Welcome, welcome, everybody. Glad you're all here. We've got about three minutes to go before we officially kick things off. So open up that chat and say hello. Hey George Rochester welcome Geoffrey from Guatemala. Good to see you. Paul. I'm not talking to you that's funny though. That's funny. Hey Richard A Niles from Faroe Islands. Interesting. Okay to save me opening up a Google tab Niles, tell me where are the Faroe Islands interesting
now I'm looking at a Google Map. Okay, but like halfway between Norway and Iceland. Nice. Yeah. Awesome. Well, now's glad you're here, folks. We're about two minutes away from getting started. If you're just joining us on Zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I'm dropping in once again, the link bundle which contains today's plugin list as well as the replay link and an invitation to join us tomorrow. Because we will have with us the ever popular Timothy Jacobs lead developer for solid WP and WordPress security expert. Timothy is going to be talking to us tomorrow about the trusted devices feature in solid security, which is really one of the the only ways to protect against this new session cookie hijacking issue that is now the predominant way that WordPress sites are being hacked. Over 60% of WordPress sites last year were hacked as a result of the stolen stolen session, Cookie compromise, which is it's not just WordPress that this is a an issue with any site you log into. But Timothy is going to be with us tomorrow, talking about how the trusted devices feature that's been in solid security for many years actually helps to deal with that. So if you haven't registered for this livestream yet, do so we'd love to have you that same time tomorrow. 1pm Central Time, Paul, I think so. I mean, we'll see. Timothy's pretty, timidly is one of those remarkable people who is incredibly intelligent but has a way to explain things at a very simple level. Version trusted devices. I think that is a Pro feature. But I could be wrong. I don't I can't really look it up right now. It's we're about to start. I can does anybody know off the top of their head and I'm not sure if it's Pro or not. But it's quite good. And it's it has been a little harder to to implement in the past, but they've been working on that UI. Again, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Let's get the link bundle dropped into the chat once again. It is right there for you today's plugin list as well as the replay link and the invitation to join us tomorrow for that trusted devices live stream with Timothy Jacobs, the developer for solid security. Good stuff. Good stuff coming up. All right, it is three minutes after so let's get started. Well, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and it is plugin roundup so usually the first Tuesday of every month we open up the WordPress plugin directory and we find about a dozen plugins that we think are interesting. Some are fun, some are helpful. Some are, you know not so awesome sometimes, but we do our best to give you a few interesting plugins every month that you can take a look at using in your project. So if you're just joining us in zoom, once again the link is in the chat if you'd like to download today's plugin list. It is there waiting on you also the replay link. And most importantly, as I was talking about in the pre show, an invitation to join us tomorrow for this live stream with Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer of solid WP talking about understanding the trusted devices feature in solid security. And this is more important than ever because this is a feature of solid security. That's one of the only ways that you can deal with these so stolen session. Stolen session cookie compromises. It's a mouthful. They are becoming one of the main ways that hackers are getting access to WordPress sites. So take a look at that is a free live stream tomorrow and the link is there in the chat if you would like to join us for that. All right here is this month's plugin list and as always, we start with a disclaimer that look, these are plugins that we've spent a little time tinkering around with. We've not thoroughly tested them for functionality and compatibility and accessibility and security and all those things you probably would want to make sure you're comfortable with before you use them on a live client project. We've done a few things just kind of make sure they work and do some fun things. But there's the disclaimer and we need to say that so you know, make sure you thoroughly vet any plugins that you would use on real live websites for all of these things. So with that, let's dive into the list shall we? And I am really excited about this first plugin. I stumbled across it actually for a client project and I absolutely love it. It is called just events and can anybody guess what it does? It does just events. So if you have a website, let's just say you've got a site and they have they want to show events, but they don't need like a calendar view or the list view or subscribe or sign up or recurring events or anything like that. They just want to display events that disappear on the date, you know, after the event is over. That's exactly what this does. And it does it really really well. So just events. Let's activate this now Sue, that's the thing Sue was saying in the chat. Yeah, you could create a custom post type for this. But the problem is, how do you get the event to stop displaying on the website automatically when the event date passes? Also, you know, unless you create custom fields for this custom post type, you wouldn't have a way of showing the event start and stop time the date would just be the published date of the post. So that's what this does. And it does it really well. So let's activate just events. Now this does create its own custom post type called just event and it works really well. So let's go in here to our events. This is created by the plugin. And look here's what we have here we got you know, the thumbnail we got is an upcoming or is it past pretty cool. Is it an all day yes or no? Start Date end date. Really, really simple. So let's go into this event. And so it's just a basic post, right? So if you're using the block editor, you can use it right here if using the classic editor, you can use it your page builder of choice, you can use it it's just a post. The thing that's different is over here in the side is this meta box for just events. And you can turn this to an all day event yes or no. You can have this really nice the Gutenberg style date picker that pops up for your date and time of Start and End. You can also add an external link if you want to do that. But when this is all said and done, you have a really nice event custom post type events. Hello. Yep, type. There we go. And there they are. Isn't that neat? So let's take a look at some settings
and here it oh, I actually changed the archive slug that's why that wasn't showing up. Right. So let's go to the actual archive slug here. And we'll see the events Yep, so there's only okay this is kind of ugly, but we need to go in there and style this. This is picking up some theme styling. So this shows our one active event if we went in here, and we did a different end date for this old event.
