Best of iThemes Plugin Roundup (January – June 2022)
5:30PM Jun 8, +0000
Speakers:
Nathan Ingram
Keywords:
plugin
woocommerce
vimeo
site
add
block
hooks
questions
order
leaflet map
activate
test
nice
helpful
email
beaver builder
pull
product
page
editor
Good afternoon and welcome everybody to the best of January through June 2022 plugin roundup here on I iThemes Training. glad you've decided to join us for the next hour as we take a look at all the favorite plugins from the last six months. So at the end of every best of webinar, we asked you the question, What is your favorite plugin of the month? One vote one vote only and we keep track of those and about every six months we put one of these best arms together and by the way, last December in December of last year when I started I'm not sure why I haven't done this before now but we just started asking what were your favorites of the favorites so maybe we'll have like the best of the best of whatever that would be right so that would be like world class favorite plugins of the roundups. Anyhow, if you're just joining us in zoom, welcome, pop up in that chat window. I'm going to share one more time the handout link it is there to follow along. It's the PDF you see on your screen. Right here. So let's get started shall we? So we're gonna get started with a really fun plugin that started we reviewed back in January of this year, and it is called Gravity Forms live summary. So I'm a big Gravity Forms fan. I've been a big Gravity Forms fan for a long, long time, and many of you are as well and this is one of the better add ons that I've seen lately for Gravity Forms. So again, all these plugins are free in the WordPress plugin directory. And right here Gravity Forms live summary by Geek on the road. So let's go on in and activate that plugin. And it starts with live summary right there it is. So they've actually changed the UI around just a little bit since we did this last back in January. And it actually makes a little more sense now. So rather than all the settings being here in the Settings area, each form now has its own set of settings. So I'm just going to go here under order form and GF summary add on to have a look here. So on each form, you have the ability to toggle is it going to show a summary or not? And if there are products in the form that are calculating a total, do we show the total in the summary so I'm just going to toggle both of those on because this is as you can see an order form. Let's see save. And if we take a look at the form, what we're going to say and what we're going to see here is each of the fields of the form in the settings of the field, there's a checkbox here for do I show this in the summary. So you can toggle that everything's off by default. This form has all the fields turned on from the last time we demoed this back in January. So we can decide for each field of the form. Does this show up in the live summary or not? So we've got name and email is going to show up and is that product that's going to show up? This product shows up? The shipping options will show up and right so that's what we've got. So let's actually pop open the page that contains this form. So you can see how that looks. So here's our summary. So this is what the plugin does. It's going to push the form over to the left and give us a little sidebar on the right this is the way this appears is not editable in like there's not a UI to edit the format of how this looks but then this is good enough. You could certainly edit the CSS if you want to do something with the colors or the borders or whatever. But basically look when we start typing in information like that it starts live updating the summary area that
and so we'll do five of those and one of these and let's choose a shipping option. And look at that. It's just updating the total as we go. It's really really nice. And you can imagine how this would be super helpful. If you're using gravity forms in like an order form situation. This is super cool. And it just gives that running total right there along the side and we'll submit it. And so that is essentially how it does it doesn't have to be an order form like this. It works with any kind of form. And again, you can choose which fields show up in which fields don't. So that is Gravity Forms live summary one of the hits from January 2020 to any questions or comments on that one. That's a fun little plugin to show
all right, so next up on our list. Oh, wait a minute. Melanie has a great question here. If it's a recurring amount, does it show the details of it? And let's see. So it would depend on what the field is right? So if it's let's just say I think I know what you're after Melanie like for a donation form where a person could enter a recurring amount. Yeah. So if we were to say I mean, what what you would have here is like a field that says, Is it a one time gift for donation form or recurring gift right? And so you know, we could add a radio buttons, and let's just put that up here somewhere or wherever. And that would be type of gift one time or recurring.
Now I want to show that in the summary, and so when I do that
it's going to show it right there.
