Written by

Kristen Wright
on

March 17, 2020

Last Updated On March 17, 2020

Every month Nathan Ingram looks over the last 30 days on the WordPress Plugin Directory and makes a list of his favorite new additions. Here are his favorite plugins, his WooCommerce recommendation and his good/bad idea WordPress plugins.

Nathan told us last month that he was concerned about some of the ways Code Canyon is handling updates to certain plugins. This is an ongoing issue that we need to be aware of with at least one plugin. It isn’t typical of Code Canyon to allow developers to limit automatic updates, but at least in this circumstance it is happening and it may be an issue in the future with other WordPress plugins.

1. WP Health

Quickly checks WordPress installation and shows a snapshot of the site showing if it is up to date, secure and healthy. See the snapshot through the tools in the admin bar. Premium features include broken image monitor, page speed graph, broken link monitoring.

Nathan’s Notes

• Formerly My WP Health Check
• Plugin is about the same in the free version, but premium features are easily put into a care plan.
• Premium features are dynamic and include areas that can add value to your client relationships.
• An accessibility monitor, in Beta, but watch for this feature.

2. Contextual Related Posts

With this plugin you can easily add related posts to your WordPress site. It comes with caching, short-codes, widgets and custom post types. You can even choose which types of content will show up as “related” for your site.

Nathan’s Notes

• One of the best related posts plugins I’ve seen in a while.
• Lots of options to customize its behavior, including with thumbnails and without.
• Available free add-on restrict related posts to the same category or tag.
• Out of the box, it looks good, but you may want to tweak the CSS to make the output match your site.

3. Advanced Scheduled Posts

Allows you to set the date and time of expiration and the schedule which overwrites another post. Permalinks changes automatically and so does the slug.

Nathan’s Notes

• Schedule a post to expire at a certain date and time (reverts to draft).
• Or, more interestingly, have a scheduled post overwrite an existing post (including swapping permalinks) when it is published.
• However, for simple expiration, Post Expirator is a better option since it has more options for expiration (change taxonomy, etc.)

Simple But Useful Plugins

1. Change Admin Email

This plugin restores the functionality as it was before version 4.9 on single sites. This may be required on sites without email access or for testing purposes. Use this if you want to change or develop something on a WordPress site without having to go through the email confirmation loop.

Nathan’s Notes

• Perfect tool for changing admin email on a site without email confirmation.
• Just install and activate, nothing else to do.

2. WP Host Hide

Nathan’s Notes

• Simple way to hide a page or post from search results, category pages, etc.
• Note: checking “Front Page” on blog post settings keeps the post from appearing on the main blog page.
• Not exactly perfect English in the plugin, but easy enough to figure out.
• Creates its own top level admin menu item.

2. Admin Bar Position

This plugin can change bottom to “Admin Bar.” It also can change Admin Bar position with “shift + up” or “shift + down.”

Nathan’s Notes

• Moves the Admin Bar to the bottom of the screen by default on the front end.
• Toggles the position with easy key strokes.
• Really handy if you’re dealing with positioning issues while creating a site.

This Month’s WooCommerce Add-on

WPC Variations Radio Buttons for WooCommerce

When it comes to choosing an option from variable products, customers now don’t have to click on each option or browse from the drop down list in order to attain product info. By adding radio buttons, all variations and all attributes will be shown at one screen only. Making decisions now is a task of much less effort now to your visitors.

Nathan’s Notes

• Replaces the standard drop down for WooCommerce variations with a nicer dropdown (select2 or ddslick) or, even better, radio buttons.
• Display image and price in the variation selection.
• Select types can be set globally, then adjusted for each product if desired.
• Adds its own top-level admin menu.

This Month’s Good Idea or Bad Idea

Kama WP Smiles

This WordPress plugin adds blocks with smiles to comment form in your theme and do HTML/visual editor in the admin panel. This code allows you to easily add smiles into comment or post content.

Nathan’s Notes

• Animated GIF smilies…what could go wrong?
• And I don’t care what they say, a GIF is a G-raphic, not peanut butter.

Admin Custom Font

Admin Custom Font plugin allows you to replace default/factory in WordPress Admin Dashboard with hundreds of different Google Fonts. Visit Admin Dashboard > Settings > Admin Font to customize font type and styles.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Most admin styling plugins are atrocious. But this one might have promise
• Select any Google Font for your wp-admin typography.
• Also allows you to change the size and weight.

