We'll get that going here momentarily. We'll get started. Welcome, everybody good to see folks logging in from across the United States and around the world. Glad you're all here. About a minute to go before we get started, if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and you will see the link bundle for today. All right, captions are now successfully connected. I think that's the last thing. Hope your week has started off. Well, many things to talk about today. Great to see everybody.
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Well, good afternoon. Good
morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world right now. It is the first Tuesday of the month, which means it's plugin round up here on solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy. And every month, usually right here on the first Tuesday, we take a look into the WordPress plugin directory. And we find a handful of plugins we think are interesting, and fun and useful. And we've got a pretty good list for you today. As we are getting started, let me just remind you that today is when WordPress 6.5 should release. So you ought to hopefully you're not actually automatically updating a major WordPress version that has some risks. But you should be able to if you want to at some point later today, expecting that literally anytime now it might drop while we're alive today. But as we have been doing the last several releases, we have a meet the WordPress live stream coming up tomorrow. You can find that here at Academy dot solid wp.com under upcoming live streams. And right here is our meat WordPress 6.5. I'm going to drop that again in our link bundle, which is now in the chat that includes today's handout and the link to this live stream where our own Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP, he's also one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. He's deeply involved in core WordPress, and he's a great explainer of all the new WordPress things, including the font library, which will be live in WordPress six, five. So this is a free live stream. Please join us if you've not already registered the link is right here. Well, we have plugins to look at today. And again, is that first Tuesday of the month, and we've got a great list for you. Let me get the windows resize. There we go. All right. So the disclaimer, as always, as we go into these plugin roundups, is that look, these are just some plugins that we thought were interesting. We've not thoroughly tested them for quality of code, or accessibility or security, or any of those things. You should of course, do all that testing yourself, if you plan to use these plugins on a live site. We just think they're interesting. And every month we bring you a fun list. I work going on 10 years of doing this now, we started this, I think in October of 2014, if you can believe it. So that's a lot of plugins over the years. And this is a pretty good list in the mix. All right, let's get started with what is not a plugin. The very first thing here is a plugin. Yes, that is not a misspelling that is the name of a new website that I would I want everybody to know about plugins dot I O is an excellent tool that actually lets you find what you're looking for in the WordPress plugin directory. So this is something that a developer has made available for every one that actually supposedly uses some AI magic behind the scenes to actually help you find what you need. Now, why is this important? Well, if you go to the wordpress.org/plugins in the standard WordPress search, or the same search, you'd find on the back end of your WordPress site when you go to add a new plugin. The search results are really poor. And it's because of the algorithm that they use to return the results. It's very similar to what SEO was in the mid 1990s, where there's just lots of keyword stuffing and so forth. They also weighed out As the the number of installs a plugin has and that sort of thing to try to bring more relevant searches, but a lot of times, you can search by the exact name of a plugin. And it's maybe not even there, it's really hard to find. So that's where this tool logans.io is super helpful. So somebody gives me an idea of a plugin that you might want to search for in the chat. What kind of plugin might we want to find just a topic? A type of plugin? anybody? Anybody? is right there in the chat. piece. That's not a plug. Okay, how about search?
Better search? Oh, wait a minute. Well, okay. You do have to sign in. Hang on a minute.
I thought I had done this already. I apologize. Oh, okay. Now we're signed in our there's another one. Ah, okay. There's several, we're gonna try it better, sir. Or sir. What was it search? The first one that Sue dropped in better search. And it's doing its thing and AI magic and search and all that sort of stuff. And look, boom, we've got some pretty darn good results here. So you get when was it last updated? Active installations, what version of WordPress that was searched with. And by clicking this, it's gonna pop open a new window and take you right to the plugin. This is a fantastic tool, you can also search by, hey, let's get the ones that were most recently updated in this list and so forth. So that's pretty neat, right? Christine wanted mini gallery, if it gives us anything.
So there we go. And it's pulling in all the right little
images, and so forth. So this is a really, really helpful plugin search. It is much better than the core WordPress alternative. So actually, this is the alternative. It's much better than the core WordPress offering. So yeah, pretty neat, right? Just look for whatever you want. Okay, Doug has one here, hide menu. I'm just going to try one more here. So is there something here that let us hide a menu item? This is really something that would be in a description. Hey, how about easy hide menu items, Doug? menu option? NAV. So this is the one, this is a really good one I've used before. Yeah, so there's some really good options here.
