version Yeah, we will be switching to YouTube when the solid solid live transition happens. The the free and open webinars will be on YouTube and the premium webinars will be in zoom. Okay, look now finally it looks like the captions have decided to work probably something incorrect I did because, you know, I do those sorts of things. Okay, now captions should be working for everybody. Yay. Okay just a minor inconvenience so again welcome everybody Glad you're here. Let me get the link in the chat for you. There is today's plugin list as well as the replay link as usual after we wrap up today, so all of that is there we got a pretty decent plugin list. Summers tend to be a little slower for plugins but there's still several interesting ones there on the list today. So we're about three minutes away three and a half minutes away from getting started. Welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Great to see everybody here. Stacey. There are very few things that could ever be elevator or air horn. Those are the two they're just not replaceable. You can't beat those. Hey, Jeffrey from Guatemala. Welcome. Good to see everybody popping in here. Let's see burn from Virginia. Richard, welcome. Class, Auxilium tech, welcome Phoebe. Stay see. They see with me, Barney. Good to see everybody. We are two and a half minutes away from getting started. If you're just joining us in zoom, the slide link is about to pop in there again. There you go. So we'll be getting started here in just a few minutes.
All right. Got a couple of WooCommerce plugins to start off with today. And a few fun AI plugins. Yeah. And one that I just happen to run across in doing some client work. That is really pretty darn cool. So we've got a few really good ones to show you today.
About a minute and a half to go before we get started. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. Kay, welcome
Hey, Michael. Just about ready to go. I'm gonna drop in the handout link again in the chat that's got this month's plugin list as a PDF to download as well. As the replay link when we finish up today. Hey, John, welcome. Hey, Tom. All right, everybody about a minute to go. We're also going to do something to improve one of these plugins with chat GPT today, which should be a lot of fun, what could possibly go wrong? Glad everybody's here. The attendee count is ticking up. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat and say hello. I'm going to put in the link once again for the slides. Not slides for the handout today the August 2023 plugin roundup handout. We'll be getting started here in just about 30 seconds. Glad everybody's here. Hey. Sharing. Taking down the last few seconds before we start the recording and get underway.
I do not see Beth Sue, but I do see you Hi Sue. All right. It's three minutes after let's get the recording started and dive right in. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world today. I welcome to the August 2023 plugin round up here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host and I iThemes Training and every month for many years, we have looked at the WordPress plugin directory and gotten a list of about a dozen or so interesting plugins that have been recently updated or added to the WordPress plugin directory. So glad you're all here. With us today. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop open the chat and say hello, I'm going to drop in our link bundle for today. At the top there you'll see the Google Drive link that has this month's plugin list as well as the replay link which is right below that we'll have it up in about an hour or so after we finish today. You can go back and rewatch or share or whatever you'd like to do. And lots of good, lots of good plugins today, several in particular that are going to be fun to talk about. So yes, by the way, we also allow members to submit plugin requests. Once you've logged into the I iThemes Training site. You are able to click right here to suggest the plugin and just drop in that information there. And we will evaluate it to be added to our list for the month. So no member added plugins this month and we've had a pretty several pretty good ones over the last few months. So as you come across a plugin and your work and you'd like us to feature it, just drop it in there on that link and we'll be happy to give it a look. So here is this month's handout if you're watching this on the replay, just click the Download handout button right below the video and you'll have this PDF. So as a as our note on disclaimer always is here on the plugin Roundup. These are just plugins we've taken a look at and thought were interesting. You know, we were not vouching for these as far as the quality of the code or security or, you know, privacy concerns or accessibility or any of these things. They have not been thoroughly tested. We've given them a bit of a look and found them to be interesting. So as you would with any plugin just make sure you give it a look and make sure it works with your stuff and doesn't break anything. So let's get started with a couple of WooCommerce plugins, starting out with an interesting plugin called WC spots. Now this is a plugin that will allow you to create a hotspot photo that features certain products. On your website. Now you might say well, why would I want to do such a thing Nathan? And here's what I think. I think that you know, one of the big reasons for having a ecommerce in WordPress, is that better than most platforms that can run e commerce. WordPress does really well also with content management, right? That's what WordPress is at its core. So you know, having a blog, having other types of content that can associate with your store is pretty helpful. And so if you're going to have a store, it's helpful to publish regular blog posts about new items. You've gotten in or things, you know, and use those to promote those products on social media. And so what you might do is maybe there's a new collection of products that has come in, and maybe you've got an image that has all those things together, that sort of thing. And what this plugin is going to let you do is create hotspots on that image. That connect to products in your store. So let's take a quick look here at how WC spots works. So let's activate the plugin. And we have one of these setup already but let me just show you how this is going to work. It is a block this does not work. I guess it could work in the description of