plugin does. The settings are really simple. And I just want to give you a quick look at how this can actually impact the actual site. So Chris did a good job and employed Kadence API to create this new version of WP Nathan, if you've been watching the plugin roundup for a while, you know that the after we build a new WP Nathan, it starts to get worse and worse. It's like the second law of thermodynamics. It just keeps getting worse and worse. It slowly dies. With all the plugins that we're constantly adding.
So we refresh to this is just a straight Kadence AI website. And so there's nothing special about this at all. It's just a bunch of content. And so here's the two pages that we looked at. There's an about page with a whole bunch of stuff like counter uppers and you know, there's a video and some stuff, and then also did the blog page, which is, you know, it's going out and fetching all these blog posts and their images, and so forth. So let's take a look at the before and after. I pre did this just so that it would save us some time. So here's our About Us page. The before and after. This is just using a guest profile in Chrome so it says light and as normal as it can get. And I'm just using the White House tab here. And so here's our stats with a 4.5 speed index for the about page with the in this is without simply static. Here's if when it's made static, it dropped a second, plus not too bad now, there are no other performance. There's nothing else going on performance wise on this site to help increase load to or to help speed the site up. So there's a lot of opportunity here with images and so forth but it shaved a full second off the load time. That's pretty good. The blog page on with it not being static, was a 3.3 second load time with it. Being static. Wow, look at that 1.5 seconds. So that's, that's pretty good. So it does make a noticeable impact on PageSpeed. And it might be worth playing around with. So again, this is one of those plugins that you're going to want to test. Make sure it's not going to conflict with any of your setup and so forth but I see a lot of promise here, and it is serve static. So let me start a couple questions here. So he was asking the pages added to the WordPress installation. So I'm not quite sure what you're asking this. These are existing pages, that we've just grabbed the URLs and dropped them here in this box. But you can also do it again as all pages or certain post types, and so forth. So yeah, what do you think? questions comments about this? One? Tanya, great question. What happens when someone updates the page? Well, let's just try that. So let's go into our about page and let's edit this page.
Let's just add a bit of content there. So I don't know if this I can't remember if this automatically refreshes. Now it's not going to show it to me here because I am logged in so for all logged in users it it knows not to show a static page. So let's look at it. Oops. Okay, so it has apparently updated Yeah, so it updated the Now look here okay cache, but cached missing. Let's refresh this again and see if it up. Yeah. Okay. So it fixed it. It automatically updated the cache. Yep. So it took care of that. versus saying there's a setting for refresh on Save. Now this one is about the settings for the plugin, but apparently it's also smart enough to know that I updated the page, and it flushed and refresh the cache on the page. So that's pretty good. Jeffrey, yes. So the cron time this is how, you know how often am I going to flush and regenerate the cache. So you can set this whatever you want. Yeah. Anyway, I think this plugin shows some promise. But again, of course with the caveat, this is definitely one you're gonna want to test. One thing that they do note is that it can conflict with certain caching plugins, which makes sense, right? So if you're using something like a dopey rocket or a total cache or something like that, you're going to want to really test this out and make sure you're not going to goof anything up. But again, pretty, pretty decent little plugin. I've seen a lot of these static plugins and the settings like it requires an engineering degree to understand. This one is pretty simple, and it seems to work. So give it an exploration and see what you think that is serve static. Any other questions or comments before we move on on that one? Pretty cool. All right. Next up on the list is a plugin called search tools. Now, one of the things about the default WordPress search that comes in core as part of core WordPress, is that it really doesn't give you any options to refine searches to prioritize certain things in search. There are a number of plugins that can help with that and this isn't one that does as well it's a new one and it's pretty good. You also the WordPress default search doesn't give you statistics on like what people are actually searching or how many searches are being made. And this is a simple free plugin that is going to do just that. So let's activate search tools. And I'm gonna go ahead and deactivate serve static so as it doesn't get in our way and activate search right here now what we're going to notice immediately is here on the dashboard, we're gonna have some stats, which is kind of cool. Now we don't have any searches here. So let me just ask everybody real quick if you want to go to WP nathan.com and search for something, and let's get some statistics in there.
