So many things today. Bill's like a Monday. Glad you're all here. We'll get going here in just a moment
all right link bundle is there in the chat with today's plug in list. Everybody should have captions now. It I can take a sigh of a quick breath of relief. I think we're all going in all working now. So sorry for the delay. Folks. We'll get started here in just a moment
I basically broke WP Nathan about two minutes before we were supposed to start so I'm having a great day. How are you? Alright, glad everybody's here. Hey, Dan, good to see you. All right, folks. The links are in the chat for today's plugin list. Billy that is actually tomorrow is the best of the six months. That is coming up tomorrow. Today's December plugin Roundup. So I think all the things are in the right place where we can actually begin other than I don't have the handout loaded for myself. Once we get that going, we'll start the recording and we will dive right in. I'm glad to see everybody today. If you're coming in. I'm running just a bit late. I broke all the things just a couple minutes before we were supposed to start so I'm feeling really good about myself. All right.
Oh, there was a mistake in the email burn I did not realize that. All right. Well, let's get things started and then I'll talk about all that. Well, happy Tuesday everybody. Welcome to another Live stream from solid Academy. It is December the fifth 2023 So it's time for plugin roundup we've been doing these plugin roundups for more than 10 years now generally the first Tuesday of every month and we take a look across the WordPress plugin directory and pick about a dozen or so plugins we think are interesting. If you are just joining us in zoom make sure you open up the chat and say hello, waiting on you there in the chat. Is this link to download this handout. If you're watching this on the replay, just click the Download handout button below the video. And you'll have this list as well. It has links to all the things when we always give the disclaimer here in a moment at the beginning that we have not extensively tested these plugins for you know code quality or accessibility or security or any of those things. We've just taken a look at a dozen or so plugins we think are interesting and bring you bring them to your attention and yeah, can there might be a missing link somewhere. We'll figure that out in a minute. The right there you have the handout and we're gonna go ahead and get started. There was as I was just notified as we're getting started a mistake I think in the email that went out regarding dates. Today is the December plugin round up. It's our normal monthly plugin round up. And then also on tomorrow we had the best OB so at the end of every month plugin roundup we take a very formal and quality vote by just having folks Sound off in the chat about what your favorite plugin of the roundup is. And then we compile those and give you a best have about every about every six months. So yeah, again, apparently Yeah, the pattern CSS link is wrong. Chris has added the correct link in the chat. Or you can just search for pattern CSS in the plugin directory. We'll get there and all right, so let's get started with December 2023. And the first Oh, before we actually get to the first one. I've given you a link there in the handout. Another benefit of being a solid Academy premium member that is you have one of the legacy I iThemes memberships and includes training or you are a member of solid suite and you have that product, you automatically get premium access to solid Academy and one of the many benefits of premium membership is that you can suggest plugins for the roundup and many of you have done that the link is right there in the handout to do that and we always give you credit if we use your plugin in the round up. All right, well, let's get started with the first plugin of the month and that is this really nifty plugin called Easy map. Now, adding a map to your WordPress site could be fairly simple, right? Like you go to the Google page, you copy the embed link and so forth. Now, adding a Google Map might not be what you want to do on your site for various reasons, speed reasons or maybe privacy concerns. That sort of thing. Here is a really simple way with a simple shortcode to add an open street maps map to your website. It comes in as a shortcode there's no API needed, and it just works pretty easily. So let's go in here. First of all and activate EZ map. So easy map activated and let me show you what that looks like.
So we have a page set up for easy map here.
Alright, so right here we have the shortcode and this is all it takes to render the map. So you go and you grab the latitude and longitude from a spot. Ironically, I use Google Maps go grab the latitude and longitude. You can see that up in the URL, and you just do the shortcode easy map lat equals latitude one equals longitude, set your zoom level, and then the the pop up note right here. This will put a little tooltip and then actually I tried this and it doesn't work and it just got left over. So there's our shortcode let's let's just see what this looks like. So again, it's using the free open street maps option right there. And so this happens to be the neat little local coffee shop that's close to me and right down here in the middle of Old Town and it's a great little spot. So this a couple of issues. With this. The map sets by default for 400 pixels high and there's not really a way to change that. However, it expands to 100% width of whatever container that it's in, which means it's really easy to for example, set up a Kadence row here and just drop our shortcode and one of those half rows sections, and it'll just render the map right out. Boom. So it'll it'll contain itself and center up nicely within the container that it is in where you can zoom in and do all those things that you want to do with the map. scroll around. It's really, really nice. And that's a great, it's a great point there. Paul, if a client is not showing up on Google Maps, if their place isn't set up correctly, you can certainly use this and just use the tooltip right there. Pop up equals that's what puts that name you can make that anything you want.
