So welcome everybody. It is May 2022 And it's the first Tuesday of May. And it is the plugin roundup here on iThemes Training. It is the longest running webinar series on I iThemes Training. We've been doing it for a long time now I should have looked up the numbers. It's been a while. So we started a long time ago and every month we bring a fun list of plugins to the front that had been newly added to or updated in the WordPress plugin directory. Usually over the last 30 days. We add some different things from time to time, but generally in the last 30 days, and we put them together in a list and bring it to you folks here on this fine webinars. So glad you're here and let us get started. So we're going to begin today with a neat little plugin that I find very handy. It is called conflict finder by WP fix it so let me ask you, How many times have you had a problem with a plugin and the very first email from tech support says What?
What does it say? Always always disable all
your active plugins. Right. And yes, I asked your developer Thank you Cheryl. That was great. Oh, yeah, so that's really good. Advice. Because generally speaking, if it's a quality plugin, and it's just not working for you, like you're probably the only one that's having that issue, right. So we need to figure out what the conflict is. And so disabling plugins is a very logical and wise first step. So the challenge with that is how many of you go through and you disable disable disable and then you go to re enable that one? Which plugins did I have active and maybe I had some inactive plugins, which is not a best practice, but maybe I did. So you know, how do I remember what I did? And by the way, that can take a little time checking a bunch of boxes. Anyway. Conflict finder helps you deal with that whole situation. It is a great light if you're going to start troubleshooting a site. This is a great plugin. I just stick on there at least for the time when you're troubleshooting. Let me show you why. So let me go over to our plugins list and I
will give you the overview of this plug in
conflict finder. There it is. Okay, activating conflict finder. That's gonna give us a menu items somewhere
well Oh, it's
Yeah. Okay. So it's in two places. It adds the giant disabled plugins button that I just looked right past so don't look past the giant disabled plugins button. So watch what happens here. The plugin developer support says disable all your plugins. Okay. One click done except for conflict finder, which stays active which is not a problem. All other plugins had been disabled. What's cool is this you may have noticed before, I disabled plugins that many plugins were active and many plugins were inactive. This plugin remembers which ones were active. So when I click Restore plugins, boom, just that fast. The active ones are active and the inactive ones are inactive. Isn't that great? I think that's super cool. Now here's the other thing. Watch this disabled plugins. Now let's start one at a time activating plugins. Did that fix it? Nope. Let's activate another one that fix it. Now. Let's activate another okay. So now I figured out what it is, even though some are active and some are not. So the state is a little different. Like for example, neither of these plugins were active before I'm going to hit Restore plugins. And it's going to remember like it left the ones on that I just activated but it turned on all the others so you can do this in pieces even and it remembers what was active before you started this process. So I find this to be a pretty cool tool to help with this whole debugging process. Now it does give you something else as well. And that is you notice up here in the top there is an admin menu link for debug area. So let's click that. And right here in the debug area, you have the ability to toggle on and off debug, debug log and script debug. And I say debug if you're a developer you say debug apparently that's every smart developer I know says the bug but I just can't say that. Anyway, so we'll turn on our web T WP debug and debug log etc. And look we click debug logs. And oh look right there. We got all like we have things like you can see you get immediate access to your logs right here. So that's the other thing this tool does. I find it really great. It's not something I probably leave on every site all the time. But for troubleshooting This one's really cool. So Alright, any other questions or comments on this one? This is a good one, right conflict finder, or conflict finder. WP fix it. All right, so let's move on down the list to the next plug in on the list.
And that one is, well we're actually
into a group of block editor plugins. So if you are starting to use block editor and play around with things, here's a few that you might find interesting. One is icon separator, which is a handy little thing that lets you put an icon separator on your you know, it's named on the nose which is helpful. So let's activate icon separator and I head over to that page really quickly.
And let me just edit this page. Now you will
notice that I have on this page already a nice little block of text and let's say right here between this column of text the two columns in the one column, I want to put something here that separates this. So let's
add a block
and icon separator. And there's our separator. So over here we have some settings. And this is really nice, y'all so icon settings. Look here first. Let's say you have a custom SVG that you want to use as your icon. Well, you can simply take the text of that SVG file and paste it right here. And boom, your icon is there. Isn't that cool? I like that a lot. However, we are just going to use the built in icon collection here. And I'm just going to grab something Oh, I don't know. Let's use this dashboard icon. Insert icon. Okay, so there it is. It's teeny tiny. Oh, but look underneath we have some icon with settings to eams three eams or I can do a custom. We can make it 20 em so for 320 that's really big. Doesn't make it 10 or
10. Again, it's
still pretty big, but look at that. It's kind of cool, right? Let's make it three just alright, and icon spacing so how much space is on either side of the icon by the border one em to make up your own Ian's that's kind of nice, right? Oh look icon fill color. So let's make it blue. And notice it pulls in all the Kadence color palette. That's being used on the site. How about a stroke
color? That's ugly. That's ugly.
Let's clear that. But you have the ability to put a stroke on it if you would like look oh, now there's some separator settings. So how wide is the separator in comparison to the container that it's in? Is it three quarter with half with third fourth custom? That's kind of cool, right? We can add top and bottom margin. They can be linked or unlinked for how much margin we're giving this icon block. And let's see here, though the line style so do we want dots dashes, whatever? How many pixels is the line? Look at that. You can do all sorts of things with this. And you can even set the color if you'd like.
