Welcome welcome. Glad you're here for the August 2024 plugin Roundup. We are about six minutes away from getting started officially. Glad everybody's here if you'll open up the chat and say hello I am going to drop in there the links for today. plugin download list is there you can grab that. Also, if you haven't registered for our live stream next Tuesday for the WordPress security Roundup. We'll have Thomas Wraith, have we watched your website back with us. That event had to be postponed for a few weeks but it is back on the calendar for a week from today. So make sure you join us for that one. Thomas and his team manage something like 17 million WordPress sites are they're watching and monitoring 17 million WordPress sites and he always is on the cutting edge of WordPress security and what the hackers are doing now. So make sure you are registered for that one. It is always a good one. As you're coming on in open up the chat say hi tell us where you are logging in from today.
All right, welcome welcome, everybody. Hey, Helen Chris Rachel, welcome guy from Tenerife, Fiji from Germany. Welcome, Christian from Buenos Aires. Richard from Philly Rachel from Fort Collins. Hey, Rachel David from New Hampshire. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're all here. Hey, Vern. If you're just joining us in zoom open up the chat and say hello, I'm dropping again our link bundle in there you can download this month's plugin list using that link. Also there is the sign up for next Tuesday's live stream with Thomas rate we watch your website. He has a lot to talk about with WordPress. Security that is coming up one week from today. And it's a free live stream. Good stuff. Glad you're all here. Hope you've had a lovely summer
it is already August.
Crazy, right? So we're just about three minutes away from getting started. We'll start the recording and about three minutes after the hour. Coming right up a Stacy John welcome. Class. Beth. Tanya. Allen. Good to see everybody. All right, just about three minutes to go. If you're just joining us again in zoom, open up the chat and in there you will find the link bundle with today's plugin list which you can download and also the signup for the live stream for the WordPress security roundup coming up next Tuesday. It's going to be a good one with Thomas Rafe if we watch your website glad you're all here got a pretty good plugin list today. I'm excited about it. several interesting things
ah see Vera that sounds just delightful. Yes, I mean, what what more do you need besides a lovely evening in the Netherlands? A good beer and the plugin round up. I mean, that's who could ask for more.
Again, if you're just joining us
if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I'm dropping once again there in the chat, the link bundle that has the plugin list for this month, along with the invitation to join us next Tuesday. One week from today. We're Thomas rave we watch your website in the WordPress security Roundup. Thomas and his team manage something like 17 million WordPress sites. They're watching security on that many sites. It's crazy. And he always has great insights about what the hackers are doing next. So that is coming up. In a week is going to be a good one. So about a minute and a half to go before we get started with plugin Roundup. Glad you're all here. Come on in, find a seat open up the chat say hello. The links are there in the chat. If you want to download the plugin list you can grab those it's a pretty good list today, I believe pretty good list. Now just about a minute to go. Now before we get started. I also one find a fun little plugin to wrap us up today. You can look ahead if you want to spoil the surprise but it's a fun little plugin that we found in the directory Hey Brian, welcome.
Alright folks,
just about ready to go. I'm gonna drop the link bundle again once again in the chat if you need to download this month's plugin list. It is there waiting on you. Just about ready to start? Hey Bonnie. Hey Tanya
just about ready to go everybody. Plugin round up for August 2020 for less than 10 seconds away.