Yeah, so right. And so if a field is shown by conditional logic, it's only going to show up here when a value appears. So you know, email will show up but only when something is typed. Right, so that would work in a conditional logic situation. It's a great question. All right. So again, that's Gravity Forms live summary about Geek on the road. Any other questions, comments on that one? It's a great little plugin. All right, so let's move to the next plug. In on the list and that is the olana email tester. So email issues in WordPress are a lingering problem with just about everybody. You know, a lot of sometimes if you don't have your email set up correctly, for one reason or another, you find that those emails aren't being delivered. at all, or sometimes maybe they end up in spam. And, you know, I recommend a transactional email service like postmark to take care of that but especially maybe you're just pulling it aside. You're trying to troubleshoot something and you just want to be able to test to see if an email is delivered. That is the very simple task this plugin will do for you. So Lana, email tester, let's activate this plugin. And it will show up over here under the Tools menu LaLana email tester, and so let's just send ourselves a quick email Nathan at i ithemes.com. I am going to send that email and let me let me log into my mail. So you can see that came through
logging in Oh, my goodness. All these welcome. Thanks. Alright. So yeah, right here. So there's the test email from WP Nathan. Look. Little learning there, but there it is. This shows that it was that it can send email so by email works. So it's a very simple, just send an email plug in, but it will quickly allow you to test whether the site can send email on it. So for example, maybe you have a process or an audit checklist that you use. If for example, you're going to start to manage when a website you did not create this would be a great item for your checklist to make sure that that website can actually send email. Alright, so good thing. Yep, so that is the Launa email tester. And that simply sends a generic email to whatever address you specify to make sure your site can send email. Any other questions or comments on that one? Manu? Yes, I did mention postmark is a service that takes over the sending of emails through a WordPress site or through any it's not just WordPress, but it has been recently acquired by Active Campaign, which I think is a good acquisition. We use it for all of our client sites. It's great. Okay, next down the list is a really fun another little testing type plugin. It is called order test for all for WooCommerce. So if you if you're managing a WooCommerce site, or especially if even in the development process, you want to be able to test and see if certain things are working if the checkout process is working. And you don't want to go through the trouble at this point, for whatever reason of setting up a sandbox, maybe you're not to that point yet of actually setting up a real payment gateway. So what you would use this is a great plugin that will allow you to put in essentially a fake payment gateway into the into your WooCommerce site. So let's go in here and activate this one. It is order test for all WooCommerce rolling scrolling, scrolling, right there. It is. Now what we'll need to do first is install activate and enable the WC order test payment method in our payment settings. So we'll go to Settings under WooCommerce and payments. And at the bottom of the list here we will toggle on the WC order test gateway. So let's toggle that on. And I don't think there's anything we have to set up here. Yeah, just enable it and enable the gateway for all users. That's interesting. This is new I didn't see this before. I wonder if that means that it will only work. You have the option for it only to be for your user.
Oh for non logged in users interesting so you could actually run this on a live site this is new. I don't believe this was present in when we looked at this back in was it January? Yeah. So this is pretty cool. So like you can activate it. And since you're logged in it will use the test gateway but if you're not logged in it uses your standard gateway. That's pretty cool. That's uh, I didn't realize that was even there. That's a new addition. Anyhow it's enabled. So we can now go into our shop and buy some downloadable kittens. And let's go check out proceed. This just lets us test to make sure all of our shipping things work all the calculations are working and placed the order using a test gateway here, and boom, there we go. Done. And that's a real actual order here that will show up. It's basically a fake payment gateway that lets you test everything about your your WooCommerce installation. Other than talking to stripe or whatever. So it's a nice it's a nice little add on for testing. Again, order tests for all WooCommerce any questions or comments about this one? He has a lot of love for this one back in January. All right, so moving on to February those last three were all from January of this year. Let's move on into February Shall we with a fun little plugin called vibes. So a lot of discussion in the WordPress world is centered around speed. And performance optimizations over the last year or so. And vibes is a nice way to pull some of that information right into WordPress itself. So let's go in and activate the vibes plugin.
Now one of the things that you want to do immediately is on your dashboard, you get an executive summary of look. All of your web core vitals well see here. Why aren't we loading? Well that's interesting. Maybe I have to go oh, you know what, I think I have to go to the analytics area first to get that generated. Let's go to web vitals. It's got to think about it for a minute. Okay, now it's pulling in. Oh, there's not enough data to show this because the site doesn't get any traffic. We do get this though. So that's kind of helpful. So it's all the things that the Google Lighthouse tests are showing. And if this was a live site that was getting real traffic, we would pull in all of the the aspects here for the mobile scores, and that would show up right here, but we don't this is a, you know, just a dummy site. And so we don't have that information. But you can see look at this. We've got some of our endpoints and time to first byte and all that showing up right here. You can also filter this by date range which is kind of cool. There's an also some additional analytics areas here like let's see performance.
