everybody. I'm going to drop in the link to the download which is there in the chat now. Sue spent a couple of hours building macros What were you working on soon and what were you using
to build a set of macros?
Uh huh. Sounds like fun. Yeah, macros that macarons Ah,
yes.
Glad everybody's here we are about five, five and a half minutes out from getting started. He was plugging round up. I like to see I like writing code to when not when it works. And when it doesn't get worse, my my level of frustration kicks up quickly. Because I don't know enough about all the things to figure it out well enough. AI is an incredibly big help. I will totally agree with that.
We've had some fun
with some chat GPT code on the agency side recently.
And yeah, it's done. It's
helped us do a lot of things we would likely have had to hire out before. Michael I do not use GitHub. I don't use I'm not really a software developer anyway, but the only thing I use GitHub for is there justs act store code snippets out there that I share with folks on webinars. So I am definitely not a developer would never claim to be exactly so. Alright, folks, if you're just joining us, let me drop in the link to today's slide. It's there in the chat waiting on you. That will give you the handout of all of the things for today. Pretty good list today. I'm pretty excited about many of these couple of members submitted plugins to actually from Hillary and Hillary and Doug actually submitted the same one so we'll have some fun with those.
Yeah, Melanie,
yes. Thank you all and by the way, if you are a and iThemes Training member, you are welcome to submit plugins. Once you're logged into the training site, you can click the suggest a plugin link. And that will take you to a little forum to drop in now the plugin so we are happy to consider all those the only caveats being that it's in the WordPress plugin directory and in most cases, it doesn't really need to like it can't just be a way to connect some third party SAS into the WordPress although one today is kind of that so we kind of bent the bent the rule a little bit on that,
but I think it's useful. It's like
I reserve the right to bend my own rules. Alright folks, we're about three minutes out from getting started. Glad you're here today. If you're just joining us, pop up in the chat say hello tell us where you're logging in from today. I'm going to drop in the slide link again for you. We'll get started about three minutes after. Got some fun plugins to take a look at
today. Yay.
So we just heard
from Sue that she was working on some macros What's everybody else working on this week? Let me hear from you. They're in the chat. Also, as you're chatting, make sure that you drop down the little blue drop down above the chat typing area to everyone not just hosts and panelists. There's several folks that are just talking to me, which I appreciate but nobody else sees what you're saying. Welcome everybody.
Hey Kay from Sweden.
Heather is working on cannabis. cart. That's interesting. audit reports for Beth for moving to Sweden. Tonight's as K. Excellent. Welcome Scott from Long Island. Good to see everybody again, pop up in that chat. Say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. I'm gonna drop in the slides. Again. I'm not the slides but the handout once again. Doug's working on a photo blog. Class welcome Little Rock Melanie from Georgia. It's a beautiful sunny day here. In Birmingham as well about 8080 degrees sunny, very pollen esque right now. We got a lot of the yellow stuff floating around which is why my voice is a little bit weird. Welcome our classes setting up GA for our we've been doing that too. That's what Chris has been working on this morning for us. Welcome Frank from Germany, Chris from Oregon. Good to see everybody. By the way, just check several of you are just chatting to me which is fine. But if you'd like everyone else to see it, make sure the little blue drop down over where you type your chat message. Make sure that says everyone. I think it defaults to hosts and panelists. So make sure you have it. chatting to everyone if you want everyone to see what you have to say. which I would recommend. Full Moon in South Africa it's also full moon. I mean I guess the moon is full no matter where you are. We just haven't gotten there yet on this side of the world. So welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. We're just about ready to get started. Folks logging in from around the world. And I'm gonna drop in the link to the handout for today. Which will open up in just a moment. Stay Stacy's got the white stuff. We have the yellow stuff down here in the south. The pollen is just mad this year. It is crazy. It's very early
All right everybody.
It is three minutes after let's get the recording started and we will
get underway. Well good afternoon everybody and
welcome to the plugin roundup here on I iThemes Training it is March 2023. And once a month we take a look at the WordPress plugin directory plugins generally speaking that were added to or updated in the directory in the last month or so. And we may put a list together usually about a dozen plugins that we thought were interesting. If you are just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat say hi tell us where you're logging in from today. It's good to see folks from around the world logging in for this webinar. Always great to see everybody the link is there in the chat to download this handout and if you're watching this on the replay, you can just click the Download handout button below the video and you can have this as well. This is our list of plugins for this month, always with the caveat is, you know, these are not things that we've thoroughly tested. Right. So I've been making a point of this the last several months because, you know, I've gotten some comments about well, this doesn't work this way and this way and this like we're not spending hours of time on each of these plugins. We're looking at them and saying hey, this is kind of interesting and it might be helpful to you. So if it's something that you're planning to use on your own site or for a client project, just test it, do your own due diligence, and make sure it's gonna you know, meet all the criteria that you have for compatibility and security and privacy and accessibility and all those things like Chris just said in the chat, but of our main criteria is that when we activate the plugin in the testing environment, it doesn't cause a fatal error. That's always a plus. So, you know, we weed those out right away, usually, right? All right, so let's start with a plug in that I could have sworn we did years. I've lived a couple of years ago, probably here, but I can't find it in the archives. So maybe I just dreamed it up. But it's one that Hillary suggested and I really like it. We've I've actually used it on a few classes, a couple of client projects. I think we've done it but I can't find it in the list. So we're gonna do it again because chances are, maybe you haven't seen it. It is called stock pack by Derek Cohn development. And this is a really cool way to access many of the stock art libraries that are out there. both free and paid. So we've done a number of different plugins over the years here on the plugin roundup that will allow you to connect to some external stock library like there's actually a an official plugin for Unsplash for example, that is created by Unsplash to let you connect the media library, you get a little tab up there and you can search the Unsplash library directly from within the media library. And so this is one that actually does multiple libraries, and