All right. It is three minutes after let's get the recording started and begin the roundup. Well, happy Tuesday everybody. Welcome to another Live stream here from the solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and every month we've take a look at the WordPress plugin directory and we bring you a list of 10 to 12 plugins that we think are interesting and deserve your consideration. So welcome. We are glad you're here. If you are just joining us in zoom, you can open up the chat say hello and find there in the link bundle which contains this PDF, the August 2024 plugin roundup if you're watching this on the replay, it's just below the video. You can download this and follow along. As always, just the disclaimer we haven't thoroughly vetted any of these plugins for compatibility or bugs or security or privacy or accessibility or any of those things that you probably want to consider strongly before using this on a live site or on a client project. We just thought they were interesting. And every month now for almost 10 years. We've been bringing you a list just like this that we thought was pretty cool. Also, if you are a solid Academy member, you can select our suggest plugins for inclusion in the list. We get some of those from time to time and we consider them as well using this link right here in the PDF. All right, let's get started shall we with the first plugin of the roundup which is called notification Master. I'm going to pull over the dashboard for WP Nathan here and we'll take a look at this one. Notification master. Now this plugin lets you customize the notifications that are sent out by email when certain things happen on your WordPress site. Many of them are things that were sold as a mini some of them are functions that WordPress would send an email for automatically like new users and that sort of thing. This lets you customize those but also create additional notifications for events that WordPress might not notify you about. Now, this does not do things like all the dashboard notices that appear this is not that plugin. It's not going to hide dashboard notices. This is going to send or let you customize emails that are sent to various people could be the site admin could be the user could be some other email address of your choice. notices that go to those places whenever certain events happen on your site. So it's a pretty cool little plugin here. Let's take a quick look here by first activating the plugin. Notification master right there it is and that's going to give us a new dashboard item over here, right at the top All right, so pretty decent little user interface here. It's got its own internal navigation here at the top that corresponds to the Admin menu over here. We have some statistics about how many notifications were have been sent over a particular time. So you see a couple that were sent today just in testing and let's take a look. We have a setup just this test notification here for when the user logs in. So let's actually before we go there, let's just look at the overall settings with the plugin so you can and I would suggest probably doing this in the background. Because that's whenever something happens, especially if it's a high traffic site. Getting those notifications done in real time can be difficult. So this kind of sets up processes, the send those notifications, you can delete them based on a certain day. The Pro version has WooCommerce triggers, which is pretty cool. But here it lets you toggle on what kinds of notifications you want to be available. And this is helpful when you go to set up a notification. It's going to show you all the options that you have toggled on here. So if there's some of these that you don't want, like do I really want to know if a taxonomy term changes, probably not. Maybe a comment status, maybe media haps I don't really care about theme or plugin changes. So I'll save those and now those will not be available. In my notification list when I go to create or edit a notification. So it lets you kind of streamline what's shown there. Let's show this one which I've called user login. And I've given it that title here. Now here are the triggers. So I'm just going to walk quickly down the list. So you can see the sorts of things that this plugin is watching so that you could send a notification if one of these things happen. So maybe if a post is added or if you have an approval process, this is really helpful for sites that have you know, a publication process with authors and editors and that sort of thing. So post is approved post is set to draft published scheduled a post is sent to review the lots of things with posts here when post is trashed, when pages are added, approved, drafted, published, scheduled, etc, etc. Many things here when comments are added or published or trashed or spammed all that when new media item is published or updated or trashed. When users register they update their profile or if a user is deleted. The one we're using here is if a user logs in or logs out or loses a password or user change. This is really helpful for WordPress built in privacy functions like if a user wants to export their data. This can customize the notifications that are associated with that. So lots of different options here especially for a free plugin. So we're just going to stick here with our user login. And now at this point we would I'm just going to delete the here so you can see how this sets up. I'm now going to add a connection. So you'll notice that in the free version here there are three different connection options. I can send an email, I can push a web hook or if you're using discord oddly for your business, you could push a message out to a Discord server. The Pro version lets you post to Facebook X slash Twitter, Slack Zapier and make what used to be called Integra mat, but we're just going to send an email that will click that next the connection name we're gonna call user login. And I want to send it to now there are merge tags here where you can send to like the email or the blog or whatever. I'm going to send this just to me, Nathan Nathan at solid dopey.com Somebody's logged in and down here I can say Hey,
am I logged in? Should they
type they have okay. And then I can drop in the merge tags of here's some user things. So maybe this user name logged in and maybe I could put their email address or you put whatever you want. To hear. For email. Oh, shoot. Oh, that's a little quirk if you click off the window it goes away with this again quickly.