a WooCommerce product. But really this is better than what you would it is better used as like a post promoting a group of products. So let's just take a look at this page that we've created. You might just assume this is like a blog post. It's in the block editor. And the WC spot is a block. So I'm going to just scroll past some of the stuff we've done and you would add it right here as a WC spot just like that. And once you do you'll get a block that looks something like this newly added a hotspot so within a block here's just a picture we created and let's that's something for Doctor Strange is amulet. So maybe we wanted to do something for his cloak. And if that what happened to be a product in our store, we just start to assign it. The products over here. This gives us a list of all the products that we're going to feature on this one. So let's just add another one. I don't have a product for the club, but we'll just pretend it's this one. And once that product is in, then I can click here double click and choose one of the products that we've assigned to this hotspot. So once that's there, it shows up in a little loop of products underneath. And let's show you what it looks like on the front end. Now I've got one right above here that has several products and it just so you can see an example. So here's this one and right here we got this and see how it highlights the product beneath it. And so here's one we just added down here. And so you have the full product view where you can click through the product or add it directly to the cart but imagine you had you know your collection of fall new fall items here and it's right there and you have a blog post about it. Here. You can just use Select put the little.on the item and it would link right over to link right over to the product itself. So this wouldn't work. With MailChimp, right? Because it's actually associating in the database this hotspot with the existing product, but it does some pretty cool stuff. And so this is a really clumsy sample here but you see pretty quickly how this will work and it's a block so you can do anything else you want to do with blocks it just it's going to show up right here. You can put that in the Kadence row and kind of make things make things show up the way you want it to the other option you have here. As you dig into the views over here. I'm just going to select this spot. And look we have some options for layout. So do we want to stack it on mobile? Yes or no? What does that look like? What is the product layout look like the items underneath? We want to have a list like this, or a grid or like this. We want to align center or left so we have all these options here to change the number of columns. And of course, that's a live preview with the block editor. So it looks pretty good. This lets you choose how you want the pop up to look. We have lots of control over how all of these things look. And the question in the chat. Do the word show up on hover? No, they actually show up the whole time right here. As you can see. And so you you click this and it'll take you have the option to click straight. I think this one is not one. Yeah, but the Iron Man's got let's I think our Captain America shield came just got unconnected somehow. But like here, you can click there. It shows you which product it is when you mouse over, and you can add to cart or go on into the product. So pretty cool. I definitely want some experimenting and see how you can make it work for you. But it's an interesting approach. To better advertising your products. John So yeah, if you were using MailChimp, then you would maybe have a blurb in the MailChimp that links back to the blog post. Which is really what you'd want to do anyway to get traffic on the website. Yep, so that is WC spots. Any questions or comments on that one? i And Sherry Yes, there is a I think it's a powerpack add on for beaver builder that does something similar, but it doesn't. It doesn't directly connect with WooCommerce like this does and it wouldn't display the product underneath. But it would let you put a hotspot and you fill in by yourself the URL you want it to click to. Yeah. All right. So next up is another WooCommerce product. This one is called Simple Product badges. So badges are a great way to visually add detail to a shop with a little a little pill that shows Hey, this is low on stock or hey, this is on sale or whatever. And WooCommerce of course has new and sale tags that can be added to products. This one gives you a little more control over how and when those things appear, as well as allowing you to customize your own little badges for different things. So let's take a quick look at simple product badges. If you're a WooCommerce person, I think this is one you're really going to like
us. Oh product badges so we'll activate this. And what we'll find is that it has added a new menu item for us here. Now there's two ways you can go about adding a badge. The first is here kind of in this list at the global level. So here we can say you know this is applying a badge that says MCU approves a Marvel Cinematic Universe approved item and we're we are adding this to any product that's in the product category weapons which is several of our products here. So we have you know quite a few products. They're fake products in our store, many of which are weapons and if we go out here to look at our Marvel store. Something just broke. This might be a great example of two plugins that don't play well together. Maybe that WC spots doesn't like our isn't that interesting? critical error on this website. It is bizarre that I literally just played with this plugin two hours ago and it just broke. What in the world
my goodness, okay, well, let's try this again. Nothing else here I see that should be causing a problem