it's kind of clever so let's take a look at stock pack and we're going to activate it first right there. And now there is some setup process that is required here and this is as I was mentioning in the pre show, one of the general guidelines we have for the plugin round up is that a plugin number one needs to be in the WordPress plugin directory. We don't do premium plugins or Code Canyon plugins, none of that it's a freebie. And also it needs to the main functionality of the plugin can't really depend on connecting some API to some third party SAS out there. Like we don't we're not just looking for some way to bring a SAS into WordPress, generally, but this one does have a connection that allows it to it connects to the stock pack website which then allows it to connect to all these other stock art library so we kind of bent the rules a little bit on this one, but I think it's worth it. i It's an easy setup at stock pack.co And let me get into the settings here so you can see that and last anyone try to copy my token it does extend off the screen here and I'm going to delete it when this webinar is over. But so what basically what you do is you go to stock pack.co There's a link right down here to do that. And you basically just sign up for a free account and grab your API key the token here, drop it in. You do have the ability to number one, turn on safe search. So no, you know, adult images show up in your search. And then you can select which stock providers do you want to connect to now, it's actually a two step process because actually, let me just log in right here, just so you can see what the backend looks like on their site. Take me just a second to log in. Alright, so here's the back end of here. And notice I've selected a couple of you select one as the default basically. So once you're logged in, you create an account you copy your token right there and you select which is the the like the default stock library that you want to search. So I've got Unsplash here selected, but you can also connect like this to Adobe Stock. And so it's like a, this is why it needs this stock pack website kind of as an intermediary, because you connect your Adobe account here. If you use deposit photos like I do, because I've have a million credits that I bought on AppSumo for deposit photos, you can connect it there. It also connects to Getty Images and I stock so you can connect to all these libraries. And it will use that API connection through this plugin to pull in images. It's really cool. Now granted, remember if you if you grab the image you're buying it from the stock service or you're using one of your deposit photo credits, for example, but it allows you to pull stuff right in, right but there's several here the Unsplash Pixabay Pexels. These are all free and they're reasonably good stock libraries. So now back to the plugin settings. I have all these turned off because we're not connecting those. I have these three options selected. And in my account again, I've got Unsplash selected as default but I'll have access also to Pixabay and Pexels. Now, there's a setting here that says do you want to change the file name when it comes into WordPress? And you can yes or no. And that adds an extra step. If you want to, you know change up the file name, you can do that. So we're just going to leave those settings as is and let's just go into a post shall we? And drop in a an image into something. Let's just go here. And we'll drop in just an image
and go to the media
library and look we now have a tab for stock pack. And opening this up. It's searching wants us to search for something so give me something to search for anybody in the chat a puppy dog. So we searched for a puppy and it's set for our default provider. So right here all the images from Unsplash. Isn't that cool? Now if we don't see what we like here and it is infinite scroll, so as you get to the bottom, it's thinking more and searching for more. And if for some reason you don't find the image you like on you know the 8 million puppy images on Unsplash. Now look, you can choose from other libraries. So here's let's look at Pexels for example. And we'll just grab one from here. Oh, it's a it's a little puppy in a cup. Let's do that one. So you can change the file name here. If you want to. We'll just hit download. We're going to agree to the terms and it's pulling it in directly from our stock library source. Alright, and look at autofilled our alt text I mean as long as this is over there on the stock site, it's going to pull these things in like we have a title. There's a caption with the appropriate attributions. The description is there, the alt text is there, select Boom there it is. Isn't that cool? Sue, does this add a huge file size to the site? Well, okay, so WordPress by default limits the image size to 2560 right so if the image is larger than that coming in, it's just like if you upload an image manually in the WordPress then that's probably what was taking some time. This was probably a ginormous image on the stock art library. So when it came in WordPress then crunches out all its file sizes, and you know, it's going to limit and then if also if you have an image optimization plugin, like, you know, Smosh or E dub or short pixel or any of those others like that, it's also going to do its thing this works exactly the same as if you were to upload a file manually into WordPress. Su i don't mean the individual picture I mean, does it add a lot
searches?
Oh, so that when I was searching the images, nothing they have there was being downloaded. Image Search Options. Yeah, none of that was actually being downloaded. That was we were actually through the API key searching through the pixels and Unsplash library live just as though we'd gone to that website and we're seeing all the results. It just brings that process into WordPress. And like some of you were saying there in the chat it this is what a great thing for if you serve a nonprofit client that doesn't have a big budget or you know, your grandma's blog, or whatever, you know, just give them some stock photography and connect them right to one of these libraries. And it's really easy to do. Like you saw how easy that was, and we're done right? So you have a few options, but works just like that. Any any other questions or comments about stock PAC? That's one that Hillary suggested for us. So thank you, Hillary for bringing that to our attention. I think we did this years ago, but again, I couldn't find it. So there it is. Any other questions? Or comments on this thing before we move on? Okay, I have no comment about Getty Images. Y'all can ask me about that in office hours. I've told that story in the past. All right. Next up, scrolling down is a plugin called animate G L. Animate GL. So animate GL is a library of animations, that it's just like it's out there. Like you can grab it and queue it and you have all these animations you can add to elements on your site. what this plugin does is bring in the Animate GL library and it's got things like slide in and wiggle and all you know all the things and this this plugin brings in that whole library into WordPress and allows you to assign those the various animate GL animations to different blocks in the block editor. So it's pretty cool. If you're using a page builder, for example, you probably have you know some way of each little element in your page builder each module, you have a way to like add an animation to it if using Elementor or Beaver Builder or whatever you can do that and this does the same kind of thing for the block editor. So let's go on in and activate the Animate GL plugin.