So, this is
a super Now granted, it's one block okay, it's one plugin for one block, but this block has so many options. I find it super intuitive. And this is one of the there are a lot of things I liked about the block editor and this kind of live preview of what it looks like as you're changing all the settings is one of the things I really really liked about block editor. So there you go. question Where do you put the alt text or description for that icon? That is an excellent question. So it doesn't
look like there is
anything built in to do that. However, look what it did. We pulled our icon out of the library. It dropped in SVG markup, so we could probably add it manually right here if we wanted to. And that would work. That's
a great question. Dave, does
it work in page builders? Nope. This is a block. So it uses the block editor.
All right, any other questions or comments for this one? Here's how it looks on
the front end. It looks remarkably like what it looks like on the back end. Like that. We need some bottom margin here. But there you go. Oh, all righty.
All right. Moving on to the next one is magazine blocks by block card. So if you
if you are
designing a site that has lots of content particularly oh I don't know a magazine site. Figure, big blog, lots content. These are a set of blocks I think you will find to be very helpful. So this is magazine blocks by block art. Let me activate this one. Now. These are content blocks. They're basically I mean in a nutshell, these are ways that posts can be arranged in an interesting way. Okay, so there's several of these that I really like. So let me go back to a page for this. I think it's just blank.
It gives me a spot to do things okay. So
here there are five blocks. So there's featured posts, Banner posts, grid posts, list and tab posts. Now many of these things you could do with Kadence blocks. However, one of the one thing that this is a little bit different is this really focuses in on post author and comments. And categories. Because you know, on a magazine or a big a very content rich blog site, you've got a lot of taxonomy happening and you want to make that accessible to people. And you want to show who the author is and you want to lift comments up to the top and this just does it out of the box in a beautiful way. So for example, let's just do feature posts to start. So what that's going to do is have one big post at the top, and then a list of posts going down. So notice how it displays we've got the author and the author's avatar there. We've got a link to the number of comments. We have the taxonomies here underneath and all of these things are styleable on the side here, so it's pretty cool. I like this one a lot. Let's look at
another one. Banner posts are
sort of the same way. It looks better on the front end, but it sort of arranges things and you know one of these Metro type block arrangements, kind of cool. Another one
here is the
grid which is just a very simple grid but it makes it full width right across back to back posts. looks better on the front end. Another one that I really like is the tab posts. So look at this, so latest and popular. So this is like how many comments and things and so it's tabs that work like this. And what's really neat about this particular one is that you can add this
in a column
it looks really good, like in a half column on a page. So not spend too much more time on this because there's nothing really extraordinary as far as functionality. This is just a great set of blocks if you have a magazine or big blog type site to quickly add content with the sort of things that a magazine or a big blog would like taxonomy and author that sort of thing. Pretty cool. All right. So that is magazine blocks by block art any other questions or comments on that one? Robin, yes, many of those things can be done with Kadence. This just like you'd have to do some a little extra design. These are just kind of pre done blocks. If I was already using Kadence blocks, I'm not sure I would use this plugin because you can do a lot of this out of the box Kadence as well. All right, so let us move on to the next one. If you you are using block editor you want this plugin like this, I think is a must have for block editor users and it's called Gutenberg. Add New Post. This in my opinion should be wrapped into the block editor by default. Let's just go here and add a new page. And you'll notice immediately here at the top that there is a new button.
Well Did I
activate the plugin? Yes, I did. Oh, you know what, I don't think I refresh this page and that's going to be probably
at Hang on. There it is. Okay,
so I start typing first. So once we actually get the auto draft we get this new button up here. So let's say we just created a page whatever. Let's drop some ipsum text in awesome. Publish. We got our page Great. Now, right here at the top. I've been having problems on dumpy Nathan today. It's been really slow. Anyway right here is a quick button, add new page. Boom, we just get right into a new page. So it's a nice little. It makes it's a lot quicker for the UI also. Once we get here, there's a couple of things hidden here as well, which is duplicate the page and delete the page permanently. So we could go into for example, an existing page
let's go to this icon separator page this is weird that buttons not showing up. I wonder if we've got a conflict with some other a bunch of plugins active it probably shouldn't be Well isn't this weird well unless you duplicate
the page or delete the page permanently right here from it's going away something weird is happening on the site today y'all weird weird weird. Yeah, right Jeff the wheeling we got something to help us find conflicts. This is weird. Normally that's down something is there's weirdness going on.
And there's been things happen oh, yeah. Wow. Many many problems. Wow. I'm going to deactivate the Gutenberg plugin.
This is why they say don't use Gutenberg on a live site. The plugin Gutenberg now that didn't help either.
Good grief.