Pretty cool. So
I really liked this. I've, I've used it from time to time over the last month or so. And that's a great resource I thought you'd like to see as well. So that is plugins.io. Okay, let's move on down to the actual first plugin of the plugin round up, which is the SVG Color Changer. Now, how many of you like working with SVG, s? And WordPress? I certainly do. We use them as often as possible. I love the way a good SVG looks on a mobile device, just that there's just something about the sharpness of that icon or image that you just can't beat it right? Now, SVG is, though, can be a little complicated to work with. And maybe you get an icon or whatever, that's an S V, G. And you need to update some colors, you know, to maybe match the brand colors that are on the website, well, you have to have a software tool and open that up. And if you know what you're doing, it's not that big of a deal. But wouldn't it be cool to be able to edit that SVG right from within WordPress, and that's where SVG Color Changer comes into play. So let's go over here and activate SVG Color Changer. Because as we all know, activating a plugin is the first step to using
all right, boom. So
now here under media, we have an option that is SVG Color Changer, like get. And what it's going to do is look at the media library, and it's gonna find all the SVGs that are in the site. So there's a couple of logos for this demo site. Here's an icon that I uploaded earlier. That's just, you know, an icon that I found. Here's another one, okay. So let's say, for whatever reason, we want to address this, this logo, right, and let's make everything that's white. Let's make it yellow. So we're going to change the colors here and look as I mouse. Say, you got yellow and white. So if I'm changed this white color to a yellow, look at that. It is going to edit the SVG. Ah, how about if we go down here and let's take a look at and see when I change the colors. So let's find, okay, like, here's the white. And let's make this. I don't know, let's make it more of a gray. But see what see what it's doing here. Isn't that neat? So we can make it kind of a gray. And maybe this, here's our outer color, maybe we want that more of a light blue. And here, as you mouse over the color, you'll see it highlight pink, in the actual. Here's a, here's one, let's make that yellow. Anyway, so you get the idea. Now, when you're done, you just hit change colors.
And it has now
edited that file. So if I look at it here in the media library, and again, you met this is a caching thing. So it may be that it hasn't totally we have to like refresh, or shift refresh. Now there we go. See, it actually changed the colors of the SVG. So yeah, it edits the SVG. And you know, probably as you know, an SVG is simply a text file. So it's going in and finding the colors in that SVG text and updating them. So isn't that neat? Now, again, use with care, because it's edited now, and maybe make a backup of it or whatever. But it lets you change really simply right here from within the WordPress admin area within that neat, alright, let's say we like this, this icon, but we don't like this kind of salmon color. Okay, well, we just have to mouse over the colors to Okay, here it is right there. And let's say we want it to be more branded like that up, Nathan. And let's make it a red. Alright, so that more matches this current styling on this site, change the colors. And look here in the media library. Hold down Shift for refresh to force a refresh. And there it is. It is actually changed. So pretty neat, really easy way to edit your SVG is right from within WordPress that is SVG Color Changer, one of the more clever plugins I've seen lately. Yeah. All right. Yeah, Doug, this is definitely one you might want to hide from the clients because everything will be wrong.
Alright, right,
moving down the list to another fun little plugin called development assistant. Now, how many of you have gone through the hassle of trying to figure something out in WordPress, and you get into WP debug, and you're trying to look at the debug log, and you got to go back in and out of, you know, your WP config and turn those things on? And then go grab the debug log to show it. Okay, so it gets rid. So it's a hassle, right? So wouldn't it be nice if we could do all of that from right within the WordPress admin? Here we go. development assistant. So let's open up this one, and activate development assistant right here. And I've got to remember where the settings are, I think they're under Settings. No tools. Where are the settings up down here, Dev assistant right here. So we're gonna go into settings first,
and we get some options.
So do we want to enable WP debug, you can turn it on there, the log and the display. So let's just turn all these on. I don't want to turn the display on what WP Well, let me tell you what these things do. WP debug allows you to see what errors are happening that are often even more. There are things that will show up in WP debug that won't show up in your error logs. So debug debug is a really good thing. Now the classic way of doing this is with a constant in your WP config define WP debug equals true. And that obviously works. That's the classic way to do it. This just shortcuts that process by putting it here in the WordPress admin area. WP debug log is another constant in the WP config that creates a file in wp content that's called Debug Log. WP debug display actually prints out it shows the errors on the site. So probably don't want that on on the live site. But anyway, we're going to save this. And so there's now this is actually working. Okay, boom, boom, boom. We actually have this we'll come back to this in a second we'll actually have this option Which is super helpful, that lets us it sorts our active plugins first. So if you're in the process of turning on and off plugins to see what's causing the problem, this actually pushes all your active plugins to the top of the list. And your inactive plugins are underneath that can be helpful or not. But then we also have some other things here, where if you are in a dev environment, you can use Mail hog, which is a GitHub tool, it's very developer free. But if you're a developer II type person, you might want to know about that you can connect it, it's like a fake SMTP server, basically, that lets you test your mail. And we'll come back to this part in a minute. But So here under dev assistant is the debug log. So we can open this up. And rather than having to go out in you know, with a with a code editor, or you know, an SFTP tool, or the file of cPanel, File Manager or whatever, and look at the debug log, you can actually see it right here within WordPress, you can download it or even delete it if you want to. And this will show you everything that's in the debug log, like I got something weird with PHP going on here. I don't know what that is, we'd have to figure that out. But you can see the debug log right here. So that's super helpful. Now, the other thing that's nice is, as you're going through the process of you know, when you get the support reply that everybody loves from plugin developers, which is fill in the blank, deactivate plugins, except for ours and switch over to a default theme. Well, that's always fun. This helps you expedite that process. So for example, we have now this column development assistant, where we can temporarily deactivate some plugins. So let's just temporarily deactivate some of these, you know, one at a time, and we're testing we're testing. Okay, and I'm done. Look, now I can activate the ones that are temporarily deactivated. So with one click, it's going to go back and reactivate all those that I just deactivated. So that's really helpful in that testing process. So that's pretty cool. So yeah, it gives us a lot of really neat options to bring in the to bring in debug issues, debug tools, right into the back end of WordPress. So there you go. And you can also there's this reset plugin data when deactivated. So no matter what I did here, with plugins, active, the active or whatever, if I deactivate this plugin with that box checked it, it and it does it and does all the changes that I've just made are undone. How about that? That's better. So that is development assistance. Really helpful tool, if you're trying to figure out problems, questions or comments on that one.