Now, this is one of the nice things in this particular area. It's using its own metrics, so it's not actually pulling in from Google for this. This is the real life experience of real users on your site. This is tracking, which is super helpful. And so that's here under the performance area. It's not pulling this data in from Google. This is actual real. You it's tracking users on your site. There's also under let's see in the analytics area, there is some resources and what's actually being used on your website. So there's a bunch of data here anyway, it's interesting and particularly when you get a live site and you have data. Oh, here we go. Look at that. It just took a minute. So now we're getting data populated into the dashboard, which so that's pretty nice. So you can kind of see what's going on there. John, does it is there a performance impact of having the plugin active? I'm sure there's some minimal teeny sliver of a second, but I mean, not not anything that you would be able to tell. Like, you know, if you put it in a lab, like if you had some tool that was measuring down to the 10th of a millisecond or whatever, probably you'd see something's it floating a couple extra scripts to pull stuff in, but it's not. This is not something that will slow down your site.
Any other questions about this one? This is vibes a nice little plugin to install and have a look at
All right, next up again from February of this year. This one we enjoyed playing around with and this is this is the kind of plug in that it's kind of hard to demonstrate because there's so much you could do with it. We have just a very simple thing to demonstrate on this today. And it's something that you'd really want to learn more about to use effectively, but it's called wicked block builder, and wicked block builder allows it gives you a visual interface to build your own custom block editor blocks. So no coding is necessary. You just sort of put the elements in place. You can add css and other things, but you don't have to know PHP and JavaScript and the other things that you would need to know to create an actual Gutenberg block. This kind of does all that heavy lifting for you. For simple blocks. Like for example, maybe I have a staff listing on my website, and I want to put, you know, the person's picture and their name and their title, right and I just want to block I can drop in and fill those things in and there it is. So it's perfect for those sorts of things. And if you are beginning to develop in the block editor, you realize, you know, sometimes, you know, there's not like a staff member block, or maybe one that's customized exactly like you want it. And this allows you to build those and again, we're going to do a very simple demo of this. This is a rabbit hole you can go into and learn a lot about and learn how to customize each of these blocks better, but it's really easy to get up and working out of the box. So let me show you the wicked block builder by first activating the plugin which is always a very important first step. So activating wicked block builder we now have a menu item. And notice here you can also with this not only build blocks, but also now I don't believe this was present in the plugin back in February when we originally saw it. You now have the ability to build block patterns and you have categories to sort in your blocks and your block categories. It does absolutely work with Kadence as well. So let's just there's a block. This one is actually left over from when we demonstrated this back in January. And now let's just have a look at this. It is our staff listing block. And you get to set an icon for it from a bunch of included icon. So that's kind of nice. That's what shows up in the block editor itself, which I'll show you in a minute. We can have it support a custom class name all the various things here. The Pro version even allows you to have repeater fields. So when we get into the next part, what are the things that we need to define in this blog again, this is a quick demo. It's not like I'm not teaching you how to use this plugin today. There's some great videos out there if you're interested in this. It's really easy to get up and running quickly though but in this block, we're going to have three bits of information. First, the image of the staff member, the name of the staff member and a job title. So once we get we just basically grab that and plop it in we could add something else like Job Title, Location, like this, right? So that's all we have to do. We can add another bit of information. Then we move into the editor view, which is how is this actually going to be shown in the block. So we're going to put a div with there's a div wrapper around it. We drug the image over here, couple of rich text components for the name and the job title. I'm going to add another one for the location. And that's all we have to do. I'm going to save this. There's some other things you can do like adding options in the sidebar. There there's a some things you can do for the front end view over here but just with this quick thing I'm going to go in and drop in a block here on this page. So let's say we're going to first of all put in a row we'll just get like a three row layout. And now we're going to do here's our staff listing block that shows up right here. And look we've got we've got selected image, the name the job title, some I didn't get be for some reason we didn't get the location Did I forget something here is very possible. I forgot something here. Your job title. I bet it was because it didn't have a placeholder. It was actually there it just wasn't showing me anything. But let's try this again.
Now, not sure what's going on there, but we'll just add an image real quick. So let's pull in Betty White. We Miss Betty White. Or actually this is Golden Girls right so her name was rose. What was roses last name on the Golden Girls. Anybody remember? Rose something? Somebody's googling Nylund Thank you. That was right. That's it. Thank you, Joe and Vicki. And job title, I don't know. So, right, they're simple. Add an image, you know, so all your stuff is defined. You just drop it in. Now the advanced part of this comes in where you can maybe restrict what image size is used here and add some styling to the name and maybe add a border and those sorts of things and just bake all that in. So you have created a custom block that is just for your design on this page. Right? And so it's I mean quick and easy to set up a simple block like this. But the amount of things you can do from this point for your custom block is huge. Like we could spend an hour training on this plugin just for it maybe even longer than that. I sue does it support dynamic information? Why yes it does. If you look down here, there is a C. I believe it is ng on attributes. Let's see. There's one of these is dynamic
The answer is yes. And I can't remember where I saw that. It is in here somewhere it's it will be a pro feature though.