And we'll take a look at how this works
eventually, all right, so
let's take a look. We have a page setup with some things on it. And actually, I'm gonna go in really quickly to Okay, so there is now a page here in the admin area. Called animate GL and this gives you presets on you know, it gives you examples of how these things work. And there's a little video you can learn about animate GL and how it works. And so as we load the page, this was our default entrance animation. This gives you some examples of some of the others that are available. They're kind of cool. Right? Now the neat thing is you can change the default animation. Like you can change all of the options here. So like for example, if we want our entrance animation to be you know, like you can change up you know some of these things and it gives you a live preview and you can set that as your default over on some page so you can you have really granular control over what the default animation looks like. And there's also there's some of these things that aren't there yet, like mouse effects there's just pool. But what if we do enabled on this watch what happens I need
to save, probably reload. In that
there's these funky animations like this, which I think is kind of cool. There's also some scrolling effects that are going to be coming soon. So effects not only with mouse interaction also, as you scroll down a page you'll get you can have some effect happening. So this is they're they're still adding features to this free plugin. But you'll have the ability to do that. So it's kind of
cool.
Now, in the block editor itself, let's just grab this image I think I'm having trouble grabbing that image for some reason. All right, there it is. Alright, so there is now a new
there's now a new right menu meta box called animate GL this plugin adds where you can set the different animations that you want right here, as well, and duration and delay. So you have control you know, like for example, if you set a preset, you know, you can you can change that up. Also, back on this page, you'll notice that there was a CSS classes. So you could go into for example, an image and add a CSS class to anything and it'll pick up that animation class. So gives you a lot of options. And, you know, to bring in those animations, if you're not doing that in some other way. So that is animate GL by creative interactive media. Any other questions or comments on that one, besides the fact that it can make you dizzy? And
then the CSS class seems to be the best. Yeah, it is kind of cool. Right? So you can put that on anything that you want to animate? Yeah. Ruby, does the animation slow down the website? Not generally, because it's just a it's just CSS. So there'll be a little bit of CSS added, but not a lot. Where it can, well, here's where it can slow things down. If it's a very old computer, you know, because the browser has to render the animation with CSS, that's going to use the the processor of the computer or the phone. So it's if it's an old phone or whatever, it can sort of, you know, it can be jittery or whatever. But if it's relatively new hardware in the computer, or the phone or the tablet, it's going to be fine. Yeah, CSS animations aren't very heavy. It's a great question. Sue, does the CSS animate text? I don't know what Awa means see? Oh, as well as images. Yes. So it's the whole element. It's the block. Think of it that way. It's the block that gets the animation.
All righty. Well, that my friends is animate GL.
Let's keep scrolling. Next one
on the list is inbox for WooCommerce. So if you have a WooCommerce site, I think you know I was on the fence about this one at first, but I think this could actually be kind of cool. This is a it's essentially this plugin creates like a direct messaging system within WordPress, where your customers can send messages to you as a site owner about questions about the you know, the the products or whatever, and it's all handled right here from within WooCommerce. Now, why would you want to do this you might ask? And the answer is, well, maybe you don't want to give out your email address to the to the world you know, and so this is like a it's a an internal direct messaging system for WooCommerce websites. Let me show you how this works. You may find this as a neat little addition for your store. It is inbox or WooCommerce. So we will activate this plugin and right here under settings.
There are some settings.
So let's open up the Inbox tab. And we have some questions. You know, where do you want to manage the inbox? Look at this it actually will even connect to ticket systems like Zendesk and Freshdesk and they promise more to come so this can actually send a message write directly into your ticket system, which is kind of cool if you have a big operation. There is a pro version that has some more things. And so there's just a few little options here. And let's just see what it looks like on an actual product. I'm gonna talk about that image in a little while. It's kind of accursed. All right, so here is a product. Now the one thing about this in the free version, you don't have a lot of control over where this banner appears. This is the default banner and this is how we send the message so we click Ask the seller and we can type a message
hit send. Alright, now I just got an email as the site owner that something has happened. So I can go here into my inbox under WooCommerce and look right there. There's my new inquiry. And look, it just shows up sort of like a like a, you know, a mess. A text message. Right? So I can say
right there
now i It knew who I was. I'm basically talking to myself it will ask the person for their email address if they're not logged in.
Let's see what that looks like real quick.
So you put your email
address in right there if you weren't logged in? Yeah, and so that's that's where it goes now if you if you're dealing with existing users, you'll they will see a chain of their conversations on their My Account page. They have an inbox right here. And so there's my open inquiry. Look at that kind of cool All right. So I don't know if you can make that banner into reusable block or what I'm not sure how that works. I haven't really investigated it it might be worth looking into. I know there may be some limits on the free version 49 bucks a year. So not terribly, not terribly expensive to do this. So if you're running an E commerce site where you want to get some conversation happening, I think it's kind of a cool little plugin. I've never seen anything else that does this before. So I kind of think it's interesting. So that is inbox for WooCommerce. Any other questions or comments on that one?
