Again, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom, we've got about five minutes before we get started. I'm getting our caption set up now, just a moment to get all that going.
Just about there
a few steps involved in this process. All right captions should be working now.
And they are so once again welcome
everybody if you are just joining us in zoom, pop open the chat and say hello. The link to the handout is now there in the chat as well if you'd like to grab that. So you have all the links and all that sort of thing. Just about four minutes to go before we get started officially here. I've got a pretty good list for you today, I
think. Speaking of which, I should
probably open up the list.
So I have those always a good thing.
So yes, if you are in the US hope you had a nice Independence Day. Weekend.
Oh my we have the wrong title. Still says June I'm going to fix that really quickly. Totally missed that earlier. So again,
welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. Good to see everybody. I am fixing the title on the handout because it still said June and we wouldn't want to confuse anybody
because I'm confusing enough. As it is
so hope your week has started off well. And if you're in the States, hopefully you got to take a nice day off yesterday.
Enjoy a nice bit of
food and fun with some folks that you whose company you enjoy. I am just about to have that handout updated all right. So if you need the handout just follow that link and you'll be able to grab this handout which now has the correct title on it. If you have the original one you now have a collector's edition. The July 2022 plug in round up
all right, just about ready to get started. We're about a minute and a half out Yes, yes, rather warm here in the southern part of the US right now.
Just a little bit warm. Not that that's out of the ordinary All right, less
than a minute to go. Now. If you're just joining us in zoom, make sure you pop up in that chat window and say hi.
Several really, really good
ones today
just about ready to start here have we now
is Paul now he's got the moniker a PT
because you know why? Not? All righty,
whatever. Okay, it's three minutes after I let me pause just for a moment so we have a good place to cut the recording
and we will begin. Well, good afternoon and
welcome to the July 2022 plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here and I iThemes Training and each month we take a look across all the things that have been added to the WordPress plugin directory over the last month or so. And we try to bring you a fun list of interesting plugins that may or may not be useful for what you're trying to do in your work. With WordPress. Usually we have several really good ones and I think this month is certainly no exception to that. If you're just joining us in zoom, make sure you have the chat window open and take a look because I've just shared the handout that Google Drive link is there. If you're watching this on the replay, click the Download handout button right underneath the video. And that will give you this list of our plugins for this month. So let's get started shall we? With a plugin called WP remote users sync. Now you folks may have to help me with this because it seems like in a recent office hours we had somebody asked questions about synchronizing users and WordPress and this I can't remember if it was this one this may have come out of that discussion or it's one that I found afterwards. That allows you a Karen it was you That's right. It allows you to synchronize users between multiple WordPress sites. So there have been some plugins over the years and matter of fact, the one that I used to use to do this stop being supported and so we actually just merged two sites together so we wouldn't have this issue anymore, but this is a really great plugin seems to work perfectly. That allows you to keep in sync users on two different WordPress installs. And actually multiple ones. You can stack them up I believe. It's pretty cool. So let's
take a look at this one. Ooh, that window is too big.
There we go. All right. So let's have a quick look here at WP remote users sync. And let's see. First we know we activate the plugin. Always the most first and most important step in this process. WP remote user sync and once we do that, we get a menu item right here under Settings. And notice I have done this already. I've synchronized a site that's called dev.wp nathan.com.
And it's essentially a mirror
of the WP Nathan's site just so we have a couple of things to play with here. So I need to log into this one as well make it
that should have had this done already. And I did on a separate browser profile. But that's alright.
All right. So you need to have both the plugin installed on both sites. And once you do, it works really really well. Actually, this one may already be
active. Let's see. Yes. All right. So
notice what we have here on the dev site. It synchronizes with WP Nathan on WP Nathan. It's synchronized with Dev. And so what's really nice here is this here's your all your settings. You can choose what you want to happen. So for example, on outgoing actions from the up Nathan to dopey Dev. I want to synchronize their login and logout you know if they log in or log out. We can synchronize that create users update users, delete users, changing passwords, roles and other user metadata. That's pretty interesting. And also you can you know, so like this can happen on one side or not the other. So for example, if I create a user on the up, Nathan, maybe I don't want to synchronize that created user. But if a user is updated from the other side, like I don't want to know on this site, if this site creates users, but I want to know if they update their information or passwords or whatever, so that you can change what information you're passing back and forth. The next thing you need to do is make sure that the the encryption keys are the same between your two
sites. And this is just random,
you know, string of characters, which I'm going to delete because you people will probably stop this video and you know, go back and copy the things anyway. Not that anybody would do that. Certainly not. No, no, no, of course she wouldn't do that. Anyway, you make sure the keys are the same and then that's all you have to do. Like that's it. It works really, really well. So for example, let's go over here. And let's change let's just look at our users. You'll notice that they are very, very similar and in fact, they are synchronized. There's five users here and clicking back and forth see there is zero change in the tabs right. But let's say our customer on this site for whatever reason changes their name to Mr. Mr. Nathan is going to be this person's name. So we will save this and then immediately without doing anything else on the other site, the dev site, we refresh, and look, boom, it updated, just like that. Like it just happens. Whenever WordPress fires a function that updates the user, then it pushes that change back and forth based on your selections. It's really really cool and it just works. So highly recommended that he works with delete, too. So like if we get this this vestigial user from when we did give WP right here the skip that he meant, let's just delete this one and I'm gonna attribute all content to makes apparently that user has some content. And if I delete that user, it's synchronizing right now it's taking just a second