But yes you I have seen dynamic information as I was playing around in this plugin. Su Yeah, you could do something similar. Well, a Kadence element. Yes, you could it would use case for this would be if you want a let's just say it's a the client would want to go in and add a staff member it would be easier to for so for example in a Kadence with a Kadence element. It would be helpful to plug pull in things like you have a custom post type with staff members. In this case you wouldn't have a custom post type it's just going to be a block where you're dropping things in. Right and you're just typing each one in. So this gives you the ability to have predefined content blocks that you would fill in the information for each time you add the block to the page. Yeah, pre designed block. Exactly. Yep, that's just for a specific type of thing. So lots of options here. And if you are all in the block editor, I would totally recommend checking this out. The Pro version is $49 a year and it's for unlimited site. So it's a really reasonably priced pro version. And gives you lots of things like you know, conditional logic and repeaters and things like that. So pretty cool stuff. So that's wicked block builder. Any other questions or comments on that
one? All right. Scrolling down to our next greatest hits plug in is the Vimeo plugin, the official Vimeo plugin that works with WooCommerce and that was something we started talking about back in March. And it's a really interesting it's a really interesting plugin it essentially brings in the video Vimeo video creation tools within WordPress. So if you weren't aware, Vimeo has tools that allow you to sort of drag and drop create a quick video built right in if you have the Pro version, or well that's it. I think it's available even at the first level of whatever the paid version is whatever they call that. And this is specifically designed for WooCommerce. So within the WooCommerce product area you have the ability to you have the ability to create an add a product video to the to the WooCommerce products. Let's take a look at that. Vimeo. Here it is. Now the one bit of setup I'm not going to show is you click the link, you go to Vimeo you authorize it and it pulls back in an API key takes like 10 seconds it's super fast. I already have this pre authorized because I didn't want to show the API key on a live webinar. You know how that goes. But let's go into a product here. And we'll just add it to our first one here, that geeky T shirts product. And you will notice that down here on the right there is now a look Vimeo video gallery. So, oh we're not authenticated. Okay, one moment please. Apparently when you deactivate the plugin, it authenticates the site, which I guess makes sense. But now I just need to go and activate the site. So while they me I was thinking really hard about this. And of course, it's going to be slow because we are on a live webinar and nothing ever works out the way it should on a live webinar. My goodness let's try this again. Make sure I'm signed into Vimeo which I am
Oh, my Vimeo is not loading. I can anybody else get to Vimeo right now. Or is it just me? Fantastic.
Wow. Okay. I have some issue. Melanie, you can't get to Vimeo. Oh, look at that
yeah, I Yep. Vimeo is having an issue. Sorry, Vimeo. We tried to demonstrate your plugin but it broke. Yeah, they must be having some sort of issues right now. Interesting. Let's see. Yep. Yeah, the down detector showed a spike as well. Okay. So what we will do is, put a pin in this and come back to it. Maybe we'll come back at the end of the webinar. Yeah, I can't get it the public site I think loads make it incognito. But nothing on the back end is loading. Yeah, the public site loads. But if I try to log in, nothing happens. They're having some issues. Okay, so we'll come back to this. It's really cool. It allows you to add a product video. Let's move on down to the next one then which is our Leaflet map plugin. How many of you have used leaflet maps? In the past leaflet maps are an excellent free alternative to Google Maps. Google Maps, if you've used them at all, any kind of customization of Google Maps you know that now and within the last couple of years, you've had to you actually have to go in and create a billing account before you can get a Maps API key. And they give you a certain amount of free and then they really start to hit you with with usage. I mean, it's Google Maps are helpful and valuable and you get what you pay for. This is a great option. If you need a custom map. And you don't want a Google Map whether because you don't want all the clutter and a Google map or you don't want to put an API key or any of those sorts of things. So leaflet is a great free option for this. And this plugin called Leaflet map by Baz does is a nice way to integrate that into WordPress with a very simple shortcode. So let's go in and activate our leaflet maps. Plugin. Do Okay, here's active and there are just a few settings here. So you can set your defaults, default height with Zoom and so forth. Whether you want to show zoom controls, whether you want to double click to zoom, those sorts of things. The default map tiles these are the styles that are available out there and there are a number of I think there's even a better list than here but on Wikipedia, there is the wiki of the Open Street Map. There are some pile URL so you can this is a little tricky to get to work but you can go in and basically it adds styling to the maps to make them look slightly different. So it's basically skinning the map. So you have the options to put those in as your default map tile. You can also change those in the shortcode itself, which is kind of cool. So we're just gonna go with defaults here and I have a page set up that has an open Leaflet map. Let's take a look at that. And here on this page, it is simply a shortcode Leaflet map address equals Birmingham al Zoom is 12 height is 600. And if we take a look at this
it's a nice little map of my hometown of Birmingham. Alabama. So it's free, works really well.