Oh, and something I neglected to mention, which actually got me very confused today. If you tab to the next field or click to the next field, this email address isn't set you have to hit enter to turn it gray like this which is just a little weird, you know, subject
I'll just put the email address there. So enable the connection and save. John is asking where the users kept so this is just watching the WordPress user list the standard WordPress users on the site. If anybody logs in, it's going to trigger a notification. So it's not managing users itself. It is just watching for things to happen in WordPress. So update this. Good to go. I'm gonna log out and log back in again and see if I can pull my email up over here. Alright, so we're gonna log in. Now that should have triggered a response
and I bet I don't have
Yeah, it went to spam. So I don't I don't have postmark running on this site. But there's my there's the email that it sent. So there it is right there. Pretty cool. So you could send these notices whenever any of these activities occur. And there's lots of options for those triggers. As you can see, so the pro version adds event triggers for WooCommerce, which could be super helpful. And also has integrations like Zapier, Slack, Facebook, those things that you saw earlier. So it starts at $69 a year goes up from there.
Interesting, right?
So that is notification master by notification pastor. Questions or comments on that one pretty neat little plugin to start things off
all right. Now, by the way, one interesting use case of notification master, maybe you don't like for example, the default WordPress email to reset your password. Well, you could change that if you want to here which is kind of nice. Okay, let's move on to the next one. Then, which is called archive inactive plugins. Now, this is I think, it may not be the first but it's one of the first plugins that we've ever done on the plugin Roundup, where it's actually not in the plugin directory. I ran across this one this week, and I found it interesting in the last week and I found that interesting enough to include, but it is only available through the author's website right now. I don't know why it's not included in the plugin directory yet. Probably perhaps if I had to guess because there's a huge backlog of WordPress plugins. If you're submitting a new plugin, the plugin team is behind. And last I saw it was several weeks before a plugin could be even evaluated for inclusion. But anyway, this one is at the author's website. It is called archive inactive plugins. Oh and it's already active. Isn't that nice? So it's active here. And let me show you what it gives you. So right here you've got for example, this new archive item below a plugin. So let's click archive. And what that is going to do is pull that plugin out of the list here and place it in a filtered area here called archive. Now, what's also really cool about this is it moves the plugin to a completely separate folder. So I'm dopey Nathan runs on cPanel. So let me show you what's going on here. Under here the wp content folder there is now a folder called archived plugins. And there's the plugin there so it actually moves it completely out of the WordPress standard plugin directory and pushed it over there in the archive plugins folder. So it's kind of nice, it's not in that so it's not in the spot where a typical plugin would be found. So Stacy's asking how would you remember that you have the plugin? Because right up here, you now have archived as one of the filters for your plugin list. And there it is, and it's still listed here. The the code is just moved out of the standard plugin folder. Rachel's asking can that location be customized you there's no settings in the plugin that would allow you to do that. I think pretty sure it does. I don't think it has any now there's there are no settings No, there are no settings for the plugin. You could hack the code pretty easily, I would imagine. But then, you know, now you have to support the plugin on your own. So there's no there's no way to do that on your own. Elizabeth says if it is still in the server plugin, could it be found in compromised it's very unlikely that this plugin if you have a plugin in this folder, that it would be found because it's that's it is a publicly accessible area, but somebody would have to know to look in the archive plugins folder. It's unlikely possible but unlikely. Big so BG wants to know if can you activate or delete the plugin? Well, so from over here, you can delete it or restore it, but you cannot activate it because it's not in the plugins directory. So if you wanted to reactivate this archive plugin, you would click Restore. Now doing that just moved it out of this archive folder and back into the plugin folder. And now you could activate it
more actions under bulk now, it's just here for archive so you could bulk archive plugins but it doesn't give you any additional functionality. So anyway, I just thought that was interesting, especially if you have a you know, a plug, just kind of clear things up a little bit. You could just push everything over to archive and then it's interesting. That's archive inactive plugins from ignition labs. Any other questions or comments on this one? And the cool oh, let me do it. Let me mention this one thing. Very important. Archive plugins are not shown in the Available WordPress plugin updates, meaning just for example, I have a plug in on the site called WP rollback that gives you a UI to roll back a plugin to a previous version. So we're going to roll this one this Active Campaign postmark plugin back to the previous version of one dot 19.0. So it's going to show a an update. Let's go to the plugins page. Alright, so see we have an update pending for this one. If we push it over to the archive because it's not in the plugin folder, WordPress doesn't check it for updating so it's not going to show that an update is available until you move it back to the standard login list. So
just be aware of that.