okay, it's working. I don't think this plugin updated. But like literally I was just playing with this. I was just playing with this. Okay, I don't know what just happened, but it's working now. That's weird. I think we had a plugin conflict. If we went into the error log, we could get into it. I don't think it's this plugin. I think it was one of the other ones that it bumped heads with. Who knows? But so notice that here we have some of the Marvel weapons and we have our tag there. MCU approved. And so when we dig into this, you know, you can change what category you have the ability to style the button and you got a bunch of different options here of what you want. You can also by the way, set priorities on the badges. So if multiple badges match a particular item, you can have one that takes precedence based on the badge. And yep, so this way it kind of the global level, you can assign badges onto products. based on criteria like tags, product categories, or if you go all products, it's going to apply to everything. So that's one way to do it. Another way is to just go straight into a product. Let's do this one. And we can create a badge only for this product. So we can, you know, there's some predefined ones. But there's also you know, this was a custom badge. We're gonna say it's leaving this month. We have our styling here. And so forth. So pretty cool. Also, if for some reason, we don't want to display any badges on a particular product at all, it adds this option where if we checked this, even if it matched one of the globally defined badges, it wouldn't show you can opt out per product that way as well. So when we look at this, that's why we have this leaving this month option. So it also gives you the ability to change the default sale badge. If you do a new badge you can set for how many days the product is considered new. So based on the published date of the product, you can set up a new badge. And it'll just show new right there for the first 45 days the product is in the store. It'll show the new badge and then it'll timeout and stop showing. Yep, so pretty cool stuff. Nice. Nice little bit of power there. The question from Doug is is it possible to change the location of the badge to a corner diagonal? It's a good question. This is just you could probably do it with CSS if you got in there and played with it. I kind of rotate that div we'll see what we're dealing with here. It's a span. So probably you could add some CSS, you'd have to fiddle with it, but to make it tilt and then you know get what you wanted it to be. It would require some fiddling but it's just a span that overlays so probably. Yep. That is simple product badges has some promise any other questions or comments John is asking spots and badges don't mix I don't think it was spots. I think it was one of the others. It may have been that login login me activate spots and see if the world blows up. Now it works. I don't know I don't I'm not I'd have to check in the error log to see what plugins bumped off that problem. All right, any other questions or comments? Okay, moving down the list. Alright, we got a couple of AI plugins as usual. There are so many AI plugins y'all. If you look at the list of newly added plugins to the WordPress plug in directory, there are so many AI plugins. Everybody's trying to put some sort of AI plugin in. Many of them are similar, and we've done some of those over the past several months. You know, if you remember we've had aI plugins that are content generators, and they you know, we've tried to pick some special feature that each one has, and we had even a few new ones like that this month, but they weren't really special. So we didn't add those but we did find these two plugins that are a take on implementing AI on a site that has comments. And so if you have a WordPress site that has comments enabled for whatever reason, these are two plugins you might want to consider. So the first one is called comments engine AI. So let's activate comments Engine API. Now both of these plugins by the way, this one in the next one, are going to use an open API, or pardon me an open API API key. So you'll need to create an open API account and add an API key over and so it's based on volume. And you know, it's a metered usage. It's very, very inexpensive for text replies, you know, just pennies. It's very, very cheap. But what this plugin allows you to do is create some fairly realistic comments on a post. So you know, one of the main problems with a comment, like a blog, where you're doing comments is oftentimes, you know, nobody's commenting so nobody comments. And so here's a way open API, open API will scan your post, and then create a relevant comment on the post. Watch this. It's kind of interesting. So we haven't activated so let's just go to a post. And we're going to just grab let's say, Here's the top 10 MCU movies posts. And so down below our content, we now have this window. So how many comments do I want to generate? Let's do three. And what are the tone? And maybe let's just do one and we'll do different kinds of tones. So let's do one that is sarcastic and we'll click to generate and we'll get the comment here in just a minute. Okay, so we need to open our comment tab to look at it. Okay. So here's we're here in the comments. Right here. Sarcastic such unique choices iral You know, whatever. Alright, and so you know, the names that generates are oftentimes not awesome. And so maybe you want to edit those, which you can do right there, but it will generate some fairly realistic sounding comments. Let's do another one. And make this a positive comment. And generate. See, whilst the generating Sue is saying Google frowns on this thing for reviews, yeah, but this is your own comments on your own site. It's not getting in adding fake Google reviews. So there's one right there so you know, and you can publish these. Actually, they go in as published because we set that here, publish immediately or you can preload some comments, and have them published in the future. Yeah, it does sound a little dishonest. But you know, it's one of these things where maybe it'll it'll seed some comments to get some discussion going. Anyway, it's an interesting take on AI, I think pretty interesting. So that is the comments engine and you have all these different options of the tone, and so forth. Exactly. Class build a huge fake following powered by AI. Yeah. All right. So Paul just said, I would rather have replies generated the comments left. And your wish is my command. That's the next plug in here. It's called AI reply. Now, again, this connects to open AI through an API key. But this will allow you to generate believable comments or replies to comments. So we're going to just leave these here. And let's go and activate this plugin API reply. Alright, that is active and let's refresh this page. And when we get to when we're on a comment screen look, now we have this option to reply with chat GPT so we'll click this and it's generating. And there it is. Let's go here and do this one. We forgot to reply. Let's hit reply. And let's reply here with chat GPT.