Nathan's favorite coffee joint I can type
and that's what's going to appear in your tool tip I did something Oh, you know what, there we go. That apostrophe messed it up. There we go. You
can make that say whatever you'd like it to say. Pretty nice. Ah, yeah. So Vern, it's very new. That's the point of the plugin Roundup. A lot of these are very new with low installs. And our whole goal every month is to bring you some plugins that maybe you haven't seen just yet. So there's easy Matt works really well. If you're a Kadence user as Tonya has mentioned, and Kadence has a great little maps block that you can use as well. But here's one that works best shortcode pretty nice. All right, Scrolling on down the list to our second link here is carbon icons, carbon icons. Now, there are a number of different icon blocks for the block editor. Kadence has a nice little icon block. But here's one that brings in maybe a larger library of free icons than others and it's called here, carbon
icon. So
let's go down and take a quick look at that one.
Activate carbon icons and run over to its page here. All right, so one of the things
I like about this you get a really nice WYSIWYG view of how the icons are going to look. If I want to add an icon, I can
click here we go.
I have this our icon picker block, click the plus. And you've got lots of different icons in here. That are searchable. So there's like a TV icon. We'll go with that one. And once it's in, we can do all sorts of neat things with it.
We can set the size here like that whatever you want it to
be and we can add padding and so forth, we can change the color of the icon, the color of the background.
I put some, some padding all around it here. Once it's
selected, we can this is not a good one to show but you can flip it horizontally and vertically and even rotate it around this way. So it's pretty cool. You can make it clickable very easily. Yeah, so I like this one a lot. One of the really cool things here is the ability to drop in your own custom SVGs. So if we were to go to an icon site like icon finder, and let's just look for something simple like an arrow and grab something that's free. Let's say we like for whatever reason, this arrow right here, we can simply copy the SVG to the clipboard, boom. We can go right down here. Let's add another icon. Click the plus and just click Insert custom SVG. We can paste in that SVG preview it layer there it is. scale it up. Add the icon there it is and now it's movable and everything else just like we just had so pretty cool little set of icons, carbon icons, fairly lightweight works pretty well. Any questions or comments about carbon icons? Like this one a lot. One thing that it doesn't do like this, this instance of the icon it doesn't save it to the library so it uses its own library of icons and then it allows you to paste in one off icons. Of course you could save that as a reusable block and use it in other places too.
So there you go. Pretty neat.
Carla doesn't work with the classic editors. Now this is a block. So it does require the block editor.
Yep. All right. Next on the list
is a really interesting plugin. That is called single post page. Export, single post page export.
Let's activate that one
Paul, now what does this plugin do? This is our on the nose plugin and name winner. So here's the deal. WordPress has a reasonably ok export where you can export it just built into WordPress under Tools. There is the ability to export, you know various post types you can just start by date and so forth. But what if you just want one page or one post or one post out of a custom post type. That's what this does, and it's really, really cool. So if we go here to our posts list, notice that when you do the hover menu when you hover over the post title, there's now this option for export. And if we click Export, literally, it just downloaded the single XML file that has you know, it's in the standard WordPress export format. So super easy to just export a single page now, when would this be helpful but maybe you need to pull pull things over out. Oh, Paul is asking does it bring images in the right way? No, this is a standard WordPress post export. So it embeds the images but they're going to be at their current location. So let's see if they're here. This is the XML file that this just exported. See if there's any images. Yep, so the URL for the image is still at, you know, the current location. So you'd have to grab the images. But, you know, if you're using block editor, if you're using a page builder, it's going to pull all that layout in even with page builders like Beaver Builder, it should pull everything over. You might not, you might still have to update those image URLs though. That's something you want to experiment with, because that's just the way the core WordPress exporter works. This makes it super easy though to simply pull out one post of whatever post type and drop it in someplace else. So that is single post page export.
Any other questions or comments on that one? A lot of fun there. All right. Moving
on down our list for Gravity Forms users. Here's a fun little plugin. We love Gravity Forms here on solid Academy and we always have for many, many years, always looking for fun little add ons for those this one real time validation. Again, it's kind of on the nose with the name. And this is going to allow you to make your forms a little more usable. So do you ever get frustrated with filling out a form and you got to submit it then it scrolls you back? To the top and now there's all these things that were wrong that you have to correct or something that was missed that needed to be filled in? That's fine, but it would be better. I think it's a better user experience. If rather than waiting until the submit button is clicked it just shows those validation issues right as you're going so that's what this plugin does. And once we're all set up here in the settings for the form. Down here at the bottom, there is a toggle for enable real time validation on this form. So we have that toggled on. And now let's take a look at the form itself. So here we have your name required. Now down under the Appearance area. Now we have this new field that this plugin adds called Custom validation message so you can type in whatever you want it to be Chris has added this, we need to know your name. What if we wanted to send you a birthday cake, okay. So if you miss something here, it's going to give us that validation message. We can then so each one has its own oops please supply a valid email address. What do we want this to say? We could say if you don't fill in any comments, why are you even filling this out? That's really nice. Okay, so saving this. Let's take a look at how this looks on the page that or not make picture it's here all right. So if we didn't fill out the name and we go down, look, immediately on leaving that field. We get this validation message. I hit a button and it showed all of them. So
it shows the message
immediately in line same for email address if we click out of it.
We get our validation messages.
So I think this is a nicer way of prompting users to put in the correct type of input here. You can get rather complicated with this. If your form requires phone numbers entered into a certain format. Yeah, that could even be something you could use for validation. So yeah, that's it. Really nice, especially for longer forms, having these real time validation messages right in line pretty cool. All right. So that is real time validation for Gravity Forms, questions or comments about that one before we move on.