Anybody anybody
All right, moving right along to the next one.
This is called double dome.
It has a word count widget for your WordPress dashboard. So if you have a site that has a lot of content, maybe it's your personal blog, or it's you know, whatever, and you just want to see how many words you're writing. I think this is a neat little addition. So I could particularly see this for you know, personal blogs, maybe news type sites that might have a lot of articles just to see you know, it's there's there's a lot of information this is going to reveal so let's activate double dome. And once that's active, we'll take a look at the WordPress dashboard. And right here is our double dome information. So many things here. So here's our posts average words. There's all of our products, all of our things. This is kind of interesting. I don't know why they call it double dome. I think that's the name of their that's the name of their company here. So, you know, I'm sure they have a reason for that. But it's interesting, right? Like if I'm running a blog, and I would like to see, well how many words have I written altogether? What's the average number of words in every post that I write and those sorts of things. So this just pulls that data up to the surface and gives it to you in a nice little dashboard widget. And notice that it's also pulling in custom post types. Our WooCommerce products are there in a couple of different custom post types that we created with pods for this, this dev this demo site.
And all that's there. Yeah. So Doug, exactly.
So a great way to encourage clients to blog more or other people to you know, if you're working with other people with personal blogs to blog more. Yeah, I get to see it's like instant reward on, you know, posting a thing, right. So and it only does count the published ones, not the draft ones. It's a very simple plug in, but I think it's kind of cool. We've done a number of thing, a number of plugins that do similar things, many of them are just, they just show up like on the post screen, and they only take that one post type into consideration. But this pulls everything up into a single dashboard widget that is double dome, word count Details dashboard. Any other questions or comments about that one?
Kind of fun stuff there. All righty. Scrolling down to
a plugin that is called spreadsheet, paste block. So have you ever tried to pull spreadsheet data into WordPress, it is oftentimes not super easy. And it goes all over the place when you try to paste it and sometimes the tables work and sometimes the tables don't. Well, there's a bunch of different ways to bring in tables into WordPress. You know, there's the old you know, og plugin called Table press. There's a bunch of others that do that and you can import spreadsheets into them. But it's really, really complicated. They're really large, complex plugins. This is just a slug and all I want is a little bitty block of text like a table from my spreadsheet. Isn't there just an easy way to drop that in? Yes, and this plugin lets you do it. So let us go activate spreadsheet block and I'll show you how it works. Spreadsheet spreadsheet paste block. There it is. We'll jump up here and take a look at the page I have set up for this already. All right. Now what I did earlier was I pasted in some stuff out of a spreadsheet. And this was just a 12345 by three just in a spreadsheet just like this. Matter of fact, I wonder if I can take it out of this and put it back into a spreadsheet so you can see that process. If I had been thinking far enough ahead, I would have done this already.
But alas, I did not. Okay, yes.
So here's what it looked like before. And I just threw some stuff, right? This is, you know, I'm just in an Excel spreadsheet here. This is just some stuff I put in. So just imagine any table you can think of in a spreadsheet and all I'm gonna do here is just copy a range of data. And then I'm going to paste it right there. Now, yes, the tab stops aren't exactly it doesn't matter. It knows what to do with this stuff. And I can suck at the First Row as Headers. Or maybe the first column is headers or both of them are there's no headers whatsoever. Okay, great. It doesn't matter. We're gonna say our first row is our headers. We're going to update and then we're going to take a look at our post.
There it is.
It is put it in a table. Now you say that doesn't look very pretty. It doesn't have borders. And whatever. This is what how the theme styles the table. So it is not this plugin is not opinionated as to how the table ought to look. That's where you get into a lot of bloat with all these other table type plugins. You know, they give you all these things to design and it gets really complicated if I just want to pay something in here it is. And the HTML is super clean. Look, there's table there's a tea body. There's a row with our three table headers, and then our rows of data. Now these are centered because for whatever reason, in my theme in the Kadence theme at centers, the table headers, we just go through and add some basic CSS if you don't like how it looks out of the box, and all your tables are styled that way. So Sue tabs or commas, none of those things don't think about this as a CSV. I am literally copying live data out of the table. You know, we want to make more, we can make more. It's just copying these live cells. And I'm pasting that in. And this block is taking all that stuff and putting it into a table just like so. It is super easy. Ah oh what does it do with formulas?
I have no idea.
Let's do something. Let's make a formula that says this is C to last 200. All right, and let's fill that. I don't know what's gonna happen when we do this. Let's copy that. Just pull it it's just text. Yeah, it's just text. So it pulls it in and it works. So again, this is not live data. This is just text out of the spreadsheet. Elizabeth can the data be live linked to update? No, this is no this is a copy and paste right there's other plugins that will do that. We've done a number of different plugins over the years here one is like WP sheets to WordPress or some it'll pull in live data out of like a Google sheet and display that and it's just live updating. This is a super simple just copy and paste. It's not for
that purpose.