And you can embed that wherever you want it to be. The shortcode has a lot of different options, which you'll find here on the shortcode helper link. They give you some samples. You can add multiple markers here. So adding multiple markers, for example is something that you would need a Google API key if you were using Google Maps. Pretty nifty stuff. We can actually take this let's drop this in our page. I don't know if that's gonna work. Can you put multiple shortcodes in a shortcode? Oh, we're about to see. Yeah, you can. So there's our three three pins in Toronto. Yep, so a few samples. You can do. Do this by latitude and longitude if you'd like. Lots of options for the shortcode very easy to use. Nice to put on a contact page. You don't worry you have to worry about any potential privacy issues using Google Maps if there are any. Yeah. Any other questions or comments on this one Leaflet map? Paul's asking about the reCAPTCHA that's just because I have reCAPTCHA three running on the site. It shows up everywhere.
Other questions or comments about Leaflet map? Okay, Scrolling on down to this one really made a splash back in April. This is visual action hooks. So if you know anything about hooks, they are basically spots on a page that as your theme or plugins or other things are rendering the page. hooks are the place where things are rendered. And the nice thing about a hook in PHP is that you can sort of intercept that hook and add your own content at that spot. And so if you're using for example a Kadence element or if you're like a beaver builder person, you have a beaver theme or part and you want to hang it on a hook. You can choose the hook. Now the trouble is figuring out where these hooks actually are because they don't show up per se on a page. And so this is a plugin that shows you visually where all the hooks that are firing on your site are located and it is super helpful. There's one annoying thing that it does that I'll show you but it is a very helpful plug in as you're developing a site. So as we look at our Okay, so here's the annoying thing that it does see how it bumps my menu over that only happens for me it's not on the live site. It only happens for logged in users for whatever reason. Like if I go to this an incognito window, my menu is just fine. I don't know why the plugin does this. It did it back in April. But here's the great thing like this is not a plug in I would have on the site a lot. I would have it during particular points of development if I needed to know where a hook was on a site. So let's turn on our visual action hooks. Ah, and look. We get all of our hooks in display. So right here is the body of the WordPress core body open click on this there's Kadence before wrapper before header, the Kadence header, the Kadence header top here is the Kadence primary navigation see all these hooks that are there? And so as you're either doing custom PHP or working with Kadence elements or other things that depend on hooks, this will show you exactly where these things fall on a site. So that's really helpful. Let me actually go to let's go into the checkout process because it's super helpful especially that's it's really goofing on my site here, isn't it? Wow, look at that. So let's get a product in the cart and go to checkout. Oof, that is really ugly. All right, so in my cart if I turn on the hooks, we'll also get the WooCommerce hooks that show up see those the WooCommerce specific hooks so it works for theme plugin core WordPress. Any place a hook is showing up on a page. This is going to allow you to see where those hooks are located. And it's really helpful when you're trying to add some custom code or custom anything that depends on a hook to display. Otherwise you have to use what I've always called the dangit method, which is let's try this one. No, that's not it. Let's try another one. And so that kind of works sometimes, but this little allow you to precisely place the things that you want. So that is visual action hooks by coding habits. Any other questions or comments on that
one? Visual action hooks. Some of you use the dangit method by a less rated G name. Yeah okay. All right. Let's try Vimeo again and see if it's gonna decide to work. Hey, look Vimeos back. Alright, let's go back now to our Vimeo I'm gonna need to authorize that plugin really quickly and hopefully we can make that work now. So quickly now I am grabbing an API key. Hey, look, it works. Well. Now it's still spinning. I may have spoken too soon. Okay, strike two for Vimeo. We'll come back again. One more time. I'll give it one more shot. All right, next one on the list. This one has actually made it into our stack. We've used this on our last few client websites. We really really, really like this plugin, because it is the simplest way to add documentation. To a client site. It just works. And it's so simple. It's really great. So it's called Help manager by Bohemia plugins, very low install footprint. Don't let that one scare it. Don't let it scare you away on this one. It's a great plugin. So let's activate our help manager. Help Help Help Help is all right help manager. So it