Let's make it March that's automatically going to show it here again. Hello Cloud Flare issues there we go. I don't know what happened there. Yeah, so and this is basically it. It's gonna watch these dates and when the event is done, it stops showing. Yep, so I actually I had the wrong URL. I was tinkering with this. Actually, this is a beaver builder layout that I was looking at before and I was tinkering with how does it display this is a beaver builder post type a post module. I was tinkering with how it displays there and you can pull stuff out it's just you can't make it not show. So that's that's the issue. So yeah, let me back up the here in the settings is where you can define what the archived slug is where the events are going to show up and disappear automatically. You can make that whatever you want it to be. And I have here event list. You can change the slug for the single event here if you want. You have the options of you know how many events per page date, time format, separators, all of that. So it's pretty. Again, it's made to be a very light Event Manager. We're simply displaying events that disappear when they're done. And but again, since it's a post if you want to have registration, drop your favorite form plugin on there. You know, in the post itself. So it's really really simple. And once you see you know, you get into your theme in the customizer. In this case, it's Kadence. We would create you know style the archive page for this event post type, and then look however we want it to look pretty cool. Sue Can you send people to a registration link? Sure. It's just a post. So we'll go to event list which is our current archive slug there. And if this is the event that you're talking about, then it's got a URL and you can put whatever you want to on this page and you know your registration form whatever you want. And then send people that URL just like you would to any other post. Maybe add a social sharing block on here. And there you go. Sherry, can you display it as a banner? I'm not quite sure what you mean is banner Sherry, like a dislike an image someplace? Probably not. The issue here is, again, it's does this How does this expire? Right? How do you stop it automatically from showing on the website? It's on this archive page that the developers have created the logic that says only show posts here that are you know that it hasn't reached the end date of the event. So
the link your you know something I'm not quite sure what that was for and I actually didn't test that there is a field here like Paula saying in the chat. There's an event here for external link. I don't quite know what that is. I don't know maybe it goes there. If you click the thing. Let's go see. Not quite sure what that does actually. Might be for Wait a minute, which one did I just edit the old event or the test that edit Thank you. So if we look at the event list again here if we go to the old event. Yeah, I don't know what that's for when I had to get in there and see I really don't know what that's for. But I like this it is super helpful for, again, simply displaying events blidi does it only work on their own archive page? Well, no, they're posts. You can display them with anything like a Kadence post block. For example. You can pull those out but only on this events archive page. Will the old events disappear automatically? Because that's where the logic is to stop those from showing. Do they expire? Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by expire. What happens is they're still actually on the site. They just stopped displaying, and they do have a status of ongoing or upcoming here. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. I would just you know if this is something that might be of interest to you again, it's really great if you don't need the weight of a the full events plugins, like there's many of them out there like the events calendar and so forth. They do so many things, but oftentimes you only need this little bit like just make the event expire automatically. That's what this does. Okay, moving on down the list to another fun plug in how many of you have clients that are podcasting? And wouldn't it be nice to have some way to automatically import a new episode to a post on their site when it is dropped in the podcast feed? That's what this is going to do. So let's go out to auto podcast import, deactivate one and reactivate the other. Now once we get in here, there are many many settings now we have created this custom post type. Okay, we did this. The plugin doesn't do this. We did this. It's a simple custom post type. And literally, you know, we did it with pods here I think. Yeah, so it's just a plain custom post type, right? And now we can go here into to where is it? Tools menu, auto podcast import there it is. Alright, so we need to add a feed first of all, so we'll go there. Now we're gonna give this a feed now I have found just for demo purposes. We love for clients, a podcasting platform called Buzz sprout. I love it. It's great. It's cost effective. It works well. Super easy. We have several clients using this and this is the podcast that buzz sprout produces called Buzz cast. So we're just going to use that for a test here. We're going to call this buzz cast. The Feed URL is going to be the RSS link here that buzz Buzzsprout creates. I'm just going to grab this RSS feed. Drop it in there. Now I get to okay where do I want to create posts? It can be anywhere. Now again, we created this podcast custom post type just for the sake of this demo. The plugin didn't do this. We did this. You could drop them in as post pages, whatever you want. I'm going to drop them into this podcast custom post type. Are they going to be published? Maybe Maybe not. Maybe we want to just bring those in as a draft. So the client can go in and add other things to it if they want to. How often does it need to check probably just daily and the or you can assign a post author. Do we want to update existing posts so if they if something changes in the RSS feed? Do we want to update it on the site? Yep. We'll say no to that or yes, that matter. And do we want to insert an audio player? Sure. So let's save this. And now we can go to our feeds list. And it'll be here it's waiting to run and I'm just gonna hit Run now. And it is now going out and slurping in all of the it just did it that quickly that many episodes How many are there 137 And there they all are. Look at that. And again, these are just posts. So you can use, you know, a Kadence element to style the way this looks. You could use your page builder of choice, whatever. And right here go into the content. It's brought in our very large title and all the content including links, show notes. Yeah, look at that, and our audio player. Isn't that nifty? And so again, this is just using a standard post view. But yeah, there it is. I mean clearly we want to make this nicer before we use it on a client site but there it is playable. Ready to go. Isn't that neat? So that is auto podcast import and the cool