Yes, ooh. So basically all this thing is doing the plugin doesn't care about this formula. It's just taking like if for example, if I copy this and I pasted this in like a text edit
like it pulls it doesn't matter. Like this is just plain text. It's just pasting the text so it's taking this pasted content drop it into WordPress and then formatting it as a table. Yep. So there's other options if you need live connections we use on the agency side we use WP data tables for that it works really well. And there's another one like It's like sheet Google Sheets to WordPress something or other. That also works. Yeah. All right. Any other questions or comments on this one that is a spreadsheet paste block really great. If all you want to do is just drop in a table from a spreadsheet. It does that and it doesn't well, it doesn't do anything else, but it does that really well. simple but useful. Okay, Scrolling on down our list to another very simple but useful plugin is this is our on the nose plugin name Award winner for the week, removed custom post type slug from URL, guess what it does? It removes the custom post type slug from the URL. And why would you want to do that for example? Well, a number of reasons it may be that you know for whatever reason in your in your particular use case you've got, let's just say a custom post type. And here's our custom post type called movies and we've got a post in it called Captain Marvel. Well, by default, it's the URL structure is going to be our site name, the slug of the custom post type and then the permalink for the post right there. Let's just say we for whatever reason, we don't want that slug there. We actually had something like this in a in a build that we're working on right now where for some reasons we didn't want the slug in the URL. So we activate the plugin. All we have to do is remove custom post type slug from URL and it doesn't
refresh the page. Well that was anticlimactic. I think it needs to go back to the actual posting trying to view and again no, okay. We have to refresh permalinks Don't you love the build up and then nothing happens
all right, refresh our permalinks that will probably fix the problem
okay, I know why it's not working.
We have to select the so there is a this is the thing I hate about this plugin. It adds a very large top level menu link when this really should just be a settings page. I need to tell it that I want this to work on the movies custom post type. Forgot about that. So once I save this and by the way, you can select multiple custom post types here.
Now it'll work really I'm sure this is entertaining for someone there it is. Okay,
I needed to actually click the link so it pulled the movies out of the slug. So let's use case we needed something like this earlier. on a on a site we're working on. And aside from that really awful top level menu item. Pretty good plug in, gives you settings page works does a good job. That is it that is removed custom post type slug from the URL by the amount of chatter in the chat room I can tell this is everybody's favorite plug in have a roundup Am I right? Oh What if somebody copies the link? That is a great question.
Ah, let's just see,
shall we? I think it will find it WordPress is generally smart enough to figure that out. All right, so there's if somebody had movies already. Let's see
what happens yeah, it found it.
So WordPress, frequently will just find like the closest matching thing if it's just a little bit of like a slug in there like that. Okay, well given the amount of chatter in the chat room about this particular plugin. Let's move on, shall we to one that I just added from David boundaries called media toolkit media toolkit. So this is a fun little plugin just dropped in the media library. Just dropped in the plugin directory to help you with your media library. It does a couple of things that I kind of like, let us go and activate media media media media toolkit, right there it is. And we're gonna get a link now under our media
menu link which is convenient. All right.
So a few things this is going to do. First, it's going to give us the ability to change up the file name. When when an image is uploaded. So for example, maybe I want the author's name so I know who uploaded the image. So I could say author, first name, dash, author, last name, or author, I could just say author full name. So this is the person who uploaded the plug in and then I want to put the date and then I want to put the original file name. So what this is going to do is whatever is uploaded, it's going to say author, full name, the date, and then whatever uploaded as originally so you know, to change the name of the file. This is helpful if maybe you have a bunch of people uploading things, or you want to append a date to the beginning or the end of the original file name. It also gives you the ability to change the image quality 82% is the default JPEG compression that an image gets when it goes up. Maybe you want that to be 60% instead. Now if you're by the way, if this only affects WordPress core functions, if you're using an image optimizer, again, like E dub or short pixel or Smosh, they have their own little setting for this and that's going to override this. So this is only helpful if you're not using an image compression plugin. It will give you the ability to replace the original images. So on upload, this is going to downscale the original image to the threshold of this default. So that's the WordPress default 2560 say you only want images to be 2000 pixels. Awesome. When you upload an 8000 pixel wide image, it's going to downsize to 2000 pixels and not keep that original to clutter up the media library. So it does those three things which I think are helpful. I'm not like I would never use this piece right here. Because my you know, we use eat up on the agency side to optimize images and eat up also actually does this, but I've not seen anything else that does this, which is kinda cool. So a few interesting little features for your media library, a very light plugin, it's not going to get in the way or slow things down. Pretty cool thing called media toolkit from David boundaries Vernes so set the percentage to what well think about like if you're if if you're an old school Photoshop user like me, I would frequently compare or set the JPEG quality to like 60 for a web image. That's a pretty good balance 45 or 60 depending on what kind of image it is. You get a smaller file size that way, but it's going to depend on the image how that compression actually works. So that's why WordPress gives a little higher default. And that's why really it makes sense to have a really good image optimizer because it will give you a lot better sections. Oh how do you disable it? Just leave it at the default and leave it alone. 82% is the default for WordPress. Yeah
so just leave it alone. At the default setting and you're good to go. Any other questions or comments on this one media toolkit. All right. scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Alright, I found this plugin actually today and I think it's kind of cool. So this is called Copy all text. How many of you like me, get frustrated with this feature of the block editor. I'm using the term feature loosely. Let's open up this post. Not like that. Here we go. Alright, let's open up this post. And so it used to be in the classic editor. I could just click in here and do CTRL A and copy all the text. Right? What you can't you can't do that now because it's all in blocks. Or you know now you can highlight but that's kind of hard to do, you know. Anyway, what this plugin is going to let me do, let's just activate the plug in first before we demonstrate it because that's usually the first step for success and refresh the page. I'm gonna get a new icon up here. That just blends right into the block editor and it says boom, copy all text. I click that done. Pretty cool, right? So now all my text with one link is copied the whole post is right there. It so this is copy all text, no images. text only. Right. I guess you could ask. If you want images, you could ask the padding to make a new plugin called Copy all text and all images. Stephanie, you could use the code editor. But if you do that,
then you get all this markup. So this is an awesome so I can like this,
like if this needed to be edited or whatever. You could always look at it on the front end and copy. But this is a single click copy all the text. And the other thing is if you have a page with lots of layouts and things going on, you can still copy all the text and pull it over. It does occasionally get it's weird. It gets some like settings like some numbers will appear like one of the separate lines that are probably settings of different blocks that appear to this plugin as text but it gets generally you know it grabs all the texts you might have to just delete a couple things. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Copy all text by the padding. Ruby is asking is there a plugin to extract all content, images and text without other WordPress files and layouts? Ruby no other than you could you probably the easiest way to do that would be to copy on the front end of the website. So if you have, you know, images in line copying on the front end and pasting, you know, like into Microsoft Word or something like that. That should preserve all your images that way, but there's not a way to do it that I've seen on the back end
Sue is saying use the library or this the ListView
I don't know.