shows up here under publishing help. And essentially what this allows you to do is right here on the dashboard with this active look there is a help document that we've created. Here it is. We can edit this document slowly and it uses the block editor classic editor now one thing to note. The block editor classes that make columns only render on the front end. So block editor features like rows do not work. On the back end. It's only showing like if we go here, it only like it showed I had it in the block editor text and text in two columns. And notice here they're stacked so columns don't work however, we can really quickly let's see here. Come on now. Well, let's we can add a let's just say we want a video in here. Right so there's a video and you know, like we record something we could drop in a Vimeo link. This video always works. And you can you can put whatever you want to in here. So let's just say it's a it's a screenshot with some markup on it or it's a video with training or whatever. So here here's our video. Boom, they're just right there in line. Look at that. Isn't that pretty? So you just been played the video you go whatever you want here. It is nicely searchable. So this is what the client sees right here that as you stack up more topics, they'll show up here in the dashboard widget it's actually searchable when the dashboard finally decides to load so you can actually search your documents and have them pop up there. It's a super easy to use well executed. Inline documentation plugin Stacy can this be used with the classic editor? Absolutely. So let's just activate classic editor which is not on the site
it'll just replace the block editor with the classic editor as you would expect
so as I refresh the edit here, there it is. Now we lost our video because it was using a block but we can add media like it's an mp4 Yeah, so there's our Rick Roll video. And it'll insert right there or you can Oh embed with a YouTube link or a Vimeo link or whatever. That's helped manager from Bohemia plugins. It's really, really great. I love it. We've used it with good success on a couple of client sites already. Any other questions or comments on this one?
Folks, Okay, moving down the list is a plugin that will help you fix plugin problems in WordPress. Nobody ever has those right? Plugin conflicts plugins causing errors never happens but just you know, in case it might, here's a plugin you might want to be aware of. So this is this is conflict fixer. And let us activate that plugin. So actually, let me just go through here and deactivate some things because 800 plugins and the way my luck is going today I'm gonna get some sort of weird thing happening. And let's just delete many things here or deactivate things. Okay. All right. Okay, so this is conflict finder from WP fix it. The first immediate thing you're going to see is disabled plugins. So you know that if you go to a plug in company and say your plugin doesn't work, what is what is the first thing you're always going to get? Try it does it work with other plugins deactivated right, because that's the first thing that we should do to test and see if there's some sort of conflict. So when I click Disable plugins, everything gets disabled. Boom, one click. Everything's disabled. That's really handy now, but watch this. It remembers what plugins were active in which ones were deactivated, right? So a minute ago, I had a bunch of them active and a bunch of them inactive. Now everything by the way, other than conflict finder, is deactivated. If I click Restore, it puts all the plugins back the way they were so 13 active 25 inactive on the site. So that's one really, really great thing. So with this, I can just deactivate and then gradually enable one at a time to see if I can figure out which plugin is causing the conflict right. Now the other thing that this does, is that it shows up here a debug area. And it actually gives me a quick access to my debug log. So I know what's going on here. That's really weird. I don't know what that's about. I got some stuff going on. It's interesting. So we get access to our debug log just right here in WordPress. So it's super helpful. And it lets me see what's happening so I can turn on and off that EP debug Debug Log in script debug right here. It's great gives me all that right Rec and C and it's a great tool for quickly diagnosing problems on the site. Barb is asking does it remember the settings for each plugin? So each plugin usually plugins, right those settings in the database. However, we just saw, for example, like with that Vimeo plugin, it lost its connection. So that's going to that's a per plugin issue. So if I just toggled off all the plugins, I would have to go back in and reconnect that Vimeo. So that's something I would just have to be aware of that so that's a weird that most plugins don't do that. I'm not quite sure why Vimeo loses its connection. Many other plugins that have an API connection like that, don't lose that connection when they're deactivated. Not sure why the Vimeo one does, but it does.
Yep, so any other questions or comments on this one conflict finder from DDP fix it?