Yeah, Vern, this is one of those things you might seem like it would have. There are a number of reasons apparently why they've chosen not to do this in core. Yep. All right, scrolling down the list to our next plugin in our Roundup is pattern CSS pattern CSS. Now, if you are a block editor aficionado, you I think are going to like this plugin. It is definitely for advanced users. But it allows you to get very hard me It allows you to get really granular with your CSS and be able to make those changes right on the page in real time.
So let's take a look at pattern CSS.
Activate this take a look at our sample page. We got a couple of blocks set up on this page and they are just lovely. Are they not? So clicking on this. This is a heading block over here. Notice there is a new toggle over here in the in the can in the side menu called additional CSS. This is what pattern CSS adds. Now, it allows you to right here add additional CSS to any core block. And the nice thing about it is you don't have to know the actual CSS class of the thing you're trying to style. You can simply use this term block surrounded in square brackets and it knows you're talking about the block and questions. So notice what we've got here. In this block, the color of the text is white background red, and then I've added a CSS transition so that the it's a smooth, if you block hover, if you hover over it then you get this stuff. Pretty neat, right? If we get rid of all this, then it's just our standard heading. And it shows our changes in real time in the editor. So it's pretty nice. The other thing is you can just use code for things inside the blocks. We've got this superscript text right here. So it was you know we've set it up as superscript right here. And the markup for that is s u p. And so it just automatically knows that superscript inside this block gets styled this way. Now the nice thing about this is the CSS applies to nothing else other than this block, this block that it's attached to. And if you go and save this block, like as a reusable block or reusable pattern, it it goes right along with it. So pretty cool. If you're again, if you're a block editor user, this is definitely one you might want to have there in your arsenal. All right questions or comments about this one and our lovely demo here.
Pattern CSS it does some other fancy things,
by the way, along the way of combining adjacent rules and doing some other things to optimize the way the CSS is rendered on the page. So it's done with it's very thoughtfully implemented.
All right, moving down
the list to this one, which we missed the URL on sorry about that. You know, we copy and paste these titles and I think my proofreading skills were lower this month. Okay, so query loop post selector now, this is again, for you block editor aficionados. This is something it's a niche case. Okay. It's a niche case. But if you started to use the Query loop, you realize it's pretty powerful. It can do a lot of things. But one thing it's difficult at maybe I just want a loop or a grid of posts from the query loop that are just like some select posts. Like I only want these posts to show up. So this is an extension for the core, query Loop block. And it lets you do exactly that. Let me show you what I mean.
Let's activate query loop post selector
and take a look. So let's just say on your homepage or whatever you want to show just a couple of pages in the loop. This is going to let you do that or a couple posts. So here's our query Loop block. And again, this is the standard core query Loop block right here.
But as we click on it oh, wait
okay, I'm missing out on Emma. Hang on, what am I missing here that the plugin get activated? Not seeing the settings really post selector.
Just a moment. Make sure we have the right things selected. Okay. I was I was clicking the wrong thing. So make sure we're on the query Loop block. All right, so here's our typical query loop. You can select the post type, the order and so forth. But now, we have this selective posts option, which means rather than having to just order the last five posts by date or whatever, what we can actually do is select which ones we want to include in this loop. So specific posts.
I want this one. This one and this one in my loop. And that's what will appear. So
this is really helpful. If you want to just pull out certain posts to display in your query. Again, it's kind of an edge case. But there have been a few times in building with block editor that I needed something exactly like this, just to show these particular pages in this loop. All right. Any questions or comments on this one? That is query loop post selector, it adds this nice little selector right here. That basically overrides everything else.
And just lets you pick the certain posts that you want.
All right, let's see su does that work with the new Kadence query loop? I don't think so. Because this is actually extending the core query Loop block you could try it but my guess is no, this is this extends the, the, the core block rather than cadences for you. All right. Next up on our list, we have a couple of AI plugins. Now. We've done a lot of AI plugins over the months here. Matter of fact, when AI really became a thing earlier this year, we featured a couple of AI plugins every month. The plugin repository has been filled with AI plugins since then, so we really, they're all kind of the same, who really haven't shown any more of these because they were all really very, very similar. This one's come along and I kinda liked the UI of it. And so we wanted to show this from today. It's been a while since we've done some AI plugins on here anyway. So this is an AI plugin called Mind. And just a quick note, it does require an open API API key to work so you just go set up an open AI account. This is different by the way than having a chat GPT account you actually sign up at Open API, and you register to get an API key. And so you pay by its metered usage. So you pay it's a very small amount, but you pay by the word or by the character or whatever. Very, very inexpensive. So you do have to set up your API key in the settings. I'm not going to show that page because I don't want to reveal our API key. But let's activate mind. Let's see where is that
AI mind. And when we activate it, we
get a little onboarding. Hello, my name is mind. I'm an AI assistant designed to help you in writing content. Isn't that cool? So there's settings page here where you would enter I'm not going to click that because our API key is there. That's where you'd set your API up. And then there's some additional stuff here under discussions where they've given you a forum basically,
on on GitHub.