Pretty darn good, I think.
All righty, well, let's go to our next plugin, which is block AI crawlers. Now. This is a you read about this all the time, there's various media outlets that are blocking access to chat TBT and other AI bots from crawling their site to use the data on the site for AI content. So this is a plugin for WordPress that does that. So let's go into our plugins and activate oops, you know what we need to deactivate development assistance. So we get our normal list of plugins again, there we go. Block AI crawlers now we're going to activate this. Now when I just activated it, a couple of things happen. So first, it's going to add items to the robots dot txt file. Now, in WordPress, the robots dot txt file is generally dynamic. There's not usually a an actual physical robots dot txt file. So your SEO plugins and things generally dynamically generate the content of that robots dot txt, this taps into that and add some things. So if we go to WP, Nathan slash robots dot txt, here's what we see. So we got a bunch of stuff here that is blocked now by the robots dot txt, and it came from this plugin, like if we deactivate it and we reload this, you'll see that that stuff's gone. So This blocks all the crawlers. Beth is asking, Will this have an impact in the site showing up in search results? No, because the AI that Google is using is pulling information from its own search database, not the site directly. So if your site is not indexed for Google, then that would affect that, but not not this. This is the individual chatbots. So it's going to add this to the robots dot txt. And it is going to let me get to let's see.
If we look at our page source, right here, all right, so it adds this meta tag to our header, which says No Ai, no image AI, which is additional header tags on every page of the site that instructs AI bots not to scrape now, of course, it's up to the AI bot to honor that request, just like the robots dot txt, search engines have to honor that request. Most of them do. But there's, there's nothing it's like not actually preventing them from scraping it. You know, AI bots, generally look at the content for these tags, and they and they obey them. But it's up to the individual bot to do that. Now, here's something interesting, you know, if this is the kind of thing you want to do, this is a great example of a plugin that you could ironically, scrape the code for yourself out of the plugin and add it to something like a custom functions plugin. So I just thought I had this year, but I guess I didn't mean, let me download this plugin, just so you can see how simple this code isn't what you might want to do with it.
Oh, here it is. All right, so here's the plugin file. And if you take a look at this, it is a single plugin, single php, plugin file. Let me open this in the code editor in this is all it is. So there's a few, there's just one function that adds those blocks to the robots dot txt file. And there's another function that adds that meta tag we just saw. And that's basically it. There's one other thing here that says, you know, if you actually have a physical robots dot txt file, then don't activate the plugin. But this is simple text that you might just want to pull out and stick in your own custom functions plugin, if you want to block the crawlers. So it's a good candidate for that really easy to do with some very basic copy and paste.
So that is block
AI crawlers, questions or comments on this one. Beth, what about being so Bing is using one of these? So being the Bing search is actually powered by open AI as core? So yeah, cope Microsoft co pilot? Yeah. Elizabeth, why would you want to block this from adding content? If you've got proprietary information on the site that you don't want showing up in AI? It's a good way to do that. Yep. Or if you want people to actually come to your site to find the information instead of using an AI bot, that's why you would do that.
All right. Moving on down the list
to another one, which is this one was actually suggested by Melanie add COC, I forgot to attribute that to her on the the handout here. This is a great plugin that Melanie found and suggested, called product add ons and fields for WooCommerce. And by the way, let me mention this. If you are an academy premium member, you can suggest plugins at this link. So if you've got a plugin you want to add to the roundup. This link is now on every plugin roundup handout. If you're a premium member, just click it and suggested plugin. All righty. So product add ons and fields for WooCommerce. If you are a WooCommerce person and you have WooCommerce things, then sometimes you realize that it would be helpful to have a custom field or two or three on a particular product to give you some additional information. Like maybe it needs to be customized or maybe there's certain things that you want it to be and that's what this plugin does. So So let's go out and activate. Right up. It's,
it's actually this one here, PP O M, for WooCommerce. So we'll activate this.