thing here is you can have Hello, go back. You can have multiples of these tools here. You can add more fields if you want. So you could create you know, maybe there's a different custom post type for different podcasts the client has or whatever. It will just pull them in. Isn't that sweet? So I really really liked this and it works I mean, it just works. So there you go. Auto podcast import questions or comments on this one before we move along. This was a good find. I'm really happy we found that CEU if it were a separate archive page like events does it separate the podcasts? If they're in a different custom post type? Yeah. Yeah, not by feeds. But like if you dumped everything into one custom post type. There's really no way to differentiate which podcast it came from. You'd probably want to create separate custom post types for each feed. Or there's not a way to do it now. But it would be cool if the developer allowed you to attach a taxonomy like it's in the podcast, but it's this taxonomy which is the name of the podcast. They don't do that yet. Yep, so there's no way to assign a taxonomy Yep, it's pretty cool. All right. Anybody else? I think we're good on that one. Kenneth, can I use this to put other people's podcasts? Yeah, like I just did. We just added the entire contents. Of this buzz cast podcast, all 137 episodes. We added that to WP Nathan. It's there. It's there. So yeah. 100% All right. Moving on down the list. Okay, so this is one of those situations. Where there's a couple plugins here that are included that are very similar, but they are here because we're doing some stuff for a client and I needed to solve a problem. So I went looking for plugins, and I found a couple that are interesting, and I want to share them with you. So what we're doing is for a particular client we're building a site that has a front end logged in member dashboard. And it's it's kind of similar to what we did on solid WP, the Academy site where you can log in and you can see your favorite scenery, the favorite live streams, you've highlighted that sort of thing. And so anyway, just a nice front end dashboard. So there's a couple of things that we wanted to be able to do to make that more easy for them to use instead of having to go out to the core pages. So one thing was, I want on this dashboard page for the user to be able to initiate a password reset, instead of having to send them out to WP login, PHP, question mark, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, you know, I want a nicer front end experience. And I found this plugin and it works great. It's called front end reset passwords. So again, this may not be something you use all the time, for sure. But it is something that if you're building one of these front end dashboards, you definitely want to keep this in your plugin file. So let's activate web front end, reset, whatever it's called and reset password. Oh, by the way, we just deactivated the podcast plugin and look. All our podcasts are still there because they're posting a custom post type so you can even deactivate it if you want to the post will still be there but now front end reset password right there. Now what I deleted our demo page, and I forgot to put it back. I am awesome. We will do it right here on this demo page. So what this does, is it allows us to very very easily create this last password
form. Okay, so let's settings sprint and password reset. Okay, so many, many settings here. Which page do you want to use? Oh wait, no there is a password reset page. Wait a minute. One moment please. Oh yeah, there it is right there password reset. I am blind. So you can select which page you want this to appear on. It needs to have the Reset Password shortcode on that page. Do we want to redirect the person to a specific page from the reset email? You know is there some kind of page want to direct him to for all these various things? What do you want to call the form for the password reset and has the default you can change the form text if you want a new password so all this text is changeable. In other words, here's the what the email looks like. It's got some magic tags you can use and so forth. Here's what the actual page looks like. Reset. So it's picking up this border from the theming styling. It's pretty clean styling otherwise, and it looks just like it would on the backend. You just put in your email address or username, hit the button and you get an email. So if you're creating a really nice dashboard, this is a good way to do it. Matter of fact, you can even turn off or not put anything in these form titles and just hide all this stuff and just say reset password and have the box like the way we did it was in a tab or an accordion or something but it opened it up and there was the place to reset your password. So it's really clean you can it's very flexible in how you want to do this. And it very easily allows you to let your users reset their password right there from the front end. So again, kind of a niche use case but when you need something to do this, this one's really good. Is it secure for each user? Billy, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. It is it follows this is just a front end for the regular WordPress Reset Password flow. So it's not creating its own Reset Password flow. It's just giving you a box to initiate it. That starts on the front end. Yeah. Now there is you can do something here at some very minimal security, which is your passwords got to be so long. Yeah, yeah, so minimal security. One thing that I do note here is that the plugin doesn't have any way to add a CAPTCHA to this. So it's potentially open for a denial of service attack, but it's likely going to be on a URL that a bot isn't going to pick up on. But for us, for example, we're going to in order to view this form, you got to pass through a Cloudflare challenge just to make sure it's secure. We'll do that at the Cloudflare level based on the URL though. But that is front end, reset password. Any questions or comments on that one? Pretty neat. All right, next on the list on hover link preview. Now this is a plugin it's a it is a feature plugin from the WordPress performance team now feature plugin in the WordPress world means that this is a plugin that a specific core team is working on. They're doing development here with the goal of this is going to be merged into core WordPress. So several big improvements have happened on PageSpeed over the last couple of years that have come out of work that's being done by the core WordPress WordPress performance team. This is one of those things. And what it's going to do is a prefetch or pre render function. Now if you're using some sort of caching, or maybe you see the settings in CloudFlare, where when you hover over a link or even get close to a link, sometimes it tells there's some code in the background that says Go ahead browser and preload the page that they're hovering over. And the goal here is that you get close to it you're hovered kind of thinking about clicking something while the page