Okay, so where does this show up? Let's create a new post. And mind shows up right away. Right here, open mind. Let's do that. Let's create a post title about oh, I don't know somebody to give me a topic.
What are we going to write a post about? England? Oh, yeah, sure, why not? England's and let's see
it's now going through the API. Alright, the penguin masters of the cold kingdom, I don't know maybe a different one regenerate. How about that penguins, the majestic Rockies. Now I'm gonna insert that and I put it here. Used to go here. Alright, so
now let's
in the inserter, we now have an AI button where we can do some things. Let's create an article though. Let's do a post about
penguins and majestic birds. So we'll get it to generate us something here. Just a nice little way to bring in open AI into the WordPress editor.
Now we're probably gonna get a very generic. Yep. So insert. Alright, so now we have a pretty generic content, because we didn't really give it tone or voice, but from here let's just say I want a longer intro. I can click this link here make longer make shorter, summarize this paraphrase, adjust the tone. So what I want it to be like this translate into various languages. So let's translate this into Spanish. With that block, there it is insert boom, now it's in Spanish, right?
So it's pretty cool.
It's a nice UI to bring AI
into WP. There you go. That is mind Chris. Yeah,
Chris is right. It feels a lot like notion if you've ever used the notion AI are very very similar. Phoebe How much did this cost? Maybe a nickel?
Maybe just a few cents. It's super cheap. Yeah, let's just check and see cost for open a API. Here's our pricing. Yeah, a penny for 1000 tokens. Not sure how much a token is right here. Okay,
here we get a token it let's see. Pieces. 1000 tokens is about 750. Yeah, so a 750 word article is a penny.
It's super cheap, super cheap.
Any other questions? Or comments about this? I mean, obviously, this was a two minute demo. You could do a lot more with this be a lot more clever. It's just a nice way. You know, I probably wouldn't use it to generate titles. But it's it could be really nice to say Look at this. Let's make this longer.
So we blow out that paragraph a little bit
yeah, so kinda nice.
All right. Any other questions, comments about mind?
All right, now that mine
does require the block editor. If what if I like the classic editor you say? Well, let me introduce you to tiny AI assistant tiny, relating to the tiny MCE editor. So if you're still using the classic editor in WordPress, this is an AI tool that you can actually use. So you don't have to use the block editor if you don't want to. You can use AI with the old classic editor. So let's go in to activate the plugin.
Any AI assistant
we'll take a quick look at that. Now. I do have the block editor active but we have a classic block on this page to demonstrate so you'll see the tiny MCE editor right
here and
that lips this will be how it looks in the classic editor as well. Now you do have to toggle open your toolbar because the AI tools are found here in the second row which is by default hidden. So underneath AI tools, you can do a lot of different things here. So the neat thing is this plugin lets you customize what the actions are. So I think right here under Settings dropping your open API open API API key here. I'm showing this because there are many more characters extending. There is a premium license but basically right here, you can actually change what you want this to do. So notice in this drop down,
there are
these three options, rephrase the content, make a summary translate to Spanish, whatever. So you define these right here. So if I want to say
just
like rephrase, we could say, Make
this funny, or just call it funny. And then the command would
be what you would tell chat GPT to do.
rewrite this in the style of Jerry sign.
And by the way, we can only have three active commands so I'm going to need to remove one
of these and then add that command funny and we'll save this refresh
so it's a little more limited than some of the other AI tools but it does give you the option to do some AI things.
So it's rewarding this bit in the style of Jerry Seinfeld.
BG Yes, it does work in other languages forgettable Jerry Seinfeld bit going on there. So here notice I have a translate to Spanish. You can do that as well. You just you basically create your own it's a shortcut to add in and an open AI prompt to the tiny MCE menu.
So fleeting this is
this translate to Spanish is something that I did. So we could change this. Well here's one that Chris put in translate to Ukrainian. We'll make that one of our options. So there's our Spanish that just happened. I'm going to delete some of this so that it's
a little shorter, and that oops need to update.
So it pulls in our new option. We just changed out Ukrainian here
so it'll it will support any language that open AI supports and there's there's many languages that open AI slash chat GPT supports
all right, there you go. So it is now in Cyrillic. All right, so
you get the idea. This brings a little dose of AI right there into your classic editor. Oh, let's see what happens if we go back to English. I think we've used I'd have to go create that command, but you get the idea.
All right. Moving on down the list.
Let's talk about the next plug in here called disclaimer fi. If you are running a website that has affiliate links, or some sort of promoted content this is something that you'll need to have. You need to of course surround any affiliate links or any promotional content with a with a message to make it legal. Right. So just a simple disclaimer. So this is a plugin. It's designed to do that. Now. I will note if you're running Kadence on your site, you could do this with Kadence elements in a similar way. But this is a standalone plugin that will allow you to
add disclaimers to your site. So let's take a look at that. Install activate disclaimer fi and we see
is it puts itself way up here at the top.
Okay, so we've set
up one block here already. Let's just see and notice you can have multiple of these blocks setup. Here's our affiliate disclaimer. It's a couple blocks it's
a heading block and a paragraph block and we're going to set this up we did have that data segment. It's in the settings systematic.