What is all of
this? Okay, so
something Yeah, look at this. Something's going on here today. Just a couple errors. It's not it's not yet the tempo the conflict plugin now. I don't know. I've had problems happening all day on the up Nathan and I don't know what the deal is. And I'm gonna blame Chris that's what I'm gonna do. Who knows? Okay, so hopefully we can make it through the rest of this webinar. Anyway, I would suggest that you try this crazy little plugin called Gutenberg, add new post on your site, and it probably will not break like it does. On my site. Is really it's not the icon one
I don't know. I deactivated it right. I don't know something
is just weird weirdness is happening this did not happen when I tested this only a few hours ago. I don't know see my w is even going here. Something's going on on the site. I don't know. Yeah, this is live webinar disease. Okay. Anyway. If you like the Page Builder or the block editor, I would try this plugin you'll like it. Because it right here duplicate page Delete Permanently. It's all right there and you can click Add a new and it knows what post type your answer will add a new post, add new custom post and a post type whatever. Okay, moving along to the next block editor. plugin, which he says with much trepidation. This one is screen reader text format. So if you are particularly
looking for
if you're particularly concerned about accessibility, like we all should be, then there's a few things that you have to be aware of with screen readers now. We we are having a an event in the at the end of June with Amber Hines and equalised digital where we're talking all about accessibility. That's a premium event. It's a two day four hour training all about accessibility. One of the things that screen readers can't read for example, is strikethrough text and so that's one of the reasons this plugin was created. But this plugin basically what it does is it gives you an interface in the block editor to create some text, even highlight some text in like a paragraph for example, and mark that as screen reader only. So it hides that text from a typical desktop view. But for a screen reader it it reads the text so that it gives context to something right so if you have an image that needs to be explained beyond what the caption does, or particularly like maybe you've got some strikethrough text screen readers don't read strike through text so you don't know. And so you could preface that strike through your text saying you know the following text is is strikethrough so let me just show you how this works. It's really cool. If you are concerned about designing for accessibility, which I hope you're this is a great little addition in the block editor. So let's edit screen reader text format and hope our editor doesn't blow
up. Maybe time to
blow off them beneath and start over again. Alright, so I am going to type the following text is strikethrough.
Now what I can do is highlight that text and from the context menu here select screen reader only now it highlights this text and see it disappears here but it's actually or did it just kill things
just happen? Everything is broken. The world is broken. Oh my goodness.
Oh no. There it is. Well
weirdness is occurring All right, so it's there. And if he as you this is the
Alright, so let's look at it on the front end so it's not going to show up here. However, if you look at
there's a span here. The following text is strikethrough. So
that's going to read on a screen reader, but it does hide from your desktop view. So it's it's helpful.
It's helpful. All right. Any questions? On this one before I move on?
I hope once we move out of some block editor plugins that that's where our conflicts lie and
starts to work okay,
let's deactivate anything related. To any of those things that we were just
doing. And hope that we no longer have problems. Okey dokey. Moving right along. All right, the next
one is sticky. floating button sticky floating button. All right. So there's a number of ways you could do this. And this plugin is one of them. You could do this with a Kadence element that is fixed. You could do this with your own little div and some CSS but this makes it really easy for even a client to change. What your sticky button looks like and by sticky button I mean you know a button that is stuck to like the bottom of a screen like call now. You know, click to WhatsApp, us or
whatever. So
let's let's activate sticky floating but
and a few
things. It does create an unnecessary top level menu but you know there you have Alright, so the default settings let's just look at the site and you'll see them
I can go there. Alright, look at their sticky button right there. There it is. Just sticks to the bottom of the page. Works really well on mobile. And
so this would be great for like a literally persistent call. To action that's there throughout your website. You've seen things like this right? And this is an easy way to do it. You literally just activate this plug in. This is what the text is going to say. This is the link the button goes to. They give you a couple of tips if you want to be click the call, you know you add the TTL and your link where does that link go? Is it new window same parent or open the link document? Is the position of the button left right center or is it full width. You can set your background and text colors you can choose from a very limited number of system fonts. They did this I don't know why they did this. It should have just picked up the theme font but they didn't do that. You can set your sizes based on your screen padding for the buttons. And and this is really nice. You can exclude like if you don't want this button to appear on certain pages or posts or whatever. You can add a comma separated list of post or page ID so it can't be the title. It's got to be the number you know comma separated list and it will not appear on those pages. So that's really helpful. Again, super simple. The reason I like that again, you can do this a lot of different ways and accomplish the same result but what the reason I like this one is it is so easy like a client could just log into the back area. Oh sticky button, edit the text, edit, change whatever done right and it's just done and it works. So there you go. That is sticky button but digimax Any questions or comments on
that one?
Beth, so you can't just put it on one page that listing all that yes, yes, they have excludes not includes for this one. Question How to exclude pages so now the what she would you it says here you have to use the paste or paste page or post ID. So in order to get the ID you can do that a couple of different ways. just pasting in core WordPress you kind of have to look down here at this little area and see this one says post equals 161. So that's the ID of that post. Here's also a plug in called Show Ids from 99 robots.
And let's
see there's a bunch of them actually now DRO draft press bought that one from 99 robots. If we activate that plugin and we go back to our posts list that will give you the idea is right here in a column. So if you're gonna be doing this a lot then
do that. Yep.
All right. So if you want to exclude then what you're going to want like so for example, if you if you were going to do something like this, and you only wanted it to show up on certain pages, that's where I would create a Kadence element, a fixed element and that way you could say I only want it on this page.
So this is probably not the best solution. If you only want the button to appear on certain pages. This is really designed for a persistent button that's there on your whole site.