has already started to load so that when you click it boom, it just pops right up almost instantly. And so this is going to be coming to core and it's really good. It is really helpful. So there's not really a way to demonstrate or test this very well. I would just suggest that you play around with it. It is called on hover link preview you can test it on now it's called speculation rules. Yeah, so it comes up to speculation rules the name of the plugin in the directory is on hover link preview, which is confusing. But here on speculation rules. Oddly, the settings are found at settings and reading. So I will never remember that. But it's right here speculation rules. So do you want to prefetch your pre render, depending on the kind of content that you're linking to sometimes it's better to prefetch or pre render they have a note about that. And then how aggressive do you want this to be? Now the question in the chat is it can it be turned on for a single page or whole site? This is currently whole site only and I'm not sure if there are any plans to change that. Yep. So it's interesting I would do this is going to be coming to core. I would suggest, you know, when you have some time and you're tinkering around on things, download this plugin, put it on a demo site and just see how it works. There's only a couple settings I think you'll see a little faster page load. And again, every little bit helps as we're trying to increase the speed of WordPress overall. That's pretty cool. Any other questions or comments on that one before we move on? That is on Oh yes. Thank you Fern for mentioning that currently only supported in Chrome, but work is being done to get it working with other browsers also. So my guess here is they just want to get the functions basically going in one browser, and then they'll deal with the small browser compatibility issues that will pop up. We're trying to get other browsers compatible. Yeah. So there you go. All right. Next up, I got these out of order a little bit. For some reason, we're back to the next two plugins for our swanky front end user dashboard. The next to do the same thing but slightly differently. So many times you'll want to give the user of a site the ability to delete themselves. This is particularly helpful if your website is falls under GDPR. You know, a user should have the ability to delete themselves and this is a very these are plugins that do that very, very well. So the first one is helpful if you're not running a WooCommerce site. It will work on WooCommerce but the other one is really optimized for it. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this one is great. And we're actually going to use this on a client side. It's called delete me. And it lets users delete themselves. So we'll activate this we will have some settings for delete me. There's a lot here so you can choose what roles in delete themselves. In this case, we probably just want subscribers and customers. And then we have all of this option. These are all the things you're going to show up on the front end, and you can click in here and edit all of this text to translate it or to update the language, change how it reads whatever you want to light. It's not very pretty, but it's very functional on what you're able to do to affect the front end display. So many, many things in like here, do you want them to confirm their password before they're deleted, and so forth. You've also got had the ability to use a form here instead, that that has a full form instead of a link. So let me just show you how this looks. And you'll get an idea of how it's gonna work. So here's delete me. And I'm an admin. Let's just demonstrate. Ooh, hello, spinning beach ball. Alright, let's create a new very simple just a test user
Oh, who owns test.com But they probably get a lot of emails. And this is going to be a subscriber alright, and I'm actually going to go in an incognito window, so I can swap around here. Let me log in. Oh, why don't I have my password manager in incognito?
We're going to swap to that new user using the user switching plugin to get that switch to link there. And then we'll go to delete me. So now you see I have a delete account. It wouldn't work because we don't have you know, as an administrator of actually the super admin, you can't delete you know, you don't want to delete admins, right? But you can delete any other ones. And this link, I click it and there's a confirmation Are you sure yes or no? So there is a confirmation. If I want this to show a a form instead of the link I can check that box and save
okay, I'm doing something wrong
Do I not have something set? Right? I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that was this very simple link? What's going on here?
Okay, I don't know what's going on. There. That's weird.
Don't know not sure what stopped working? That's really odd. We tested this repeatedly on the client side no issues. The form flashed in my incognito for a millisecond I wonder I wonder if there's any kind of conflict going on here
I'm going to try this and we're gonna move on. I don't know. I don't know why that's happening. Literally never had this problem and I've looked at use this plugin a lot on this dev site we're working on. Anyhow, that link gives the confirmation it deletes the user thrilling. Okay, I don't know why that's doing that. That's really really weird. It is. So Chris and I were just talking this morning there's so much garbage in WP Nathan we're about to blow it off and start over again and it could just be WP Nathan weirdness. Yeah, so I would recommend that you. Yeah, I would recommend that you test it because I don't think you'll have this problem. Does it do author replacement? No. This plugin does not do that. So this is really for like subscribers who just want to delete their account, right. But this plugin is nice because it will send you as the administrator a link that an email if you want saying this person deleted themselves. It can also delete the user's comments, which is helpful so let's just say you know you got some a blog site and this person wants all their stuff to be gone. They can delete themselves that includes all their comments and so forth. Yeah. So bummer. I'm not this is my apologies to the developer because this is likely not a dumb thing. It's probably a nice thing with WP Nathan. And we're gonna it's time to blow this off and start over again. Well, let's move into the next Delete Account. One it is called WP front end delete account. It is specifically geared toward WooCommerce although it does delete users period on any site. So let's activate that one WP front end delete accounts
and take a look at that. Oh, so he see something's going on. Like I'm getting beach balls and that shouldn't be happening. Oh my goodness. We've got major this this site is wonky. You Yeah, it needs to be it needs to be fixed. Okay, so this is the site that is running WooCommerce already this demo site, and I'm logged out
let me go back and get this again. Just a second. Sorry about that.