And you'll see how this works. So let's go here to PLM fields. And we've got this one field right here called engraving. And so this is our demo field. And so here's this engraving field, it's going to show up for our products, categories of weapons, which we have our Marvel Universe characters here on this site. And we have some weapons like Iron Man gauntlet, that sort of thing in the AR store. And so what this is going to do is give us an additional field for engraving. For any product with the category weapons, let's take a look at what we've defined here. And basically, it says it's going to be engraving on weapons, limited 25 characters, you can set the length there, there are some conditional things you can do, there's a lot of things you can do with the pro version, but just basic field right here, this is going to show up on any weapon that's in our product list. So let's take a look at one of those, you'll see how it looks. Let's go over to Iron Man's gauntlets here. And right there, look at that, we have our nice little thing. And let's say we'll just, there's Tony Stark, we could add this to the cart. And this is going to carry straight through to our checkout process. And it'll be on the order data and it'll pass on through as you fulfill the order to do whatever you need to do. So it's really simple to add a short little field like this, you can also set up let's do another one here, let's say
let's add a new group. We'll call this I don't know.
Well, let's do this, you know, let's just call this test. My brain is not being very creative at this moment. And we're going to add a field to this. So here's our option, there's see how many there's so many options for the pro version. But we can do just a text input a text area, a select drop down and put radio buttons, checkboxes, email, address, date number, and something that's hidden, you have all these options to
add,
oh, this by the power requirements. And we can say our options would be higher 20 Vault would be free.
To 40,
well, 100, we'll say this is an extra. This is almost like a variable product. We're going to add this to the field. And we're going to say let's save this
and go back to our main page, we'll call this
you can actually even apply this to an individual product. So let's say this power option needs to apply to Iron Man's gold. So we'll save that. And we'll take a look at this again. And now look at that we've got power requirements here. And this will actually change our pricing as it goes. So really easy way to add different options that can even affect the price. It's super, super helpful. And again, many more options in the pro version, which is starts at $99 a year for single site. So that is again for Melanie add Cox, she uncovered this one. She is not here today on the live stream. But great little plugin from female. Any questions, comments on this one?
Really easy to use. Okay,
let's move on to the second WooCommerce plugin to the round up. And that is product stock sync with Google Sheet for WooCommerce. If you have ever tried to manage stock on a WooCommerce site, it's not fun. It's not exactly a fun experience. It can be hard to deal with. And it would be nice to have, you know, like a Google sheet out there that has all my products and all the stock and so forth. And so this actually, lets us do that. Now. The caveat is this. The setup is not the easy easiest thing to do, because you have to connect this plugin using the Google Sheets API. And if you've ever gotten into the Google Developer Tools, you know that setting up an API is tricky. And it can weird like one little setting can set everything up and whatever. But there is a step by step process they give you to follow. And if you follow it, and don't miss anything, you will in fact, connect the plugin through the Google Sheets API to the sheet of your choice. So let me actually, I think I already did that. Yep. So let's, let's activate this plugin. And you can see what we've done here. Here, alright, so this is going to create a gigantic menu for us. Three, three line menu over here in the WordPress admin area. Thank you very much developers. And so you put in your API keys here, which I'm not going to show you. And here's our sheet details. So we have our Google Sheet, I'm going to pop that open. And there it is. So here we have our sheet synced with our WooCommerce. So we've got stock levels for some prices. So you can increase prices, sale price, all that all those things here. So let's just say we move over here to our products page. And let's just start change the cost of Iron Man's gauntlets to $1,000. And we'll update that. Okay, so they're now $1,000. If we go here, and we sync our sheet, it is now going to push the cost right there to $1,000. So it updated the the sheet value, which is really helpful. And it would have updated any of our stock quantities and so forth. So let's say our Infinity Stones, we've got a quantity of 41. Let's say we sold a couple, and we have 39. Now, we sync this will see that dropped down to 39. Right there. So it's a really easy sync back and forth. Because this is a Google sheet, you can have other formulas on other paths or whatever calculating things and doing whatever is super, super helpful. Now the other thing that's really nice here is this product, quick edit. So this actually brings the sheet view right here into WordPress, where you can change the price. Right here, and when it goes green, it has synced here. And it's so we did 299 for the Captain America shield, it used to be 199. If we refresh the page, it is now 299. So this gives a really simple sheet style view right here within the admin area that updates both the product and the sheet. Now one thing, if you were just to update the price here on the sheet, it does not sync backwards to WordPress. So the actual Google Sheet is only a one way sync from WordPress to the sheet. But if you want to do it on both sides, you use this view right here. And it's the same thing, just use the same view. And you can make all your changes right here. This view updates both the product and the sheet at the same time. So it's really, really helpful. It does, there's a little bit of a setup involved. But once you get over that hump, it's pretty darn good. So that is WooCommerce stock sync for with Google Sheets. Doug says the master sheet could be good for a client who gets confused updating each product separately. Yeah, right here.