All right. I've lost the spot where I set where this shows up
alright, we're just gonna make a new one. It's not forgotten where it's set up.
Let's put that one in the trash. We'll start over again. Notice how we can export this because that other plugin Alright, let's do a new one
all right, there's the we'll just say this is our disclaimer.
Disclaimer fi All right, Chris, what am I missing here
have lost Oh, you know what?
I've lost the spot where you could there's a place where you tell it to where it shows up where these blocks show up.
I see settings now. All right. Well, this is going well.
Um, I
deeply apologize to the author of this plugin for a really poor demo that I'm doing right now.
Oh, it's under here. Look, it's hiding at the bottom. It was hiding at the bottom
down here. Okay. Where do you show this before the post content after the post content? Where do you want to show this various post types on your site? The way you want to set it up on taxonomy. So a great way to do this, for example would be to have a tag that's like affiliate or something then you could only display this on posts that were affiliate posts but for now we're just going to show for all we want to exclude it on anything and then priority if there's multiple of these on the page. So there we go. We have this now set before the post content on all posts. So if we take a quick look at the front of our site
just go to one of our posts. Right here is our disclaimer text. And as we edit this
add the word disclaimer.
It automatically updates sitewide boom. So you could put that wherever you want. And it works really, really well. So again, if you are a Kadence user, you're familiar with elements you realize you could do this with an element just as easily just show it at the top of the content when it meets certain criteria. And you can do some things with it but this is a great little plugin that does exactly what it's supposed to do. That is disclaimer fie questions or comments about this one
Stacy right now just about affiliate so you know there's there are certain things that if you're in the US, the Federal Trade Commission requires disclaimers on various things. A lot of health and weight loss. Those sorts of things require various disclaimers. So you can have different disclaimers for different categories of posts. If you're in those areas. Yeah,
it's super helpful. All right. Well, let's
move down another one called simple pop up block. Probably the most interesting plugin icon of the day. Not quite sure what that's about, but we got to pick balloon on a string. So there you go. A simple pop up
block. Let's take a look
all right, simple pop up block. Now. This is a pretty nice little plugin that will allow you to believe it or not add a pop up on a page it's in. It's all controlled from a block that appears on that page. Now, again, if you're a Kadence user Kadence conversions does a great job at this. It's probably a better solution. But if you're needing on a site that's not running Kadence This is a nice little free solution to put in a pop up that has enough options to work. It's certainly not the most complicated and feature rich pop up option that I've seen, but it works and it will do very just fine in most cases. So here's our pop up. Click on it, it brings our editor out where we can see this is a block and we got a heading block and here and there's a button that we can change the link. And there was a background in here that said over here. So it's pretty nice. We click on this we have options for what's going to trigger this product. thing let's say will trigger it on scrolling to a to halfway down the page. What is it going to do? We can show it once auto close you have those options. The conditions it's going to show for logged in logged out whatever. Let's update this and let's just see how it looks on the page.
If we scroll halfway down the page
did I not enable it? Scroll to percentage show for all Update All right, why didn't you work
wasn't that interesting
if a time triggers deciding to work today All right. So after five seconds
yeah. All right. So that worked. And you're right. Maybe it's because I'm already more than 50%. So let's make it 90% of the way down the page.
See if that works. Yeah, this is a short page. We probably need to make the text longer. So scrolling down to 90% now it's just it's not wanting to show up there. That's interesting. It absolutely worked when I tested this yesterday. Let's try this for a not for a different browser
Oh, something weird is going on there. Oh wait. I'm logged in. If we save for a show for all interesting. One of
the other things that's interesting that you can do here is scrolling to element. Let's see if this works. This CSS selector as I recall is this image
we can just grab this figure ID.
Then when you get to a certain item on the page
let's do this. Let's give ourselves a lot more text. So when we get to the image, it ought to pop up.
Someone's going on this has worked perfectly yesterday. Something about my demo is goofing this up. Did you get the point?
Chris, it could be a JavaScript error going on.
We have a bunch of plugins running Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Anyway,
this really does work. I promise. I played with it for about 10 minutes yesterday and it worked under all conditions. If you need a pop up block. Check this one out. If you're not using Kadence on the site, you need a basic pop up to do something. This really does work and it's pretty easy. Yeah, this is my demo that failed for some particular reason. I don't know why. All right, we'll move on down the list to slim S E O. Now. This is a plugin that's been around a while it has a pretty loyal following. It is built to be exactly what it says. Now, there's a bunch of different SEO plugins out there. likely you have your favorite SEO plugin that you use, but one thing is certain. Over the last several years, the scope and size of SEO plugins has simply gotten larger and larger. And larger. There are very few types of plugins in the WordPress ecosystem that have as much code bloat as these SEO plugins do. And so sometimes they're just not fun to use anymore. There's stuff everywhere and it's doing things and you might log in and there's all these things in your dashboard that weren't there before. It's really it can be frustrating. So slim SEO is built to be the anti code bloat SEO plugin. It is created by the developer is on Tron who is one of the team on NetBox. So it's high quality code. And it's it's quite good so let's take a look at this one.