Look and even notice that
that it was a sarcastic comment, so it dealt with it. Yeah, hit reply. There you go. Anyway, open our AI now getting into the comments game. Okay. Will they work in more than the English language? That is a great question. Let's see. I believe so. And I believe and I think it's here. Right? Yes, right here. So this is the comments engine. This is the one that generates the the comment and class I haven't tested this, but I bet that the reply looks at your site. Language and WordPress and replies in that language. Open AI is certainly able to do that. I can't say for sure that's what happens. But it wouldn't surprise me if that's what happens. I mean, it may actually look at the comment, and notice, you know, detect what language it is. And then reply in that language. So, yeah. Anyway, I see the love for fake comments just all over the chat. I just think this is an interesting way to leverage AI that would we're seeing it happen everywhere. And this is a pretty cool application of the AI technology, I think. All right, any other questions or comments or, you know, criticisms, that's we've had plenty of already for either of these two AI plugins. I mean, you could just you could have a conversation with yourself via AI. There you go. So the ethics are in the air, you know, you can make your decision about that. I think I just think it's a cool application of technology. One other way to plug in WordPress, a plugin AI into WordPress. All right. Anybody else on this one? Okay, next up, copy to clipboard for WordPress, copied to clipboard from WordPress. So here is a way if you have some sort of content on your site that you would like to make easily copyable by somebody, maybe it's a code snippet. Maybe it's, you know, a set of instructions or a recipe and you click it and whatever. What this is going to do is allow you to pre create a copyable section of text and then make it copyable by a shortcode embed. So let me show you how this is going to work close close close close. Let's just for the sake of not tempting fate the activate all these plugins since we've already had a plugin bump today. All right now let's add copy to clipboard for WordPress. Here we go. This is gonna give us a top level menu item here. And in here, we're gonna have all the things that we've created that are copyable. So I have an example here of just kind of that one of the first ways I thought about using it, which would be hey, I want to share a code snippet with somebody actually, let me back up to the Edit page. And so here I just have a very basic layout. Here's a shortcode that'll render the current year in WordPress and I've got the shortcode there. And what I want to be a people to be able to do is just to hit a copy button to get all that code on their shortcode. So what I've done is I've gone in here, under copy to clipboard and I created this current year shortcode item and then I just put whatever you put in here is what's going to be copied to the clipboard. And so this is just one example of it. You also have the ability to change how the button looks. That's going to be the copy button. So, this is here. There is a shortcode created right there that you can copy and paste. And that's what I've put right here below this little code block. So if I take a look at this here's how it looks. So there's a link here to copy this to the clipboard. Here's the code. If I hit copy, it's there. It's on the clipboard and I don't have a way to paste it. Let's see. So if I paste there it is. So it creates you know I've created the predefined block of text that's going to be copy that can be anything you want, just text and then this creates a shortcode that when it's clicked, it takes this group of text and puts it in your clipboard. And so here I've just put it this in a block as well, just to show what it is. So you would have the this plugin does not display the text that will be copied. It simply outputs a link that when you click it, it would be copied. Now one thing that it also does this is in a span so you can this right here, this ca cwp. txt, you could put that in your stylesheet and make it look like a button if you want it to. Or you can define it for each separate one. It's got the ability to do that here. I would probably do it for the whole site. Yeah, that's how it works. So you know if you have a recipe or you know code or other things that you would want to make easily copyable this is the way to do it. Pretty interesting. That is copy to clipboard for WordPress. Oh, Doug's using that on a client site now. That's great. Any other questions or comments on this one?
Okay, let's move on into our next plugin which is called awesome view count. Awesome view count. Now, some analytics is an ongoing item of discussion in the WordPress world in the web world in general, especially when it comes to privacy, all the changes to Google Analytics for and you know how much analytics do I really need? And you know, sometimes all people want to know is how many views a particular page or post has gotten? And that's what this plugin is gonna do. It is probably the simplest approach to analytics that there is and in some cases, this may be all you need, and it's super light. It works all behind the scenes. There's no privacy concerns. It's literally incrementing a number in the database. So if you remember, back in the day, I'm talking about like late 90s We all had these little Perl scripts at the bottom of our pages that would increment our page numbers, right? Oh, my page has been viewed 236 times I'm awesome, whatever. So this does not put on the front end, but it does output on the back end. And let me show you how this works. So here we go to posts. And there's now a views option here. And it literally just shows you the the number of views that a post has gotten. It is the simplest possible approach to analytics you could ever find. So you don't get how many today or yesterday or last week or whatever, but you do see oh, here's my most popular posts. Unfortunately, this column is not sortable with this plugin, and it only works with posts. So it's very simple, at least in this first early version. But you know again, super simple approach to analytics now I included this plugin in the list. Ben, does it go up when you refresh the page? I believe so. So it's not tracking unique visits or anything like that. So it was at seven it should now be at eight. And if we refresh the page, it's probably going to go to nine Yep. So every time the page is loaded, it's just incrementing the number. So some people that may be all they want, and that's great. I include this plugin also because it's an interesting way to show you how to extend a plugin with chat GPT. So let me show you what I did. I think it's not helpful to have this plugin that only shows posts what if I wanted to show pages also, or custom post types? Right or WooCommerce products which are basically custom post type with a little extra seasoning thrown in. So here's how easy that is. With chat. GPT watch this. Be prepared to ooh and ah I think it's up now I've lost my chat GPU. Oh dear. momentary pause while I find my chat GPT window. Okay, so here's what I did earlier today. Let me scroll up the page. Okay. So I'm using GPT four because it's better for development. This is a WordPress plugin that adds a view count to the postless. Currently it only works with posts I want you to modify the code that works for post pages and all define custom post types including WooCommerce products. Make sure that you adjust not only the code to display the view count on all post types, but also the mechanism for tracking views because I wasn't sure how it was doing all that. Also, I want you to change the code so it can be added in a code snippets plugin rather than being installed as a standard plugin. So basically, as I looked at this plugin when I downloaded it, this is the actual plugin file and it only has to it's a single file plugin. So it's really easy to deal with and so that's literally I posted the contents of the PHP file right there. And I told Chad TPT I want you to make this so it goes everywhere. And it says okay, oh, and and then I changed it where I want it to be. I want to just be able to paste this in code snippets for demo rather than it being an actual plugin. So here's the code. There it is. So I tested that, or here's, here's the new code that generated that with an explanation. And then I said, Oh, wait, it doesn't want to test it. It the count doesn't appear in WooCommerce products or for custom post types. So it realized what was going on and it fixed it. And this actually works. Oh, it wasn't still wasn't appearing for custom post types. So it tweaked it. Alright, and this code actually works. So I copied this code, and I stuck it over here. In the code snippets plugin or WP code when we activate that and I'll show you what it did. Oh, shoot, hang on. We need to deactivate the plugin first because it's bumping heads.