Okey dokey let's move to the next one, shall we? This one is called Hide admin columns. Can anybody guess? You know what this one does? It lets you hide some admin columns. So let's take a look here. I'll actually like this one a lot. It is oh I already have it active which is handy. Let's go into the settings here. And what this is going to do is take a look at your the custom post types, the posts and pages and custom post types that have been defined on your site. So any standard custom post type is going to show up here to be selected. Now currently we have posts selected we'll just leave that and what it's done is it's pulled in what is currently being shown on WordPress as the column title so title author categories, tags and date, title, author, category tags and date and let's just say we're not using categories and tags on our site. So we're going to check those now. Checking on means turning off in this case. So we're going to hide categories and tags from posts. And when we do that, it links things up a lot, doesn't it? I kind of like this. So we could look at WooCommerce products also here's an option of many things. The WooCommerce products area. This post view and post all posts for you gets really cluttered especially if you have a bunch of add on plugins. So this would let us clean that up a lot. So products doesn't give us as many options interest. You it only gives us title and date here. That's interesting. Frank is saying can't Yes, you can do this under Screen Options per user. So you know Screen Options. Yes. But if you want to just clean the whole site up, say for all of your clients that log in, this is kind of a global way to hide all those columns, whereas everything here has to be done per user in the screen options. But it's good question. So for some reason, it's not picking up those WooCommerce additional columns, which is interesting. Like here's one for events, we have Pineland date pages, things so it lets you clean things up quite a bit. That is hide admin columns. Been it's a different fee. Yes. So it is a different feature set from the admin columns plugin, which can actually add additional columns and make things sortable and so forth. So what this does is clean things up, not add things to Yeah. So they are sortable, I mean, so this plugin doesn't add any functionality to add columns are sort columns or anything like that. It only hides columns. Now the admin columns plug in can make certain columns sortable. You'd have to test it out. It works with some and not with others. Okay, moving down to the next one, which is called dynamic draft post. Now, I gotta admit, I actually pulled this one out of the roundup at the beginning, and then it dawned on me how this could be really, really useful. So this is going to be a niche use plugin. Definitely not one I would use on every site. But this could be super helpful and save you a bunch of time in certain circumstances where you need it. So what this does, I'm just going to show you what this does is first of all, you have to activate the plugin it's going to add a function to your block editor. Oh, it's already active. So that's handy. Let's look at the settings. So this tells you which post types it's active for. And let's just go into a post and let's say I am either writing posts, brand new, or I'm going in and I'm looking at an existing site's content and I want to create some additional content with some internal linking which is going to help my SEO. Let's take a look at I don't know this, this one, this post. Let's go in here. And this is a pretty now it's an AI generated post right? And let's say we want to write another post about keyword research, whatever. So what we can do is highlight some text and create a new draft post based on this text. So that's interesting. Only grab that keyword research tools. That's curious. So we're gonna make the post called keyword tools and the content normally would have grabbed this whole paragraph. I'm not sure why it didn't do that. But we're going to create this item and watch what happens. It automatically links what I highlighted to the draft post that it just created. So here's this new post, and this is automatically linked to it. And now I can go in there and create the post. Also, the link is disabled if the post is in draft status. So that's kind of cool, right? So can you like initially I'm like, why would you ever use and then it hit me. Oh, going in as I'm creating content and an idea comes to me. I can highlight some text, create a draft post right then, or go through an existing site and start creating drafts of other kinds of content. It's really kind of an a very clever login, if you're doing that task. So anyway, I thought that was kind of cool. That is dynamic draft posed by the digital mic. Not a digital mic, but the digital mic. Good. So Sherry has something she can use it on right now. Very cool. Any other questions or comments on this one? That is dynamic draft post. Okie dokie let us scroll down the list Okay, another this is this is another one that you might say it ought to be in core. If you were a block editor user. Let's just go back into our wherever we were just going to click on a post here. So you know, if you're a block editor user, you probably know you can click on this button and delete a block but it's a lot of clicking and a lot of scrolling. Or you could go in here to the list view and delete a block here but it's always a lot of scrolling. Wouldn't it be nice if there was an easier way just to delete a block and there is from this plugin called delete control. So let's activate delete control. Reef refresh our post and clicking on any block gives you a trashcan icon right there. And boom, it's gone. Single click right so that's pretty cool. Delete it, it's gone. Yeah, really, really easy. works on any block, no matter what it is. It puts it right up there in this core original, the initial block editing ribbon so I mean, that's it. It doesn't do anything else other than that, but it does it pretty well and it's a great idea. I like it a lot. So that is delete control. The as this sparks the debate of why wasn't it done? In court? And what I can tell you is there are a lot of smart people who spent a lot of time noodling over what icons ought to be there and not and I don't think it's that they didn't think to put it in it's that they decided to that it wasn't the one of the primary things that people are going to do and maybe they're right. I don't know. I just really liked this like, and here's a cool plugin that just drops it right in there. So the weight control, simple but useful. All right. Um, let's scroll down. To the next one, shall we? This one is called mail. Sure by Corey Trevor. This is really helpful if you are experiencing mail deliverability problems with your website. I'm sure nobody ever experiences that problem, right. WordPress is not delivering email. Why is that happening? Well, let's activate mail sure and see what we can find out.