We'll do a couple of searches here and we ought to start to see some things popping in here. And look at that. Right so we, we you can look at today, seven days all time you start to see some of the things people are searching for and how frequently it's being searched for. Look at that it lifts it automatically orders and lifts the top searches up which is kind of cool. Interesting, right? And this is just the didn't have to change anything. The search is the search. This extends the core WordPress search so if we want to get some more details, we can go here and we look today. Now this this will flush out a really nice graph over time. There's a good screenshot here on the plugin page where you can see how many searches were made. I'm not sure how useful that is, but there you go. And here's the search terms over so it didn't meet and it just works right out of the box. All I did was activate the plugin. So you also have some additional settings here. Like maybe I only want my search to be in the title, whatever reason or in the content or just in the excerpt or whatever. This one is really helpful. So here I can say I also want to extend the WordPress search into a meta key, in other words, a custom field. So you know, here's some custom fields that are defined on the site. And you know, I want to search that field too. So this could be really helpful if you have a bunch of data that's in a custom field. You could have it search that as well, or I want to search term or not terms in taxonomies or categories tags, these sorts of things, you know, which custom post types do we want to search? Do I want to search the author name and have that show up? You got a lot of different options here. And for free, this is a pretty good tool. So this is search tools. Any other questions or comments about this one?
Pretty nice. Give it a quick test and see if it'll work for you. All right, next on our list is this is an interesting plugin as well time based revision cleanup. I bet you can kind of guess what this does. So as you probably know WordPress stores revisions for your site. Now, often times the like, let me say it this way, in courses here on solid Academy we've talked about a WP config constant that will limit the number of revisions to a certain number. We've also shown plugins like I think it was called WP Post revisions, where you could specify a number per post type of how many revisions that post type would keep this is a different approach to that because it says we're going to limit the number of revisions by a time period instead of a number. So let's say you know, you have your revision set to 10 and it's going to keep the last 10 revisions of this page. Well, what if you're editing it today? And you change it 30 times for whatever reason? Well, you only got to have the last 10 And you can't roll back to your earlier work in the day. This with this. You could say I want to keep the last seven days of revisions or 30 days of revisions, however many that is and so it makes it time based instead of total number. So this is pretty cool. Let's activate this plug in and take a quick look. Time based revisions will activate this and settings and based revisions and right here. So we can in our set. It gives you a nice little graph of what's been going on. But also you can say how long do I want to retain revisions, let's say 30 days, right? So this can be really really helpful. You can also set this to clean up on with a cron schedule at that point. You can also if there's a problem, you can timeout anyway and log all of your deletions. So this is a really neat way like if you have a site maybe that that only gets edited in certain windows. This could be a really good tool to save all those revisions. And then, you know, you'll have more efficiency in the bucket instead of just deleting them by the number. So anyway, that is time based revision. Clean up questions or comments about that one. I've not seen another plugin that does what this one does unique. All right, well, let's keep going. Then we have a few WooCommerce plugins in the list and we're going to start with this one called Disable emails per product for WooCommerce. Now, yeah, Chris is right. This one is cool, because well, I'll just show you why it's cool. It's one where you will immediately know if you're going to have a use for this and if you know if you don't do a lot of WooCommerce you might not think this is much and it probably wouldn't be helpful to you. But it's likely if you do a lot of WooCommerce you're gonna go Oh, I see how this could be helpful. And let's so let's activate disable emails per product for WooCommerce. All right. So what you get here is the addition of a new tab on a WooCommerce product called Disable emails. So here's all of the emails that are the standard WooCommerce emails it's going to send out at different points. And maybe for some reason with this product. There are certain ones of these emails I don't want to send. This lets you disable checking on means turning off, disable the failed order email for whatever reason, or if you have certain custom emails that you that had been added from some process, and I don't want those sent out for this product. It allows you to do that. And it just works. You just check them all. And there they are. It's also really nice in the global view here if we go to settings, see it. Settings, disable emails per product right here in this tab. And so you can see, as you disable emails on each product, it's going to stack them up here. You can kind of see a bird's eye view of the different products and what emails are can or disabled for that particular product. You can also go straight here to edit the product, which is nice. One other feature of this plugin that I think is probably the most useful, at least in my mind, is this. So let's go to this order. And these are just a bunch of dummy orders we've added in here. We can go into this order. And let's say this have you ever had a situation where things needed to be done to an order in WooCommerce but you were afraid to do that because it would send the customer an email and you didn't want it to send the customer an email. This says okay, I want to disable order emails on this order only. And this is really helpful. So like we can update this and if we can even change the different statuses didn't take Okay, well File this under it. worked yesterday. That's really weird.