refresh. Boom, they're gone, just like that. So
this is really helpful if you have a network of sites, or maybe you have some sub sites that a company uses. And it lets keep everything in sync. Right. So yeah, really nifty. Chris is asking do you see any downside to syncing users on sites? I mean, you only where it makes sense. Right? So maybe you have a UMaine site, where there's a store and then you have a sub site, that is a membership site, right? But you want to keep those users in sync. You can totally do that with this plugin. So for example, if somebody makes a purchase, or like they, you know, if they have a user on the main on a main site, but there's WooCommerce running, and they update their password there, but there's also a membership site where there's restricted content and so forth. That password change. You could just reflect it between the two. So it's transparent it happens right behind you know, nobody realizes what's going on. It just totally works. So that is WP remote users think it is the best solution for this problem that I've seen in recent years. Pretty cool. John, so with this work in keeping a sync, keeping sync a developing dev site to an existing site. This only John, this only works for users, right? Only users, not posts and pages and those sorts of things. This is only for users. Roi also where I have a dozen sites where you can keep your password updated. I mean, I don't think I'd use this for that. I think I would just manage those sites. This is for like, you know, if you've got a bunch of users logging in different you know, I don't know that I would use this for my personal passwords, updating like I wouldn't have the same password on multiple sites. If I'm the developer. You'd want to keep your you know, your unique passwords between lots of different sites. Unless there's a good reason why that you know, I just don't understand why you would want to do that. This is you know, you're opening up communication between sites. So, the risk the security risk on this is higher than a standard WordPress install, but it's not super high risk, either. So it's factor all that in. Does that make sense? Any questions or comments? Any more on WP remote users
sync? Vertical plugin.
Okay, moving right along to then if only this could extend a WooCommerce it does for users. And because you it would not you know it wouldn't it won't keep in sync your order information. But it does keep in sync the users and their user meta. So by the way, when you look at this site because it has WooCommerce installed, there's a you know all this user meta like shipping address, billing address, that's all going to carry over if you have selected
the user meta right there in the metadata.
So it will pass that additional user meta that WooCommerce adds so pretty cool. Okay, moving down. Moving down the road to the next one is called Lahti files, Lahti files. Now just a little note. We did do a great webinar a few months back with the new Kadence Lati block. And it this is built into Kadence blocks. So you may not even need this plug in if you're a Kadence blocks user. It does have a couple of additional features that are pretty cool. But Lahti, if you're not aware is a it is a file standard that allows for very small file size animations, Lotty files is a file that opened in the wrong window. Lahti files, is a repository of free Lahti animation, so this is a Lottie for example. It was developed by Airbnb, and they've open sourced it and yeah, so like you can search for animate somebody give me an animation to search for and be nice. This
is a family show.
What shall we search for a
bulldozer? That's really that's like off the wall but why not? Okay bulldozer.
So there's our bulldozer Look at that. Now, like a lot of, for example, free stock art sites. You'll also find down here there's some premium ones mixed in if they want you to sign up for a thing and there's not a whole there's premium animations here. A lot of these are premium, which is unfortunate. So we don't have price free. We can change it there. So not many free bulldozer.
wadis Lottie da let's try something else.
Let's do something simpler like about dog
dog, dogs that are free so let's say here's
a dog right there, right so Lottie files is a big repository like a free sharing site for Lahti animations, right. So let's go in this is their plugin. So it's going to bring Lottie files library into WordPress, which is one thing it does a little better than the Kadence block for allottee. Not Of course it doesn't mean you have to have a different another plugin. That's okay. If you want this additional feature, which I'm about to show you. So, we've seen for example, how some stock art libraries a lot like Unsplash you know, there's an Unsplash plugin and you can search Unsplash right from within the media library. This does something like that for Lahti animations. So let's activate Lahti files and let me just jump over to the page where we have that one set up.
Let's see there's some settings that you'll really have to deal with. But if we were to look at what used to have a page there for that, sorry, I'll just drop them in right here. Yes, there are a lot
of Wadi animations available. So if we search for Lottie, you'll notice there are two blocks. This one is the Kadence block. This one is the Lahti block. I'm going to click there and notice what we can do. We can like bring in an existing Lahti file if that J allottee. file was a JSON file. And so if if there's already a lot of upload in your media library, you can find it right there. You can upload your own Lottie or you can even insert it from the URL like right here, Billy acetyl, here's the body animation URL. You can just copy that and you can drop that URL in right here. And that will give you your body look at that. We'll turn off our controls and there's your little pooch that isn't that cool? Now another way to do this is the browser itself. So if we go back to Lahti, discover animation look, we now have a UI directly into the Lottie site right here in WordPress. So we look this is an equal opportunity show. So let's do cats. And so here's our cats 404 page with a cat in a whatever that is. That's interesting. All right, here's the nice cat. Let's insert that animation and there it is. So I will turn off the controls. Yes in that nice. Paul, how are Latinos with accessibility? It's a great question. So let's see here. Let's update our page. It is a see. Wonder if is there? I don't see it. Here. Is there. Alt text for Lahti animations? I don't know that there is. Let's just take a look at how it ran. That's a great question. Let's look at how it renders on the front end.
