glad you're all here we're just now about three minutes away from getting started we'll kick things off officially at three minutes after. If you're just joining us in zoom pop open the chat and you'll find the link to today's handout with all the plugins as well as the announcement we're going to begin with today and that is that I themes is becoming solid WP and a lot about that there at solid wp.com Check that out great intro video of all the things by the leadership that is now behind i themes. Dev Devon and Cromwell those gentlemen by the way, the founders of give WP a plugin that we have enjoyed for quite a while here. So we are just now about three minutes, two and a half minutes before we get started. glad you joined us. If you are just opening zoom pop up in the chat say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. Great to see folks logging in from around the world. Let's see here. Jeffrey from Guatemala Barney from Virginia Scott from Long Island. Rick from Ohio. Welcome everybody, Jan from Pennsylvania. Byrne from West Virginia. Good to see everybody.
Hey, Doug, from Toronto, Deborah from Texas. XL I'm from DC Henrik from Netherlands. Tina from South Africa. Welcome Tanya from Maryland. Augustine from Guinea. Awesome. I guess then I think you're the first person from Guinea that we've greeted here. Welcome. Glad you're here. Just about a minute and a half to go before we get started. Officially the link is in the chat today with this month's plug in list along with the link for the replay and resources if you want to rewatch or share and of course the link to today's big announcement which is I themes is becoming solid WP we'll get started talking about that here in about one minute. From now
so again, welcome everybody. Yeah, this is not an not a late April Fool's joke I themes is rebranding we are becoming solid WP, a solid foundation for all of your WordPress websites. Check it out there at solid wp.com. I posted about this on social media yesterday and I did get a couple of replies of is this like a late April Fool's joke it is not. In fact, this has been in the works for some time now. So we're just about ready to go 30 seconds before we get started. I'm gonna drop in the link to today's slides and all the things right there in the chat. As you're just coming into zoom pop up in that chat, say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. We're just about ready to get started.
One more thing with the captions and we will be ready to kick off here.
All right, who's ready to get started? We got a great list of plugins today. Let's start the recording and dive right in. Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to another live AI iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at iThemes Training and it is time for plugin Roundup. It is the longest standing webinar here on iThemes Training where once a month we take a look across the WordPress world and give you a list of about a dozen or so new or recently updated plugins that are there in the WordPress plugin directory about nine. This is our ninth year of doing this every month. So Wow. Lots of plugins over the years. And if you're just joining us in zoom, let me drop in the link to today's slide today's plug in list, as well as the link for the replay and resources for this webinar. You can click that same link and you'll be able to see the transcript the chat log, grab the download and rewatch the webinar if you'd like to do that or share it with others we're gonna get started today with some big news and that is that I themes is becoming solid WP so if you have not yet had a chance to take a look at that, if you've missed it on the social media that's been happening. Take a look here at solid wp.com It is I think just rebranding, so we are becoming the solid. This is it's an interesting approach they decided to take with this. I think just doing a rebrand in public meaning slowly gradually developing the brand right there in public and getting your input along the way. So one of the things you'll start to see is products are being renamed like I think security is now going to be solid security backup, buddy. It's going to be solid backups. I think Sync will be solid Central. So there's a lot of work that's being done right now especially on I theme security, to become solid security, a lot of reworking of the internal navigation within the security plugin. It is really really cool. I've been able to see some of that happening. Really interesting things. So take a look here at solid wp.com. There's a great video right here from our leadership, Matt Cromwell and Devin Walker. Those are by the way the founders of give WP also one of our sister brands under the stellar WP banner and Devin Cromwell or are now in leadership at iThemes and are walking us through this, this branding rebranding process and you'll hear from them right here on this video. They're at solid wp.com Now, one thing I would like you to be aware of is that we're going to have a town hall about this. Matt Cromwell, our director, Senior Director of Customer experience will be here with us next Tuesday. That's one week from today, talking all about the plans and what's happening with solid WP you'll probably also get to see some sneak peeks at screenshots of what the solid security plugin will look like. It is really, really cool. So you want to register for that. You can just click right there. We just added this webinar to the schedule. And I'm on the top of the list here right here coming up introducing solid WP next Tuesday at one o'clock Central. And you can go directly there at this link right there in the handout. Let me drop in the link to today's plugin list that has this document if you just coming in late. Yeah, so this will not affect any licenses memberships all of that none of that is going to be changed at all. As my understanding that will be a great question to ask for Matt Cromwell next week. But I don't believe there's any changes to anything like that. This is just a rebrand you know I themes has not been the best name for AI themes. You probably will agree as we haven't really had our own theme for quite some time. Right since I think this builder was sunsetted. That was really our last theme. And yeah, so it really the focus is now on security and backups and solid Central and all those things. So changing the name, I wouldn't expect any changes to your existing licenses. So but that's a great question to ask and you can hear it directly from someone in leadership next week that has come in at one o'clock Central on April the 11th. So tiny I get it. Yeah, hold your breath when stuff like this happens. I understand that. I don't think you have anything to worry about. All right, who's ready for some plugins now make sure you do take some time to look at this though later. A lot of really cool stuff happening at solid