Okay, any other questions or comments on that one?
Okey dokey. Moving down the list to an interesting little plugin that I have. It is I had a couple of problems with this, but it's good enough that I wanted you to see it. No question about the show ideas button hang secondary type, it's draft press.
Here's the link. Now. Yeah, that's it. There is the link to the plugin right there. Okay,
document engine.
So do you have a website? On which it would be helpful
if people could click a button and have the contents of the page delivered to them as a PDF? Wouldn't that be good? For example? Maybe you have a site that has a directory and you would like somebody to be able to print out a PDF of your directory list or maybe it's a single entry or you have a recipe site, or maybe it's a historical society and you've got pages big, you know, historical, whatever page and boom, hit the button and PDF, right. Lots of use cases for this. And document engine does it and it's pretty simple to set up. There's a couple problems I found throughout but I will explain that in just a moment.
So document engine, document engine. And
we have a document thing here Okay, so it's gonna put a button out there. And we're gonna call it download PDF. That's great. What post types now notice over here, that it has picked up WooCommerce products and stuff in summary, which are two custom post types we have in this test site that were created by pods. And so it knows about that. And so I'm actually just going to have those show up on the stuff page. What's going to happen, you have a couple of options. We can when you click Download PDF, it can pop open the PDF and a new window or it can just prompt the download. Now I usually like it just to pop the PDF open in a new tab. You can choose whatever you want. Where's the button going to be before the content or after the content? Let's say before the contrast you have to the content? And is the button right, left or centered? And let me just show you this so you can see what it looks like. So we have it on our stuff. custom post type. So let's take a look at what we've got there. And I don't remember what that was what is my favorite word count picture.
There isn't one. I literally I
think this is something we set up during a webinar one day, but you can see right here is the Download PDF button. I'm going to click that. And Wallah. We get that it knows headings. It's got text it's got the title and page numbers that are generated automatically. Isn't that cool? So I like that a lot. It's really helpful. And
there are a few other options in this plugin as well.
Heather can it rely on CSS for styling? Why yes, it can. I'm glad you asked if you click the style look, you can enter your own things or you can say use the current theme CSS so you can drop in your
own CSS
Barbara's asking what a popup blocker stop that probably not because we're actually opening a new tab. It's doing the same thing as like on a link target equals blank where it would just opens a new tab so it's this is not a pop up.
It's opening a new tab.
So this is the part you'd want to experiment with. I had some this like I can't I'm not sure why the fonts not changing here. This just will take some experimentation. I literally spent like five minutes on this plugin getting used to it and see what's going on. It definitely deserves some more investigation. The other thing you can do is deal with your headers and footers so you can put common headers and footers drop a logo in the header. This doesn't work right now, but but it could be this site also. So like when I inspect this, there is a console error that happens whenever I click this to browse out to find a graphic but it may just be my site it may just be WP Nathan is broke, broke. So try it on your site. It may work I put in a support ticket for the plugin Dev. So you want to show the post title which we did right here. Do you want to show page numbers? Yep. How about the header font size we can set that? Do you want tags in the footer. You can add HTML here to generate your own custom footer for each page. Show the post title page number, footer font size so you get a lot of control over what these things look like. You have some things about the page as well. Is the page horizontal or vertical? So do you want you know landscape or portrait? What font sizes used? You know, so you have a lot of options here. Pretty cool stuff. So that is document engine from Matrix add ons. If you have a site that would benefit from this, you know as kind of scrape the surface testing this one you want to dig into it a little bit but it appears to work very, very well. Let's see a few questions in the chat. Deb there is a setting for photos yes or no. So it works with photos. Like if we let's just do this. Let's go to the button. Oh, there's something else. There's two other things this does that I forgot to mention. They also include a block that is a PDF viewer. So if you have a PDF, they've got their own block that will display that PDF on your page, which is cool. Also, if you want to manually place the button, there's a shortcode to do that. So with that being said, if I go back here to my let's just enable page, also for this to work. And if I go back to that page, where I just was with the icon separator let's view that one and big icon. Now we have that. So there's a picture here, right? Let's download this as a PDF. Yep, see picture show up. Now notice what it didn't do was retain the columns. But that was a setting that I haven't played with yet. So it does retain the pictures that are in the text. It did not want to test it it pull in the featured image for a post for example, that does that I'm sure it will do that. I just don't know how it deserves some further explanation. Christine, will it retain URLs or links you might you can probably put that in the footer stuff where the settings I've got too many windows open
Good grief. But or
maybe what you could do that's weird. It seems like they'd have you know add links to the page. You may have to actually generate some sort of shortcode are here to make the link appear. But it doesn't do that out of the box. You'd have to figure that out. Okay, so is this for the admin of the viewer to create that PDF or can you set this so Q this is it's on the front end of the site, right? So this would allow your user to click the button and have a PDF of the page. That's what that's the point of the plugin. It's pretty cool. Let's see is the PDF created with accessible content or as an image of the page content? So it is a
it's text? Right so this would be as it's just a standard text? PDF? It's not an image. Let's see
Stacy, do you think it would work on websites that don't let you right click and copy. I think those two things are unrelated. Because what this is going to do is pick up the content of the page and turn it into a PDF.