Interesting well item number one that the live demo is not going as it did in testing. So anyhow, this would let you turn off emails for that particular order. If you needed to make a change to it. So that's super helpful. And again, this is one of those things where if you if you've used WooCommerce you see probably some situations where this would have been helpful. Hanya after it updates the process has finished the question is did it send an email? It may reset it after it finishes probably I don't think so. In this delightful, I just shut down entire browser. All right. So that's going to take me a second somehow I just managed to to totally close that Chrome session. I apologize.
Yep, so that is disabled emails per product for WooCommerce. Very helpful in certain cases as you're dealing with WooCommerce so this is likely what I'm gonna keep in my toolbox. And remember, for the next time I have an issue like this where it would be helpful. Alright, scrolling down the list to the second WooCommerce plugin. This is auto complete orders for WooCommerce. Now this one is really helpful and this is one of those things where I think this ought to be part of core WooCommerce and it's not if you have a virtual order or a downloadable the order has a product that's downloadable. Sometimes, well, it's not ever going to send the customer an email with the virtual link or the download link until the order is is completed. Right. And so that usually requires some sort of interaction with the site. Manager. And so the consequently, what happens is, the user orders a downloadable product and they don't get the immediate email. This fixes that issue. So auto complete orders for WooCommerce lets you do exactly this. So we're gonna go now to WooCommerce settings in general. And down here we have these, this is what the plugin adds. I want to automatically complete any orders that have virtual and Downloadables. So this means that whenever somebody orders something, it's going to immediately send that email letting them have the links that they have that they're waiting on. I mean I if I ordered a downloadable product, I want that link right away. And this fixes that problem and it 100% works. Really good solution. If you have a WooCommerce store that has these virtual or downloadable products, just use this it's good questions or comments on this one.
It also has some options for completing auto completing orders from certain payment gateways and so forth. Good stuff here. All right, moving on down the list. Okay, this is also a really, really good one. WooCommerce prune orders. So WooCommerce prove we that we've actually used this plugin on a client site recently. Where it was an old legacy WooCommerce site had been around forever and ever had many 1000s of orders. And as a result, the WooCommerce database was cluttered with all these old orders. And that will ultimately slow down WooCommerce so what this does is it lets you go back and and delete not only the orders, but also like if you've noticed with WooCommerce when it adds the order notes over here. So all of these order notes, right here these are stored as comments in the comment table in the WordPress database. And so you have just tons and tons and tons of database entries for every order. So our client said clean everything up. We don't need it orders that are more than a year old. So we went in and cleared all of those with this plugin. It worked really, really well. So let me show you how it works. We'll go in and activate WooCommerce prune orders now. You are deleting things out of the database. So obviously, obviously you're gonna want to make sure you have a backup. So don't do this. This is deleting is forever. Okay, you're killing things out of the database. So make sure that you have a good backup prior to doing this. Once you have a good backup, or maybe you want to do this on a staging site to test it first. We found it to be totally reliable. It works really well. Go in here to WooCommerce status and tools. Yeah, so WooCommerce status tools. So they put the plugin tools here under Tools, which is really good instead of some other little sub menu, whatever down here, the ones that have these red notes these four items are what the plugin note down the trash. Here we go. These four items, five items are what the plugin has added. So Q is saying it's risky. 100% It's risky. If you want to prune the database, this is a great way to do it. We of course just like you're saying in the chat, we exported an old copy of the database, it's back there if we need it. We can restore it, look at it and so forth. But this is a good way. Worked great for us to clean up the database. You can trash canceled orders completed orders failed, pending and refunded. So it's based on the status of the order. So if we want to say trash completed orders, we'll click that. Are you sure? Yes. Now right here it gives the date. So what it's saying is, from this day backwards, we're going to trash the orders. And so once that's done, boom, it goes through that takes a little bit of time and it works works very, very well. So if you have an old WooCommerce site that you want to clean out some of the old order clutter, this is a great way to do it. Again, always make a backup questions or comments? About that? That is WooCommerce prune orders