All right. logging in and we'll switch to this other user test user
that is just weird. Something happened there. Okay. So we're logged in here and notice nicely integrated down here at the bottom of the My Account page is the Delete Account option. So we click that this one does require that you reset permalinks
and you just tell I typed the word to confirm. And it's gone, redirects you back to the login page. So and that user is now gone. So that one's kind of nice if you're already running a WooCommerce site, and you want to provide your users an option to delete themselves. That user is now gone. So yeah, a lot of options are available with this one. as well. Many, many things, you can change what you want it to type. You can delete all the comments by the users here. You can add in this one, you can attribute the contents of that person to some other user, like the author thing that Doug was mentioning earlier, or Vern was mentioning earlier. That has this one has that option, doesn't it again, doesn't have to be WooCommerce it can be used anything and you can change. You know what? emails get sent in when so it's a little more fully featured. The delete me is a little lighter. So it just depends. That's front end Delete Account. Any other questions or comments about that one?
All right. There's a question in the q&a about this on hover link preview. This is the same speculation rules and on hover link preview are the same plugin here in interesting they okay, if it's here, that means that we maybe this title just didn't get updated. Anyway, speculation rules is correct. The handout is incorrect here. Varun yes it can be used outside of WooCommerce the front end, delete there should be a shortcode let's see. I believe there's a shortcode to place it. Take a quick look. Yeah, right here. So you can place it either in a with a Gutenberg block that's built in or with this shortcode anywhere that you want to. Otherwise it automatically integrates itself there. In the My Account page. Makes sense. All righty, moving on to the next one and it is Show page slug in admin. All right Show page slug and admin. Super simple plugin. But have you ever found yourself looking for page slugs and you can't find them. And you have to go all the way into a page or a post to figure that out. Again, this is kind of a niche case but we are working on a project and we had to have page slugs and we couldn't find them. And there's this really neat simple toolbox kind of plug in that I love to have these plugins just in my back pocket for these particular use cases that come up where I just want the didn't activate. I just want the slugs to show up. So now when I go to pages, Look, there they are. It's really helpful. Yeah, when you look at this, you know just kind of scanning even if maybe before your site launches, let's just make sure that our URL structure looks good. Like it's all it just drops it in right here. That's all it does. It's super simple, but it really does make a big difference that only works for pages does not work for posting custom post types. But this will help keep your pages straight. So that's it. Excellent toolbox plug in, put in your toolbox and forget about it until you need it. And then you'll remember Hey, there's that plugin that will show the slugs of the pages in the admin and it's called Show page slug in admin. There you go. All right. Questions or comments on that one. Easy enough. All righty. Let's move on to WP master toolkit. Now there have been a few of these type of plugins that have come out lately and basically what they are, you know a lot of folks, me included, have a collection of PHP snippets and WP config constants that they like to put into all their sites to kind of customize WordPress to do things their way and this is one of those kinds of plugins that it's sort of a kitchen sink type plugin, if you will, that does many different things, but it does it smartly. So there's a bunch of toggles things you can turn on and off and the plugin is built modularly so that when you toggle something on a new menu item will appear sometimes or only when you toggle on and off or is this functionality actually happening. So it can be very, very light or it can have a lot of functionality that can be used to replace a bunch of other plugins. So let's take a quick look at WP master toolkit. And you'll see what I mean. Now there is I does create a new colored top level menu which I just love as you can see by my expression, love it when plugins do that, but this is a I mean it might be worth it. So we've got a nice little sidebar of feature categories. And as you can see, there's a lot of things that are rolled in here. Let's take them one category at a time. So want to hide admin notices on your site. toggle that on, it now hides all the admin notices on your site. It's going to have logging coming in a future coming soon. Pro version. We know nothing about that yet, but there is a pro version coming soon. Do I want to hide the admin bar? This is super helpful from certain users of certain roles on the front end. So again, maybe you're building a logged in membership type site, but you don't want to show the WP admin bar on the front end. This will let you do that. You can also track when a user last logged in. Let's save this. And notice down here we have these two items that have appeared because we have these features toggled on so we can go here to admin notices and see some things oh this is where they will appear so they'll they'll not appear on your dashboard they will appear here which is kind of cool. The Hide the admin bar. This okay which roles do you not? That's a typo. He's got disabled comments there. This is the hide admin bar, but you can disable the admin bar for certain roles. So you can turn those on and off pretty neat. Let's take a look at our next one. content and media. Do I want to allow SVGs to be uploaded boom turn it on. And that now adds the appropriate code snippet that that tells the WordPress Media Library to accept SVGs open all External links A new tab pretty cool. Allow custom links to open in a new tab. So if it's a custom link in your menu, you can make it open in a new tab if you want. Also there this is coming soon auto publish posts with a miss schedule. This is really helpful. If you've got something a website where you have posts aren't publishing at the right time. This will help to kickstart that process here's an option to disable some features. So some of this these are snippets you may recognize from our Starter Site courses. Like disable feeds disable Gutenberg, disable the WP mail altogether you can do that here. Some security options like hiding the WordPress version from the source code, disallow File, Edit XML RPC, and stop new users from being created. Lock the site URL so that's the stuff that settings in general you can lock those down where they can't be changed with this. Lock the admin email blacklist user names strong passwords that just lots of things here stop this is really cool stop themes and plugins from being uploaded period could be helpful. Some other features turn off the default WordPress sitemap you can do that here. And then some other settings which is really cool. You if you get this the way you want it on one site, you can download it as a JSON and