WP. Let's get started with our first plugin of the roundup and it is an AI image plugin called AI image labs. Now this by a group of developers called WP zone and you might recognize a WP zone because they are the creators of the WP layouts plugin that we've had here on the plugin Roundup. We've also talked about it in some of our Starter Site courses. Really great little plugin that allows you to save page builder layouts off to the cloud, so very similar to Kadence cloud, but it supports things like Elementor and beaver builder and Divi up in the cloud so you can move your things around. By the way, the developers at WP zone reached out to me about this new plugin. And I asked him about WP layouts because we haven't seen a lot of development happening on that plug in recently. And they said keep Stay tuned on that because there's some really cool things. They're going to happen with WP layouts later this year. That's great because it's a wonderful plugin, especially for free. So let's look at this AI image lab plugin. It is an image generation plugin using the power of AI and it is right there inside of WordPress. So let's move right on into WP nathan.com and take a look at AI image lab. Now AI image lab you're going to find this right here under MIDI well actually. Okay, the first thing you need to do Sorry about that. The first thing you need to do is get it connected up to the WPS Zone website. So you do have to connect get the EU send an email back. It's a very simple connection process. And this will connect the plugin to their website in order to generate the images through their API key. It is free. They do say that it's up to a reasonable amount of usage. So if you're, you know, if you're crunching out 1000 images per hour, they might have something to say about that but it is free currently in the beta. And what you'll find here is now once it's all set up and connected under Add New, there's this really big orange button called generate images with AI so we click on that and this whole user interface appears down here. So somebody in the chat give me an image. What can we generate here as a test for this plugin? Right there in the chat. Give me a couple of ideas. A deer next to a pine tree. Okay, how about a deer next to a pine tree? Those are two suggestions. Deer next to a pine tree and we'll click Add and generate images. So like most of the AI image services, you're gonna get four images back from one generation request that's pretty typical. And that's that's what that's what we get. Alright, so there's one that's not awful actually had a nice there is a deer next to a pine tree another one pretty nice. Oh, we got some snow and this one. Yeah, so these are not bad at all. This one has a little more of an illustration feel to it. So you can actually click on these and see them a little more detailed. And let's pick I don't know let's pick this one. I kind of like this one. So none of them are downloaded to the WordPress image the Media Library yet until we click Get this image and there it went. It's doing its thing up here and boom, there it is. Now it named it one which is I mean it is what it is. You'll probably want to go rename that after it brings it in but there's our image really not that terribly bad. There was few more creative creative options. First by my by the way, everybody say hi to Micah Ingram there in the chat. That's my daughter. She's doing some work for me now and has joined us on this her first I think it's plugin roundup so everybody say hi to Micah. And let's try another one. Let's try that alligator in a bathtub because why not? Alright, generate images. This is the one where it gets interesting because you got to wonder if AI knows enough has enough samples out there to create a an actual image from this. Okay, here's an alligator in like a swimming pool. That's terrifying. This is like a dragon in a hot tub. Okay. Okay, this is a little better. And okay. Okay. So, here we have a perfect example of what happens when you generate AI images you get, you know, this is not the best. This one is not bad. So there's one that's not bad. Yeah. Okay. So you know, the more obscure your prompt, the weirder the images can get and oftentimes, you know you This is much more of a looks like a sleeping dragon than it is an alligator. But this one has a little problem with its snout. So that's what you get with AI right? Pretty interesting. So that is AI image lab
Not bad right especially at no cost brings it right into WordPress and you know with reasonably okay results depending on your prompt. Paul says AI equals awful images. You know, it really it really depends. It depends on your prompt and if there are references, if there's reference material out there, the more obscure like fish, fish riding bicycles, somebody said something like that. Yeah, that's that's where things get a little weird. It'll also get a little weird if you suggest an actual person, like a person's name, a celebrity's name, or you know, a character. It doesn't like that if you get close to copyrighted things that sort of gets a little weird. So anyway, that is a I image lab from WPS zone. Any other questions or comments about that? Absurd images? Yes, indeed. All right, let's move on down to the next one, shall we? This one is called Easy folders WordPress Media Library folders. Now, if you've been around plugin roundup for a while, like many of you have, you know that we've done a number of plugins like this. We liked a plug in I think it was called file bird. That was a good one a while back we did happy images that were happy images was happy images. I believe there was a really good plugin. This is this is a little something that we haven't seen before. So yes, it creates folders for you to be able to sort out your media library but it does a couple of things these other plugins do not do. The first is that it also allows you in the same back end folder II type interface to sort your posts, pages and posts which is kind of interesting. Also, it's not yet available in the plugin, but apparently it will be because it's listed, but there's a block that's included that will allow you to on the front end of the site, show the contents of a folder which is interesting. We've not seen that before on one of these folder plugins. So let's take a quick look at easy folders. We'll activate that here. And what we'll find in our media library is now a new folder interface. Just like you've seen, and we've pre sorted a few things here. Here's fonts, not sure what that is. Oh, it's actually fonts, fonts that are used on this website. And of course, they live in the media library. So there's our fonts and here's some logos. Yeah, some images that are related to the products in our fake store here. Let's create another one. Let's go back to All Files we'll create another folder. Let's call these our AI images.