Snippets. All right, let's toggle on that snippet, which I called all summer viewcount. But that was clever. Alright, so that is now working. So now when we go to pages there it is. That's how easily you can modify a plugin with chat GBT. Pretty cool, right? It's that quick. Like that literally took me five minutes. It's all about what you ask it for and then you have to test it and tell it what doesn't work or whatever. And you'll Yeah. So Paul, I saved that for the webinar. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could make it sort by the views column and you make it so that the views column is sortable?
Sure, I love it when chat GPT says sure no problem
your columns. Now again, I will tell you if you're using the free version of chat GPT which is on the 3.5 version of open AI. The it is not as good. The the plugin and PHP coding abilities of chat TPT four is far better, far better than 3.5. Okay, so there's our snippet. Let's copy this code. And let's go back and edit our code snippet. And let's see if this works. Let's paste it in an extra PHP tag at the top. This is where I saw somebody said you don't have any have to have any PHP knowledge. And that's not entirely true. You kind of have to know generally speaking, like you'd need to know oh, there's a second opening PHP tag. That's a problem. So we'll want to fix that. So let's update this. Let's see if this works. Oh, look. It's sortable. Isn't that amazing? Ooh, it made all the zeros go away.
That's something we want to refine. But anyway, you see how easy that is? Now again, for those of you that are members, I've been kind of plugging this but for those of you that are members in October our premium event is going to be on leveraging AI inside of WordPress. We're gonna do lots of different things from content to code to other fun thing. So this is just a little taste of that. But sadly, it's so easy. It's so easy now with chat GPT. Okay, any other questions or comments about that? Think I'm going to disable the snippet so nothing blows up because we haven't fully tested it all right. That was awesome view count and awesome or view count. Moving down the list. Okay, Barney. Don't let AI make you feel obsolete. I totally get that. It's a it's a rational response. But let me put it in perspective. And these are the words I've quoted a number of times from CJ Pomar, who is the founder of brainstorm force, the creators of Astra and ultimate add ons and all those things. CJ had the best perspective on AI several months ago. And he tweeted this, he said, and by the way, I used to call it seated or whatever the heck they're calling tweets. Now. It's going to be tweets with me from now on, but anyway, the what CJ said was when computers came along, computers didn't replace accountants. accountants who used computers replaced accountants who didn't. That's what AI is going to do for our industry. So it's really unlike Melanie's saying you have to know what to ask AI any kind of generative language tool like AI is you have to you have to instruct it like you have to prompt it with the right things. It has to be trained for what you want, otherwise you get garbage. So you know having a base of not you know, a general knowledge of WordPress, a general knowledge of how PHP and plugins work in WordPress. Even if you don't know where the semicolon goes, you can still you know, you if you have some base of knowledge, that's going to let you use the tool. It's just pretty cool. Okay. Moving on down the list to the helpfulness meter, helpfulness meter. Now, this is a nice little, little thing that I think could be helpful on certain kinds of content, particularly maybe you're creating like a knowledge base for your clients inside of WordPress or maybe you've got, you know, some instruction type posts. And you want to be able to measure whether this article was helpful to someone or not. So that's what helpfulness meter is all about. It's got a really weird icon. I'm not quite sure what's going on here. But helpfulness meter. Let's activate this plugin. helpfulness meter, here it is. And so what it's going to do is add a Was this helpful block at the bottom of posts and pages. So there is a settings page let's take a quick look at this. helpfulness meter. And so here's where you can say I want to display it on these certain post types. And if you do that, then at the bottom of each post, like right now, by default, it's only enabled for posts. It's going to ask Was this helpful? Yes or no? And thanks for your feedback. Once you vote so if we just look at a post, it's gonna pop it in right at the bottom of the content. Where is it?