Oh, Christina is saying if you have links in the content, that is
what I just do. There we go. That is an excellent
question. And I don't know the answer to that. Why don't we find out?
Let's go back to a page and make a link, shall we? Let's just make a link out of this. Just make it a hash to get a link. Update, view and PDF.
I did retain the styling but the link did not go through.
So that's kind of a bummer. All right. Cole, can
you customize the button style?
Yes. You can. So here in the Button Settings. Styling
let's see Wait, no. Oh, you know what you can't actually this is it's you could with CSS but there's no interface in the plugin to do that. So what it's actually doing is it's picking up the theme style. For the button and using that which is really the best thing to do so that your buttons look consistent. I would think Lizabeth what resolution of the PDF be created. I have no idea yet test that so I gotta move on just for sake of time. So there's a lot of questions about this. You see the usefulness of this plugin. I would encourage everybody to download it and try it out. And if you like it, leave a great review for the author.
Okay. Moving on down the
list is our s WP books showcase. So does anybody have a book list on a website that you've created for yourself or a client? Maybe it's a list of books that they recommend but they have affiliate links and those sorts of things, right. So this is a that you can create this in a custom post type and you know, create your single layout using your page builder or, you know, or or Kadence element now that it will allow you to create templates for custom post types. You can do all that but if if what you need is a simple book list that has all the custom fields already set up for just about anything you want to care about with this book. Then this is the plugin it just it's just going to work. So RS books showcase.
Let me activate that plugin. And we'll see a
book right there. And I think I have Yes, I added a sample book, which is full of ipsum text. So the way this will work, you got your title of the book, you can type whatever you want about the book, maybe a book review or whatever. And now look, we have this block have custom fields for our book information. So we've got the name of the book, the published date, publisher name, short description, country pages, all the things all the numbers. Now there's a button. a buy button text and a button links so you could put in do you have an Amazon affiliate link for example, you could put it there, your pricing and so forth. And when we look at this
looks pretty decent. Oh, you know what I had this problem
when that sometimes when you when you activate a plugin that creates a custom post type like this one does, you frequently have to reset your permalinks so if this happens to you, like we have this new custom post type books, you need to just reset your permalinks which means changing them to plain
and then back to post name. And then this will work. Okay,
so there's our view, right? Nothing special about it. The colors don't match my site. So I'm going to want to go in with some CSS and tweak the colors but I mean, look, it's a simple book review page. There's my title, my blurb. There's a buy button pops open the buy link, we got all our stuff right there. Yeah, I mean short description in our review. It's all right there and look a sticky button at the bottom. So you want that too. So it's really a simple plugin. You could totally do this with a custom post type if you wanted to change you know if you really wanted to make the display look different than this. I mean, it's what you see is what you get. If you don't like the way it displays you got to make your own that's fine. But if you just want something simple like this could be up and running in five minutes, versus taking a couple hours to build out a custom post type and a custom display for it. So Barney will this work for real and ebooks? Sure. I mean you're you're uploading the image. I mean, you're you can put whatever you want in here. It doesn't even have to be books necessarily. All these custom fields are geared toward books. But yeah, I mean, you put the image in here. You can look here it has a taxonomy for authors which is cool. So you could link the link to each other. That's kind of nice. I'm gonna guess there's Yeah, look, there's two taxonomies here. I didn't notice this earlier. There's book categories and book authors. So you'll have a taxonomy list of all the books that show up in that category or all the books this author created. That's all built out whether it's real books, ebooks doesn't matter. You know, you can link out to the purchase wherever you want it to go. So pretty cool plug in, functional out of the box. You could build this yourself, but I mean if it's a simple book displays all you need, this is great. Any more questions or comments about this one before we move on? Because I have a bevy I say a bevy of WooCommerce plugins to show you. If you are a WooCommerce person you will like I'm about to show you because there are very cool things to come. Alright, the first of the WooCommerce plugins is product layouts for WooCommerce. Now, here's the thing, one thing I do you want to say is we scheduled
webinars. Okay. You haven't seen this yet? We scheduled may 18.
So it's about two weeks. It's a it's a it's Yeah. Two weeks from tomorrow, been written or the founder of Kadence is going to be with us talking all about the new Kadence shop kit, which is ground breaking. I'm saying that, like it's pretty significant. It's a complete rewrite of the shop yet it's not like it used to be it can allow you need to do many things like what this plugin I'm about to show you does. And so a lot of the stuff you'll be able to do with Kadence and Shotcut. If you're not using Kadence then this plugin is great. This this let me give you the link. This is a free webinar for everybody. So if you want to register for that one do it it's going to be great. We've got already like 600 people signed up for that webinar. So yeah, it's the first first come first serve 500 seats once they're filled, they're gone. But yeah, this is gonna be a great webinar coming up on Kadence.
Anyway,
so this plugin though, particularly if you're not using Kadence is just unbelievable.
Let me show you. First we activate the plugin.
We've learned that on plugin Roundup, if you try to use the plugin, before the plugin is
active, doesn't work. That's just my little word of wisdom. To you. Oh, the Register link is not working well, look at that.
Okay, well, we'll get that fixed and I will just give me like, I don't know what's going on there. I will have that fixed within an hour after the webinar wraps up today. I think I know what happened. It was a change that somebody besides me made so it was not my fault this time. This time. I can't email you. Just give it like give me an hour after we wrap up and go look and it'll work. Okay.