There we go. Okay, so we got our folder and watch. We're just going to drag this over, and it's going to take a second and it's in there. Alright, we'll drag this one too. This is clearly AI as is this one so we can start to sort this way. Now, again, this block isn't active yet but in the future they'll it says on the plugin description the block exists but it doesn't I wasn't able to find it. They're probably going to be adding that later. But this you'll actually be able to with the block on the front end in the block editor, expose what's in the contents of these folders, which is kind of nice. So kind of like a gallery like this. Pretty neat. So it's searchable in the Pro Plan. There's a lot of things available in the Pro Plan. But this is super helpful. Now again, something that it does differently than other of these folder plugins is right here under the pages interface. What you'll see is a very similar folder structure and we are really slow today really slow today, my goodness. Okay, so right here under the pages, you'll see that yeah, right there. You have the same ability to create folders for pages for posts, etc. So there's our settings for easy folders are here. You can restrict access based on if they're an admin user or not. There's also lots of options for the Pro Plan but for example, you can it lets you show media details here. You can change the there's lots of options here basically. So this is where do we want to use them with posts and pages or just media so we can toggle off the post types. In the pro version you get lots of other options here as you can see, so that is easy folders. Any other questions or comments on that one? Nice, pretty nice plugin. Interesting. Like I can't wait to see what the block does with that one. Ah, let's see Tanya, does it change the path after the move? No, this doesn't affect the image path or the you know the link to the image at all. This is only for visual organizing purposes on the back end
All right, let's move on down to the next one shall we? It is called this and by the way Ben Bradley's been here today. Been suggested this one. This is an ability for our members. Once you're logged into the iThemes Training site, you have the ability to suggest a plugin and we have several plugins that you folks have suggested today which is pretty cool. This one is bought from Ben Bradley. It is called turn Yoast SEO FAQ block into an accordion. It's the most on the nose plugin description of the day because what this plugin does believe it or not, is it turns the Yoast FAQ block into an accordion. Go figure. So this is really helpful actually. And if you've never seen this before, simply having Yoast SEO active even the free version of the plugin gives you the ability it adds to the front end of the site. an FAQ block which is really helpful and just so that I don't lose my mind I am going to disable this folder plugin. Let's go right here to our folder block.
Okay, so here's our demo page and we just have some basic, this is the Yoast FAQ block. It is really easy, you know, just like with anything you just can do FAQ. Oops. If you if you want to use it, I can't seem to type correctly. So Yoast FAQ if you have the Yoast SEO plugin active, it adds this block where you can just enter a question you enter the answer. It's really nice and easy to use actually. So the way this works the way this block works is on the front end of the site by default, it simply gives you a list which works really well. It's a nice FAQ. Now, why would you use the Yoast FAQ because it puts the correct schema around these entries to let Google and others know that look. It's a schema FAQ question and a schema FAQ answer. This lets Google know what kind of content this is and helps it get hopefully a little bit better SEO on this page. Now what this does, like if you have a really long FAQ, this can get pretty long. So what we're going to do is we're going to activate this plugin and simply by activating it not changing anything else at all. Once it's active, we refresh this page and we now have an accordion. Pretty nice, works really well. And for those of you that are interested in such things I'm tabbing you can notice that this is in hitting enter this does respond to keyboard controls. So it is helpful to those who need assistive technologies. So pretty cool stuff. Ah, yeah, it's a simple plugin, but it does a great job at turning these FAQ items into an expandable accordion. Tanya, what about styling? Great question. So you don't have a lot of options here. You probably would have to style that. On the on the front end. The Yoast FAQ block doesn't really give you much as far as styling goes on the back end either. However, this is pretty straightforward HTML, you'd have to deal with it in your style sheet. But it's all you got. You have lots of classes to work with, but you'd have to style it manually.
So that is turn the Yoast SEO FAQ block into an accordion and it does just that. Sharing you You're right I think it is definitely pulling in the default. It's very minimal styling in this to begin with, and it's inheriting the styling from the theme. Yep, the good job then pretty cool plugin haven't seen that one before. Alright, let's move down the list to the next one. It is called Butina team. Now we've done a number of Butina blocks over the last several months. This is a the Butina team has a really good the the blocks that are in the Butina family by Express tech. They've got some really nice blocks. And this team block is pretty cool. Let's go in and activate this one Butina team block. There it is. And let's take a quick look at our pages again because we have a demo setup on this one. So right here you see the team block and action. So if we were to click on this, we have there's all of our team items and we have really good control over what's happening. If you look at it in the list view. You can see each individual team member so it's really easy to navigate here. You can use the outline view here as well to see what's going on. This is really poor SEO because we're jumping into an h six I'm not sure why that is set to be that. Let's see if we have control over that. But if we want to edit this one, let's say we can click the single block. We have ability to change our alt text. There's our image. Here's our title. Do we have the ability to do yes right here. It's just standard block editor here. So this shouldn't really probably be an h2. And then we can set our typography. We have all the standard block editor options here. So it's really easy to edit these. You just click each individual item and you have the ability to change it. Pretty cool. Now back into the block itself. Watch this, you have the ability to change it to a grid just simply by that toggle. It can become a grid or it can become a slider. Either way, so some of these images are round and some are square because we can click this make it rounded. That cool, really easy to deal with. What You See Is What You Get now. There is many many many options here. As you can imagine, underneath all of these things settings to change shadows and navigation and do you want the