upload it to some other site and all your settings magically appear. Pretty neat. So that is WP master toolkit. Questions or comments on this one? Vern okay. It's a good point from Vern. So with all these features, how fragile is this going to be if WordPress updates? So here's the thing. WordPress is really good about maintaining terms. So the a function that is used to unregister a certain feature out of WordPress or unhook a feature, that hook is likely going to be there forever. So I think it's probably pretty future proof. Like it the same as this is honestly, this is no different than adding a code snippet to a custom functions plugin. This is just visual and a toggle UI to turn it on and off. It's using likely the same functions. And if you're not worried about custom functions, you shouldn't be worried about this. Does that help? It's really I think, I would not be worried about it being future proof. So that is WP master toolkits a great question burn thanks for that all right, WP master toolkit moving on to the most dangerous plugin of the month. Media CCleaner and database optimizer for WordPress. If you like me, have used a media cleaner in the past, only to delete many, many images that you realize were actually used. But it said they weren't. Then you probably have a little bit of PTSD about plugins like this like I do. So let me just tell you, this one is different and it's pretty darn cool. Now of course always make a backup before you do anything like this before you clean your database before you clean your Media Library. Please make a backup because you just never know. And the likelihood of something going wrong with using a plugin like this is it's proportional to whether or not you have a backup of the fight. So call the backup Murphy's Law insurance and we'll move on. So this though is super helpful. Let me get into this plugin media cleaner now. Okay, I'm just gonna say this but I activate this plugin. I believe that probably at some point in the future, they're going to have to change their name because they are calling themselves WP optimizer. Does that sound familiar at all?
To like a major plugin that's been around forever and ever in WordPress called WP optimize which does a lot of the same things. Boy, I sense a name change from a mean lawyer letter coming in the future over this but for now we're just going to look at it. This is media cleaner database optimizer. It's here under WP optimizer for and we start out with a really cool bit of grass Look at this. So I've got my there's my plugins and I've got so of all my media files 83 are not in use, which sounds about right for the site. Only 50 are in use. And there's my themes. I'm not quite sure why they show plugins and themes here but they do. It also gives you just a quick overview of the clutter. How many how much stuff you have in your database. That's just clutter. That's kind of helpful. Let's go to database optimizer. This is really no different than other tools that are out there where you can delete all the clutter out of your database. Really nothing new to see here. What I liked though, is the media cleaner this is pretty cool. So it shows you right away. Is it using anything No. Now I actually dropped in a feature request to the developer today. I would really like to be able to sort by this column. So I can see what's used and what's not more easily and then group select those to be deleted, like you can group select and group delete images, but there's not really a way to group those together. Anyway, so the problem for me in these media cleaner plugins is that most of them will catch it if the image is a featured image. Some of them will catch it if it's just a an image that is used on a particular post right? So for example, let's go to without doing doesn't matter. Let's just go to a page here. Now I had this set on a page for a reason. Let me go back to that. Was it media cleaner? We're gonna put this
on your test. Ok. So I'm going to just in a block editor, I'm going to just put in an image from the media library. There's that first one that's not being used anywhere. And if I update this then it's right away. You're going to tell me it is used on that post. That works. It also tells me what image sizes for this one had been defined. Okay, what if though? It is in something else like a a carousel, like a Kadence carousel? Right? Let's these are all posts. That's gonna be hard to show because they're attached to the post. Let's try something else like a gallery. Like a Kadence gallery and let's put this image in a gallery. Insert the gallery will it still see it? And the answer is no. That's interesting. And that was I didn't try the Kadence gallery. I tried the regular WordPress gallery. That was underwhelming Okay, so it's not showing in the Kadence gallery. That's interesting. What really though did get me interested here was that it works with page builders so watch this if I go in to Beaver Builder here, for example, many of these media library cleaner plugins would not see an image that was dropped in with a page builder module in something like Beaver Builder but
it sees it boom. Not only that. Oh, doggone it. You know what? The repeat master toolkit has turned off my admin bar
is it
not only this but watch this. Let's delete the photo. Save it. So now it's not here. And Geoffrey you are going right where I was going. So right here other other media cleaners won't do this. But here let's go to the row and put the image on the background of the row
so it's just a background image
and it picks it up. So that's pretty darn cool. Elizabeth it didn't work with the Kadence gallery and I'm not quite sure why Su is saying that. Currently there's an issue with core not seeing Kadence headings. So that may it may be all be wrapped up in that but particularly if you're using a page builder. Yes, I did save it, particularly if you're using a page builder. This is a dream come true. Because most of the other media cleaners out there. Don't see images that show up in a page builder. module or in a background of a row or something like that. So this is pretty darn cool. And I can just delete the image. If it's not in use, like right here, delete it, boom, it's gone. Make sure you make a backup. I didn't make a backup of that. Because it was kind of a creepy image to begin with. That There you go. That is media cleaner and database optimizer questions or comments about that one. Yeah, and, and Doug, that's a great point. It's been a while since I've investigated other media library cleaners. So maybe they've caught up to this too, but this one is free and it works. I'm like I'm happy about that. That's pretty cool. Can you test it to make sure like, test what they've so what I would if I were you to test this, I would look at all the ways you're using images. Like for example, we saw there was an issue with a Kadence gallery. So I would just test that just like I showed, but a gallery put us something on your paint like if you're using elements or for some reason and do an image in Elementor and make sure that it shows up here just like we just tested and then you can be pretty sure that yeah, like it's picking up images. But 100% make backups before you do any of this. They if I'm misunderstanding your question, just ask it again and and I'll do my best