I think I know what happened there. Yes, I know it says the event is over.
But we will get that fixed. Just give it an hour. Now what so what happened was this webinar was scheduled previously and we changed it out for a Kadence for a another webinar instead. And I think they use that link before it and they let this other link. I don't know what happened. It was a mess. They did. In other words, they rescheduled the event. They did not put the correct link back on this webinar when they did that. But I will make sure that it's fixed. Just give me an hour after the webinar wraps up. Okay. All right. So product layouts for WooCommerce. Here we are. There is now a product Layout menu item. Oh Mike, Sarah, I think that's Sara. Everybody say hi to Sarah in the chat. Oh, it's Mike. Hey, Mike. Nobody can see Mike but me because he's only talking to me. But he's fig. He's fixing it as we speak. So I'll continue to speak and Mike will fix the things. Okay, so where we are now is product layouts for WooCommerce as I re gather my thoughts here, product layouts for WooCommerce lets you do some really cool things with product layouts for WooCommerce. So for example, here is their basic new styling here.
And you've got some C here.
Alright, let's just create a new style shaly we'll call this one our test
style. This one is going to blow you away. So here's our new
style. And so from the beginning, how many columns do we want in this view of products? 123478 12 I mean Good grief. You can change how many columns you want. That's pretty cool. We can change our column gap right here. We can change our row gap. Let's make it three columns just so you can see a row. We can change our row gap. Isn't that awesome? The way that preview is I really really liked that. So they also do we want to show the category or hide the category. Show the tile rating, boom. You can turn on and off all those things. Do I want to show these little icons that pop up? I can turn those off to the product settings themselves like what am I actually displaying? I can display categories I can display recent best selling things that are on sale. And at the end of this it's gonna give us a shortcode we can put anywhere. If you do have an icon, you can have you know what is my Add to Cart icon. If it's a group, product and external product, the variable product you can change up all those icons right there.
We can get into style. So what needs to go here?
Do we want it to be centered or to the right
is there a border around this area? Or not? All the
things that you want to do you can do. It is super cool. So image styles. Which size of an image is it going to be? Is there a border? Is there a radius? Let's make let's make it round.
Just that quick, right?
If we're showing categories, what do those look like? Change the typography, the font, the weight all those
things? You have control over
basically everything with title looks like what the ratings look like what the price looks like. And even here in the advanced area, you can change the background color of the grid. You can change border margins and paddings all those things. So once now that we've built our beautiful product grid here
we can
grab our shortcode right there. So we can grab the shortcode drop it on a page post and we're done.
Super, super cool.
All right. Any other questions or comments on this one? It's a great plugin isn't it's one of the best WooCommerce plugins I've
seen. All right, next up in the
list is another really cool WooCommerce plugin. So one of the most frequently missed opportunities is the thank you page. After you finish an order. You know the customer is checked out they're happy with you. They love your store, they bought something, what a great place to engage them with something else. And yet the thank you page is frequently not customized by people who do WooCommerce sites because it's a little difficult sometimes, right? I mean, do you know how to customize the thank you page right now?
Maybe maybe not.
This gives you a really easy interface using the customizer to tweak the WooCommerce thank you page. Let me show you how easy this is. Let's go in and activate this plugin
thank you page there it is. And we go into the customizer. Now this does take a
moment to load up in the customizer. So just be aware of that we click the thank you page and we're loading and we're loading again one more time. Give it a second. Now it's working. Okay, so we are now on the thank you page. And this is out of the box. Right? This is how it just works out of the box. So thank you first name, there's your order number. I can edit this by the way, and I've got all the order in it's got my little, you know, merge tag here, and I've got all these other merge tags I can
pull in.
I can, you know, do I want to add a coupon code I can do that. But look like you've got this layout. There's a thank you message. There's a coupon code. There's an order confirmation. You can move these things around if you want and it just shows up right here. This is super, super cool. You can even add additional areas if you want like I want to add a single row boom, there it is. And I want to add social icons. And let's see I need to edit those.
And let me just put in a couple of hashtags. Look at that. Isn't that cool? So you can do all sorts
of things. Without her yes Stacy, instead of having a full with a page template right here in the customizer. And let's say you know you want to edit the customer information. Boom. There it is. You can change all the things you've got styling. You've got templating you want to change everything. It's all done right here. It is so easy to use. It's ridiculous. So you know we want the social up at the top. Well, let's
put the social up at the top. Boom, right there. This
plugin is fantastic. I've not seen anything like this so that is the thank you page customizer. Now there are there are a few frowny faces on this one, okay. It creates a top level menu item, just so you're aware. It does that. I'm not quite sure why, but it does because it uses the customizer. But there is
a top level menu item that is created. Thank You page. I don't know why they did that.
Also, it immediately the first time you activate this gives you two giant spam banners across the top so just be aware of that. Also, it adds this animated bar that's that star spins from time to time and I don't know why and it's really annoying to me. So just you know, you can dismiss this, but it's a principle of the matter. So this is a plugin that while cool, takes advantage of the real estate that it has to use. In your WordPress dashboard. So there you go. That is customized. Thank You page customizer. I still think it's a great plugin from Villa fie. Any other questions or comments on this one?