Not sure why that's not appearing. Maybe it's under the comments. No. It blows me away. How we can test something prior to plug in round up and it works perfectly and then we get on the live the live stream and something weird happens. See, there it is right there. I wonder if God just missed it on the other one. Anyway, here's what it looks like. Why is this helpful? Yes, thanks for your feedback. Oh, you know what, I wonder if Okay, that's what happens already voted on the other one. And so it doesn't ask me again. It attach that comment with a cookie I guess to my user, so it disappeared. That's what's going on. Oh, that makes sense. So now when we look. We've got our helpfulness meter right here. Elizabeth, does the user need to be logged in to vote? I have no idea. Why don't you go vote. Here's the link. Drop it in the chat. There's a link to the first post here. Click on that and vote. I'm gonna guess you don't have to be logged in
Nope, you can vote whether you are logged in or not. So there it is. Now you could so there's some options here. If you wanted this only to be for logged in users. For example. You could turn off the automatic injection and use a shortcode. And like with a Kadence element or something display at the make it display at the bottom of the post and the row that that's in you could make the visibility logged in or not logged in or whatever. So there's ways to do it. But by default, it's going to show to everybody unless you in some other way. Make it only show to certain people. And again, you can change what is asked. You know, here's the positive answer. Here's the negative answer that's helpful for translation. Or if you just want to ask a different question, but either way, it's going to keep showing you your results right there. Now this isn't sortable either, it would sure be nice if it was sort of well, but it's not. Yeah, it's a very basic but helpful, you know, for instructional type content they'll be seeing and get some very quick user feedback. Yeah, Phoebe that's like a comment section that like if it's not helpful, maybe ask for some additional information. That would be a great suggestion to the developer. You should totally do that. This is a brand new plugin. It was just released. So you know, literally out two weeks ago nobody's using this yet. It's brand new. So go out and you know, create a support ticket with a feature request or leave a review with a feature request and communicate with the developer. All right, that is the helpfulness meter. Any other questions or comments about this? Oh, Vern doesn't do different details propose? No, it's, you get that's the single question. Because what you're after here is a ranking in the column of helpfulness. Okay, next up are a couple of different plugins that do exactly the opposite of each other. And you may need one of these from time to time so I've included them in the roundup. The first one is called stay logged, stay logged and so by default, WordPress with your session cookie, lets the user stay logged in for 48 hours. So if you've ever wondered why you go back in Yep, you know what, sometimes I don't have to log into WordPress. Sometimes I do have to log into WordPress. By default WordPress will keep you in for 48 hours. And then at times you out you have to re log in. Now, say you want to change this. What do you mean hours is a long time. Maybe you only want to have an inactive session open for an hour, right? So if somebody hasn't done anything with it, they're logged in and it's been an hour, I want to automatically log them out. That's what this plugin does. So let's go in here and activate. stay logged. No, tempting fate here by having multiple plugins active there's also this one Alright, stay logged on down down down
alright, so just bumped me. So when I activated the plugin, it reset my session cookie so I had to log back in. Okay, so stay logged that settings are where are the settings
this is one of the wonderful things about word right there. inactivity. Logout is what it's called. These plugins, like they'll put their settings menu someplace where it's called something different in your layout on them. Okay, so this is all what's on the Settings page. And it is how long do you want to stay logged in for so the default here is 3600 seconds, which is an hour. So this is the login duration in seconds. You put whatever number like you could put two seconds on there. If you really want to take off your client, put two seconds they log in, they're logged. That would be really frustrating. Be a great practical joke, but you know otherwise no. No hour and hours. Good, right? If you're not messing around on the site, after your login for an hour, this will bump you and you'll have to re log in. So very simple plugin. It does something very important though. And this may be we have a client that's very security conscious and we have something like this on their side. as well. So that's it that stay log does a very simple thing but very helpful questions or comments on this one. stay logged. All right, down to the next one which is exactly the opposite. Of this other plugin. It is called stop logging me out by my favorite plugin developer name of the Roundup, which is Roy Orbison. Yes, Roy Orbison, and his Gravatar is Roy Orbison as you can imagine. Anyway, this plugin does exactly the opposite. So we'll go in here and we will turn off stop logging me out. Pardon me stay logged and we will activate. Stop logging me out which is really not going to help us at all because it has no settings. But now that we're active, I am never going to be logged out of the site now. Ever period done. It just removes that feature to automatically log me out. So the 48 hour default doesn't even have matter anymore. And I will always be logged into WordPress now, probably not something you're going to want to do widely. But maybe during development, you want to stay logged in or for whatever other reason, you may want to stay logged into a site. This will let you do it. So those are two very opposite plugins that do very different things. But both having to do with the login session in WordPress, so that is that. Questions or comments about one or both of those? are either
Okay. Scrolling on down the list. This one's interesting. How many of you have a site where you maybe have a bunch of URLs and they're in there HTTP, whatever, whatever and they're not clickable. We've adopted some client sites before and it's a pain to go through there and make all those things clickable links manually. This is a very shortcut. Maybe it's a stopgap solution if you have that sort of situation, but it's called clickable. And it allows you it will. What it does is if you have URLs in your content, and they're not linked it will automatically with jQuery, make them a link. So just for example, let me show you what this does. I've got a page set up that
so here we have this page, and see there's a bunch of links are just kind of in the content. Right? And all we have to do is activate this plugin. That's going to load a jQuery on the front end that's looking for URLs, and it's going to wrap them within a tag basically. So now we refresh the page and boom they're all clickable, kind of cool. Probably not that you probably wouldn't want to do this forever. But let's say you've got a quick solution to a problem that you need. You need to make these things clickable. This is a good stop gap to put in the way to immediately making all URLs, clickable, or whatever they are. So it just it's literally just gone in and wrapped them within a tag with the content there that was already there. So that is it clickable. Questions or comments about this one? Pretty straightforward. Ah Sherry, will it make them open a new tab in the browser? No. But there are other plugins for that. Or you could take the code of this plugin and put it in chat GPT and say, Hey, would you also make these open in a new tab and it will say sure, I'll be happy to do that. And here's your code. Oh, John, great question. John asked in the q&a. What happens if you deactivate? So this is not changing anything in the database? So once this is deactivated, there are no more links. So it's just like it was. So this plugin is loading some jQuery on the front end that as the page renders, it's looking for links and the content and adding the a tag and real time version. Yes. Like it's making the tweaks on the fly. Yeah, so it's not changing anything in the database.