Especially good stuff. All right. Any other questions or comments on this one?
Jeffrey, I see that question. And yes, it does handle inventory.
With your stock here. Yep. All right,
let's move along to the next one, which is clickable blocks. All right now clickable blocks. This is a plugin that some of you are gonna go that's super cool. And some of you're gonna go I and you could decide which camp you're in. But this is a clever little tool that allows you with the core group and column blocks now if you're using a block add on like Kadence blocks or generate blocks, something like that, or other some other blocks that that has groups and columns in it doesn't work with those, but it does work with the core group and column blocks and anything in them so you can actually select or group some blocks Mix together and make the whole thing clickable. Let me show you what I mean by this. Let's activate the plugin. So let's just say, you know, you've got a block of text that you want to make everything or maybe it's an image and text, and you want to make the whole thing clickable as one unit. That's what this is going to let you do. So let's go into our test page here.
And you'll see how this works.
All right, so right here, we have a core roadblock with an image and a paragraph text. Now when we click this surrounding block, notice here, there's a link icon that is only there if you have this plug in active. And you can make that clickable to google.com. So it lets you grab that whole bunch of things, whether it's a row, or a column, or a group, and make it clickable, which is kind of cool. Let's, let's duplicate this paragraph. And so even here, let's actually move these out.
To be standing, let's get rid of this row.
Alright, so let's we have these two blocks. If we click these, and we group them, now we have this group, this whole thing can now be clickable
to something, right.
And what this is doing is putting an a tag wrapper around this whole group of blocks. So it's pretty clever. It's a really interesting use of the block editor. And there may be times as you are editing a site where you really want maybe it's an image and text to all be grouped together. Yeah, class, when you're hand coding, I got to do this too. So this is a nice little kind of hacky way in the block editor. To accomplish that I've earned what is the visual effect look like? It's just going to be everything's, everything's a single unit. But see, when I mouse over one, the whole thing has the hover color. So this is one single a tag that covers this whole thing. I mean, two paragraphs is not the ideal use case here. What would be better is
add or put an image image here.
Now this whole group that includes the image is now clickable. So when we look at this, who that's big. See, we when we mouse over the image, everything, this is one single a tag. So you can imagine a little column designs or whatever. Pretty neat, Doug? Yes, if there is something clickable, let's just make this link clickable. It's going to break it. If we put any kind of a tag in there, that's going to mess things up.
Yeah. So
yeah, it wraps the a tag, it just breaks it just, that's just typical HTML behavior. So nothing inside this linked group can be linked, basically. Yeah. But again, it's something clever that you've not yet been able to do in the block editor until here. So kind of cool. All right. Again, some of you you're going, that's pretty cool. So maybe you're going to move on, I get that. This is one of those kinds of plugins. So any other questions or comments before we,
in fact, move on? Oh, okay. Well,
let's move down to the next one, which is protected by content. So this is a plugin that lets you do the thing that we often hate to see on other websites, which is, why can't I right click? Why can't I select and highlight blah, blah, blah. This is a plugin that does that. So you're gonna love it or hate it. It's another one of those plugins. But you may actually have a case in which you need to have a site where the content is protected from copying and pasting. So let's activate this. I need to be in plugins, pages.
Protect my content. There we go. All right.
So with protect my content, you now have a settings page called Content Protection.
And
you have all these options. So you can disable the contextual menu, which is a right click menu, you can disable text selection, you can turn off the default RSS feed that WordPress automatically produces for all of its content. This disabled like it's an iframe buster. So if somebody tries to embed your site, any page on your site on another site using an iframe, this prevents that from happening. And this prevents any calls to the WordPress REST API unless you're logged in. So that's pretty helpful. Let's just activate all of these. And you'll see how it looks in the end.