Good stuff, right. All right, here's another one.
I just in a recent Office Hours Somebody had a question about pricing dynamically for WooCommerce. Like based on user role or quantities or that sort of thing. And I gave you the example that we've used before, which was discount rules for WooCommerce which is great. It was Beth That's right, Beth, it was your question. Discount rules for WooCommerce which is a great plugin. This
one y'all is better.
I think this might be the most fully featured pricing add on that I've seen yet. For WooCommerce it is really really really good. So let's activate this one. And I will show you what I mean.
Live By the way, anybody else remember, Microsoft Live mesh. We're going back
15 years this was like early documents syncing between two windows computers like to early 2000s. I'm showing my age here anyway, live mesh was awesome. Barney remembers it. He was great. Like you could have files on your desktop in the mesh folder, and it would automatically synchronize over to your laptop that like way before any cloud services. It was great. Anyway, live mesh. Okay, so we're skipping the Freemius thing. And we're gonna look at this new dynamic pricing for WooCommerce. So there's two approaches to this. You can do it per product, or there's a global site store level, right. So we're going to start at the store level, which is under WooCommerce settings. And dynamic pricing. It just makes sense where they put things to which is really helpful. So there are no dynamic pricing rules yet. Let's
make one so we're going to call this webinar test.
Alright, so look at this. You can do it by the day of the week. If you want to on Mondays, we give a 10% discount whatever you can do. It the time of the day, which particular product or variation or how much quantity or the price or the sales price, or like I only want this rule to apply to things in the test products category. That's what this is gonna do. Okay? And we're gonna say what's gonna happen here,
I want this could be bulk pricing.
So if if somebody buys out of any products in the test products category, if they buy 10 to 20 products in that category, I'm going to give them a 10% discount. And if they buy 21 to 40, you're gonna get a percentage discount of 20% Just like that, and you can keep stacking these things up. Isn't that great? This is really cool and it is, you have so many like the the amount of things amount of customizations that you can do to set these dynamic rules is really amazing. Look at this user role. Let's say you have a member site, and there's a WooCommerce site there as well and you want to give all your members automatically 10% off in the store. Watch this.
Let's start that. So
let's say user role is equal to customer and for whatever your user role for your members are, right? We can say it's a simple adjustment, and they're going to get a percentage discount of 20% all done right. That's it. As long as they're logged in, they will get a 20% discount on everything they buy. Isn't that cool? Now you could also say it only applies to products in the exclusive category. All members get 20% off of exclusive products. Isn't
that great? Scott, did
they see the retail price of the sales price? That's a great question. So it depends on how you set this up. By the way, Hi, Scott. How's it going, man? Yeah, this is how it shows up. So does it show up? As just the regular price? Or does it show up as a sale price? So if you say it's sale, then they see the standard WooCommerce badge with sale and the the strikeout price and the sale price or it just shows up as the regular price for them. Question Will the viewer see what the rules are while shopping? No. And let me you would have to go out and write those out. Yeah, this is a great plugin. This is why I said this may be the most fully featured pricing add on that I've seen yet for WooCommerce it's fantastic. All right. So you can just sort of imagine the possibilities here. And oh, by the way, just quickly. This was the global level, you do have the ability to add a product level.
Now that one's variable I want
to get into that. Let me just find a simple product fast
downloadable kittens. Okay.
Well long product description. See dynamic pricing. So right here you can add pricing rules just for this product that will overrule your your global rules for this product. So there you go. That is live mesh dynamic pricing for WooCommerce. Any questions or comments on this one? This is gonna be a hard vote today, isn't it?
Yeah. Okay. Now we come to the end which
I believe is Chris Malone's favorite plugin of the list and has recently become very, very, very useful for us on the agency side. We use this one to save a ton of work. And it is called Import Export, XML and other things by SMAC coders Okay? So let us
activate that. Oh, by the way. This is
if you ever seen plugins, import export XML CSV images to WordPress is the name of the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. The plug in is actually called WP ultimate CSV importer plugin. That's how it shows up here. The reason it's called this in the WordPress plugin directory is that WordPress the plugin search uses search out search technology Allah 1998 Alta Vista and Yahoo search okay, like you keyword stuffing in plugin names is rewarded. It's just it's mind numbing. So anyway, that's why you see things like this showing up yeah Alta Vista was my gift for you internet geeks such as myself. Anyway, this plugin is called WP ultimate CSV import. Here's where this is helpful. Let's just say that you have a list of locations that you want to import into WordPress to show up in custom post types. And the client gives you this in a CSV. Now in the old days you would have to copy and paste cell by cell copy paste copy paste, copy, paste, publish copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste publish, right it's just this is a super easy way to just get all that stuff into WordPress. Now there is a companion plugin that lets you export but we're just going to focus on the importer today. We're going to activate this and I have a CSV set up somewhere which I forgot Oh here it is, which I forgot to start open already. So Excel takes a minute to start. Basically this is going to be an import for my summaries custom post type. Now summaries is a custom post type created by pods that has a title and four or five custom fields right there's a quote, there's an intro and outro title and link. We did this for some webinar 8000 years ago. And so I have this CSV that has three entries for this custom post type with data for each of those
custom fields. Right. So let us go through
the very quick process of setting this up and watch how easy
this is. We shall go to Import. Let's see import.