page dots underneath and all of those things so plenty of options here and a really well done plugin called Butina. Team, your team slider or grid so does it pull from a custom post type No, this these are individual blocks. So if you need this for example, to click through to a full page about the team member, it's probably not the best option for you. But if you just simply want a grid of team members or a slider, this is really nice. It works really well. Alright, any other questions or comments about this one good Tina. team, the team slider and grid pretty nice. Alrighty, let's move on down the list to an interesting little plugin. I think this might be helpful to some folks from time to time, especially if you have a client perhaps that works on their own site. And they want to have like a little to do list in the background. This is kind of cool. Probably not for everybody but it's an interesting little plugin called dash to do. Let's open up dash to do and right here under the dashboard is a new option called to do so you know if you're in the habit of forgetting about things you need to do, then you can add a to do item right here. So Hulk was in here earlier, smashing bad guys is on his list. Order new shield for Captain America. So right there and when you're done you cross it off. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So that's really it. It's an easy way to add a quick little to do list on the back end it perhaps this could be something if you're interacting with your client, you could leave them some things to do. It's really easy. And you know, if you're collaborating, it'd be a way to add some things in there. So that is dashed to do any questions or comment Oh, can you delete the item? Yes, you just click the trashcan and it will go away. It takes a minute and uses Ajax to refresh the page. But it will go away. Yep. Just mouse over and click the trashcan whether it's crossed out or not. Like we can just click that as it is and it'll go away. Good question. Anybody else? Other questions or comments on this one that is dash to do? Yeah, no. Versioning No. Audit control. None of that. It's a very simple to do list. Thank you, Paul. All right, let's move down the list, shall we? This one is called an I called Nanaki. Drag and drop email template builder for WordPress. So let's say that okay, let's look, WordPress emails are ugly, aren't they? The default WordPress emails are just ugly. It's just a blob of text that sent out and you know, especially if you have a site where it maybe it's a membership site or something that's sending emails to other users, and maybe you'd like some branding in there. You don't have that in core WordPress, and you can't do it without a lot of code. So this is a plugin that is going to allow you to create an email template and even further change the way those emails look. For specific WordPress emails that it sends. Now we've done some email customizer plugins here on the past in the past, but they sort of they kind of create a wrapper for the email, a header and a footer, but all of the middle content is pretty much the same. This one's a little different in that it lets you maybe your prep password reset email needs to look a little different from some other email that WordPress sends. Let's have a second look at this. It's called Nanaki drag and drop email template grader. So let's activate that one.
And right here at the top, I spent I gotta say, I spent a little time looking for this menu item like where did it go and I just didn't look at the top so don't be like me. It's right here at the top. There it is. So all right, we have just a basic one set up here already for our password reset email. And if we edit this, under that, so you can go in here you can edit all the things and it's pretty simple to use, actually. You can send yourself a test email. Now what's really cool over here is notice we have assigned this template to the password reset email, but look at the other options like you can have a basic default layout. So if you want to just put your logo, maybe a header and a footer that wraps around the email, you can do that. But you can also customize specifically the password reset the new user notification email. So if there's some information you want a new registrant of the website to see again, especially important if it's like a membership site or something like that. This will allow you to customize all the text in the email, user email, change email, password change email Yeah, you can change all of those. I just like that. So let's just create a new template. You'll see how it works. So what do we want here? Let's just make a default layout for our site. And we'll call this default and you can start building so this is our editor. Notice here you've got lots of different options on how you want this thing to look. It's a little quirky to get used to if I'm gonna be honest, it's a little quirky. But you know, there's not many things that I'm aware of that give you the options to do a two column email. I wish they had done that, that they'd use the block editor for this. But alas, they did not let you have the ability to just drop in things that you want. You've got styling over here. It's not that hard to use it is it can be a little bit quirky. But once you play around with it, get what you want. Save it. Notice you also can preview at different device sizes. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. And you set it up the way you want it and you're done. You're good. Hi, Tanya, how about WooCommerce emails? This apparently does not at least yet do WooCommerce emails. That's a great question. It would though, like if you use your default layout, and just had like a header and footer, it would use that. But there aren't specific WooCommerce options here. That would be nice. But you can at least design a wrapper that goes around all your emails. Now something else this does over here in the settings. This is kind of nice. It gives you the ability here to show source code and what that means is when you when you click this button and go back into the editor, it is going to show you the HTML so if you if you like me get into situations with one of these WYSIWYG editors, and you have trouble getting something just where you want it. Using this option will allow you to actually view the HTML and make the adjustments that you want kind of like you're building a MailChimp template, right and you can do it with the visual editor or you can get into the code and tweak things the way you want it and then flip it back. So that's kind of a nice feature. I like that. Something else this does if you happen to use Mailgun as a transactional email provider. It does connect directly to Mailgun which is kind of cool. But if you don't you know in our case, we use postmark and this just worked without any just leave these settings blank and it just uses the regular whatever set up for the website already. It's kind of cool. All right. So that is Nanaki the drag and drop email template builder for WordPress. Any other questions or comments on this one? Kind of cool. It's a nice little extra, nice little extra.