It is an SVG file. I'm not seeing any alt text here.
There's a good question of in the media library does it give you alt text they're like here's
it gives you a title.
So you could use a title probably the this this is a is not
a alt text double image Yeah, what is
actually a an HTML tag which is interesting. Yeah, I know I know title doesn't replace alt text. But I'll text apparently is not supported on a ladi JSON file. Phoebe says it might be possible in the Kadence block so let's take a look at that and see.
Kadence gives us an ARIA label. So that's what we would use there. So that's a big negative here. The sloty files I didn't think about that before Kadence Lottie block does give us an ARIA label. This would be good for this would be a good developer suggestion for them for
sure. minute why
is it important to have alt text because if you are visually impaired and you are using a screen reader, you have no idea what this you know, you're missing context of this animation you've been describing. You know what it is just like you would want alt text on an image. Is there a way to shut off movement? Well, in that case, probably you would not use a Lahti or maybe it's just it's a lot of lotteries or very subtle movements
like this.
It is doubtful this would cause a person who might have issues with major animations. Yeah, it's a really good really good conversation about this. I would encourage you to explore Lottie whether it's with the Kadence block or Lottie files and just see, you know, certainly start to work out some of those accessibility issues and yeah, pretty nifty. And Elizabeth Yes, you can control when the movement occurs. Only playing on hover, for example, only playing as the page scrolls. This is the Kadence block again, and also the the plugin here Lottie files also has similar controls. Alright, any other questions or comments on Lottie files? We've got to get we got to start moving here for times sake. All right, moving down to the next one admin posts grid. Now when I saw this, it was immediately apparent that some of you are going to like this. And some of you are not going to like this. So let's take a quick look at this. I think it's interesting. It's an interesting way to visualize the Post List, admin post grid. It's going to give us a new top level menu item over here, and we'll get we'll do a quick vote here in the chat.
Here's our post grid.
Look at that. So if you've got a if you're using if you've got a blog or something, you know, this is a visualization of your posts list. It's the same as post and all posts, except rather than a table view. It is giving you more of a grid view. And you can decide what's going to be here each show offers categories tags, and so on and so forth. How many columns you want. It does have a few basic themes
that are here.
Beth wants to make it six columns.
So let's do that. There you go.
And notice you do have access to the Quick Edit menu in a white box here so that's kind
of cool. Okay, so let me
I know more people than I thought are liking this. So let me just give me a yes or no. I am very interested in this. Yes. Or no, that is a yes. It's really that is really something. So it only works on posts. It doesn't work for example, WooCommerce products or custom post types or that sort of thing. Yeah, Doug, it would kind of be nice on the custom post type, wouldn't it? But I don't think that is yeah, it's only on posts.
Yeah. Interesting. Like everybody said, Yes. Maybe those of you that said no, or, you know, whatever. I don't know. So there you go. It's, you know, you can choose your choose a theme if you'd like, which basically just changes the colors and stuff. But there you go. Yes. Now if there are hundreds of posts. So Sue says that would work if there weren't hundreds of posts. However, I don't know. Does this make it easier? To find posts, just based on the featured image. If you have a lot of posts, you might like it, actually. And of course, you can change your pagination. So look here, we'll just make four pages per four items per page. So you do have pagination here so you could break it up if you
wanted to. Yeah, this I would say
I don't think I'd use this one unless you were using featured images on your site. I think featured images is really what makes this helpful.
All right. Any other questions or comments on this one? This is admin. Posts grid.