First I drag and drop my files. Yes. Thank you for that. Drop the file, uploading, uploading, uploading done. Okay, where are we going to put this stuff we're going to put it in the summary custom post type and hit continue. Okay, now here's where it gets interesting. I'm gonna go over here to drag and drop mode because it's just easier. And these are my WordPress Core fields, just all the things that posts have. First I'm going to drag the title to there. Now the rest of this stuff are just WordPress custom fields. Now I will tell you, it does have a pods integration but it's in the pro version. However, you can just use standard WordPress custom fields. I just need to know what the slug of those custom fields are. So I'm going to open up that pod really quickly.
summaries and right there
all my custom fields its quote, Intro outro source title and Source Link. I just had to put those bits of information in. So oops. Alright, so I'm going to add a custom field and it's going to be quotes I'm gonna put quote here and the custom field is quote, add another one with drag intro here.
Intro add a custom field. Drag outro not all this came from the CSV source title, Source Link All right, all set up. Ready, continue.
We have some options to do images. I'm going to pass that up. Now that would take too long to demonstrate. And what we want to do do we need to turn on maintenance mode not because seems like a second handle duplicates. You can decide if it's a duplicate. What do you want to do? It's got a lot of options. I'm just going to start the import for sake of time. Done. We now go over to summaries and look there they are and all of the things are where they're supposed to be. Is that cool?
This saved us so
much time when we had to import how many was it Chris? Like
1000? Yeah, like 1000
location entries into a custom post type that we're using to display some things on a client build that we're working with. Yeah, so that was a major time saver.
So that is WP
ultimate CSV importer plugin also known as import export XML CSV images to WordPress. Alright, any questions or comments on that one? John, would this Importer Exporter work for moving users and orders from old site to new site? No, it did not give us that option who wants to import or did
it? Let's see. I don't think it does. If we'd let me just drop something in here again. And no, ah I don't
see no, you didn't neither users
nor orders are one of the options. Any other questions on this one before we wrap this up? Beth doesn't
integrate with ACF. So yes, just like I showed for pods. So if you're using ACF, you just want to find out what the slug of the custom field is. And ACR has a list just like this and drop that slug in just like I just
did. The question is what
is the name of the exporter plugin. I've linked it right here in the handout. If you need the handout, let me just scroll back
up the should be able to click this link and grab the handout. There'll be ultimate exporter. Okay. Anybody else on this one before we
wrap up?
All right, so this is
the May 2022 plugin round up here on iThemes Training and so we end up as we always do with the vote, one vote, one vote only please What was your favorite plugin of the round up? Dynamic Pricing document conflict conflict ultimate importer live mesh layouts, live mesh customizer Import Export conflict icon Oh, this is so we're gonna have to look at the chat log for this one. This was a plugin rich month, was it not a lot of great plugins this month. Yeah. So there are probably five clear winners Oh my. So we take these votes, they do count. Next month, we come to the best job. So twice a year in June and in December. We do a best job. So we took we do a roll up of the previous six months, all the top votes from the six months previous. And we do a webinar just of those. And so that's coming up next month that is on the schedule already. And just make sure you head over to the i iThemes Training site.
And you look at upcoming webinars. And you'll see all those things. Oh let me
tell you another webinar that has been on the schedule. If you haven't seen this yet. You absolutely want to register for this one. How to clean up a hack WordPress site. So Kathy Zant, who has deep deep experience in WordPress security is going to be demonstrating how to clean up a site once it's been hacked. That is scheduled for one week from today at one o'clock. So if you haven't registered for this one, this is another gonna be a very popular webinar. You want to get registered for that one for sure. It's gonna be great.
Let's see.
News RoundUp is coming up. And then we talked about the WooCommerce templating with the new Shotcut 2.0 That is just about to be released. And then the premium event for this month is the SEO masterclass. Lindsay Halsey is going to be back with us again talking about two very important
parts of
SEO and that is can we get that up and working here? Yeah, backlinks and as well as your local search. So two very important parts of your SEO, following up from last month's webinar on SEO basics. So that is it. Thanks everybody for hanging out with me for the last hour and we're going to wrap this up the video and the chat log and the transcript will all be posted to this webinar replay as always, Q is asking about links to previous
links to previous months
you just kind of we don't there's not one place where all these are held. There's been multiple requests for that over the years. We just don't have the bandwidth or personnel internally to create like a database of plugin roundup plugins. It would be really cool to do so actually own plugin roundup.com But there's not a spot so you just have to scroll back and find the last webinar and click on it. And you can download the handout.
That's all we got right now.
Okay, y'all again, thanks for hanging out. I'm back tomorrow Oh tomorrow with with Stephanie Hudson, my friend Stephanie Hudson will be with us talking about are we hear all upcoming webinars. She's talking about outsourcing. So this is the webinar we had to postpone a couple of weeks ago because of some health issues and she's back with us talking about outsourcing. It's gonna be a great webinar. She really knows what she's talking about. So we'll see you back tomorrow, one o'clock for outsourcing Until then have a great rest of the evening. See you back here tomorrow and I iThemes Training, where we go further together.