All right, Scrolling on down to our next plug in this one's called SP announcement. SP announcement. Now, this is a plugin that's gonna give you that little notification bar across the top of the screen. There's a bunch of plugins that do this. This one works really well. And so you may for example, want to use a Kadence element for this and Kadence element will work great for this. If you are if you're using Kadence on your site, hopefully you are you can do something like this. One thing this does the Kadence element doesn't though, is it is dismissible which is kind of nice. So let's just take a quick look at this and you can see how this notification bar works. It is very basic in its settings. I'll tell you that but it does work quite well. So let's get it activated and take a look at right where did this one live this this is the trick with all of these plugins is remembering where the menu item is after it's activated. All right now right here announcements, that's what it's called. So right here under announcements. Monique has got a great question. Can you make it across a certain page or is it the whole website? Well, you can right here, right all the page IDs that you want. So you could you'd have to know the ID of the page. The numerical ID otherwise it defaults to the whole site. But if you go to your pages there's gonna be a plug in in a minute that helps to reveal these IDs better but currently you kinda have to look down at the little text that pops up here. And down at the bottom there you can see it's post equals three ad. So that would be ID three ad for this one. And so you can just list a bunch of page IDs here to make it only appear on certain pages but by default, it's active on the whole site. So if we take a quick look at WP Nathan, there it is. So it's really ugly right now. But uh, you have control over the settings, the background color, text color, how big the font is. Are we going to have a countdown to something there's this option here to set a date for the countdown, it does not have a time feature. So you can't say midnight or whatever. It's just that date, but it does count down. Based on when the page is loaded. You can specify you know top or bottom positioning How tall is it? Is it sticky? Do you hide it on mobile? It's got all these settings that work pretty well. And it is it hides on mobile here but it's responsive otherwise, and we can close it. And the neat thing about this though is these are it's like a custom post type you can have multiple announcement bars. And let's just say maybe I want it to display at a certain time when you can just use the standard WordPress scheduling feature over here to publish it for Sunday in the future. And so at that, you know on that day it starts to appear. And you could use also something like the publish press future plug in, which would let you expire it at a certain time. So in and of itself, it doesn't have a scheduling function, but you can use other things to give it that. So yeah, and bit like Billy is saying you could use a Kadence element. The thing that you wouldn't get with the Kadence element is the dismissable x that we showed just a second ago. But yeah, the Kadence element would totally do this if you just wanted a banner across the top of the page all right, that is sp announcement. Any other questions or comments on that one?
Alrighty, Scrolling on down another member suggested plugin from Melanie add COC missed scheduled posts publisher. That's a mouthful. Missed scheduled posts. Publisher by WP beginner. Alright, how many of you have had this problem where you come in and you had to post a schedule and it did not post correctly? That unfortunately happens from time to time, especially in certain hosting environments. I know Melanie's had trouble with this on some of the sites that she manages and she ran across this post. So this one has been around a while and it was acquired fairly recently, I think within the last year by the WP beginner folks, and yeah, it works really well. So this plugin, there are no settings. You simply activate it and basically what happens is the reason these posts don't get scheduled correctly, is just in the way that the WP cron works. The DAP Cron is what schedules tasks inside of WordPress and sometimes it just goes wonky. It just stops working correctly. And it's frustrating when that happens. But you'll go in and you'll see missed schedule in your posts list. And if that happens, this plugin fixes that. All you have to do is install and activate this plugin. And it just fixes it there are no settings it's set it and forget it. You just activate it and it's going to fix this problem. It's pretty cool. So Melanie, have you found I see Melanie is here. Melanie, have you found this one fixed all your scheduled post problems? Yeah, Melanie says it works like a charm. Yeah, really cool. So that is missed. scheduled posts publisher from WP beginner and this is one just to put in your back pocket put in your toolbox. And if you have this problem come up, just remember Oh, yeah, we had that plug in that time. That's going to fix this problem. So pretty cool. Thank you Melanie for suggesting that one. All right, let's go down to the next one. How many notion users do we have here? Anybody playing around with notion as like a note taking saving management app? I tell Chris loves it. Chris loves notion. It's a really cool app, especially for free you can do lots of things with it. I have some like you would not want to use it to store any sensitive data at all, because it is not security focused at all. It doesn't he doesn't even have the option for two factor authentication. So just be careful with that. But if you're just using it for note taking and whatever and you don't care if somebody actually gets access to the information it's a great app. It's super powerful. So this is a plug in notion of phi that integrates WordPress with notion. So this is not really something I can demonstrate. I don't really have a demo account with notion to do this. But Chris tested it out and validated it this plugin works it's a one way push from notion or from WordPress into notion and it will record certain things. Like let's just activate the plugin really quickly. This is super, super helpful for like logging things would be a really good example for this. Oh, it's active already. Let's go to notion of phi. And if we want to add a new notion integration, we have to have the API key over there. But look at you can select whatever Once you're connected to your notion account with the API with the API key. Then you can access this notion database or this notion page within your notion install. And then what happens oh, there's a new user. Well, I want to push over to notion you know, these various bits of information about the user. And, you know, how don't want it to be a list or a table or whatever. And so anytime something happens in WordPress that meets one of these criteria, it will push that information over to notion. So think about this. Maybe you've got a membership site, and you'd like to have like your list of people and notion, just like an easy way to look and see what's going on. This will do that. It'll just push it right over like a log. So pretty cool. pretty helpful. Look at all the things that it can do if there's a new post deleted posts, lots of different things, new WooCommerce products, orders and WooCommerce it does a lot of different things. If you use notion just play around with this, because it does a lot to connect WordPress in notion it is a one way sync with this plugin from WordPress over to notion probably most appropriate for just keeping a log of all the things WordPress does. Now there is another notion plugin that's worth