Okay,
next up is. Our next up are a few WooCommerce plugins beginning with one called product quantity settings. Now we did one very similar to this last month and you may remember it it was a drop down selector for the Quantity field. And this was helpful if for example, you have a product that could only be bought in multiples of two or five or 10 or whatever. Remember that one, like you would click the little drop down and you would get the choices that were you know they would increment based on you know what your specific settings were for that product. Now this is similar in that you can set ranges like it has to be this minimum, up to this maximum and then it might increase in steps of two or five or 10 or whatever. So product quantity settings pretty neat little plugin. Let's go take a look at it. This is one that you'll either use or not use right like this is not something you'd put on probably your your basic WooCommerce install only if you have certain products that are sold in ranges are multiples. So let's just take a look. We'll just go to our Scooby Snacks Product here. And notice right here, there is a this was one I'd already edited before so let me just refresh by default. You go down here under product in general, and there is a quantity settings checkbox. So we'll activate the configuration. And let's just say you've got to buy at least five Scooby snacks, and you can only buy 20 That's it. And the range is the increment, right? So let's say we have to buy these in boxes of five. So you have to they have to buy at least five Max 20 at a range or increments of five. So let's just take a quick look at how this actually flushes out. Now the one we did last month has a drop down list. This actually still uses the regular Quantity field. But notice it started at five and as we increment up look, it goes in five up to 20 and then it stops it met cool. So again, not helpful for a typical ecommerce site but in a niche situation where you have to you know, control minimum maximum quantity or things have to be bought in certain multiples. This is a great plugin. I think it's better than the one last month in my opinion. So that's it product quantity settings for AI great Tanya exactly great for wholesalers. That's product quantity settings for WooCommerce any other questions or comments on that one? Pretty cool stuff there. One to kind of keep in your back pocket and remember that it's out there. If you ever have a WooCommerce build that needs this sort of thing. All right, let's go down to the next one, which is booking and rental manager for WooCommerce. Okay, so who was it that was working on the WooCommerce site where it was like a toy rental situation, or whatever.
You remember who that was? Anyhow this
is a great little add on for WooCommerce that even it does have a pro version that's coming I don't think it's been released yet. The developers mentioned pro but the link doesn't go anywhere. And they do have a bunch of other by the way really cool. Looks like WooCommerce add ons. I'd never seen this developer before mage people. It got a lot of looks like some pretty interesting WooCommerce additions. But what this one is going to let allow you to do even in the free version. i It's a pretty capable out of the box solution for renting things through WooCommerce so let's jump in and activate this plugin. It is booking and rental manager. So we'll just activate this and let's take a look at right here under rent item. Now these are these do not go in as traditional WooCommerce products. So they do show up. They can't I think actually they do show up in WooCommerce products. Yes See they show up here, but they don't appear in your store. You show these in a different way. via some shortcodes and some it explains it on the
plugin documentation page.
But like so for example, here is our amazing car.
Let's see
anybody identify the source of this image? We all time TV, people know where that car came from. Anyway, so right here there's one available we can add an icon to it. You can add your gallery at Beverly Hillbillies, you can add your gallery of images. Here's where you configure the pricing. You know, you can also set categories of rental items just like you'd have product categories.
What is the hourly rate,
what is the daily rate so 12 and 125? You can also change day in week configurations for how many hours and so forth are involved. You can add pickup and drop off locations. I mean it does a lot of different things. So let's let's look at how this actually looks on the front.
End.
You know, okay, so a perfect example of something to do. Notice that we have a new slug that's been defined rent for this custom post type for these cars. Whenever that happens, and if you come up with a 404 trying to deal with one of those. All you need to do is reset your permalinks. So this is a WordPress thing. It's not just this plugin thing. I'm just gonna go to settings and permalinks and resave and that's going to fix this problem.
Boom, there we go. So,
here's the front end. I mean out of the box, it's not bad. And you can deal with some of this with CSS if you want to. We can choose our shows our pricing, we can choose our pickup and drop off locations.
We're going to choose the Pickup Date
of tomorrow. At 9am i And let's drop it off the next day
at 12pm.
So look at calculated two days and three hours. Look at that. If I go back to 9am it knows it's just two days. And so it calculates based on our daily and hourly rate. We can have our add ons here and it just uses the standard WooCommerce payment system to do
the booking. It is pretty cool.
Yeah, John, it's got the drop off date set. As a European date, which is really interesting because I know this one is the same way. I'm sure that is in one of the settings that I just didn't address.
Yeah, and this is a free plugin. This just works right out of the box. So that is booking and rental
manager for WooCommerce. And lots of Beverly hillbilly lyrics in the chat. So yeah. Any other questions or comments on this one? If you're doing any kind of a booking or rental site, this is a pretty good plugin it seems to work. Tanya does it know that the car is unavailable to anyone else during that time?
That is an interesting question. Ah, yes. So let's see
where is the inventory? There is an inventory setting.
Under Yep, quantity available one right there.
So if you have weed eaters that you're renting, you get out quantity 10 And once all 10 are out for that period, it just knows the magic in the back end figures out that from you know if I'm gonna rent from three to 5pm On this day that there is two available during that time.
So pretty nifty. Booking and
retail rental manager for WooCommerce. Any other questions or comments on this one? It by the way, the person I can't remember who it is one of our members was that I had this this book or toy loaning site. You could totally like this would power that whole site in just zero price, but you could still reserve it and boom that's out. Right? And you know, it's one nice little addition would be when it's you know, when the current rental period ends, maybe being able to show that but yeah, this is pretty cool.
Okay, all right.
Let's move right along to our next plugin another WooCommerce add on. This is a simple little add on but I like it a lot. It is called WooCommerce hide cart when empty by WP fix it can anybody guess what this does? It's gonna hide the cart when it's empty. So when we go to the front end of our website here, let's just get to our homepage. You'll notice that I have up in the menu bar, a cart icon, right because there's one thing in the cart awesome. But if I take it, you know the cart just shows us zero. Well, maybe I don't want to show a cart up there unless there is an item in the cart. So that's what this plugin does. So let's go back and first of all activate this I'm actually going to activate the next to
say save us a little bit of time.