All right, so now we view and
I'm right clicking, click, click, click, click, click, nothing's happening, because I have this context menu disabled. I'm trying now to drag, highlight, Nope, doesn't work. So I can't do anything like that. I can click, but I cannot highlight and drag. So now this is if you're a smart developer type person, you're going to figure out a way around this, right? So for example, while you can't right click and view source, you can go up to your browser menu, and
B, let's see where is it, it's
how do I get into developer the source. So I can do it from within my top level menu, and I can copy out of here, but this is really ugly, trying to copy from this anyway, it's really kind of the lowest hanging fruit, it's going to get rid of people trying to scrape the content, Sue with this prevent AI from scraping the page now because it's gonna digest that information as a, as a reader, not a copier. So anyway, this is again, this is for the lowest level, technical type person that might want to copy and paste your content, this will help to stop that. And in certain cases, it is useful, just like somebody was commenting earlier. Yeah. Ah, yes. Photographers, yes, exactly. A couple of folks mentioned photographers, indeed. All right, let us protect my content questions or comments on this one, it could be helpful in depending on the site. But it is not an absolute protection. And if you decide if you're working with a client, and they want to protect their content, it's on the web. Ultimately, people are going to find a way to steal it. But this is a way to eliminate some of the basic content
copying. Okay, let's move on to
what might be the I'm not even sure if the right word for this. But we found this plugin. And we thought, we simply have to add this to the Roundup, because what I've discovered is for me to look away from a webpage and up to the top right corner of my Mac where the time is indicated. It's just so much work, isn't it? Or if you're on a Windows machine, it's just a lot of work to look down right to wherever they put the clock now on Windows. It's just, that's a lot of extra eyeball activity. So why don't we just put a digital clock on the webpage? And so that's what we're gonna do. This is what simple digital clock is going to do for your WordPress site. And I'm sure everybody is gonna go right out and grab this plugin, because it is awesome. Yes, so here we go. And it does this every Okay, here we go. So here's our digital clock. We actually have a lot of options over here. You can decide how big it's going to be. That's kind of cool. We'll make it full width, if you want, or however big. You can decide if it's going to be a rounded border or not. Nice. We want to shadow around it. We can change that. That's kind of nice. What is the background color? Is it going to be a oh, this is the actual
wait? Clear. Okay. Background Color? Yes.
So we can make it whatever color we want. Or in fact, we could even make it a gradient. It's got 8000 gradients you can choose from.
Oh, there you go.
You told you there was 8000 You can also you know what is the timezone? This is my timezone. Do we want AMPM? Yes, we want the date to show Sure. How do we want the date to look, you can decide that here, and so forth. So you can also change the Google Font. If you want it to be a Google font, you can do that. And there you go. Now you have a digital clock. on your WordPress site. And so now your life is complete.
There we go. Now monitor that and class.
That's actually yeah, you could. Yeah, so actually, you know what? Okay, I've been having fun with this. But that's actually a decent usage of this. So what if we did a row, and we did three columns, or let's just say two columns. And let's put this clock in this section. And we'll duplicate it for the other section. Put it in there. And this clock. Let's make this clock. Ooh, it's set for it. We probably should say, we want this to be full size, but so it'll contain itself. So let's contain that one, too. Okay. And this one, we want it to be a different timezone. So let's say London.
Oh, now this, that's actually a really good idea. So we can have different times, right? Yeah, like the newsroom. Okay. All right. So I've been a little tongue in cheek on this one, but okay. All right. I'm seeing some use cases here for your digital cloud course. Also, if you're getting eyestrain from looking up at your Mac clock are down at your windows clock.
Yeah, that's, this was definitely
a solution for you. So if you want to add the timezone, you could just say, add after.
This would be US Central Time.
And this would be
we could say
Chicago and London, right? And put them like that. Very, very simple.
install that app however you want. Anyway, kind of cool. Cool.
So that is simple digital clock. It's really, I mean, really pretty clever. To be honest, I kind of liked this.
Other questions or comments on this one? I
don't. Yeah, like tickets go on sale at 1pm. Central time. Here's the current time. Yeah.
All right, good use cases.
All right, scrolling down, let's go to the next plugin, which is easy related random posts, okay. So there's a million related post plugins out there. And this is one of them.
It is simple. That's why it's called easy. It
is a very simple way to drop in a bulleted list of posts at the bottom of the post or a page or whatever you want. It just it's so easy to use, it might be a good option for you. Now, if you're using something like Kadence, where you can on the blog layout, a single post layout, you can have a carousel of related posts and so forth. That's probably a nicer user experience. But this is just a simple easy, drop it in there. Get your bulleted list of related posts. And you can use this anywhere, it actually applies with a shortcode. So let's activate easy related posts right there. And we'll find this under Settings. Also where you have a few little settings here. What do you want to call the heading? How many posts do you want to show? This? It does for performance sake, it does cache the list. So you know how often do we want to refresh that cache, you can set that in the number of seconds. You don't want to display related posts to the current post, or just random posts, you can change this, and then you can manually clear the cache here. So here's how it looks. It does display with this shortcode. And so here we have a post, which has the shortcode added manually at the bottom, boom like that. And here's how it looks on the front end. It is a very simple bulleted list. And again, you may want something like in like Kadence has something nice and visual and scrolling. But if you just want something simple, this is super helpful. So how does it decide what is related? Likely what it's doing is pulling things from the same post category. So you have related or you can even do random save that and we should get a whole new set. Yep. And ever reading what was it 1800 seconds? Or
do the math? What is that? Five minutes? What is 1800 seconds?