looking at Also new this month in the plugin directory. And that is called WP sync for notion. This is a two way sync and you can allows you to manage content within notion. So think about it this way. You can have a database of things in notion that pushes and shares data with WordPress. So that's pretty cool. You know, think about it in terms of, you know, some business or organization you're working with and they want to keep up a list on their website. This would allow them to manage it in notion and it just pushes the changes over to WordPress. Most of the useful things of this plugin do require the pro version though which is kind of cool. So again, this is bigger than we could demonstrate in the plugin round up but we found it very cool. Especially these two new plugins for notion that both hit the WordPress plug in directory in this month. And if your notion person, just play around with it, I think it can be pretty cool. Yeah, like Doug is saying it's great for event calendar management for example. You can do a lot with this. So certainly worth playing with and who knows maybe at some point in the future we'll do a more in depth webinar on notion and WordPress. Alright, any other questions or comments on that one? That one's notion, notion of thigh and WP sync for notion. Alrighty, moving down the list. I was just thinking the other day. I want a crossword puzzle in my WordPress website. Why don't you just thinking about that to me? Did you just wake up in the middle of the night thinking about that? I'd like to have a crossword puzzle on my WordPress website. And you know, for those of you that just like me, woke up in the middle of the night thinking about that. Here's a plugin for you. It's why MC crossword and actually here's the thing this is actually a really interesting idea, like a branded a branded crossword puzzle, or something that, you know, people get on your site and maybe they play this game. It's supposed to put them on Facebook and they solve a crossword puzzle or whatever. It's a really cool crossword puzzle. Creator that you can set up very, very simply. So yeah, like a 404 page. Stephanie, what a great idea. We did the dinosaur game on a 404 page. This could totally work on a 404 page with you know with your own branded terms. So the WP Nathan site is a it's an AI generated content all about the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and we have created a sample crossword puzzle based on some of those terms. So let's just take a quick look. Actually, first again, the first step of using any plugin is of course, activating that plug in. Plugins don't work really well until they're activated. So let's do that. And we have our crossword option here. And you can have lots of different puzzles. They're just they're like their own little post here inside the crossword. So let's edit this. And look here. Here's our questions and answers and you can just set them all up make up your own, you know, home of Spider Man, all these all these things here. We can keep adding new items until we're done. Once you have added all of your things you can grab, look here the shortcode and then we've created a page here for it to display and it's simply dropping in the shortcode and if we take a quick look at this well
there's our crossword puzzle. Now the interesting thing about this is you get back to the actual page. Oh, it's here. Right here in the settings, we can deal with our colors and all of those things. So we have all the options here. What happens when you get it right, et cetera. And it generates the crossword layout. Now by the way, I went through this a little bit earlier, and the puzzle looked completely different. I wonder if I refresh it if it looks different if it's generating it each time? Yeah, look it. It looks different every time. It's the same words, but it's just arranged differently. So it's dynamically generating the layout of the crossword. And that right here, the organization Nick Fury works for Well, that would be shield. Oops
It is a little wonky here. There we go. It just played a sound in my ear. So it also has a problem with apostrophes. So there's a couple of little weird little quirky things about this. Yeah, it doesn't like the apostrophe so it brought in the HTML character for that. But it works really nicely. You can figure out you know, what are some things we could do with this for, you know, social media posts or you know, just a fun thing like a 404 page. Interesting. Yes, and it is tracking your time as well. So maybe you do a crossword puzzle and you have it set for you take a screenshot of this when you're done and the person with the lowest amount of time wins. Or something like that. It can be fun. Lots of different options for this all right, that is why MC crossword exactly what you all were wanting. This this whole thing that kept you awake at night about needing a crossword puzzle in WordPress. There you go. You are welcome. Yes, Jan now dances now I can sleep. You're welcome. Okay, next up. Now y'all are figured out by the way on these plugin roundups. I sort of backload the really cool ones to the end. Here we go. This is called PI calendar. And I really really, really like this one. This could be a game changer. For those of you that have a site that needs events, but not maybe like a full blown event calendar. Elizabeth, I believe we did this. We talked about this in a did we do this in a plugin Roundup. I thought we did it in an office hours. Yeah, that we talked about this during an office hours. So for those of you that aren't members of iThemes Training, you really should be because you would have known about this weeks ago. Office hours are a lot of fun. Okay, so here's how this works. Let's say maybe you have a website that is it has events, but you don't need a full blown Event Manager for those. So let's just activate pi calendar and watch the awesomeness that unfolds. Close couple these things here. Let's get back to posts. So with PI calendar active, I'm just gonna go to a post. Watch this. There's now over here in the sidebar of the editor, a toggle that says Show on calendar.
start date, end date. Is it an all day event? Yep, update. Boom. All right. You can do any post or page.
Any content on WordPress, you'll be able to have this same sort of interface here. Super cool. Let's see. Actually this may only be posts now. Now it works with all of them. I thought it did. Yeah, it works with all custom post types even. And once you have toggled all this stuff on, you now have an event page that you can simply with this shortcode pi cow you can drop that on any page you want. Here's ours just the shortcode py cow and if we go there, you get this really nice calendar eventually, when the page loads Oh my WP Nathan has gotten really, really slow. Okay, here's our look at that. Nice. So here's what we just did. We click it, and it pulls in the title and the excerpt of the posts. And we can click right there to view and we go right to the post. So think about this just making a landing page for your event. It could all appear on the calendar simply by toggling it works really, really well. So a couple questions in the chat, Christine, what if it's every Tuesday or Thursday? I don't this does not support recurrence. So if you need a recurring event, this is not going to work for you. Alright, it's really it's only works for one off events. The next question is are you able to customize the calendar? Let me see if there's any settings on the back end for this. I don't believe there are now I don't think there are you would have to
you could do it with CSS
Yeah, and then there are these alternate views as well. Thank you Melanie for mentioning that. Just like many event calendars offer.