So WooCommerce hide cart when empty. And when we go here it's under Settings and cart icon. Now I have prefilled the class for the Kadence header cart which happens to be Kadence dash header dash cart. You find that by just inspecting the element and drilling in you know if using a different theme or something else to place that cart. You're just gonna gonna want to find you know, the most likely and you can experiment with this if you need to, but just you know, the most likely CSS class
for this. Let's see. Right there Kadence header cart
is the ultimate wrapper div that's talking about the cart, right?
So when I do this, save changes.
Now it's at zero items. If I refresh the page, that cart icon goes away until I go back to you know, and I add, let's just say I'm going to add some downloadable kittens. Boom, there it appears.
Isn't that cool? Really, really neat stuff. So it's a
nice little feature doesn't take a lot to do just define your, your class. And if you're using Kadence you've got it all ready. And that's it. It works. It hides the cart icon when empty. Cool stuff. Any questions or comments on that one? WooCommerce hide cart when empty by WP fix it
Alright, another
fun little simple but useful plugin by the same developer is WooCommerce custom coupon messages. Now. This is a section for whatever reason of WooCommerce that a lot of plugins do not allow you to customize the text for a lot all of the messages in WooCommerce that relate to couponing. And here this plugin basically allows you to change that text to whatever you want it to be.
So
let's see right here. I activated the plug in a minute ago and we're at WooCommerce settings and coupon messages. And that right here just it's basically just a bunch of fields that has every single default message for WooCommerce. That applies to coupons. And it lets you type different text in and it also tells you right here what the default text is. So, so please enter a coupon code the default here is enter a coupon code. Let's just say something else.
If you want to pay less, enter your code. So we'll just add
that and if we go now into our checkout process
that didn't work happening. is interesting. I thought I saved the setting. But you know, maybe I didn't.
Maybe that's interesting. Yet another case of it worked earlier All right. Follow that one under mystified. Maybe a plug in conflict. Yeah.
Printing out for sake of time. I'm not going to linger here. But you can see all the different messages that are involved. And even if it's just for changing to a different language that suits better your intended audience. Really, really good. I don't know I do not have shopped kit on the site at all Kadence shop yet. So anyhow, this is where we could go forever trying to debug this but I'm just going to press on WooCommerce custom coupon messages
pretty cool. When it you know works. Don't blame the developer. I think this is on my end.
Okay, moving down the list to another one of these plugins that attach you to a stock art library of one kind or another. We've got a bunch of these over the years and I think streaming and this is a really good one. I like this a lot. It uses Unsplash as the library, which is a you know, it's a library I enjoy. And you don't have to deal with any API keys. It just talks directly to Unsplash. No problem. And it is a Gutenberg block. So if you know this only works in Gutenberg, let's go and open up our page to drop in
an image. So
there's an image that came in it does have its own block. So if we look for
images Wait a minute. Once again. Let's be sure we activate the plugin before we demonstrate the plugin otherwise it's really hard to demonstrate the plugin and refreshing. Went around messaging. That's Oh it's photos. Unlimited photos. There it is.
There's our block. I was searching early for peach cobbler so it remembered my last search which is a feature. You can also search for various things here. But we had some really great peach cobbler here for the Fourth of July yesterday. It was quite good. So let's just grab us a nice basket of peaches shall we? So we'll import that image
takes a minute because it's
pulling the image from Unsplash into the WordPress media library.
And it's done
and there it is. And notice what it's done here. It has pulled in the correct attribution to meet the Unsplash license. And it has also if we take a look at it, pulled in the alt text that was supplied by Unsplash now, this is actually incorrect. It should be red fruit. It's actually not really red. We could say peaches. We wanted to but there you go. It pulls in the author it does the appropriate links to preserve your Unsplash licensing well, and yeah, it pulls in the alt text however it's
defined at Unsplash.
And once it's in it works just like any other image module. So let's medium image
50% size. Yeah. Pretty cool. So that
is unlimited photos. Nice UI. You're using the block editor pretty cool stuff. Tanya, does it optimize the photos? No. You would need some sort of image optimizer like in most cases to optimize the image. This is just going to pull that the big image just directly from Unsplash into your media library. Now WordPress of course has a basic image optimizer in that it's going to size down the image to a max size of 20 570 or whatever that number is. So it's not going to pull a 10,000 pixel, you know the full if it's got one of those giant images on Unsplash. WordPress will size it down but hopefully you're using some sort of image optimizer yourself like E dub or short pixel or you know one of tiny ping one of the others. Any other questions or comments on this one? Unlimited
photos All right,
let's move to the next one, which is a simple plugin but I think it's kind of nice. I t g admin hover menus. So the you know, the WordPress admin does have little hover menus. This is a simple little plugin that I don't know that I would necessarily leave it on a live site but especially during development. When I'm back and forth and a lot of pages A lot of times this is you know, it could be helpful to reducing a few clicks. So activating this plugin, watch what it's going to do. So when I mouse over now the posts grid look, it gives me the last 1234567 posts that I've accessed right there. It puts them right there in the menu. So as I'm developing and I'm bouncing back and forth between pages, it gives you the last several pages right there in the menu. So it just makes accessing your more frequently used pages or posts. Just one one more bit easier. And see it also works on custom post types. Like this one. It worked on our rental items right there. It works on WooCommerce products. It just the last several access posts in that post type pop up right there. So again, really simple doesn't really do a lot but the one thing it does could save you you know several clicks especially as you're developing a site. So that is it G admin hover menus. Any questions or comments?