So we're going to get here now under Tools and you know, I like it when plugins when you activate them, they it takes you to their settings page, because I don't know about you, but sometimes I click around for a little while trying to find where the settings page of this plugin is that I just added. This one happens to live under Tools which is the appropriate spot and you get this first authentication test tab. Now here's the results of one that I ran. Oh, it's been about four hours ago now. Where this is this WordPress install has no SPF no DKM no demark none of that it's just, it's just there. There's no deliverability at all, no settings added. And that's why earlier, when I sent that test email from notifications, it ended up in spam because that's what usually happens. This runs an authentication test you can run it again takes just a second. By the way, you got to make sure that the REST API is available. So if perhaps, as a best practice, you're using solid security and you've disabled the REST API you would have to allow it in order for this plugin to run because it does use the REST API and you get the results. demark policy none. Not signed with DKM. There are no SPF records. But the email did send which is nice. So this will tell you what's going on with your WordPress mail. Now one thing I will tell you is in my agency, we use postmark to deal with email deliverability. And this plugin struggles with that it doesn't work. Or maybe if I let it sit there long enough. Maybe it would eventually work but I gave it a couple minutes and nothing ever happened. And I was rather impatient. When I was testing it. So if you're using the postmark plugin that takes over the WordPress send mail. If it's set up in postmark then you know it's good. You don't have to worry about that stuff because it's going to be automatically authenticated. So probably in that use case this isn't helpful. This would be really helpful. If you're using one of the more standard SMTP WordPress SMTP plugins where it can get a little fiddly with getting all the settings right. This will help you know if things are set correctly. Also from right here in WordPress, you can send a test email to any address and also you just clicked this it has sensed my server's IP and it can push that right over to the MX toolbox blacklist check tester to see if my IP address has any issues. So that's kind of cool. And all that right in this simple little free tool called male Sure. Any questions or comments on this one? This can be really handy if you're trying to diagnose male issues
okie dokie moving right along okay, I really like this plugin. WP remote users sync. This is helpful in a situation where you have two WordPress websites. Maybe it's a primary site and a member site or something else. And you need to synchronize users between the two. This does it and it works flawless. It is so very cool. This will let you keep your users in sync between multiple WordPress sites that can even include if you want login status. So it's actually going to use a shared cookie that will keep your site's the login and sync between those sites. Now, that kind of shared cookie situation doesn't work on Apple Safari browser, but it does on other browsers. Anyway, it's very It does this vary securely. And it's pretty simple to set up. Now I've actually set up a quick dev site. For this purpose, I need to log in with the correct URL and logging in. Okay, so this is just a basic WordPress site that's there. I do have user sync set up and I'm going to show you how quick it is. To do all of this. Also, I will need to activate the plugin as we know, the first step in using a plugin is, you know, activating a plugin. Very helpful. All right. So if it's not set up, it's going to give you this little nag up here. And so let's set up a site. So I'm here on WP Nathan, my remote site is going to be this dev.wp Nathan, I'm going to add that boom. And over here. I'm going to do the same thing but it's just going to be WP Nathan. So we add each site to the other. Now the next thing I need to do is go over here to security and add a couple of keys little tokens and what I use for this is just a password generator. So let's just grab a 20 character string of text. And these need to be the same on both sides. So I'm going to do this one here. And the same over here. This string is what validates that or by security, it's going to validate the it's correct between those sites. Copy this one and do that for the this key and make sure that matches over here. You can also automatically allow, let's say your site to on the same server, put the display IP address to not what I would do I would use the key it's a little more secure. So now that we're actually synchronized, we can say I want this these are the outgoing actions I want to send to the other side. I want to synchronize my login and logout rating up there. I'm just going to check them all. But look at all you can send over even user metadata between the two. So if you've created custom fields on user profiles as long as that key exists on both sites, you can synchronize those. So we're going to do outgoing and incoming actions or all of them on both sites. Save this really quick and just run a quick test. Oops. Oh, I have to do the same over here. Hang on.