All right. Moving down the list to nice select for WordPress. Now, you know have you ever created a form on the front end of a WordPress site and you've got a drop down list? You know, this right here a picklist some people call it drop down whatever. They're just not. The browser controls how that that drop down is rendered and they're just generally not very pretty. And so this is a plugin that you can add that will change the appearance of the drop down form on the front end of the website and your forms and make it a little more attractive. It's very lightweight, it's not going to slow your site down. What it basically does under the hood, there is a JavaScript library called nice select, that makes dropdowns look prettier, or the Select menus look prettier. And that's basically what this does. So let's go in and activate nice select for WordPress
and there is a settings page. We'll take a quick look at that. Now, so you have an option at the top. Maybe you don't want all of your selectors to be to change here and you could just give it a class like nice select and on the front end make that select box have the class you specify here and it will only be applied to those or just by default it affects everything. So you can also put a placeholder like select option or whatever that will globally change all of your selects to this. You can have the select box aligned to the left or to the right. You can also decide do I want to make this full width or not? I'm just going to save this really quick and we have a demo setup here. So we have our
interested Where is my oh so this is simply a page that has a gravity form on it with something right and so here's our basic select box. So let's take a look at how this looks on the front end. And you can see the nice select so here's the the standard nicely it just looks a little better than your typical select box that it kind of has a little fade in option your little caret flips from top to bottom. This is very easily styleable as well like if you wanted to play around with the any of your typography or colors, and that sort of thing. It's pretty easy to like you can see right here, the settings are for the different CSS options, which you can then change here in the Custom CSS. It's pretty nice. So let's just make a quick change. Here. Let's make it we're going to enable full width on all of our selects. So simply by checking that box, we will now have this select box go full width. And it's the container that it's in full width of the container. And so you can see right there, it's really simple. It's a nice little upgrade. I think it makes a select boxes look a whole lot better than default. And that is nice select for WordPress questions or comments on this one? Pretty straightforward. And again, it doesn't add a ton of code. It's not bloated. It's a very simple light JavaScript library that it's ads. All right, moving on down the list. How many of you are using the action scheduler in WordPress? If you're using WooCommerce you are if you're using solid backups, you are action scheduler is it's been around for quite a while I believe it was developed by the WooCommerce team or it came out of WooCommerce somehow it's basically a more reliable version of the WordPress Cron. And so in action scheduler, for example, you can see it here under Tools and scheduled actions. If scheduled actions is not in your Tools menu, then you don't have a plugin on your site that requires the action schedule. So here is we have WooCommerce and so action scheduler is going to be here yet again if you have WooCommerce or solid backups, and there's a number of other plugins that make use of action scheduled. So what you may notice is if you go in here and look at these, you got some failed items or some pending or whatever, there's a whole bunch of completed items. Now, each of these is a database entry. So it is filling up your database with these logged actions. And by default, every 30 days, action scheduler should go in and clean up after itself. So this plugin allows you to go in and change some of the default options about