On that one? Pretty cool, right? Okay,
next up in the list is eath eta i guess that's the plugin author's initials redirect to latest post. So what is this jingle the little bell in my brain about something that my friend Kyle over the admin bar posted about several weeks ago, he was looking for a solution, that ace could be a single URL that always showed the latest post no matter what. And this plugin totally does that. Like the solution I had given him was, well just you know, make a page and use a like, he's building a site in blocks. So just use a query block that showed the one latest post right there. And then that is just that that would work. You could totally do that. And that totally works. But this plugin just solves the problem. redirect to latest posts so let's just activate this one. And there is a it has a couple settings under the permalinks page which is a great place to put
this isn't it under here I thought it was here. Yes, right here. What is the latest post
slug by default it is latest which is good. So let's just go to JP nathan.com.
Latest and it automatically redirects to the latest post
and the nice thing about this one is it doesn't just show the latest post on a URL like I had suggested. It actually redirects you to the latest post, which is really kind of cool. So let's just add a quick post Shall we it's gonna drop some ipsum text in here to have something to actually post
so we publish. And now if we go to latest
Oh, you know what Chrome has cached the redirect because Chrome
but if we go in an unused browser,
here it is. It just grabs the latest post, which is super helpful, I think then you can change that to be whatever you want. Now, why would you use this? Well, maybe you want to add a link to your menu for latest posts. Maybe you want to have a link in your email bio that says read my latest post or a social bio or so read my latest post right or, you know, whatever. So this does that. And it's super simple. I install activate done domain.com/latest And it just works. Yeah, so that is eth redirect to latest posts. Any other questions or comments on that one?
Pretty cool stuff. This one.
J does it show the name of the post? Well so it when you go to whatever slash latest it redirects it to the the actual posts so it went to the actual posts
Yeah, so John and Karen are both asking could it be for custom post type or for profit a WooCommerce product? You could I mean, so the short answer is no, not in this plugin. There is actually though a, somebody asked that as a support question. Is it possible to limit to a certain category for example, like or, you know, could it be could we have multiple of these links that work for you know, different things, right. And so out of the box? No, but yeah, like Chris is saying, I bet it's a fairly I mean, you'd have to know some PHP right but to get into that, you know what the, what it's redirecting to, you'd need to like you could update that will take a little bit of doing but like the guts of the plugin are there to be able to fork that and add that functionality probably relatively simple. If you know a little bit of PHP where you can search and do some copy paste to PHP
but out of the box no
All right, any other questions or comments on redirect to latest
post? Of lady
can redirection the plugin covered this use case? No. Because the what it's redirecting to will be constantly changing. So the redirection plugin is awesome for redirecting things that never change. Right? But if you if something changes, you have to go in there and manually update the redirect. But you could do that every time you publish a post you can just go in and update the redirect manually. But this just does it automatically.
So it's good question. Anybody else on this one before we move on? All right, next up
is a plugin that we talked about in last week's WordPress accessibility bootcamp with Amber Hines from equalised digital. This is a free plugin they released to deal with the accessibility problem of opening tabs in a new window. So if you if you miss that event, or if you're not aware, it is a it's an accessibility issue. If you open up like a click opens up a new tab. If someone is using a screen reader on the site, then they get completely lost. It's very easy to get lost in because you don't really know that a new tab open and so forth. So they've created this plugin to add a notification that this is actually going to open in a new tab. And by the way, this is also something that sites that have major compliance issues like financial services or other sites. And you've probably seen this like you know this, there might be an interstitial where you click on an external link and it sent a link and it says that you're going to an external site, we don't you know, guarantee the blah, blah, blah, you know, you're no longer under our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and all that. Then it goes on to the to the link right. So this could be you know, this kind of, lets you know also you're going to a new tab if you click this so let's activate accessibility New Window warnings. All we have to do is activate it there are no settings, but let me open up a page that has some things on it
and notice what's happened here. So we've got if we just look at the text of the
page.