Light Admin Theme

This plugin will simplify your administration. There is a lot of default settings it hides and adds more whitespace.

Nathan’s notes:

• While on the subject of admin themes…
• Bring a little Apple into your WP-Admin.

Menu in Post

With Menu In Post, you can create shortcodes to display menus as hyperlinked lists or dropdowns in your posts and pages. Menus are easier to manage through the WordPress user interface (UI) than a list of links. You can update a menu in one place (Appearance > Menus) and it will be updated everywhere you have added a Menu In Post shortcode for it.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Really handy way to embed menus in a page or post.
• Can display as a list or a dropdown.
• Shortcode creator at Tools > Menu in Post Tools.

Phoenix Media Rename

This WordPress plugin is intended to boost SEO by updating image file names.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Fantastic solution for updating image file names for SEO purposes (many SEO pros agree that image file name matters, especially if alt text isn’t present).
• Rename from the Media Library list in bulk or on images in the library individually.
• Also adds a column for the page/post where the image is attached.

GainWP Google Analytics Integration for WordPress

The GAinWP Google Analytics Integration for WordPress plugin easily integrates Google Analytics tracking and dashboard reporting into your website in just minutes.

Nathan’s Notes:

• This is an answer for those of you looking to escape the rewrite Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics plugin.
• Forked from the original code of the GADWP plugin.
• If you replace GADWP, make sure you deauthorize it first to revoke the plugin’s access to your GA account (Google Analytics > General Settings > Clear Authorization).

Watch The Webinar: Plugin Roundup – March 2020

This post is from the recent Plugin Roundup – March 2020 webinar hosted by Nathan Ingram. In this webinar, Nathan demonstrates how to use each of these plugins so you can get a better idea of how they work. Check out the entire series of monthly WordPress Plugin Roundup posts here & register for the next Plugin Roundup webinar here.

Keep reading the article at WordPress News and Updates from iThemes – iThemes. The article was originally written by Kristen Wright on 2020-03-17 12:07:39.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

Each month, we recap the best WordPress plugins that were added or updated within the last 30 days on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here’s a list of our favorite new or recently-updated plugins for February 2020.

A Notice for Those Who Use CodeCanyon Plugins

• For some time, plugin purchases on CodeCanyon have supplied automatic updates in the standard WordPress update process.
• At least one plugin recently has begun to restrict this to only those with an active support subscription.
• CodeCanyon promises access to updates but not automatic updates.
• It is not clear on plugin pages which ones will require you to have an active support license for updates and which will not.

1. Disable Login

Disable Login

An advanced maintenance mode tool that will prevent all users (except you, the developer) from logging into the WordPress backend. Your users will see a nice message just below the WordPress logo informing them that you are in the process of fixing their website.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Handy tool to keep clients away from a website you’re currently working on.
• Does not automatically log out users who are currently logged in (feature request for the author).
• Be careful you don’t accidentally lock yourself out (it defaults to the first user ID alphabetically in the pick list).

2. Mihdan: No External Links

Mihdan: No External Links

No External Links converts external links to internal links. Featuring Full Page or Targeted Content Filtering, Custom Redirect Page/Message, Encoded Masks, External Link Click Logging, Individual Link Exclusion, Post/Page Specific Exclusion, and many more.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Nice plugin to track external links on your website.
• Integrates with bit.ly and a few other link shorteners.
• Can display a customizable redirect message.

3. WooCommerce Cart This Month’s Featured WooCommerce Add-on #1

WooCommerce Cart

Side Cart WooCommerce adds a site wide basket icon that displays the number of products in the cart. Customer can see all the cart items directly from the side cart & also remove items. Plugin has ajax add to cart feature on single product pages too.

Nathan’s Notes:

• A pretty slick cart add-on that positions an off-canvas cart on your site.
• Ajax powered cart feels very app like.
• Lots of settings to customize the look and behavior of the cart.
• Pro Version adds a lot of valuable features, and at $45 for unlimited lifetime license, it’s a decent deal.

4. Product Attachment for WooCommerce This Month’s Featured WooCommerce Add-on #2

Product Attachment for WooCommerce

Product Attachment for WooCommerce Plugin will help you to attach/ upload any kind of files for a customer orders. You can attach any type of file like Images, documents, videos and many more.