how action scheduler optimizes itself. So let's activate this plugin and take a look at what it gives us. All right. So settings, no tools there. Vendor tools, xe s action scheduler optimizer. Okay, so this shows us a little bit about what's going on. So the size of our actions table is not huge, but there are almost 400 records there. We got 1000 log records there. So we can go in do we want to go in and delete, completed failed and canceled actions. I'm gonna go in and do that and let you see how that impacts these numbers here. So we're gonna go in and say I'm gonna I want to go ahead and clean it and save changes. Boom, done. That cleaned things up significantly. And I can say, Alright, I want to go in now instead of it being a month, which is the WordPress default. I want action scheduler to clean up after itself maybe once a week, or every three days or however many days you want here. And so it'll go in and take care of that for me. And so that will if you especially if you have a site that has a lot of action scheduler items that are happening, like for example a busy WooCommerce site and WooCommerce is doing a ton of stuff or whatever you may have using action scheduler. This is something that can run in the background and adjust the frequency at which action scheduler cleans up after itself. It's a really great tool, and I'd recommend it Yeah. Manu, will this work with solid backup scheduler, okay, so again, just to be clear, this works with the action schedule. Solid backups uses the action scheduler to to run its scheduling. So yes, this plugin will affect solid backups. entries in the action schedule. Yeah. Again, this is a really good toolbox plugin, keep it in your back pocket. And remember if you have if you having a site where action scheduler is doing a significant amount of work, this might be one to add to optimize things. Alright, any other questions or comments? On this one? This is the Z s action scheduler optimizer.
Manu is asking Will it show the backup scheduler actions that fail well, action scheduler does that itself monitor if you go to tools and scheduled actions? If there are any failures, they're going to show up here. That's just that's not that's a function of action scheduler. Out of the box. Dave I use all the backups and don't see the action scheduler. Um, it's interesting, Dave, I think you should. That is interesting. Let me disable WooCommerce so that the only thing on this site that should be using action scheduled or solid backups
now it's called scheduled actions right here under Tools and it it shows up it should show up. I'm not sure why it wouldn't. Yeah, it's scheduled. It's not called Action skill. It's called Action scheduler. But in the menu, it's scheduled actions. I have no idea why. Because they want to know we needed one more thing to confuse us. All right, anyhow, z is action scheduled. Take a look at that. Action scheduler is actually really cool. It can be used to do a lot of things. Matter of fact, one of the things I showed on a recent office hours was a plugin that I developed with chat GPT that it was kind of an in house events plugin that would look at the end date and time, ending date and time of an event and schedule an action schedule or event for that time to update the event status from upcoming to past. An action scheduler is just it's as reliable as it can be. That's one of the reasons that the solid team chose to use it for running backups. It's used on every WooCommerce site and it's Uber reliable. It's good stuff. All right. That is the yes action scheduler. Any other questions or comments before we move? Along? All right, I am going to real quick go through here and disable some of these plugins so we don't bang our head into anything. What could possibly go wrong? And then we'll proceed to our next login. All right. Next plugin in our list is called V foo. Featured Image from the U R L. This is a plugin that's been around for a little while. It's been recently updated. They're starting to do some significant work. On this plugin according to what they're talking about on the plugin page. And it's interesting. This, we ran into this issue with a particular client. This is probably the first time we've had this issue. But we needed to be able to load in a featured image from an external website and there's lots of reasons why that may not be a great idea. But in this in there are certain cases like the one we had, where we needed to pull in the featured image from an external source. And this plugin has been around forever and that's exactly what it does. And some other things so let me show you. Featured Image from URL, activate this plugin. And understand where are you Oh, it's right here.