It's a link that's opening in a new tab. Here we have a button that's opening in the new tab. Okay, and when we look at
the front end, what the plugin has done is
two things. It's added this little icon to the end. That's the icon that's the commonly used reference for opens in a new window. And when I overlay the mouse on the link,
it also
brings up a tooltip that says opens in a new window. If we look at the code here, what we'll notice is we also add this is a really unfortunate place. It adds an ARIA label here is a text link opens in a new window and the button is the same way here's a button opens in a new window. Now here's a button is the text right here. Here's a text link is the text so it will it will actually read the text in the link or the button and append opens in a new window. It's pretty nice. Now those of you talking about arch should be in code. It should be in core. Watch this though. I've got an icon blocked down here standard block editor icon block. And if I Oh, you know it would be standard practice for me to open links in new tabs to go to a social page.
Here's the problem. That's not nice, isn't it? Oh,
I don't like that. So it this is why things aren't added in core.
You know, it's
when you do something in core, it can be heavy handed and we all agree this is a good like we want to make our sites more accessible. But when you do that it could affect other things like you do this one thing over here and it wiggles five things over here. And that's a little complicated. So, you know, you get some unexpected results. So, you know, this is something that maybe the developer of the plugin needs to go back and look oh, you know what if it's an icon block we need to or a social share block. We really don't want to pin those icons. So maybe in that block, we only do opens in a new window. And we don't append but you know, I don't know it's so it's, that's something a developer would have to deal with. Sherry says so can we leave the open new window and use this plugin and be covered for accessibility, while still having a new window for those who liked that? Well, yeah, so that's the point of this plugin is to let you know, it's, you know, it's better. This is a debate right? This was a big discussion last week during the accessibility bootcamp. But it's a debate in the accessibility circles. Some people say you should never under any circumstances ever open links in a new tab. You should always let the user you know right click and open in a new tab or like I do Command click whatever.
Yeah, so this is you know,
this allows you to open things in a new tab and informs people that's what's going to happen. J same is the difference between a new window and a new tab. I agree. Not sure why. This is labeled new window, but I agree it should be a new tab.
I mean, technically not a new window. Yep, any other questions or comments on this one?
All right, almost to the end now. Last couple here. Okay. How many of you recognize this developers name Alan Mark, who you may recognize it. You may not remember where Alan Mark who is the one that originally developed the Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress, which is a plugin I've been recommending for years. This was also the plugin that he sold to exact metrics and exact metrics cannibalized it and it's no longer a plugin that many people use it. It went from five star reviews down to terrible reviews, because they essentially bought the user base, I think of the plugin to try to push their pro upgrade, which you know, you can do that if you want, but you also tend to lose some market share as a result. Anyway, Allen has developed a new plugin that is basically it's exactly the same plugin as what used to be Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress, which I loved. But he's also now added Google Analytics for to it. So let's go in and activate this one. Paul is asking does this replace the GA the game WP which is Google Analytics in WordPress? So gain WP Pol is it's a different developer, right? They just pulled the old version before the Google Analytics dashboard was sold and started using that. So this does in effect it updates all that code to include now Google GA four
codes as well. So let me activate this plugin, which is called analytics insights. Now it's already active. Alright, so if I go down here what you will see is
all the UI is exactly the same. So if you were again, if you're a game WP user or if you're, you know, old school Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress user, everything is the same. The UI is exactly the same. It's very light, like a lot. But notice here we now we have you ever use a and GA for both on the site. Now, I just added this earlier, and I doubt we have any actual data yet.
But you'll notice all of this is the same as it used to be I don't think we have any data yet.
No. Hasn't been up long enough. But all of the nice graphs, all those things are just like they used to be. The core code of the plugin is the same. He's just added now GA four into the mix. So we're going to be talking GA for next month with David Zimmerman in our Google Analytics boot camp. And he's going to give us a lot of good insight. But this is pretty cool. Paul, like I just said it includes both the UAE and the GA for both UAE and GA for right there. In the settings. So you can you'll link when you go and do the authorization. It brings in both of these where you can lock the properties in
pretty cool stuff, right?
So if you're looking for a plugin that brings those analytics an executive, I call it an executive summary of Google Analytics into the dashboard that even your customers can use. This is a great plugin. I've used it for years. I really really like it.
Oh, one little note.