Okay, we can copy that. Let's see what happens when I do that. Oh, that worked. Well, that's cool. I didn't know you could do that. Okay, so there's another option to do this is clicking the list view. You have to select all of these and then I'm doing Command C to copy and that gets also interesting I didn't know you can do that easier. So you can do that or you can get this plugin and it gives you a little icon right there to do the same thing. Kinda cool.
Let us copy all the text by
the way, there's several of you I'm noticing that are chatting just to me and if you want others to see it, drop down the little two above where you're typing in the chat to everyone from hosts and panelists. And that way everybody can see what you're typing.
All righty. Anybody else on that one? Fun stuff. All right, next
up is a plugin called Site mode. Site mode now, okay, this is a coming soon maintenance mode plugin. And you might say Nathan, Nathan, there's 8 million of these out there and you're right.
And this is one of them. It just is. It's simple, and
it works. And I kinda like it. So this is site mode from mobian abdollah. And basically what you'd use this for is if you're going to pull a site down for maintenance or this might be something to use in your starter site to hide a site while it's being developed. It has some nice little features. It's not over bloated, and I kind of like this, actually. So this is site mode. And this is a brand new plug in version 0.0 dot one. I think literally I think it's a week old. So let's take a look at Site mode. And here are our options. So do I want to turn on and off like is it under maintenance or is it not? And here's our we have some options on what happens when somebody visits? Is it a 200 response which is like come back later where we're working on things? Is it a 503 server issue response, or are we going to redirect look at that you can redirect to some other place instead. That is very cool. There's a delay before the redirection that you can set. I'm just going to pull this back that you can decide whether you want to show a login icon at the top of the screen to allow somebody to bypass the coming soon and log directly in and where do you want that? Are we changing the login URL? It also lets you whitelist certain pages meaning these are some pages that I can add to the list that people can go to directly and they won't see the Coming Soon page. So any added here, don't get the Coming Soon page which is kind of cool. We can also whitelist user roles so only administrators can view the site nobody else can with these basic settings. We've also got here's our content for our page and let me just show you what this looks like really quickly. Here's the error page that we're dealing with. So there's an icon there's our little Login link and we got some text, some text and some social. So right here is our heading that shows up right there. We've got some text right here. That shows up right there. We've got some we got there's a logo right here that we can upload put our own on there.
There's our background image. Pretty cool.
We've also got our socials. So we've got these four set up where you can change the links if you want to add more you just click on them and they appear so easy to add socials, we got a couple of default templates we can change in within the template changing the logo size, the background overlay and the Opacity. what fonts are using Oh, it's very simple. Just drop it all in right here. It does give us some SEO options here. So our meta title meta meta description, we can change those upload a fav icon, the SEO sharing image goes here and then there's a place to put in your Google Analytics and Facebook pixel ID so full featured very simple it's not bloated, it just works and I don't like this a lot. So this is site mode maintenance plugin number 8,000,001 that are exist for WordPress. This one looks like a good option. It's brand new, it seems to me to be lighter than the other ones not nearly as much and not nearly as much complexity but the things that you would want to do it looks like it has. So kind of cool. Deb does that add to the whole site only or can you only use it to one or two pages that are being changed? Okay, Deb. So that would be this feature. Here where we can whitelist pages that would actually do the opposite of what you're describing. So if it's on it's on for the whole site by default unless you tell it not to work on certain pages. So if you only want one or two pages to show it, then you would have to whitelist each of the allow list each of all of the other pages on the site. Sudo I like this better than my private site. I mean, they're both going to lock a site down. My private site does not give you the option to do a lot of the things this does though, like putting your Google Analytics code changing up the screen. This just has more features like that kind of cool site mode. Any other questions or comments on this one?