Otherwise, questions or comments? Or shall we move on? Let's move on to the next one, which is native maintenance. Now this is a simple plugin. And look, ya'll there's a million maintenance mode plugins for WordPress, right? I mean, there's a million of them. Most of them though, require some sort of setup, right? You got to check you know, check the color and add a logo or it looks weird at the beginning and you have to tweak it. And you know, you could spend 15 1015 minutes setting up the maintenance mode plug in. What if I just want something quick? If I've got to take a site into maintenance or whatever reason, we just discussed, just discussed this morning, a situation where we're probably going to need a 10 minute downtime. The back of a site, move it a working ecommerce site, move it to our server and then point the DNS through Cloudflare. And we don't want anything to happen on the live site and so but I don't want to also I don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a full maintenance mode plugin that's all beautiful and everything's it's not going to be there but for 10 minutes, so I need something that can just throw up there with a quick maintenance. Page. And that's what Native maintenance does. So let me show you what this looks like. Literally, all we have to do is activate the plugin. And then oh, did I get logged out? Let's try again. This is the day of nothing works. All right, native. Here we go. Activate. Okay, it's now working. So if we were to look at the front end of the site, we gotta be not logged in. Let me get this URL. We get a vote we get a like a system generated a WordPress Core Update page. That's it done. And just activate it. Simple page. I don't want to spend time tweaking it or playing with it. There's no settings, no frills, temporary maintenance page. Billy, can you change the tax? I don't think we think it has the UI to do that. I think this is meant. I don't think it has a UI. Now, just activate it and that's it. Right? This is Paul, you could you could add the dot maintenance file but then you just get the one little line. Just you know. Ken, why is there a backlink question?
Oh, it takes you back to your point. It's just a JavaScript backlink history back
Yep, very basic. I know right. I don't know why they did that. Very basic maintenance page.
Y'all may have noticed that during the summer, there's not as many high quality plugins that come out in WordPress, this is one of those months. So scrolling down the list to our last two plugins, both of which are better than the previous several. Are you happy about that? Okay. The next one is a plugin from many orange now many Orange has a button ebene many Orange has many plugins in the plugin directory, most of which are somehow related to login logout. SMA L S A M L access you know cross site logging in they do a lot of stuff in that world and have pretty high quality products. Anyway, this is user and login management. Let's activate this plugin. Now I will say and I noticed this, like many many orange plugins, this is the very salesy plugin. Many orange loves the upsell and it's everywhere. So just Yeah, it is what it is. So let's take a look down here at many orange user and login management plugin and there are a few features here that I think you might like. At first is a really simple way to import and export users to a CSV. And there's a bunch of plugins that do this. This is one of them, you can really easily import and export users from right here. It also has basic user redirection. So redirecting the user to a certain page at login, and also redirecting a user to a certain page that log out. This is one that I really like we've had some questions about this in office hours, a nice plugin that lets me see who's logged in and what's going on. In the session management. It's probably the best feature of this plugin. So here's the active users that are actually online right now. So I could log myself out here if I wanted to. This is going to show you who's on your site, which is kind of nice. So if I hit log out there, oh, it's premium only. See they do this. They show you the feature and make you want it then you got to upgrade to premium. This will at least show you who's on your site. You can also all this is also premium. So many premium things. They have this this makes the site puts a login wall at the front of the site. To you have to be logged in to view the site profile picture. This lets you see you can up up, upload and change people's profile pictures here most of this is in the premium role. Email notifications if somebody has an unsuccessful login attempt not sure whatever you want to use that one but in here's some links to their other plugins. They have a lot of different plugins in this login space. All off logins and so forth, and this kind of connects with all of them. So, again, probably the best thing here is who's logged in, and some other options, but that is the user and login management from many orange. Yep. All right, and let's roll down to the last plugin on the list. This was not trying to sway your votes or anything. This is definitely my favorite of the round up. It is called WP last modified info. Now let me tell you why I found this plugin. This is one that I actually found doing some client work last week. And we're rebuilding a site right now that's been I think we first built the site about 10 years ago and has a lot of old content, a lot of content debt. It's being managed by a person who does SEO. That's a friend of mine from long ago and I discovered in my call with her last week that she has been making teeny tiny little text changes throughout the website. Teeny tiny little things like you know, changing one doctor's name from the dental practice to both doc doctor this and this or whatever, little teeny tiny text changes. I didn't know anything about that. So our dev site has none of those changes. And so I got I started scratching my bald head kind of hard going, how am I going to go back and see what changes she's made and update those on the dev site. How many of you can feel my pain on this if you ever if you've ever had something like that happen? And you're like, look, I'm toast like I am. This is not good, right? Okay. So this plugin is awesome. It's fantastic. It keeps getting better. The more of the features that I've discovered that it has for a free plugin. This one is pretty darn good. So let's let me stop talking about it and actually activate WP last modified info