plugins like this one will add the tracking code for you in you know and be the thing that that embeds the tracking code. I recommend not doing this. And there's a setting here let's see tracking code. Notice how we can do this dual tracking is it just GA fours that Universal Analytics GA three will say dual tracking. Or we can tell it, I don't want you to enable the code at all. Like I'm an I use the actual code from Google and I use the Kadence code snippet area to add that most themes have a code snippet place to add that or you can use the Header Footer snippet plugin that's been out there a while. The point being plugins whether it's MonsterInsights or this one or any of the other Google Analytics plugins, they will occasionally lose communication. How many of you've had that happen? Like it just loses connection to Google for some inexplicable reason and you don't realize it like your analytics just go flat. I had a client contact me one time 90 days of analytics be lost because the plugin lost connection for some inexplicable reason. There's nothing you can do at that point, so I never trust the plugin to add to add the code, do that the right way to do that manually is the best practice. Use this plugin to show the reporting within the dashboard All right, last but certainly not least, is error log viewer by best web soft. So it is a great idea to go from time to time and take a look at the error logs of the sites that you manage. And you'll find those in the root of the site. You'll find other ones sprinkled throughout the dopey content area wherever certain plugins decide to put them just to see you know, as some plugin misbehaving or their problems, whatever. So this is a great little plugin that allows you to view those error logs right from within WordPress. It is error log viewer right there. It adds a top level menu item and in this case, I don't really mind that. So let's take a quick look. First of all in our settings, which of the error logs do we want to view? Well, I've got the PHP error log checked right now. But there's all these other ones as well like the Debug Log. Here is some plugin specific error logs. Look at that. So it actually goes in like here's restrict content pros error log. Here's some WooCommerce logs, a bunch of those. Some of these, by the way, are plugin related. Like this is a plugin we did a few months ago, the tic toc for WooCommerce plugin. It's got a bunch of errors. Let's just take a look at those. You can choose which of these error logs you want to view and monitor. It's gonna save that and we'll go over here to the log monitor. And here is our error log and so I can actually view right here you know how many lines or one of the the log from to a certain date or do I want to view the full file? I can actually save it directly from here as a txt file out to my desktop if I want to. But right here, I can just view like what's causing problems.
You know, interesting.
I can then from here, I can also look at the other log files that I checked. So I'm gonna take a look at this one from that plugin that we did. A little while ago. What's going on here? Problem with the API couldn't connect with the API looks like so it's pretty neat. Now another little feature this plugin offers which I think is pretty cool. Oh, by the way, one nice thing about this plugin before I go on to that next feature is that it scans your site and finds all the error logs so you don't have to go and just know what they are. You can just look at the list and check the ones that you want. I get went out and found this error log for this plugin that doesn't you know, it hasn't been on the site for forever, you know, several months whenever we did it. Well, maybe last month, because it was six six. Whenever we did tick tock for WooCommerce Yeah, that plug in is gone. It just it scan the site it found the log which is pretty nice.
So here's a really helpful thing. If the error log changes, email me right now, I
don't think I'd want to do that for every site that I manage at all, or I would get lots of emails probably. But if you are trying to figure out some issue on a site, you could say you know, every hour if that error log file changes, send me an email so I can go jump in and see if I can figure out what's going on. This is really, really cool. So I like that a lot. You've also got, you know, allowing the plug in to track your usage but there you go. Pretty neat stuff. Now, there is also a button I just saw this mentioned the chat where you can clear this log file. So it would just wipe the contents of that file right away. So you can do that. That's helpful. Also, you know, like if you're trying to debug something, just go out and clear the log file the old if it's the same error over and over and you think you fixed it, clear the log file and see if anything else stacks up there. Alright, so that is error log viewer by best Websoft any other questions or comments on that one?
Last call. Okay, well, that
brings us to the end of this month's plugin Roundup. I believe he's asking how many? How resource heavy might it be? Maybe at the very beginning, when you first activate it's going to go look for all those log files. But after that, I don't think it's going to be very difficult at all. It's just going to, you know, watch for any changes. It's certainly not a plugin that I would want to have on every site. Very valuable if I'm trying to diagnose a problem on a certain site. Okay, that brings us to the end of the plugin roundup for July 2022. So we end with our question, one vote. One vote only please what is your favorite plugin of the roundup? So let's take a look here we've got admin post grid. remote users hover menu, error log error log, hover menu,
accessibility warnings, admin post grid and error log. Okay, Bg
settled on admin post grid. I am shocked at how I'm surprised I really am. Admin post grids for the win. Look at this so many votes. I really am I thought there would be a a strong divergence of the crowd on who liked that and who didn't. Analytics insights. So it looks like let's see here. I'm gonna guess of the there's probably our top three or admin posts greatest probably the winner, then error log as a second and then accessibility when new window warnings as a third. So pretty cool stuff.
All right, y'all, we
do not have a webinar. Tomorrow. But Thursday, I'm back for office hours. We did just get let me get the calendar up here really quickly. We did get a new webinar added to the beginning of the month next month, which I'll mention So office hours for members on Thursday.
Next. I have a webinar next Tuesday.
Yes, we will have a Kadence webinar on Tuesday. I just don't have that detail for you. It'll be posted this week. So I'm sure the Kadence team will let you know about that as well. But a week from today it's not on the calendar yet. We will have a Kadence webinar. Next Wednesday is our fly. Group on sound on systems we talking about creating systems in our businesses. News RoundUp is coming up two weeks from today on the 19th and we will also on the 20th It's not on the web on here either but we will have a webinar. It is scheduled to be on the new web or thin for I theme security which will allow you to use those cool things like facial recognition and fingerprint for logging into WordPress. So I expect that to be on the 20th we haven't stepped in and it should happen. So one last thing if you are a member our premium event for this month is sustainable support with Ben Meredith from give WP that is going to be an awesome event is all about providing customer support better for the clients that we serve. It's going to be great whether you're a team of one or a team of multiple people can be a great event this month. All right, that wraps us up for today. I'm back Thursday at one o'clock for office hours. We'll see you then next time when I iThemes Training where we