Slim SEO.
Like you'll notice right away just how simply the settings work. We'll activate slim SEO and you'll notice it doesn't even add its own menu item. It's it Nestle's right here under Settings.
Take a look at that.
And here's our primary page, right do we you just basically toggle on and off the areas of the WordPress admin that you want it to apply to? We want it to give it the meta title meta description robots. Are we pushing out Open Graph or not? Twitter cards, the canonical rel links do we want to create Sitemaps you get the idea here so does some pretty neat stuff. It even has a redirection option built into it. Which by the way you can toggle off if you want and it'll disappear.
It will no longer be active.
But it kind of unhooked all that code out of the plugin as long as it's toggled off. So it gives you a spot here to drop in header footer code for various SEO tags that you need for your various things like Tag Manager analytics, etc. Right here you can say, well, here's all the post types in the site. Do I want to hide elements from the search result? Yes, products No. Characters? No. How about these disclaimer? Five things. Yep, those should be hidden. It's also going to generate our sitemap for us.
But puts it The standard spot sitemap that XML so there's all our things here. Renae, right.
So we also have these social options like default Facebook and Twitter images. If you have an app ID for your Facebook account. There's some other tools here as well like migrating data from all the most popular SEO plugins and redirection plugins. So it's all built in here. And you might say, Well, how do they monetize this? I want these developers to be around for a while and keep it well. They do that by offering a couple of add ons, one for schema, and one for the Link Manager. It's kind of like the Link Manager is a really nice little add on that lets you see your internal linking structure and also it detects broken links and schema so they make their money on these add ons, which are well done. But other than that, it's just a really simple basic SEO plugin and it works very similarly to the others were down here at the bottom. Underneath your post content, you'll have your SEO area so there it is hiding from the search results. The canonical, just very, very straightforward and simple. So that is slim SEO by E light up questions or comments about this. Paul is asking any idea how these the results of this plugin compared to other bloated SEO plugins? Well, the thing is it's like it's doing the same things, right? All the core SEO functions like being able to edit your title and your meta and all that stuff. It's all there. You just don't have all the other stuff. Yeah, and like Peter saying in a much better way than I just did. All the mechanics are there. Yeah. What it doesn't have as the little green light, right. Yeah, like soothsaying, Yoast adds things like the keyword or key phrase. And so this I would say this is not for a novice SEO user. But you know, anybody that knows anything about SEO knows that just because you get a green light and Yoast doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? So this doesn't have any of that stuff. It assumes that you know how to put your keywords in your content. This handles you know, a good way to say this handles the technical SEO for the site, getting all your metadata and your sitemap and all those things. Any other questions, comments about this one? Slim SEO is a great little tool. All right. Last but not least, is a plugin that I just realized yesterday. We've never featured in the roundup it's come up in a number of different discussions in other live streams, but it's never been part of the plugin roundup and it really ought to, and that's why I added it. So this is simple Cloudflare turnstile from Elliott sewers, B. And if for no other reason this is the way to deal with that WooCommerce card testing attack, whereby a hacker will hammer away at your WooCommerce site and try to, you know, test all these invalid cards that they've bought in the black in the dark web. So this basically brings in Cloudflare turnstile to your WordPress site. Now, before we go any further with this, I do want to mention that solid security even at the free level does offer turnstyle as well. However, it doesn't give us a WooCommerce option there so you with with solid security, you can bring in turnstyle as a capture option for just about every area of WordPress the login page comments page reset password, you know all the different little areas of WordPress. However, it doesn't do WooCommerce which this plugin does and so even on sites where we're using solid security, if it's a WooCommerce site, we're running this plugin that allows us to put a Cloudflare turnstile on the checkout page of WooCommerce because it just it it makes those card testing attacks. It just it basically stops them completely in our experience. So let me activate this plugin. And this by the way is from a well trusted developer. It's been in the WordPress space for quite a while. It's good stuff. So you go in, you open up your Cloudflare account you add your site key and your secret key and then you can set where do you want this to appear? And here's your options so that we want it in, you know on the WordPress login page registration, reset password comments, solid Security does all of these but now we have the option for WooCommerce. So WooCommerce options go here. You can even say if there are certain payment methods like cash on delivery, or pickup, then don't run the turnstile because it's not going to process a card so you're not really going to have those card testing attacks. So that you really have the options of narrowing down the scope of where turnstyle is pulled in. This also supports Gravity Forms and a number of other WordPress form plugins. It shows Gravity Forms here because it detected that it's active on the site. But here's a list of all the other things other plugins that it supports and allows you to add that turnstile CAPTCHA as part of the process to protect the login. So turnstile is a much better capture option than Google's reCAPTCHA or, in my opinion, even H CAPTCHA because Cloudflare processes like a quarter of all the internet traffic of the internet. It's a lot more reliable. So that's basically how it works. It is simple, Cloudflare turnstile and we use it on every single WooCommerce site that we manage and we like it a lot. Questions or comments on this one simple Cloudflare turnstile.
All right, you guys are either asleep or there there are no questions. All right, folks. That brings us to the end of this plugin round up. So let's vote. I have the list of all these plugins that we've just seen, which is your favorite plugin of the roundup. One
vote one vote only please.