Christine just to clarify the answer to your question. You can have any like this this demo post right here. This is a start and end time. But it's not a recurrence, like every Tuesday and Thursday doesn't do that, unfortunately. But this is super cool. And maybe it's even kind of a stand in the middle between an organization that doesn't need a calendar and one that needs a full blown calendar. This is a way to kind of get them started in the direction of the calendar. And it's really easy. Just toggle the thing on set the date time you're good to go. So that is pi calendar. Any other questions or comments on this one?
All right, and Last and certainly not least, is Sue here. Sue is not with us today. So oh gee, Sue suggested this plugin. This is from Sue Polinsky. And I gotta let me just be honest I looked at this and I thought I don't know why there's in the WordPress plugin directory. If you spend as much time there as I have, you notice that there are these things that I call Kitchen Sink plugins, and they are plugins that do lots of different things. It's like the developer had this pile of code snippets and decided, Oh, I'm gonna turn this into just one plug in that does all of this and they're not really related to you know, the snippets aren't related to each other. They just put it all in a plug in and it's submitted to the WordPress plug in directory. I usually avoid those like crazy. And when I saw this and I thought, oh, Sue, come on with it. Then I took a look at it. And now I understand why su suggested this plugin because y'all it is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. And it's called admin and site enhancements. And let us activate said the plugin. So this does lots of things and it is the kitchen sink easiest Kitchen Sink plugin that I've seen so far. But it's really cool. So we click Activate. Now the first thing that's helpful is it doesn't take up real estate in the top level of your admin menu. Thank you very much, Mr. Developer. The other thing is it Nestle's itself here under tools where you would expect it to be with a menu item called enhancements. So we'll open that up. And look here we have a beautiful clean interface that makes this really simple to use. So what you can think about this being is like a giant filing cabinet full of really awesome code snippets that you can toggle on or off at your leisure. So for example, let's start at the top. Do you want to be able to duplicate pages and posts toggle that on and if I save those changes, now I can go over to my page list. And instead of having to install the duplicate post plug in, I just now have the option to duplicate it. Right there. Pretty nifty media replacement so we have loved for years that the plugin by short pixel called Enable media replace. Well guess what? I can toggle that on. And I don't need that plug in anymore. Pretty cool. SVG upload is another one that we've been using been using the SVG enable SVG bobbin. Bodie for years. This allows that right within this plugin and even allows you to restrict which user roles can upload SVG s and it sanitize as the SVG. So it's basically everything in that plugin. is now in this plugin with a toggle of whether or not you want to use it. Another one here, external permalinks. So this is really similar to the page links to plug in for Mark Jaquith that allows you to create a page or a post and actually then have it linked to an external site so you can kind of keep it in your flow on your site, but it actually links to somewhere else. It's kind of a simple way to redirect that traffic. This does that within the plugin. The plugin that we just did that Melanie suggested auto publish posts with Miss schedule. toggle that on, you don't need that other plugin. It just does it right here from within this plugin. Enhanced list tables. So this is kind of cool. Improves the usefulness of listing pages for various post types. So look here. Do I want to show say a featured image in my column? Let's take a look at that. We'll save this and go into posts. And look, there's now a featured image column. But look, it's kind of gotten ugly in here. So let's take a look at this again here. Let's see. Are we do we want to show the post id Yeah, let's show the post id. Do we want to remove the Comments column Yes, remove the tags column. Yes. Save that view this little better. And we get the post id right there. Isn't this cool? I've earned it it borrow code from other plugins. Maybe, I don't know it's all that but it's open source right? Any plugin in the WordPress plugin directory is open source and can be used by others. Jan does it add a lot of bloat to the site? Depends on how much you toggle on right it just to load the plugin not a lot and then you're toggling on just the features that you want. Which by the way jetpack has gone to that as well used to be jetpack just loaded everything. Now they're pretty modular like this one. So think about this in modules and I'm turning on this code or turning off this code. Now by the way, we've only gotten through the first of you know eight different things types of things. This does. So let's take a quick look at some of these other things. How about this? Hide admin notices? How many of you have been bothered this whole webinar about this stupid blue nag at the top of the screen here like me? Well, let's turn this on. And now save it. Refresh the page. Boom, it's gone. And look here at the top. I get notices that I can see right there at the top. How about that? Pretty cool right? Admin Menu organizer, you want to change the order in which your admin menu happens. You can do it right here. Just drag and drop or hide it altogether. Disable the dashboard widgets, one at a time you can turn off dashboard widgets. Now again, those of you that have been in my courses for our Starter Site and our me plugin and so forth. We have code snippets for all of this right? This is just pulling those code snippets right there into the dashboard with a user interface pretty cool. Clean up the admin bar do I want to hide you know some of these things here remove the howdy. You know all that we have the ability to do that here. Do we want to hide the admin bar on the front end for certain user roles? Gosh, I love this. I hate it when I log you know, if I've got a membership site and somebody logs in, I always end up having to get the code to hide the admin bar from that user role or whatever. This does that built in. Now look here we have do we want to change the login URL? I think Security offers that feature. So we want to add in a login logout menu. So if you turn this on over in your appearance and menu section, you have login, logout links that have the appropriate nonce at the end of the link so that you're actually logged out without having to do all the things this will add a last login site so it records when this user last logged in on your user list. Do you want to redirect after login to a certain page for certain role? Now one thing this doesn't do is admins get redirected