here it is. Okay. So the thing that I wanted, like I just wanted to be able to go into the post list, and I want to see when it was last modified because I know the date that we forked the dev site from the main site. And so that way I'd be able to see what posts or pages had been modified since that time. And I could go in and look at revisions and compare what had changed, right that was my plan. So you can sort by the last modified date, which is super helpful and there you go. Right. That in itself is really really great. But it gets better. Let's go down to our settings for WP last modified info. Wait till you see all the other stuff that it does. So first, do I want to receive an email notification? Let me start at the beginning. That was the middle tab. Okay, so first, all right. Do I want to show on the front end now this is really cool. Let's open this up. Let's go to a post and it's going to inject Oh maintenance mode
now look, it injected right here at the beginning. Of the post the last updated date automatically. If I toggle this on, if I toggle it off, it's not gonna be there. So that's kind of cool. But not only does it inject the text, watch this. It also adds the appropriate schema. So this Yeah, it adds the Date Modified schema to help Google so this will let Google know oh you index this but guess what it's been modified since then. So you might want to relook at it. It does that automatically. Which is really, really cool. And so if you're injecting it you have some options on how and where you know, the date format, blah, blah, blah, all this. What do I want to put this on archives. Here's the HTML template to display last updated on blah, blah, blah, whatever, what post types we want. To use it for and so forth. Barbara, it does not identify the changes. So to identify the changes, the easiest thing to do is to open up your posts and look at the revisions. So, you know right here we can see that. Four weeks ago, I changed that colon to an exclamation point. That this the diff in the revisions will show you what actually changed. All right, so that's one part. It gets better. We also have so here's the template tag where it's if you're getting into Gutenberg blocks, or if you're using theme templates, I'm skipping that part. Here's the schema where we can decide how we want it to inject that last modified schema. It gives us some options there. Okay, here's here's the next thing. I wish I'd done this weeks ago because I could have had the site emailing me every time a change was made so that I could just stack those up and go back and address those. It will do that. So you can say I want to I want you to notify me. And here's all the details about that. Blah, blah, blah if a change is made, so that's kind of nice. But there's more. There's also our miscellaneous options. So this I don't know what this means. Maybe it's not ready yet. I haven't seen any changes. Maybe I just didn't look in the right place. But y'all. Hi, plugins last modified info. I look at that. And I'm like, what? Oh, yeah. Look what this does to the plugin list. It tells you when the plugin was last updated. How about that? That's pretty cool. Like if I'm gonna go in and evaluate a site and see. You know how, if there's any plugins that are super old, I can just activate this plugin, and it adds it and look at the other things. Look, it adds how many ratings it's got, how many reviews, the minimum version of WordPress, or the minimum pH. I guess that's PHP version isn't available or not available. It gives me a link directly to the plugin page here. That's pretty darn cool. So that's there and you can turn that off if you want.
There's still some things here. I haven't even looked at very hard. So there's also a tools. So you know, lets you it lets you import and export settings between sites. So if you get the settings like you like it on one site, you can export them and import them into another site and then there's a help area that's not clickable on this Share button. I can't get to that. So I think they're still doing some work on this plugin. But this is very, very powerful. I really, really like that has some really cool features. The question from Vern, email address only users and admins, it can be any email address, so if I got rid of that I can type whatever I want to write. Yeah, works with SEO plugins as well. To add that last modified date, pretty cool stuff. That is WP last modified info. All right, that brings us to the end of this month's plugin roundup here on iThemes Training as always, we wrap up the round up with the question of which was your favorite plugin of the roundup one vote one vote only please. These will go into our best of at the at the end of the six month period. Let's see. Yeah. So yeah, dopey last modified by far, taking it away, yet by far. All right. That's it. Couple of votes. We'll see. Stop logging me out. Vote for spots. Vote for the maintenance one. Yeah. All right. So summertime, y'all. Summertime often means developers are on vacation and not as a plugin quality goes down a little bit but we usually have one or two that are quite good during the summer. I think that last modified one certainly deserves that place. Okay, that's gonna wrap it up for us today. There is no live stream tomorrow. But we'll be back for office hours for members. On Thursday. As usual. Let me show you something that we have scheduled in this let's see this is a week from today. This is going to be a great live stream with Dan conosce. The truth about WordPress malware scanners. This is an article that's gotten quite a bit of traction on social media. Because it's it's showing some research from patch stack and others in the security space that shows how WordPress based malware scanners that a lot of plugins use simply are not a good way to do security. Because malware that's running in your WordPress environment can modify what those scanners report and so it can turn off the fact that there's malware and you'd never be aware of it so it's gonna be a really good deep dive into how WordPress malware scanners work. How they're being actively defeated today in the wild by certain kinds of WordPress malware, and what are the kinds of security practices that we ought to have in place instead? So that is coming up a week from today and then also, a week from tomorrow. The WordPress 6.3 Launch Event WordPress six three we'll be releasing one week from today. That is August the eighth. And the very next day August the ninth we'll have our own Timothy Jacobs here. Timothy is deep deep into core WordPress. He is one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API and he is a core contributor to core WordPress, also the lead developer for all of solid WPS products. Timothy will be with us as he has for the last several WordPress releases, walking through all the new features and answering your questions about WordPress six, three. So that's all coming up on iThemes Training up See you next time members I'm back on Thursday for office hours again here on iThemes Training where we go further together