Nathan’s Notes:

• A nice way to supply an additional file download with a WooCommerce product.
• Link can be provided at any point in the purchase process, or even just show up on the product page in the description.
• Great for adding a how-to video, manual, etc.
• Pro version includes external links for attachments and other features.

5. Booter – Bots & Crawlers Manager

Booter – Bots & Crawlers Manager

Booter – Bots & Crawlers Manager is a preventative measure (treatment in advance) and treatment of damages caused by crawlers and bots. The plugin uses a number of existing technologies which are known by crawlers and bots and takes them one step forward – smartly and almost completely automatically.

Nathan’s Notes:

• A powerful set of tools to help you manage how bots crawl your site.
• Lots of settings to help “good” bots and limit “bad” bots.
• Definitely be sure to read the HELP tab as you get started with this plugin.

6. Sortable Word Count Reloaded This Month’s Simple But Useful Plugin #1

Sortable Word Count Reloaded

Adds a sortable column to the posts and pages admin list with the word count of each page/post. With this plugin you can see the word count for the posts and pages in the list view and sort them.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Adds a sortable word count column to all post types in WordPress.
• Works with custom post types but the column is not sortable.

7. WP Page Post Widget Clone This Month’s Simple but Useful Plugin #2

WP Page Post Widget Clone

With one click on ‘Duplicate’ button, this plugin can create a duplicate, replica or clone of an element, a post or a page. No need to do styling of a duplicated new element from the scratch.

Nathan’s Notes:

• Quickly duplicate any page, post or elements in WordPress (basically anything that displays like “All Posts”).
• Duplicates the post and all content, even meta like Yoast SEO settings.
• Also allows you to clone widgets in a widget area to another widget area.
• Works on Beaver Builder content as well.

8. Move Admin Menu Items

Move Admin Menu Items

Are you annoyed of an unorganized and overcrowded admin menu? Do you wish to provide a well-arranged admin menu to the users of the WordPress backend? In this case, we have
the perfect solution for you: Move all of your admin menu items, that you don’t use regularly, into a condensed and clear admin menu.

Nathan’s Notes:

• If you have sites with super long admin menus, this could be a nice way to re-organize things.
• Essentially moves menus and submenus onto a grid rather than placing them in a vertical menu.

9. Old Style Admin UI This Month’s Good Idea or Bad Idea Plugin

Old Style Admin UI

From the plugin author: “After I updated WordPress to 5.3, I thought something had gone wrong with the update when I saw those borders in the admin area, the blue color of texts on the form elements and the lack of design subtlety of the UI. So I decided to create a plugin that would undo that.”

Nathan’s Notes:

• Any time a feature of core WordPress is added or removed by a version release, there will always be a plugin to make it the way it was before.
• I actually like this one better …

10. Dummy Images

Dummy Images

Dummy Images provides functionality for generating image placeholders which can be used for various purposes – set temporary feature images, filling blank spots, test and play around with different image sizes and etc.

Nathan’s Notes:

• A helpful plugin to quickly create dummy images in the media library for placeholders.
• Has a page that shows all the dummies you’ve created.
• Would be nice if it allowed you to delete them all at once when you’re finished.

11. Plugin Report

Plugin Report

Adds a sortable column to the posts and pages admin list with the word count of each page/post. With this plugin you can see the word count for the posts and pages in the list view and sort them.

Nathan’s Notes:

• A really handy at-a-glance overview of plugins install on a site and their state.
• Useful as part of a site audit process.

Watch the Webinar: Plugin Roundup – February 2020

This post is from the recent Plugin Roundup – February 2020 webinar hosted by Nathan Ingram. In this webinar, Nathan demonstrates how to use each of these plugins so you can get a better idea of how they work. Check out the entire series of monthly WordPress Plugin Roundup posts here & register for the next Plugin Roundup webinar here.

Download the checklist PDF: The Essential WordPress Maintenance Checklist

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“exit_popup_enabled”: 0
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Keep reading the article at WordPress News and Updates from iThemes – iThemes. The article was originally written by Kristen Wright on 2020-02-05 12:41:32.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

Each month, we recap the best WordPress plugins that were added or updated within the last 30 days on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here’s a list of our favorite new or recently-updated plugins for September 2020.

In This Month’s Plugin Roundup

1. Unsplash