Okay, moving along, we're getting closer, May 2022, the live mesh dynamic pricing plugin for WooCommerce. This was a really interesting plugin that gives you the ability to quickly change up how dynamic pricing like bulk discounts or if it's Monday, give 10% off to all the things right. So let's click activate that. One. This is live mesh, dynamic pricing
and this one was helpful you can do in a couple of ways. Under WooCommerce settings and dynamic pricing. You can set store wide dynamic pricing settings, for lack of a better term, like here's one we did last time this was leftover. So if the day is equal to Monday, then we're gonna do a single adjustment to the regular price. It's 10% off on Mondays, right? So that's pretty cool. You can also say if it's Monday, and the category of the product is test products, so every Monday we're gonna give 10% off things in this category, right? Where you can also do that with you know if it's a particular product, or maybe it's a user role. So this is a great way to set up like a members only discount. So if you're if your user has the role member because you have some of the membership site going on, then you always get so much of a discount. It's really helpful. You have a lot of options here. Now this is the global settings and you can also you know there's and or situations here, so if you know if it's Monday, and the category is test products, or if it's Tuesday, and the category is something else, exclusive products. So we're stacking conditions, you have the ability to really granularly get down to how you want this discount to apply. So pretty cool. Now you can also do this per product. So you can go into any of your WooCommerce products. And there's now a dynamic pricing tab here. And do we want this to be is it bulk pricing like for example here, if I buy five to 10 of this product, then I'm gonna give a $5 discount if I buy 11 to 20 I'm gonna give a $7 discount like that. So you could do it that way or we can make it a role based price. So if you know you are a customer, then you get a fixed or a percentage, you know, five or 10% discount from being a customer, right? So that's pretty helpful. You can also do, let's see how to add it and remove it. You can also do just custom whatever you want it to be and this is where you can do like the day of the week and all that stuff. So you can set sitewide rules you can set per product rules you can set both. The per product rule is going to overrule the site rule if there's any conflict between the two.
So that is live mesh dynamic pricing for WooCommerce. Any questions or comments on that one back from May 2022. It's a good plugin. Fun stuff does a lot of things. All right now we get into a few of the plugins that we just demonstrated yesterday on the June plugin round up. The first is block player from guten player. This is a great video player that gives us lots of options. Let's go ahead and activate that one. This is a block so it does require the block editor to work. So we'll get that one active. Let's go down to our page for that oops. Page for this one. So I didn't make a page for this one. We'll just do it here
so right here is our video player. And so we use that a minute ago and one of the examples and it allows you to pull in a video that's in your media library, which is not the best practice. We covered that yesterday, but you can do it. It also allows you to pull in videos from YouTube Vimeo, and twitch in the pro version, Vimeo with the ID and YouTube with the ID work in the free version. Now, why would you use this other than other video displays because you get really powerful customization options as to how this looks so you can add a thumbnail poster image, which is super helpful for like you don't have to wait. If you're using a poster image. The video doesn't load until it's clicked. So that's going to improve PageSpeed scores and you can change what the poster image is. You can also change you know width height and how it's going to loop or not mute autoplay you also have the ability to change all of these things like with the progress bar and rewind and all that stuff. You can also add some styling. Some some very these are actually pro options. But yeah, you have lots of control over how the video actually displayed. Yes, but it doesn't work. Very well with me. I was down. So I think though I don't think Vimeo proper is down. I think the members video interface is currently down. But yeah, yeah, mono it would be nice to have links to other streaming sources. Currently it's a free plugin and those are the two that it offers and really video YouTube and Vimeo are the bad the lion's share of video sources out there. It's probably going to solve most problems. Good stuff. Any other questions or comments on that one? We just talked about it yesterday, but it's a great plugin if you got video on your site. Next one down is a really fun plugin called Easy posts order. This one I think got the most it's a simple plugin right. But it got the most comments yesterday I think by far although we had three good these three good ones from yesterday. This one was really super cool though. So easy posts order. This is helpful in the situation where you have a bunch of posts, maybe you want to display in a grid or in a list or whatever. But you don't want to order them by title, nor do you want to order them by their date you need to order them in some other custom way. Now there's ways to do this. You could like adjust the date so that the dates go right so it's in the right order that's kind of janky You can also like add a custom field for sort order and make that like a numerical value or whatever I've done that in the past that works okay. This actually allows you to drag and drop in the Post List the posts and set the order they will display that way. So let's go activate easy posts order and by the way, we just got some weather rolling through here right now so hopefully I don't lose connection. There was a very large and bright piece of lightning that just occurred outside my window and it's raining Wow, is it raining. Okay, easy posts order. Where we did this yesterday was in the summaries area. And notice we have these in order. We click and look now we can drag in that order sticks. We don't have to save anything once you drop it, that's where it's going to be. So we'll do 213 As our order here. Now the trick here is you do have to display these in a certain way. So in your pages whereas my