Your favorite plugin of the roundup simple Cloudflare turnstyle slim SEO couple of votes for mind real time validation.
All right, slim, SEO and turnstile look like the two winners here.
For pattern CSS couple of real time validation. Yeah, so slim SEO and simple Cloudflare turnstyle. However, it is December, which means it is time for our annual holiday plugin. Power Pack. Here. On solid Academy and our plugin round up. So every year in December we take a look at some really awful ways to decorate your website for the holidays. Emphasis on really awful a couple of new ones this year. So we have a picture from the National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, my favorite Christmas movie, and there's Chevy Chase about to connect the gorgeous light display. Okay, so let's take a look and these are sorted by the way by gridwall level. Clark W Griswald. Of course the primary character here from Christmas vacation. These are sorted by Griswolds level basically, which are the most obnoxious the lower the gridwall level, the less obnoxious it is. So we're going from Griswald level three all the way up to 10 in this list of six plugins to decorate for the holidays. Okay, let's start off with weather effect. Weather effect. So this is just a nice little snowfall Disclaimer, disclaimer display for the front end of your website. So let's go down here to weather effect this one's new for this year. Nine I lifted on this setting because this is not just a how a winter holiday plugin you can it's got plugins or things for all of all seasons like you can even do rain. If you want like raindrops review that it's got a lot of different things that it will
what just happened. Mean raindrops drops one say that's not sticking. Let's preview There they go. That's really bad. Okay, it's really poor.
So, you know, not the greatest graphics in the world here. But let's turn on some. Let's do some Christmas snowfall. A factor Christmas effect. Like you can have it dropping balls and bells and candy or whatever. We'll do a snowfall effect and save that. Let's bump up the flakes so we can see it
and preview what it looks like.
All right, there's our snowfall effect. Let's take a look on the front end of the site. Oh yeah, look at that. We've got nice little you know, not terribly obnoxious snowflakes. We can bump them up a little bit and change our sizes up to large
Alright, there's some big snow falls.
Alright, so anyway, you get the idea here. You can have some winner effects on your website. There they are. And it will float various things telling your page depending on the time of the year. Okay, that's weather effect. Griswald level three, fairly boring, but we're going to move on to Xmas lights. Now there is a plugin called Christmas lights that is different. This is actually Xmas lights, which is a little better. This plugin hasn't been updated in like eight years. So you can decide whether or not you want to use it. It's probably perfectly safe. It's simply displaying on the front end of your sight. Some Christmas lights right across.
There we go. So yeah, Paul, there
are not many other religious traditions with plugins out there like I look for them actually. But anyway, here's Xmas lights, and it just drops. Christmas lights right there. There you go. On every page, no settings this it's on. So there you go. I kind of like this. It's kind of old school. But that's Xmas lights. Let's take a look at the next one. Which is
my sight Xmas edition. So okay, there is a proof version.
I mean, if you want to upgrade to the pro version you can, but I think this is plenty enough just in itself. Let's activate my site. Christmas edition, which just sounds wrong on so many levels. I believe it's under set it yes, it's under
Settings. Okay, so we've got a number
of different presets here that we can choose. They're Pro versions will give you Halloween and Thanksgiving. as well. But you get these these things right here so there's some falling snow there's falling sparkles and snow mouseover you see what the effect looks like?
Let's grab this one.
And save. And we'll get our little change. So there it is. Oh, and by the way.
We're our admin bar is hiding some of the goodness here
there we go. Yeah, totally covers the menu.
Yep. And it stays put. But you got all these things. All right. So that is I'm calling that a Griswold level six and a half. You do have some different options here. Turning it on or off on mobile enabling the effects which are these floating things, and you have some different visual
options. So, you know, maybe it's fun for grandma's capital. I'm not sure if it'd be fun for a commercial website. Not sure I'd do any of these on a commercial website to be honest with you. Okay.
Let's increase our Grunwald level to Griswald level eight. This has been one of our favorites for the last several years here on the holiday plugin powerpack. This is happy snowman. And this is what happens if Microsoft Clippy and Olaf from Frozen. Had a baby so it's a very happy snowman. There are no settings. You just get this fellow bouncing at the top of your screen. I need to deactivate this one. All right, let's take a look at our happy snowman here. And there he is right there. That's all he does. He just jumps up and down and causes general chaos. Of course he does stick to the screen.
So you get to see him all the way down the page. He is of course, responsive.
as responsive as a happy snowman can be. There he is. That's our happy snowman. Ah, there we go. All right. So Scrolling on down the list is another one that's been one of our favorites for a number of years because it is quite possibly one of the gaudiest things you could do to your website. Let's deactivate happy snowman and activate
Christmas panda. Christmas panda.
Now the weird thing about Christmas panda is there's no panda.
Not quite sure where the panda comes in. But it just gives us really
you know, these are pretty gaudy Christmas decorations. To go across. So we'll do this one here. It's kind of generic and we're gonna save that is the one on the top the bottom is it sticky Of course it should be sticky.
And we'll refresh the page.