to this page editors get redirected to this page. It's all or nothing but it gives you one redirect option here. Same for a redirect after logout option. Here's the ability to add custom CSS for your admin area. You can do that here, custom CSS on the front end, insert header footer code. So if you need you know, instead of using say the code snippets plugin to add certain code to your header, you can just use this before the closing head after the body. Basically all the places where connecting code for you know social links Google Analytics live, you can do that right here. Do you want to add a custom body class? You can do that here. Do you have ads dot txt for like your google adsense content you can validate here. You want to look and see what your robots dot txt looks like for your SEO. Right? Here's what it looks like. Pretty cool. You want to disable some things disable Gutenberg right there. You don't need the classic editor plugin anymore and you can actually disable the block editor only for certain areas of the website which is pretty cool. You want to disable comments. Yep. Or only on certain post types. You can do that. You want to disable the REST API, disable feeds disable all WordPress updates unless you manually run them. Disabled smaller components like you know all these generator tags and things that we take out with some of the code I've given you in previous webinars that can be done right here. How about security? We want to limit login attempts. Do you want to obfuscate author slugs This is really helpful for preventing a lot of the denial of service attacks. Disable XML RPC, here's some options where we can upload image control how big we want to resize the image. How about this if you're using WP revisions control, it's one of the plugins in the stack that I've recommended. You can do that here and set it by the one thing this is different than than p revisions control is that in the DDP revisions control plugin, you can set the number of revisions per post type, but this it's kind of all or nothing. You can also control the WordPress heartbeat from here. And last of all, there's some there's still some more, there's utilities. This can replace your SMTP plugin if you're using that. I don't think you should use that. We've talked about that use postmark instead. But if you are using it, you can do that here. Do you want to allow users to have multiple roles on the site? You can do that here? Do you want to log in or view the site as a different role? You can do that here. Do you want to password protect the site so like for example, we've been using my private site in our stack. We could use this instead and password protect the whole site. While it's in development, it has a maintenance mode plug in settings built in with some in some examples of things here and then redirect the home any 404 errors redirect those to the homepage so
that's a lot right. I think I just spent the last 10 minutes literally reading off all the things this plugin will do and didn't really get into much of any of them. It is incredibly powerful. So should you use a plugin like this? That's the question are the pros. I mean, I can think of a half dozen plugins we could eliminate with just this one. Right? My goodness, it replaces so many different plugins. And that's great. Except Wait a minute. Now we're kinda have a single point of failure for our site as well. So what if something on this plugin breaks? I don't know. You have to weigh that out and decide what you think. If something breaks a lot will be broken. It's your call? Yeah, it's it's interesting. Now one of the thing I did not exhaustively test this, that's part of our disclaimer for all of the plugins on the plugin Roundup. I did not exhaustively test this, but you probably don't like if you have a snippet out there that that I've given. You. That is something this plugin does. You probably don't want both of those, you probably want to get rid of the snippet that I gave you or not use the plugin for that also just choose one. Otherwise you might have a tendency to run into errors. But wow, it's pretty darn good and it's really not awful to look at. It's very well organized. And I mean, kudos, kudos to Bo, the developer of this plugin. Very, very interesting. So any other questions or comments about admin and site enhancements? Thank you. Thank you, Sue, for bringing that one to our attention. All righty. That brings us to the end of this month's plugin Roundup. So we end as we always do with this question, what was your favorite plugin of the roundup one vote one vote only please. Thank admin and site enhancements is going to run away with it
then Ben is voting for his own. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, there's virtually all admin and site enhancements. Okay, let me just ask this because that just took that ran away with the vote. What's your second choice? This is the first time we've ever done this. What's your number two choice because we usually pull two every month and these votes by the way are tabulated. And once every six months we do our best of plugin round up. That's the top from each month. Pi calendar looks like see, folders iCalendar crossword it's kind of all over the place. I need more votes, more votes to make this more official. The Yoast SEO FAQ and pie calendar as our runners up. All right. Yeah, it's kind of a tie Chris is tracking this on the back end. All right, everybody. This has been fun. A lot of fun plugins to talk about today. Let me just remind you that tomorrow we have a great webinar coming up here same time. It is the WordPress six.to launch event you probably are aware that WordPress 6.2 dropped last week. We will have Timothy Jacobs our own Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer of I think security which will soon become solid security. Timothy is part of the WordPress core team and is one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. All that to say is he knows what he's talking about when it comes to core WordPress. And Timothy will be doing our launch event as he has for the last several of the major WordPress releases. That is coming up tomorrow one o'clock Central be with us here with Timothy and ask all your questions about WordPress six not to Timothy is one of those unique individuals who is brilliant and can also explain complicated things in a simple way. He will be with us tomorrow for that. One. Also, don't forget to register for the introducing solid WP townhall which is one week from today. One o'clock Central on April 11. link is right there. I'll drop in our links one more time in the chat. If you missed those coming in late. download the handout. We'll have the replay and chat log and transcript of this event up in about an hour on that replay page. Alright everybody, thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. I'll see you back here tomorrow one o'clock central time for the WordPress six out to launch event here on I iThemes Training where we go further together.