Now for those of you who've been
paying attention to plugin roundups over the years, you may have realized that I tend to backload the plugin roundup with fun plugins right just to keep you interested to the very end so this month is no this month is no difference. And I've never seen anything like this before. I calendar. I like this a lot, particularly if you're working with an organization that either doesn't need like a whole event calendar, but they just need some events that show up in certain places. Or maybe only leaves only a few and doesn't need to show the rest of it like it. It's like an in between between. I just have posts and I now have an event calendar. This lets you assign posts that are posts or a custom post type or whatever. It lets you use them in any event calendar. Watch and be amazed. This is the PI calendar. I think it's pretty cool
All right. So pi calendar. Oh, there's not even a settings page. So here's what we do. Once we activated this plugin. There is now going to be a new meta box item. Calendar. Look at this. There's a toggle button that says Show on calendar. There's a start date and an end date. Let's say it starts Thursday. And let's just say this is a blog post about some event. That's happening. Right? So we get a you can do times, this is going to be an all day event. I'm just going to update this. Now watch. Right here. On our page. We have a we had notes down here. Put a word supposed to go. Alright, so on this page, we have a simple shortcode and that shortcode is simply pi cow right there. Let's view this because what this is going to do is take forever. Here we go. This is going to give us a calendar and look here's a post and one of the other blog posts that I had set and you can click here and go to the full post. Here's what I just did. So imagine you have a you have some nonprofit organization, and they don't need events all the time but they do have certain blog posts that they use that R for events, so you could toggle the event on for that event and it would show up on the calendar. That's pretty cool. Melanie would this work with WooCommerce tickets? I think it would. I think it works with all custom post types. Let's take a look. If we go to products do and let's edit one of these products. It should just be right over here on the side
oh, what went wrong? Maybe not. Doesn't look like it works the products bomber bomber. It works with all the other kinds of custom post types though. Like you just saw movies. It works with this one as well. I don't know why it wouldn't work with products that is that is interesting to me. But see it works with other custom post types. It Melanie look in block view seems like it would show up here maybe it's only for the block editor
I'm not seeing it that might be Mel Melanie I would install it and play around with it. The other thing about this is cool. If you look at the there's a bunch of different parameters for the shortcode
under installation so there's
some options of just a post type. So you can have one calendar view that only shows posts out of a certain post type. So the so you can sort of classify your events together out of a custom post type. And then there's one so changing up the type of display it is. So there's also you know, a list view and a week view you know, so you know you could default for example to monthly list view, which would be you know, view equals list month in the shortcode. Yeah, so, it'll also do languages here. It's kind of cool. So this is inventive. I've not seen anything like this before I could see it being very useful. In certain cases. And that is pie calendar. I have no idea why it's called pie. No idea. Makes me want to eat some pie
Melanie what you could do is have a blog post talking about the event with the WooCommerce add shortcode on the event to just buy the ticket
Okay, anyway, so that's pi calendar. Pretty nifty, right? I like that one. All right, scrolling down our list is the second member suggested plugin of the month. This was both by Hillary and by Doug. This one almost made the AI webinar that we did a few weeks ago if you missed that it's in the library on I think the iThemes Training site. And it's from Jordi meow who is a well known WordPress plugin director at a developer who does most of his plugins have pertained to something about the WordPress media library. And he's brilliant developer been around forever and he's playing around with AI now and this is his plugin. It did not make the AI roundups. I really only had space for two and those two did different things better than this did. And so I showed those, this does a lot of different things. And I noticed that this morning Stacy, this one is actually I think there's a security issue with it currently. So it is currently closed pending review. It's gonna come back for certainly, but I'm going to show it anyway cuz it does some some fun things. Basically, this does require I mean, I don't know if it's gonna come back or not. Maybe there's something nefarious about this but Geordi meow if it was any, if it was an unknown developer, I would be worried Jordy he's been a WordPress developer for ages. There's just probably some small thing that they're dealing with. Anyhow, this does require an open API key so you do have to set up an account on open ai.com Grab the grab an API key so that we can connect chat GPT and the Dali image creator into WordPress, but once it's there, you get so many things that you can play with. For example, one of the first things that I saw that I liked is right here and there's a whole thing whole bunch of stuff under here but look here under our post names. Let's just grab one here. Spider Man in need of new suit after an accident, which is really funny AI generated posts, but look, we can click suggest titles. So we're going out to open AI now and saying give me some different titles for this. Do that. And we can just say right there, we're gonna make that the title and update it
except it put quotes around which I don't want but there it is. So that's
a fun little thing. There's also under the API Playground many things you can do just immediately talk with chat GPT right here. It did update the slug Yes. It did update the slug in that last post
Yep, it did update the slug. There's lots of different things in here you can play with. If we want to build content, we can do that right here. So what's the topic? Let's create something I don't know. Incredible Hulk Hello, what? My brain has died Incredible Hulk finds a puppy in a cup. Puppy in a cup. Right? So it'll generate some things. We're gonna get a couple we're gonna get some a title suggestion this does take a minute, but this will generate all of the things. Hawks heart melts tiny pup in teacup. Love it. So it's thinking about all this. This is how much it's costing us so far. You can change the writing style and tone here as well. It does take a minute
or so. Now I will say as we're waiting on this to generate this, this is this was the test article that we generated. The Avengers relocate to Hawaii and we happen
interesting. Something happened
you have the API here
as well where you can access the things from within the post as well. I wonder why that didn't be. We allowed the AI to create the featured image. It was not great. What is up with this? Is it I think I pulled this into a draft or something. But I don't I don't know why that's not showing now this has nothing to do with the plugin. This is this particular post. How weird it's the headline as on the homepage. We got a problem this isn't this is WP Nathan problem I don't know that's weird. Anyway, here's the image.
This image is so bad. So this is classic
AI Generated Image of The Avengers going to Hawaii. So oftentimes, this is what you'll get when it's when it's like, like an actual person or something like that. The AI is not going to generate that. And so you get this cursed image. You know, it's a copyrighted logo. So it's not going to pull all that stuff in. Yeah, and I bet you're right Chris. I bet it is that custom post type plug in but it wasn't attached to posts. I don't know why this one. But anyway, you get the idea. Sometimes you say I generated images are not all they're cracked up to be. Anyhow. Alright, so here Look here. Here's our sections. Here's our content. There's an excerpt. And we can just create the posts from right here and go right into it. Pretty cool stuff. It does come in as a classic block so we can convert that to blocks. Even added emojis, which I'm not sure what I think about that. But there it is.