Here it is. It's just garland stuck to the top of your of your page. So you should 100% Write a plug in called Hanukkah Harry
will add it to the roundup. let you do that with Chad GPT su
get chat GPT to write you a Hanukkah Harry plug in. There you go. So this is Christmas. Panda. It has this garland it also has snowfall. Of course we want snowfall. This gives us great big chunky snowflakes. There they are. Great big chunky snowflakes. All the way down our site do we want to pop up? Of course we want to pop up. What do we want it to be? Let's do How about this snowman right there at the bottom right corner because why not?
Let's put this on here. Oh display pop up. Yes there they are. Because why
wouldn't I want to take up roughly 1/4 of my screen real estate with Merry Christmas
and a snowman.
So this is Christmas panda rendering your website virtually unusable for the holidays. There you go. All right. Last and certainly not least, is the beauty. That is Christmas a fi now that Ben Ben is asking about accessibility. We're not even talking about accessibility. I mean, accessibility is out the window with these plugins. Christmas Eve fi in particular, this one has earned and has maintained a Griswald level 10 for many years. It is by far the best of the worst possible plugins. It was just updated today. With nothing new other than saying it's compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. So Christmas FYI from cyber Fox right down here is our menu item. Let's take a look. Do we want snowflakes? Of course we do. We can have heavy snowflakes. Let's do that heavy snowflakes. One thing this does let you set the time on and time off if you want to turn on and off these effects. So there's our Christmas effects. But I mean if we're gonna have snow, why wouldn't we want beyond insanity level? Absolutely. And going very fast.
So let's do that. And
boom. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Here we go. That Dan that Dan. That's just for you. Dan Canalis from up in the great white north. That is Canada level snowfall right there. From Christmas to fi okay. So moving down. Do we want music? Of course we want music. Let's do Jingle Bells, shall we? Jingle Bells. Now I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear it. Through the doubt you'll be able to hear it through the webinar.
Oh now see many of our
browsers have automatically turned off audio replay
automatically. autoplay away. So that's unfortunate.
Yep, and I'm still not hearing any audio but if you go there, you'll hear it. It's just not going to come through the webinar. So yeah, it does add this player at the bottom that's just how it is. All right, let's see what else we want to how about a flying Santa? Absolutely a flying Santa would be awesome. So in the middle of our beyond insanity snowfall let's just put a flying Santa faultline through here, shall we? Come on Santa, where are you? There he is. He's popping on in right across there because you know, it's already hard enough to read our text with the snowflakes. So let's just you know, let's just have a Santa. Oh, speaking of beyond insanity snowflakes. We do have classy snow here. Oh, let's let's make our cloud or snow a little bit more classy. I'm not sure how this is classy here but I do like it better.
Let's make beyond insanity. Snow. Slow. All right.
That doesn't give me quite the headache. Okay, how about Christmas decorations for images? Should we add a Christmas decoration to each of our images? Well, of course we should. Let's activate that. And now every image in WordPress
should. Maybe these don't because they're in a loop. Neither of those interesting. Maybe it's just the blog pages. Yeah, so we got these little
garlin things up at the top of each of these images. And if we had images, it's this is not a great demo of this. We had images in the text we'd see those two, just a little bit image there. Why not? When we want Christmassy headings, absolutely. Because you know, why would we not want a Christmasy font so every heading is now going to get this Chris I mean, I'm not sure why this is Christmas, but it is so we get this funky little fart that's gonna replace all the headings on our website. So there you go. We could make this apply only to the homepage and we can turn it on and off at certain times. That my friends is Christmas to fight Grizz wild level 10 Once again this year for solid Academy. Isn't that a lot of fun? Yeah. All right. So anybody gonna put one of these on there?
Oh, do you want to vote?
You want to vote? Well, sure. But actually, I'm gonna honor Paul's request. We did this last year. I think we want to do it again. And that is let's turn on all of the Christmas plugins at once and see if we can
blow up WordPress. It worked last year. Let's see if it works this year. All right here we go. Drumroll please. Here we go. Here it comes. Oh yeah. That is gorgeous. There comes Santa Claus.
Oh my goodness gracious. Yeah. So there you have it all. The plugins activated at once. Shall we take a vote? Do you really want to vote on these? Give me your favorite Christmas plug in your favorite holiday plugin right there. Christmas Nephi.
One vote that's it. The last one Christmas for Christmas panda.
This is actually how do I make my phone overheat is with the phone browser trying to render all this garbage?
Holy cow.
All right. So there you have it. Christmas holiday. Winter plugins for this year our plugin round up. Holiday plugin powerpack. Hope that was fun for you. All right. We are back tomorrow with our best of plugin roundup the best of from July through December, based on the votes that you gave at the end of each plug in Round Up over those months. We always have some great plugins to focus on there. Every time we do this, I hear somebody say oh, I'd forgotten about that one. I have a plugin I could use right now or a place to use that plug in right now. So make sure you come tomorrow if you subscribe to or if you registered for today. You'll still probably get that reminder link for tomorrow. It's all in the same all of the same system. So hope to see you back here tomorrow for the best of July through December plugin round up here on solid Academy where we go further together.