Check all the boxes, check check, check, check check many checks
Alright, now it should work.
So we are now totally synchronized between these two sites. So if I come over here on WP Nathan, and I add a user
it just helped to the other side and added that user over here. There it is. Pretty cool, right? If I delete it here on the dev site it's gone over here as well. Pretty cool. It just works. It's really really nice. So several questions here. Varun is an API exposed to the public Well, it's, it's talking through its own channel that it is created and it's encrypted, based on the random string of characters that are added and it's using open SSL, all this alphabet soup of encryption that makes it really secure. So pretty cool. It also has a tool that allows you to export the list of existing users. So if you want to, like you have a site that's empty, and you want to pull all the users over here over to there, it gives you a built in tool to just push all those users over version. I have no idea what the end point is. You'd have to do some research on that. But yeah, this this is the best user sync plugin that I've seen. works really, really well. Any other questions or comments on this one? WP remote user sync and to cool?
Alright, scrolling down the list to the next one, which is called Email kit. Here's a really nice addition that you could put on just about any website project that just gives you that extra little level up for your clients. So maybe you like me add a little extra to a site where you customize the login page with the user's logo and maybe some branded colors on their WordPress login just just a little extra thing to do doesn't take but a minute, and it just levels up. You know how the site looks as the client is beginning to use it. Email kit does a similar thing, but with the emails that are sent out so what this is going to let you do is create a template and there can be various templates depending on what kind of email is being sent. But it lets you brand the email that's being sent and do it very easily. So let's activate email kit. And here we go. So I think we have one set up already a couple of things here. So here's one that we edited for our WooCommerce email called New Order Confirmation. And look you have all these little items you can drag over in into this area. It's like we lost our image. I may have accidentally deleted that earlier. Probably so. So here's the new order email that goes out and if I want to change this text, look, I just put it in right here. And I can update all the text that goes in here. You can change your font sizes and all the things centering the text, you know text, transform all the colors. You have total control over every aspect of this email. And let's just say for example, at the bottom of my email, I want to put some social icons. Well guess what I can do that. Boom, there's my social icons I just added to the bottom of this email and clicking that I can add my URLs. It's just so easy to customize emails with this drag and drop email template editor. And you can see right here how it looks on phone versus desktop. And previewing it as various devices. Tablet. You see it kind of brings in the sides here. Bone size, it's really cool and works quite well. Now the pro version lets you save templates to reuse. But yeah, this so that's set up to be the new product. Let's go into edit here. This allows you to right here where you can decide where it's going to be applied
have lost the spot where you think it's when you first set the email up. Yeah, when I added it, here it is. So give it a name. Is it a WordPress email or a WooCommerce email? Let's just say it's a WordPress email when a person resets their password or signs up. So here's a brand new thank you for registering see how this works. It's really easy to step through and decide where is this template going to be applied. And now what does it look like? And you've got all these options to change you know this is terrible text. You know, that's the terrible text that normally goes out in that first welcome email. Now you can edit all that it's really great. So that is email kit from WP met. Questions or comments is probably is the best drag and drop email template editor we've seen pretty cool All righty, lots of possibilities there and it's be very it would be very easy for you to set this up for your clients. Just give them a little extra something when those emails go out. All right, next one is a calendar plugin called Sugar calendar. Now calendar plugins in WordPress sometimes they're not great right? They're way too complicated. They're really hard to use. They require a lot of input from you as a developer to style correctly on the front end. And they're just they're not great oftentimes. So sugar calendar is I think one of the better options to just get some events on your site pretty quickly and the free version even supports ticketing with payments, which is crazy. Normally that's a paid upgrade. So let's take a quick look at Sugar calendar. It's been around a little bit it was recently updated, which is why it made our list for this month sugar calendar. So let's jump in here and take a look. They have some nice onboarding information here. But here's our back end event list. So we've got our plugin roundup event here we've got this recurring event for four days. These are setup as you might imagine, kind of like a custom post type where you can go into the event, give it a title. It's got a really nice interface. It's pretty clean. recurring events are only supported in the pro version so you don't have to upgrade to get recurrence. But you can create a multi day event without having to do a pro version. You can add the location linking you have to add a pro version. I mean, you could just put a link down here in the details to be honest. Ticketing again is supported in the free version. So we could say this is 10 bucks apiece. $10 apiece for the plugin round up with 100 capacity, and it'll just work. So that will set up a purchasing if we save that workshop really well. So if we go here to our calendar, got a little page setup for that. Here's how it looks on the front end. Let you see the page simply has a shortcode right here I'm sorry, it's actually a block. So you could fit this calendar into a block based layout that you already had, which is kind of cool. Let's take a look at the page itself. Here's how it looks on the front end. It's really clean and nice. You got a nice little search here. Design is very modern, it's unobtrusive i It's a very simple palette, so this should just blend right in with most sites. You can view of course by month week or day,