There you go
There it is. All right.
It'll create products the same way but anyway, let's have some fun play around with AI engine from Jordi. Meow as soon as it comes back into
the plugin directory.
All right. Oh, Paul was asking what the hashes were those two hashes that means an h2. It's Mark, markdown language.
All right. Last
No, there's two more actually Wow, we're gonna run over time today. Okay, this is what how many of you have struggled with getting a PDF to show up in WordPress, not download a PDF. Anybody can do that but like to view a PDF and WordPress There's a host of really bad plugins that do this, and they're really bad. This now we have the official one just released from Adobe that allows you to view a PDF on your WordPress site. It is called the Adobe embedded PDF viewer. Let's just go take a look at that and activate. What was the final bill for the post? I don't know it was less than a penny less than a penny CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. I'm going to activate the Adobe embedded PDF viewer and now that's active and I should have a page Yeah, yep. All right. So here it is live. Eventually. All right. So there is that last month's handout? From the plugin Roundup. Let me just show you how this works. It is a block and so there's our Adobe block. We can upload a file or grab it from the media library. And the site is slow today. Alright, so it filters out just PDFs. Let's select and notice that we have a number of different options to show the PDF. This is our size container which we can set the height and width to make it work whatever we want it to be an actual size or we can do a full window which gives everything right there scrollable with our toolbar and everything, just like the smaller so it all fits. There's also in line which just drops it in without any sort of menu. And then there is a light box which
gives us a button and I'm not sure why that button is so large it wasn't like that earlier, when we have a plugin conflict. Yeah, click that and it opens up in a nice light box. But notice we've got our Adobe toolbar over here, and so forth. We can print we can download. You can turn these off, by the way, as well. So it's a really nice Adobe branded PDF viewer. Like this one a lot. It's really I mean, inexplicably difficult to get PDFs into WordPress to show up like this. I'm not sure why that's been so hard but Adobe has finally gotten into the game. Alright, so that is the Adobe embedded PDF viewer. It does not do a flipbook. No, don't get me started on flipbooks. Again, this is a scroll book. It's completely different. Okay, yes. You can scroll it. Alright. Why Last and certainly not least, is dyno game. How many of you remember the old dinosaur game on Google Chrome if you went to if you got to like an error or something, it would pull up the dinosaur game where you can run your old dinosaur through the little the little obstacle course. So this does that and it brings it into WordPress with a fun little shortcode this is clearly the this is the clear winner of the plugin roundup today the most useful plugin that exists dyno game I have a page with it on there. I gotta find it. Dinosaur game. Here we go. It's just a shortcode dyno game. You can change it with some speed and audio options. But here we go. There we go. We're running. We're running. I'm really not as good at this as I should be. It's harder than you think. You just you jump in cacti jumping jumping. You can also duck if you want to. I've never gotten far enough in this game where I've had to duck which shows that I am really no good at this. So there you go. Ah, this could be a fine Oh, ducking for the bird. Alright, so I'm dying. Oh gaming, it's feeding up. This could be on dead. So this. This could be a fun thing to put on a 404 page or just you know an Easter egg on your client site. But that's called dyno game. And it is there for you to download in the WordPress plug in directory. All right, everybody that is the end of the plugin roundup for March of 2023. Let us end with the question that we always ask at the end of every plugin roundup which is what is your favorite plugin of the month please one vote one vote only because we will come we will compile these results and put them in the best of webinar coming in June. So looking looking the pie calendar animate GL stock pack Adobe Adobe dynamic game pie calendar pie calendar, adobe media toolkit. Adobe stock stock when we got a bunch of this is tough. So Adobe Stock pack and the PI calendar. Looks like are the are the winners stock pack by far so stock pack is the winner with Adobe PDF viewer and pi calendar as close second places. Good stuff. All right, y'all. We do have a number of webinars coming up this week if you haven't seen yet. We pull up that calendar for you tomorrow my friend Elizabeth pampelonne is going to be with us talking about marketing minimalism. This is going to be a really great presentation. Elizabeth knows what she's talking about. She cuts out all the fluff on how to market your agency. It's really good. highly suggest that you take part in that it's a freebie. Register for that one of course office hours coming up for members on Thursday. And then next Tuesday it is one we've been looking forward to so I probably you've gotten the emails that say they're telling you about your Google Analytics is going to be transitioned to GA four and so forth. Coming up because Google and Universal Analytics is going away. David Zimmerman, our SEO expert is going to be talking about how to transition into Google Analytics for what this automatic transitioning that Google is suggesting really means what's going to happen with that. David is an excellent teacher and I would strongly suggest that you take part in that webinar, whether you're just managing your website or client websites, because there's a major thing happening this big transition to GA for this year. And we need to understand that really well. David is going to be there talking about this particular transition of automatic the automatic movement that Google is doing. He'll also be there to answer your questions about GA for in general. Next Wednesday is fly pricing. Of course office hours coming up on the 16th and news round up there on the 21st So that wraps it up for us today. I'm back tomorrow with marketing minimalism with Elizabeth pampelonne. Hope to see you then here on I iThemes Training where we go further together.