My brain is not mapping right now whatever that is, it'll refresh that list. So there you go random or related. Just an easy way to get people to click on through what your to other content that you have on the site. So pretty straightforward. That is easy related random posts. Other questions or comments you have earned? I think it is 30 minutes. That sounds about right. Or, you know, we could just, we could get a calculator plugin for our WordPress site, and calculated there. 30 minutes? Yes. Thank you. This is wow. In many ways, my brain still thinks it's Monday. Okay, let's move on to the next one, shall we this is called temporary login from your friends at Elementor. Interesting little plugin here that you may either like or be adamantly averse to using. So we'll take a poll at the end of this. So the goal here, if I just had to read between the lines, I have no inside knowledge of this. If I had to read between the lines, the support people at Elementor got tired of having people struggled to create users on their site, so they could go in and debug issues. So they created this plugin, I'm guessing this is total gas. But it's feasible. They created this plugin called temporary login. And basically what this lets you do is it generates a link with a token in it that lets anybody with the link login to the WordPress site as an administrator.
So dangerous, maybe useful. Also,
maybe, let's take a look at this. This is temporary login. Oh, it's already active. So let's go down here. I think it's under. It's under users users temporary login. And here we go. All right. So here's the gigantic login. And you can do a few things, Stacy. Yes. So it's like, it's like session stealing sort of not really, but in a way. So you can copy this URL. And I'm going to open up an incognito window that would otherwise not have me logged into the site. Like I'm not logged in to WP Nathan, in this browser instance. But if I go to this that I just copied, I log in as an administrator about that. So from here, you can also revoke access, so revoke. And if I try to do anything here, it's going to log me back out. Yep. So I'm logged out. In here, Grant Access, this turns it back on. So by default, it grants access for seven days, and then it automatically turns it off with that link. You can also extend access. And this extends it for
I don't know, it didn't say. Let's see. I don't know. I don't know what it just did. It can be extended I'm not sure for how long. So yeah, that's it.
If you need to give somebody quick access to an admin site temporarily, it sure is easy. Is it a good idea? No, there's downsides to this. And you can't, there's only one of these active at a time. So you can't have multiple ones of these floating out there. So I don't know. Now one thing to note, if you are requiring to factor with solid security Pro, for administrators is not going to work with this because you trot like if you turn on two factor and you go to the link, it wants you to put in a two factor code. So there you go. This could be very, very helpful if you have a non technical client who needs to send you access to your WordPress site. But you know, I don't know this is definitely a Use with caution type plugin because it's completely back ending any multifactor login protections that you have in place. So let's do a quick vote. Would you use it?
Yes or no? And I'll take a sip of coffee.
Would you use it? Yes or no?
Okay, mostly No. All right, let's
move on then, shall we? Next plug in is called post Porter, post Porter. So there are lots of different options for exporting WordPress posts out of one site and into another mini. You know, there's a core WordPress exporter that does really well moving in the post content like Like title and so forth title and content doesn't do a very good job moving images, there's WordPress plugins that will grab posts and media. This one does that it does posts in media. But it doesn't use an export file. It actually uses the WordPress REST API. So it slurps in images from another site automatically. Let me show you how this works. It's kind of interesting. So we have this dev site set up@dev.wp nathan.com. And I'm not logged in. Why don't I do that? This is just a, I think this was the Kadence AI site that we were tinkering with. All right, so we're logged in here to dev, and we need to activate our post Porter. post order are you. Okay, so once I go here, this is if I want to import stuff into this site, I use POST Porter, if I'm going to export things out of this site to another, I go to my export keys, I'm going to go here. And this is what I'm going to copy. So I'll move over here. And this by the way, something about Cloudflare makes this go really, really slow. I'm not sure what that didn't take time to figure it out. But when I disable CloudFlare, this was super fast. So it takes a minute, right. And these things, it's talking back and forth, because the site's already connected. And so what I've done to connect the site, is I've copied the URL, and I copy the export key over into the settings that will be here. And I've connected them already. That's already done. And here I can say I want to pull over posts. And I want to put them into posts. So the post type I want to import, I'm going to import posts from this site. I'm going to put them in posts on the site. That's it. So I'm going to hit save, and it is now going through the process of importing the posts. Now let's just while we're waiting, let's just look at the posts on this site. There's a bunch of posts here. That Are
they have featured images. Blog.
Right, so this is these are our posts, just some garbage posts, there is media listed in even in the post. Okay. So it's now importing. Yes, it's all or nothing like most exports, you know, the core export and so forth. Don't let you specify which ones you want to get. You're just grabbing all of them. Okay, so it just came in. We can look at our import logs. No log found. That's interesting. Well, we'll go into posts and you'll see
nothing. Why didn't that work?
Interesting.
might just work like a charm earlier. Did we get the images? No.
Oh, I think there was one other step I had to go through.
So while it's loading this again,
it does work on basic post types. I tried to pull WooCommerce products over, and it did pull the products but it missed all the metadata like price and so forth. So it's not a good solution for that. It It works really, really well for pulling over posts. Okay, here we go. Let's do this again.