Yeah, I would just you know, test all of the different ways you show images, one on one site somewhere, and then you can be pretty sure that it's picked up. You know, it knows it's going to pick up. What's there. Good. Okay. All right, moving along. Another really simple. And Elizabeth that's a great point. Solid backups gives you the ability to only make a media backup. And this is only Yeah, only your upload only your media. Yep. Your stuff in dopey content uploads. Alright, here's another one that we ran across on a client project. And again, this is not one I mean, you may not use this once a year. But wow, is it helpful when you need it? It's a great toolbox plugin, and it's called taxonomy. switcher from the good folks at web dev studios. So what this is gonna let you do can be really hard to demo this. Do we have Okay, yes. Okay. So let's activate taxonomy switcher Hulu up, it's not there. So let's add taxonomy switcher login, you know, in order to activate a plug in it does have to be present on the site. That's our little lesson in WordPress for today. Also active and Okay, now tools taxonomy switcher. So, what do we want to do? Do we have stuff in categories? Yeah, there's a bunch of categories. So let's do let's switch whatever reason, our movies genres over two categories done. So now if we go to genres, empty, and categories, now has our three taxonomy terms. So where this is really helpful, is especially if you're reconfiguring a site or changing around some taxonomies and you rename it and now everything's broken, it's really super helpful to push all the terms out of one taxonomy and into another. Again, this is this is a total toolbox plugin that you might not use, you know, once a year, but wow, does it save a lot of work? You know, in particular, in our case, we had about 40 taxonomy. terms. And we're making a new taxonomy. There's lots of reasons for that, but we're gonna have to manually type them until I realized that there's got somebody has to have made a plugin that does this automatically. And sure enough, there it is. Push them over, and there it is. So that is taxonomy switcher, from web dev studios. Does it update on the sitemap? Yes, because the terms disappear out of one taxonomy and they go into as terms on the other. Yeah. So the one thing to remember this is not copy taxonomy terms. This is move at switch, taking them out of one taxonomy, putting them into another All right, last almost almost last is y'all Okay, now you know, I always backload the plugin list, right? Like the best ones are at the end. This one is pretty darn good. This is WP extended search. And especially for a free plugin. This thing is pretty nice. So this if you can believe it extends the WordPress search. So it lets you do more things. So let's go into WP extended search. It has its own menu item over here. And watch Okay, so first, we're dealing with our global settings. So if it's a WooCommerce site, you can optimize this for product searches. When you do that, watch what happens. You can say oh look, I want to make sure that skews are included in the search. Do you know how hard it is needlessly hard to get the the WooCommerce product standard search to search product skews. It's ridiculously hard. We even have some sites as a workaround where we made a function that hold the SKU out of the field and dropped it in to the description at the very bottom, just so it would be searchable. It's anyway this just does it right. So let me turn this back off. But so it has some really good stuff for WooCommerce do I what I want to search title content excerpt? Do I want to search only in particular taxonomy terms? Do I want to search the author display name? In what post types? Do I want my standard WordPress site to search? So let's say on a on a on a site, you only you only want to search posts for whatever reason you can say I only want this to search posts, or posts and pages. And that's it. It'll do that. I also here's where it starts getting fun. Did you know let's see here it is right here. You can search custom fields. The you know the name of your custom field that has a bunch of data in it that you want to search, put it in here and that exposes it to the search which is super cool. Super cool. That's powerful. And you can also stack the you know, yes, no and make some booleans out of the out of the miscellaneous settings here. Now, if you thought that was cool, watch this. This is all just the global search. Let's say oh gosh, you know, I really want to have a search that's on. Like this particular section of my website that's displaying posts in the custom post type. And I only wanted in that area to search those posts will watch this setting names. So we're going to make a new search and we're going to call this new search and publish it. Now look here, we get a shortcode to display this search bar wherever we want it. There's also PHP or just an HTML input if you want to. Now once this is created, we go back to the search settings and we select New Search. And now we can say oh you know I only want this to search my movies, custom post type. I'm going to put that search with a shortcode on my movies page. And it's only going to search that content. Is that not awesome? So you have total flexibility over what you want this search to do. And then you can create new customized specific searches that are embeddable or drop in the search with a shortcode on a particular page or post. Pretty neat right? Ah, let's see. Questions. Stacy doesn't help the search on the back end or just the front this is only front end. So this takes over the regular WP search function that just your regular search box would contain. Now when you're in global, it affects the standard WordPress search but then you can create niche searches. Sherry will this load on all the WooCommerce products into the main WordPress herget can let's see. So, if you for example, this is global so this is affecting anything on this page right there is affecting the global standard WordPress search in the regular search box. You can say I want this to search products, pages, posts, whatever. So with this, you can have add products to the standard WordPress search so that it returns pages, posts, products, everything. Is that your question? Did I answer that? Lady doesn't offer any filters. Yeah, all of these things are filters where you can search by certain things and what especially with the term this is where you have to get into this and learn how this works. But you can set up booleans on do I want to make it exact search or whatever. Search only certain dates. So you've got a lot of filtering options here. It's pretty cool. Oh, user facing filters. Gotcha. Sorry about that. No, this doesn't do that. You'd need a plugin like we love grid WP grid builder for that grid builders awesome. Also facet WP search and filter pro you need something like that to bring filters in. So this is only a URL you're going to see as a standard WordPress box search or whatever. But you can customize what happens when they search or where that search is searching and put it wherever you want on the site. So it's pretty darn good. Yeah, I like this one a lot. super powerful. That is WP extended search. Cool. Any other questions? Or comments about this one before we move on?