All right. So as you can tell, with the really old UI in the plugin settings, this one has been around for a while. So Brad, is this also called hotlinking images? Yes, exactly. So this is pulling in the image from another website to display on yours. And there's copyright implications to that. I understand all of that. But there are certain situations where this is helpful. And in our case, it was helpful. So be foo. Let me show you how this works. So you've got lots of different options here. Like so many apps, I'm not going to go through all these. The Pro version lets you do featured videos, which is kind of cool. There's just many, many, many options, where this is helpful. is here. Let's just go to the Posts page. And let's go down here. Okay, so here in our posts, we have a featured image standard featured image in the media library. But now look, we have an image, a featured image URL right here. I'm going to remove this image in the library. And I'm going to add a an image from a URL Oh, I don't know where can we go? Let's go to let's go to solid WP and let's just find us an image we can link. Image please. Not a lot of images. Just want to look at as an image. That may not even be an image either. Okay, I'm coming up empty this morning image. Interesting. could use the logo let's use this lib copy image address. So let's make sure that's going to load okay. Okay, there's our logo. It's gonna look weird as a featured image but I just paste this in. And I can preview it to make sure it loads and it does. Let's update this look really ugly as a featured image because it's very wide. But yeah, it loaded. It's pretty terrible. But it's actually pulling this in from directly from the solid WP site. The other thing that's really neat here, I'm going to remove this external images. Cute does it pull in any link even links on a government domain? If the domain hasn't specifically stopped hotlinking which you can do with Cloudflare and other security things then yes, it will pull in the image as long as that image is publicly accessible. And again, it's well a lot of folks say is not a good idea and understand in many cases it's not and you need to consider copyright issues etc. But in certain cases, this is we needed this. So the other thing they've added to this, which is really helpful is this key word. So let's just say I'm just going to copy the title of this post. I'm going to drop it in here and hit preview now what this is doing this just went out to Unsplash. And it found pictures that it thinks are similar enough to these keywords I just dropped in and let's just use this one. Drop that in Update. Now we've got that as a featured image. That's kind of cool. Anyhow, very helpful plug in again in certain circumstances
All right, that is fi Fu
and if you want to stop your images from being hotlinked there's a setting in Cloudflare for that if you use Cloudflare or there's also settings you can put in htaccess or there's WordPress plugins that can stop hotlinking Alright, let's move along to the next one, which is simple Log Viewer. Simple Log Viewer. All right so how many of you ever, maybe you haven't logged in to the file manager or SFTP of your website for a while. And you notice Wow, my error log is gigantic. We've kind of several plugins over the last year or two that have dealt with this issue. This is a really good one, especially if you're trying to debug a website. This allows you to view your error log inside of WordPress and even clear it with just a couple of clicks. Let's take a quick look at this one. Simple log viewer
okay. I believe it's here under
Alright, where does it hide out right here. Big menu item. Okay, so not a lot of not a lot of settings here. But this lets us clear our log file and enable WP debug right here from the settings. Now where this shows up is on our dashboard. So this is really helpful. There's no errors in the log. Interesting. So this would show us if we had errors there would be right here in the log and there's nothing in our log right now. So it would show up right here in our dashboard. Really helpful if you're trying to debug an issue. You can turn on debug right there in the settings and your errors would show up right here in this list. And you can monitor that. So very helpful. tool if you're trying to like just let's just say you need to upgrade the PHP version on your server. And if you know anything about that, you know you better test it and all your plugins. And one of the easiest ways to do that is just lip your PHP version on a dev site and load your website under that new PHP version. See if it throws errors, and they'll show up in the error log and that way you can see it right here without having to dig deep into the file system and find those error logs. Really helpful plug in with a cool mustache as a logo that is simple Log Viewer. Any questions or comments about that one before we move on? pretty helpful. All right, scrolling down one of my favorite plugins is around up here. This is gravity wiz feed Forge. Now if your Gravity Forms user we love Gravity Forms here on solid Academy. Gravity Forms has been around for a while gravity Wiz is a maker of add on plugins for Gravity Forms. That has also been around a long time. This is a good reputable development shop and they've released this free plugin called Feed forge now this is one of the few times we have ever violated this. One of the things we the criteria to make its way into a plugin Roundup is that a plugin has to be listed in the WordPress plugin directory. This is not I they actually have this on their own site. They do not submit it to the plugin directory for whatever reason, but it is free and it works really really well. And here's the point of this plugin I see if you ever had this issue. The client says hey, I've just added MailChimp and I want to go back in and I want I would love to have all these forms that we've that we've received to be pushed into MailChimp. It's like you can have your MailChimp subscription or whatever. And then you can add a feed for me start over again. You can add a feed from Gravity Forms to MailChimp, for example or Gravity Forms to lots of other things. But that feed only works from that point forward. What about the entries in that form that already existed? Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to push all those old entries through that feed to get wherever they needed to go to whatever that feed was taking you to MailChimp or whatever. Now it doesn't work with pre payment processing, obviously, but it does work for all these other feeds. Like gosh, I have all these contact form entries from yours and Gravity Forms. We just added HubSpot. Wouldn't it be great to be able to push all those leads into HubSpot with the Gravity Forms feed? Yes, but you cannot you can't go backwards for old entries in core Gravity Forms. This plugin lets you do it. So let's go in here and activate the plugin. So Varun is saying didn't know Gravity Forms kept the history. So it's the entries the form entries will show up there. So if we go here to entries, oh, I don't know if we have any entries here. This is going to be hard to demo. I should have thought about this. Let's just quick complete a contact form and get an entry in here
and submit Oh, this is a Kadence got it. Hang on we got to get a get our gravity to get to that page that has the gravity form on it. Was this
none of that's required
get an entry in here. Okay. So by default Gravity Forms keeps this list of entries here of in the database everything that this form collects and I believe it Yeah, it I think there's a way to not collect entries, but it collects entries by default. So here's this and if we were to set up a feed for MailChimp, what well, you know what, let me just show you their page. It's gonna take too long for you to actually create this. So here is the page where they talk about gravity, the feed Forge, like for example, there are connectors that would allow you to push your form entries into a Google Sheet. This would let you do that all at once. User Registration. How about that? I've got I've got all these form entries. I want to make them users boom. You could use the Gravity Forms user registration, CRM connectors, if they were files uploaded in you know with with gravity form file upload, you could push those into Dropbox, so many options here for all the feeds. And so what this will do is once you get this plugin activated you basically select as many entries as you want. I select all 30 entries, and then it says all right I want the bulk list here in this drop down is process feeds that's there by default, or that from the plugin adds this for you by default. So process feeds and apply select which feed you want to process and then it goes to work pretty cool. Yeah, and soon as right it only it knows that it's already imported something and so it only runs it the one time if you go back and do it again. So yeah, I've learned would it be a one time thing? Probably because you've run it right? It's not going to it won't re rerun an entry into the feed that's already been run through the feed. So it runs in the background. By the way, Gravity Forms has a really efficient background process manager and run it's not going to overwhelm your website. Really, really neat. It lets you process a few 1000 entries at a time. They say if you need to process more, let us know. But yeah, it will not reprocess the same feed for the same entry which is kind of cool. Anyway, this is a freebie. And I think this will be super helpful. I don't have anything that I've had been able to test this live with a client yet, but I see this being very, very helpful at some point in the future where we want to run feeds. So there you go any other questions or comments about this? That is gravity whiz feed Forge. Pretty cool. All right. Last but not least, is triple A option optimizer by this plugin developer you may have heard of before name Yoast debulk. You may have heard of Yoast right Yoast theny right up. He wrote some plugin a long time ago. Anyway. So Yoast has created a number of plugins recently and this one is really really cool. Have you ever wondered why it is that over time your WordPress site slows down? Have you noticed that your WordPress site gradually starts to slow down even on good hosting? Like maybe the admin pages are taken forever or whatever and you can't really find any plugins that are causing a problem it just seems to run slower. Why is that? Well, the way WordPress works is that as plugins are added they will often add options entries to the database. And those options frequently are auto loaded, meaning that every time WordPress runs through a page, it's grabbing this data out of the database. You could have stuff in your database from plugins that you installed uninstalled years ago. They're still loading their data every single time WordPress loads because oftentimes plugins don't clean up after themselves. So what this plugin does, it's brilliant. It gives you this admin screen to show you what's being auto loaded and see if there's