Save
it by the way, pulls over taxonomies. So if the posts that you're importing have certain categories or tags, it's going to pull those in as well. It it pulls in offers, but you'll need to reassign them to offers on the current site.
Okay, it's taken forever. We
may come back to that in just a minute. But in the meantime, let's move on down to our final plugin of the Roundup, which is the editor
handbook.
Oh look, it just finished. Oh, you know what I did I hit Save Settings instead of start import. So it says six posts will be imported like this. Let's just do this quick import really fast and you'll see it so it is moving in posts. We'll be able to see images coming into our media library now.
There's one slow there's another one, one at a time. Let's pull it all the things in
thinking real hard about it, you can imagine if you had a bunch of posts, it's gonna take a little while it is running in the background, it is using the REST API. So it's very low. Sir, it's doesn't require a lot of server horsepower to make this happen, which is good if you're pulling in from a low powered site. Okay, we're done. Now we can go to posts.
And there they all are. Notice we
have this new category blogging that was created. And when we view this post on our site, we get the featured image, we get the image here. Oh, that's a mess. So it did get some moneta data from a Kadence. Block, which is interesting. But you see, that's it pulled everything in. So that's how it works. That is post Porter. Pretty neat. Questions or comments about that one before we did the final plugin?
Now, editor handbook. All
right. So we've seen a few plugins like this in the past, and I really liked this one, I just liked the way it's set up, it might be my favorite one of these that allows you to create documentation on the backend of the website for the client. So let
me activate. Editor handbook. White good. So
when I activate this up at the top, there's going to be a new handbook menu that pops in right under dashboard. And if I go into handbook, I'll see all the articles listed. And I can edit the existing articles or add new ones. And notice this is using it this is just a custom post type. But this custom post type is not accessible unless you're logged in. And it doesn't show up in the sitemap. So it's not going to be indexed by any search engine. So if we were to go into an article here, when we edit this, wow, we have full block editor abilities here. So we could
you know, use Kadence rows. Any any kind of
block that you have access to you can use here. You know, images, tabs, didn't put a clock in there. Because why not? You get all the things right. So when we update this and the client would see this handbook link, as administrators, we see these, you click the handbook article, and it looked Oops, oh, hang on. Have to when you set this up for the first time, you do need to refresh thermal.
I meant to put that as a note,
you do need to refresh permalinks.
And once that's done, you
can view this and it does view like it's on the front end of the site. So anything you can do with block editor, embed videos, do whatever. This is just a lot handier. So somebody mentioned using WP help, Billy? Yeah, it's better than WP help Billy. Because you can use the block editor. There are things like there are things in WP help. You can't use columns, you can use blocks and WP help. But it's displays on the back end, which means that the Gutenberg styles aren't loaded. They only load on the front end. So you lose a lot of abilities that you have at the block editor to make more complex layouts now, that'd be help is great. It works wonderfully. This is just a little notch up I think.
Yeah. So if you are if you're an admin, you
can see the edit and add new if you're not an admin, you just get the list of articles. So yeah, it's definitely help is great. Matter of fact, that's what we've been using. But this may be one we're going to test a little more thoroughly. It's pretty neat. Elizabeth, that's a great idea. Like you could document style guide and so forth.
Yeah.
So Christine is saying Can anybody below admin put comments? No, it's view only. View Only. And if we try to go to this article,
URL, not logged in, you're
gonna get a page not found because it does require login. So that is editor Handbook by dev collaborative. It is an excellent application of the block editor for documentation for the client. I love it. All right. Any other time lessons or comments about that one. Okay, so yes, I just saw six that five is out. They normally do drop it around to Central or three Eastern time. So yeah, it's
out. Final Any final thoughts on this? All right, well
then let's wrap up with our final question of the round up, which is what is your vote one vote one vote only pleased for the favorite plugin of the round up. One vote only please, we'll compile these and use this for our best of editor handbook. Several votes product add on. Digital Clock plugins, Dept to couple for dev assistants, several for plugins. Dev assistant, wow. Okay. So we have three, we actually have two plugins and a plugin. How about that. So it looks like the winner is Dev assistant and editor handbook, with the plugins tool also being mentioned. So there we go. We'll have all those for our best of Roundup, which will come up in July, you probably the second Tuesday of July. We'll have that on the schedule for the first six months of best plugins. Also, yes, the i WordPress 65, as you just saw just dropped. And as I mentioned at the beginning, we do have a live stream tomorrow with our own Timothy Jacobs, meet WordPress 6.5 Timothy who is a WordPress Core committer and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API deeply involved in core for each major release of WordPress comes on and walks us through it. These are always great live streams and that is a free one. Go and register for that that starts at 1pm Central tomorrow. And that's gonna do it for us today. Hope to see you back tomorrow for that free event here on solid Academy where we go further together.