which is kind of cool.
You can toggle by only certain like which calendars which days of the week and so forth. I want to look at this event. It shows up here with the featured image which is nice I can click it to go to the detail page. Oh this is one that you do have to reset permalinks because it creates a slug permalinks not privacy. But we'll just quick reset permalinks This is normal if your plugin creates its own slug. Now if we refresh, we'll get the single event page right there. Kind of cool. Very simple, very easy to use. Works really well. There are a number of reasons to upgrade to pro, which would include for example, let's see. The calendar feeds option. You do have to upgrade to the pro version if you want people to subscribe to your calendar for example, if you want Zapier support you have to upgrade also you have to note let's see, where is it Lanius
Ah,
let me see where is the setting to connect? I'm thinking about different plug in that we'll see in a minute. The next plug in? Yeah, so if you want to have recurring events or calendar feeds that people can subscribe to or connect to Zapier. Those are all reasons you'd want to upgrade to the pro version. starts at about $50 a year. So pretty nice plugin for basic calendaring. And it is simple. That's the beautiful thing about it. Any other questions or comments about the sugar calendar? It has been around a while. Got a bunch of users. Yeah, couple 1000 users. All right. Moving on down the list to the next one. Another plugin from the Manage ninja team. The this is the team behind fluent forums, fluent CRM, fluent, snippets, fluent. All the other things. This is fluent booking. And y'all this is a beautiful WordPress based booking. solution, which even at the free level could be all you need, if you don't need to connect to zoom or something like that or to an external calendar. So, you know, let's just say you've got a client that wants that allow booking by phone or booking in person on this certain block of availability, and it'll just do that and it looks beautiful while doing it. So let's activate fluent booking.
And I think I'm going to start just by showing you quickly what the booking page looks. It is just beautiful. So this is out of the box. It looks like a Calendly embed except it lives right here in WordPress. Here's our event and description and our person and if I want to select a date, let's click here and it opens up this nice list of all the available times. I can change my timezone here if I want. If I choose this 1pm slot. Then I enter my details. Isn't that beautiful? So you put your phone number in this is a phone number booking event that it was set up to be all this information scheduled the meeting and there you go. It will send email reminders, all that's built in. Let's take a look at how this thing is set up on the back end. Oh while that's loading. Look at how nicely it responds to various screen widths. Really pretty. Here's the phone view. And here it staggers. So if we choose the stay at pulls over that next area and pulls over it's just a beautiful interface works so nicely. And on the back end, it looks like this so you get some basic reporting. Here's where you'd want to. You can add your different it says calendars. This is really your types of events. So here's this wilderness coaching item that I set up earlier as an example where you get the time you can even let the attendee select the duration if you'd like. Here we can check our availability for this. We can use an existing schedule where we've set under availability or make custom hours for this event. It's all the things you'd expect here. limit how many can be scheduled in a certain time. Various questions to ask on this particular booking. Here's your email notification settings. You can even in the pro version attach Twilio to this plugin and it will send an SMS notification a reminder the appropriate for all of these things you need the pro version but you can set up payment through stripe, web hooks other integrations like to fluid CRM, for example. That'd be a really powerful integration. Here's your list of bookings that people have booked. Availability is here and here's where you would go in for example and say, Okay, I want to attach this to my Google Calendar or Google meet to do virtual calls. It also will attach to your Outlook calendar and Apple calendar. Next cloud which I'm not familiar with Calendar. Oh, this is yeah, next cloud. This is an open source. Kind of a personal information manager. It's pretty cool. Actually. Zoom Twilio, all these external connections are available in the pro version. And that starts at the price. Now they're running the deal. $55 a year so it's really not that bad. $79 a year normally. That's not bad. All things considered. The Pro version lets you do so many things. And it lives right here on your website. So that's kind of cool. That is fluid booking from the AP managed ninja team behind all the fluid things. Questions or comments about this one fluent booking. It indeed does a lot.