anything that is being auto loaded. That shouldn't be. Now again, this is another one of those situations where you're about to make some changes to your database. So make sure you test this on a site that maybe you know isn't mission critical and that you have good backups and all the things right so obviously, before you delete anything out of your database, always always backup backup. But let's look at this plugin because it's really cool. Now this is a brand new site and this WP Nathan site, this is the first time we've used it. This is the site where we test plugins on some of the ones we tested did not make it into the roundup because there were issues or whatever. And so we might have some options being pre loaded. Let's take a look and see if we do hit hit we do. So let's go down here to tools and option optimizer and see what we've got. Alright first tab. The the ones that show up here on the first tab are options in the database that are being auto loaded, but they're not being used by a plugin, at least that this plugin is aware of. This is the caveat. Maybe this plugin isn't aware that a particular active plugin is actually loading these options. You want to be careful with this. But let's just take a quick look here. I'm going to change to 100 and I'm going to sort this by size. Okay, look at this. So I know that we tested a plugin that was a landing page creation plugin that didn't make it into the roundup for a number of reasons. And look at this when we deleted the plugin. It left a 306k options entry in the database. Let's take a look at it. Look at this garbage. It's in the database. This is what it left. And this has been loaded every time I am blinking around all this garbage is being loaded in that something and you know so in this case, I recognize the name of the plugin. Alright, here's another one te sees that's something from the events calendar from Freemius that was leftover and it's not very large. But you know, we don't have events calendar active right here. It is installed it's just not activated. So I wouldn't want to delete those necessarily but like here's one the Kadence design library we could delete that. But this one for sure. Okay, this is it's a vestige it was leftover. The plugin should have deleted it. And it's loading 306k in memory. Look at this in memory 300k of memory is being taken up by this stupid option that I don't need. So we're going to know we have two things we can do here. We can remove the auto load, which means I'm going to leave this in the database, but I'm gonna just make it not auto load. That's the safest option. Or in this case, I know for certain that we don't want this option in the database. I'm just going to delete it altogether. So it is now gone. And that should save significant amount of auto loaded options. Look at that. It just dropped for that 300k Pretty neat right? Again, use with caution, only delete the things you know. Otherwise use just remove autoload I don't care about 300k in the database. I do care about it being auto load, right so if I didn't know what that was, but I thought maybe it wasn't important I could just remove the auto load. But yeah, it also has some options. Here's that it's used, but not auto loaded. So here's kind of the other side of that. These are options that exist in the database but aren't being auto loaded. I don't know why would want it like this is like if I undo one of these and I just say remove auto load and I wanted to make it autoload later I can do that from this tab. Here's some things that don't exist. I don't know what's going on there. I could do some research on that. And then here's every if you want to see everything, everything in the database, you can do that. Here. So really useful plugin. I think we're identifying, you know, if I were to install this on a site that's years and years old, likely I could find some things to clean up. You probably could do but take a look at this. Test it back up, and it might end up helping you optimize your WordPress. Thank you again, Yoast for a great little plugin here. All right, any other questions or comments on that one? That is the triple A option optimizer. And that brings us to the end of this plugin round up. So we end with the question that we always do, which is what was your favorite plugin of the roundup and yes Q all of these are free. They're in the plugin directory except for that one that we mentioned, but it's a free download as well. One vote one vote only please. And we'll compile these next month as best as in June. So we'll compile all these top votes into our best job list. So by far the option optimizer is number one, by far like by far the votes are both for serve static search tool action scheduler,
search tool, revisions. Any other votes another one for static search tool. All right. So it looks like option optimizer, the search tool and with a third place serve static. All right. Well, that's gonna wrap it up for us today, folks. We do have because I closed my browser I don't have this handy, but here we go. We'll have the replay for this up shortly. And of course, we're back on Thursday with members with Office Hours for members. So thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. So hopefully you found a few plugins that might be fun to play around with. Grab those I'm going to drop in once again if you were late and didn't get the handout. The May plugin list is there in the chat. Now you can download that. And otherwise, Hey, see you back next time on solid Academy where we go further together.