Alright, so I have one in Beaver Builder setup and I have one in Kadence setup. So whether using a page builder of any kind or the block editor, I'll first show the block editor example. What you have to do is make sure that you are ordered you set the order based on menu order or selection order, whichever your post module or block wants to call that. They both work the same way if you have both just pick one. So here in the posts module, you'll notice here we if we just do this by newest to oldest, we get to this order here if we set this to our menu order then it comes in just like we want it to one three. So if I update this and let's view the page we can let's make three display first I just drag and drop and I refresh in three displays for so it just with that simple drag and drop lets you change the order of how things display. Now this also works in Beaver Builder or any page builder in a posts module of any kind. Anything that's going to pull posts and display them like in a content grid or whatever it all works the same way. Oh, wait. Oh, wow. That turned into a text editor somehow. Well, that's fun. So let's, that's really, I don't know, let me delete that and we'll just pull it in fresh. So we'll do a post module. And this is gonna show summaries order by selection order in this case or menu order. Beaver Builder gives us both of these options. This plugin sets both of those to be the same so it doesn't matter which and so again, we have our three all right 321 Right there yep so if we make it to three one now, again in Beaver Builder, there it is. So it's a super easy way to get exactly the sort order. And we also discovered yesterday during the webinar that it works out of the box on the products that display in the WooCommerce store page. So just simply dragging and dropping your products in order. We saw that here in the shop, and if we go to products and we make right now glowing trees is displayed first. If we want Kiki T shirts to display first we just dropped that and refresh. And there it is. So it works just right out of the box on the store page as well. All right, that's easy post order. Any questions or comments on that one?
All right, and last but not least again from yesterday's round up to June 2022. Final one is WP dark mode. We've had a number of questions and various webinars about does anybody know how to quickly easily enable Dark Mode? Yes, this is a plug in I found for you from WP pool. We've done a few plugins over the last year or so from WP pool one was a Google Sheets editor and it was really great. They used some good work there. So that'd be dark mode is probably the best dark mode plug in that I've seen. It just works right out of the box. You don't have to do anything that you can tweak some things but you don't have to do anything other than activate it. So it is now active and there it is dark mode. Look at that. It's really a nicely executed dark mode too. I like this a lot. You have a toggle up here to turn it on and off. And the cool thing is it even works on the front end. So down here, there's the little moon icon. So I can click that and go from light mode to dark mode with a simple click. It goes in and just makes it adjust the colors on the fly to go from light to dark. So you'll notice up here the blue is getting a little dimmer, the white in these menu links actually turns to sort of a sepia really nice so that is WP dark mode. And by the way, there's a ton of settings here like many many things that you can get into. So like we could turn that switch or the floating switch was getting in the way of our reCAPTCHA. So we can move the night mode, dark mode over to the side. Well, tons of settings, you can experiment with really, really cool stuff. So yes, by the end, this is for everybody. It's not just for logged in users. So if I open this in a incognito window, you will see down here there is our little man that we can make dark mode, even incognito. Now you can change that by the way. In general settings do I want front end to have dark mode? I can turn that off and then that option is just not there. And it can just be on it can be the back end the front end or both All right, so that was WP dark mode any other questions or comments on that one?
All right, that brings us to the end of the best of January through June 2022 plugin round up here on iThemes Training. Let's do it again. This is the second time we've done votes for the best five Give me your best of the best one plugin one plugin only please your vote. The best of the best. post order Leaflet map visual action hooks, conflict finder. post order leaflet DiMeo. Let me hear from you in the chat WooCommerce payment gateway order tests order tests. Oh we need some tiebreakers here as the order test. EZ post order probably Yep. post order is probably our favorite with order tests. Yeah post order by far. Yep, leaflets. Another one. Sue's trying to get in with two votes. We don't allow that to come on. Just kidding. All right. Well, hopefully that's been a lot of fun for everybody. I go ahead. Oh, see. Yeah, so go ahead and vote if you want to the chat log will be captured and we'll we'll pull those votes in later. All right, so tomorrow we're back with Office Hours from one to two central. Make sure you get your votes in and note that we do have once you're logged in the Quick Links off ask your office hours questions up here in the menu. Now you can ask those questions. Let's see currently think we only have a few questions in tomorrow for questions are up for are queued up for tomorrow so far, still room for plenty more questions. So if you're an iThemes Training or toolkit member, go ahead and ask your questions now and get those in line for tomorrow. I'll see you back here at one o'clock. central time for office hours here on iThemes Training where we go further together.