Fun stuff. All right. Last but not least, for those of you that were in office hours on Thursday, I promised you a plugin that might rival some of the fun WordPress plugins of the past. And here it is. It is called the fly. The fly now, we brought in the developers actual notes here because they're funny and they're hilarious. The developer says this is possibly the most absurd plugin for WordPress. Maybe. Yes, it is just a fly. This plugin does nothing but present a fly on the screen restricted to the browser window. It's like a fly on the TV screen it moves around. You can smash it and it will remain there as a bug guts your screen. Other flies will come to its burial. It's kind of useful to have fun and to joke but smart even strategic use as possible. Like emphasizing news that smells bad. And like put it on a 404 page what a great idea. Anyway, some shortcodes and so forth. So let's get into this. I love this plug in y'all. It just it made my day when we saw this. We used to have there used to be back in the day. You know, we started the plugin roundup 10 years ago. We've been doing this every month for 10 years. And there used to be these fun plugins all the time. And developers have just gotten a lot more serious lately, and I'm really grateful that this developer has decided to spend some time to have a sense of humor. We have the fly Of course it creates its own top level menu for easy access. I'm going to give the fly a pass on my normal disdain for top level menus. But these are the these are the global settings. How many flies Do you want like if I just say I want one fly globally. Then all I have to do now is just go to the front end of my site. Let me close a bunch of screens here. And there will now be a fly there is Sim looks pretty realistic actually. And I can squash him and look now he's bugged out look another fly came to his burial and more. Up come back. It's much it is great. And they stay put and they're so real like do this on your own screen. They really look real. Now what you can't hear is there's also some sound effects some very subtle buzzing, realistic sound effects in the background. You can see there's a an audio icon on my tab. This is hilarious. Okay, so don't you love it. So there's some other options here where there's some short codes. So if you want if you don't want this all over your site, you can just set it to zero now they don't appear everywhere on your site by default. But you can show it on a page by this, this plugin. So let me go to the page that I had created for this page is the fly in there's some shortcodes here. The first one just shows a fly. This creates a new fly and this kills a bunch of flies. So I love this. Okay, so there is a fly on this page because we added the shortcode that put a fly on the page. So for example if you want to fly on your 404 page, just drop in the shortcode and there it is you got to fly. You want to add another fly you got this button, we can add a whole bunch of flies and kill it and they all gather around the dead fly. You can also press the red button to kill several of them to remove them from the screen. And like it's they're different sizes, some are big some are small. Yeah. So there you go. I love this plugin. And I'm so grateful to Hector for developing this. And yeah, so that my friends is the fly questions or comments? Oh my, this would be a great April Fool's plugin. You know, what would be even better is if there was a way to change the code. So it was only limited to a certain user. Like that would be amazing. To put it on there for your client. When they log in. They see a fly, but only them not like actual users. That'd be fantastic. What a great what a great joke that would be. Okay, well that my friends in the 2024 march version of the plugin roundup here on solid Academy. So we end with a question but it's an abbreviated it's a it's a modified question. Okay. Clearly we all love the fly. Okay, so assuming everybody already loves the fly, other than the fly. What was your favorite plugin of the roundup one vote one vote only please. One vote one vote only please extended search events. Taxonomy switcher events extended search extended mini extended search many events media cleaner got a couple. Okay, so definitely the search. Definitely the events with media cleaner as the third. All right for those of you that are wanting the downloads the link is there in the chat for the next couple of seconds before we wrap up. Also the replay link is there. We'll have this up in about an hour. One last thing to remind you is of the webinar coming up tomorrow with Timothy Jacobs lead developer for solid WP talking about the trusted devices feature of solid security. Very, very important feature in solid security, particularly right now because this is one of the few ways to really help deal with the stolen session cookie hack that is making its rounds as a very 60% of last year's hacks. Were a result of stolen session cookies. And trusted devices can stop that from happening. It's one of the few things that can on the WordPress side. So come and listen to me talk about this. He'll also be talking more about the stolen session cookies as well. So that's tomorrow it is a free live stream. Of course, right here on solid Academy. We'll see you back here then on solid Academy where we go further together.