Okay.
This has been a plugin roundup full of helpful useful plugins has it not? Like somebody said it's gonna be hard to vote today? Stephanie. Yes, it will be hard to vote today. Let's just put the icing on the cake, shall we? Every now and then we come across a fun little plugin that has zero actual practical use other than in this case, to infuriate your co workers. So, so if you have a site that you share with coworkers, this is a fun little prank plugin. It is called logout roulette. And the way that it works is activate the plugin and it's it doesn't show up except for the person who activated it. But for every one then for every single page you visit in the WordPress admin, there's a one in 10 chance that you'll get logged out it's absolutely it's absolutely frustrating. So let's activate logout roulette, and I'll show you how it works.
So look, I just got logged out
so let me log in again. Come on. Logon me. Okay, here we go. So let's go into the back end. Let's see how many pages deep we can get 12340 Wow. It's as high as I've gotten so far. 560 It got me seven, seven got me. So it took seven clicks. But every chance every admin page you visit, there's basically a 10% chance that you'll be logged out. It doesn't do anything else than that. It just logs you out. So really, really annoying. Oh my so this really takes me back to the glory days of the plugin roundup when we first started out because we would find a couple of plugins like this every month that are that are just fun, right? Anyway, burn that's wouldn't that be great? If the developer would add a snarky message when you got logged out? Oh my oh, by the way, a really annoying thing, even if you are the activator of logout roulette. A really annoying thing is that it can be hard to get back to the plugins page to deactivate the plugin. It took me three tries the first time so you might find yourself going in and removing it from within the file structure. This time though I actually did get to the lockout, or to the plugin page. I'm going to deactivate this before anything else goes wrong. So now we're good. I'm no longer going to be logged out. Anyway, that is logout roulette. And we have now reach the end of the August 2024 plugin round up list. So let us now please vote for your favorite plugin every six months we do a best of plugin round up that is comprised of the votes and wow many things just got voted for Okay, dynamic draft, sugar calendar fluid delete notification fluid email kit, email kit notification notification fluid. Oh dear. Okay, so if I had to, okay. I looks like if you need the link to the downloads that is there in the chat looks to me like fluid booking notification master. And Chris make some sense out of this here. Fluid booking notification and sugar calendar I think we an email kit. There's really four. Yeah, the Stasi this was the best batch of plugins we've had in some time. Yeah, blame Chris.
Oh, my. Yes.
So that's gonna wrap us up for today. Let me once again invite you the link was just there in the chat. Let me invite you if you've not already signed up for our live stream one week from today. It is our quarterly WordPress security roundup with Thomas Wraith. Have we watched your website, Thomas and his team there we watch man watch. Currently about 17 million WordPress sites. They are on the cutting edge of WordPress security. They know exactly what the trends are as hackers are trying to compromise WordPress. Sign up for that live stream because it is absolute gold every time Thomas comes on and shares his knowledge with us. That is coming up again one week from today. And I'm going to drop those links again in the chat right now before we finish. So go ahead and register for that free live stream. That is Tuesday August the 13th. All right. Thanks for hanging out with us. Today. We are back on Thursday for members with Office Hours here on the solid Academy where we go further together.
