WordPress Tips and Tricks

No copying or broadcasting without prior written permission from Steve. I grew up listening to Earth, Wind & Fire’s dance music and played plenty of it as a club DJ in the 1980s. Lots of the group’s music is still doing the rounds thanks to remixed versions bringing them up to date with added drums, percussion and synth embellishments – there really are some excellent remixes around; many released last year and a few so far this year. Ralph Johnson was 19 when he auditioned for Maurice White to be the band’s drummer. Ralph is 68 now, and like EWF, is still going strong. Earth, Wind & Fire is currently on tour in the US, but on the side Ralph has moved into smooth jazz with the release Co-Swagit with singer Andrea Lisa. As host of a jazz radio show I was privileged to speak with Ralph about his career and passion for jazz. Ralph Johnson of Earth, Wind & Fire.

In this week’s WordPress podcast I look at plugins including All Loan Calculator, FaceBook Messenger Chat, and WP White Label among others. ALL Loan Calculatorhttps://wordpress.org/plugins/all-loan-calculator/ Place a loan calculator anywhere on your site using a shortcode. ideal for mortgage and other loan sites to let your visitors workout the repayments for the loan they want. Max Upload Size https://wordpress.org/plugins/max-upload-size/ Increase or decrease the maximum size of files that can be uploaded to your WordPress site. Facebook Messenger Chat https://wordpress.org/plugins/fb-messenger-chat-for-website/ Integrate FB Messenger Chat on your website without touching a single line of code. WP White Labelhttps://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-white-label/ The WP White Label plugin is for developers who want to give their clients a more personalised and less confusing content management system. White Label allows administrators to change WordPress branding. Delete All Posts https://wordpress.org/plugins/delele-all/ The Delete All plugins allows you to delete your posts at the click of a button. To be installed with caution. If anyone on your teams likes running with scissors then do not install this one. They will click it. You’ve been warned. Need help with your WordPress site? Give me a call.

If you haven’t already, you need to update your WordPress CMS to the latest version. The all-singing, all dancing version 5 had security issues that have now been fixed. As for this week’s plugins… Unlimited Gutenberg Pack Gutenberg Pack – Unlimited Gutenberg Block Gutenberg Pack is a addon for gutenberg editor. It extends gutenberg editor to next level. We are developing many other beautiful and handy gutenberg blocks. You will see in next update. Gutenberg Pack – Blocks and Descriptions • Testimonial : This block help you to show some amazing feedback from your clients. • Buttons : This block help you to show any button with link. • Tabbed-content: This block help you to organize your content with Tab. • Call To Action: This block help you to show call to action section on your website. Assign multiple contributors to posts WP Multi Author Add a map to your site Responsive iframe GoogleMap Christmas Countdown widget The Christmas Countdown Widget displays a  Santa Claus counting down to Christmas in your sidebar. Christmas Countdown Widget Want to countdown to the New Year… Use any countdown clock that takes your fancy.

Pop Up Block This is a pop up block for the new Gutenberg editor. Includes pop up animation options, color customization, size customization and more. Best Testimonial Best Testimonial is a simple and powerful testimonial system for wordpress website. You will be publishing your testimonials with just a few steps. There are two styles of testimonail to show, which are so attractive and clean design.Features • Responsive and mobile ready. • Strong Options Panel. • Easy Shortcode • Easy Installation. • Custom fields • Slider & carousel • Categories • Translation ready • Featured Images (thumbnails) • Easy to use and customize TrainingPress TrainingPress is a online course management system plugin for WordPress. This plugin can be used to easily create courses. Each course curriculum can be made with modules, chapters and exercises which can be managed by anyone.Features of the plugin include: * Create unlimited courses* Manage Courses.* Create and manage Modules.* Create and manage Chapters.* Chapter Assignment* Create and manage Exercises.* Compose exercise with different types of components like paragraph, video, image, question (with different types).* Admin can track Course Progress of any user.* Admin can create ‘Sample course’ from settings submenu tab inside Training Menu* Assign author to course / Display author of course on frontend* Search course functionality on frontend* Share course on Facebook, Twitter, Google+* Comments & Rating option* SEO friendly URLs* TrainingPress premium addons will available soon Disable Gutenberg (WordPress) Editor This plugin disabled gutenberg editor on your website with any WordPress theme. No additional settings required.

Major changes coming to WordPress this week as it is updated to version 5. The key change, and it really is big, is the full adoption of the Gutenberg text editor. The new text editor is a major shift in how you will add content to posts and pages; and more importantly, how you design them using the new text editor with block functionality – you will be able to move items around the text area in blocks. The new editing system is replacing the old WYSIWYG editor, which has barely changed since WordPress was first first launched in May 2003 – I joined the WordPress party in 2008. Of course the WordPress CMS has come along in leaps and bounds during 2018, and this new text editor will cause some people problems; particularly those who are using plugins to add functionality to their WordPress text editor; as some of these plugins may now be obsolete and there is a risk of a clash of coding between the new CMS with Gutenberg and some plugins and themes. It could get messy for some of you. So if you use these sort of plugins you will need to review their use, disable some and see what Gutenberg can do when flying solo The launch of Gutenberg means that you’ll need to become acquainted with a whole new editing experience. If you insist you can install a plugin to retain the old style text editor; but honestly, this is a fight you will lose – so adapt to the new WordPress and move you and your team forward. Resistance is futile. Bottom line…WordPress 5 offers a flexible content management system for designing pages. Gutenberg will also give editors a much more visual understanding of the page appearance and how the content will appear on the front end. You won’t need to constantly save and preview changes to see how a post will actually look. The Gutenberg text editor / page builder is a major step forward; and while I am not saying it will break your website, if you are using an old theme or any page design or text editing plugins then you will absolutely need to check your theme works with the updated WordPress CMS, and your plugins, and then update where you can, disable and abandon where you can’t, and check to see if you are using any unnecessary plugins. Bottom line, now is a good time to perform a thorough housekeeping exercise with your WordPress site – clear out the clutter and bring it up to date. And in case you didn’t know…Johannes Gutenberg, born 1400, died 1468, was a German blacksmith, goldsmith, inventor, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe with the printing press. His early books costs the equivalent of three years’ wages. Which is almost like saying you have to be a millionaire to get access to the internet.

  In this week’s WordPress Tips and Tricks I look at… Simple Paywall – The Best Metered Paywall for WordPress Simple Paywall (beta) is a complete subscription management solution that features a powerful metered paywall. It doesn’t stop there. It’s packed full of features that will help you monetize your content and drive growth. Almost every aspect of how you protect and monetize your content can be customized to your needs. Please review our features to see all of the amazing things you can accomplish using Simple Paywall. AddFunc Backgrounds AddFunc Backgrounds adds a Backgrounds content type your WordPress website. The Backgrounds editor makes it easy to create multi-layered backgrounds for your website, which you can then select for use on any Page or Post. WP Amazon Shop for Dropshipping & Affiliation WP Amazon Shop comes with a NEW Outstanding Feature, Amazon Dropshipping & Affiliation Program Both.Search and build products from Amazon store to make easy money by affiliation. No hassle, no coding, no amazon aws keys! Login Monitor Displays current logged in users in administration screens in real time.

In this week’s hodge podge of plugins I feature… Popup Message for Contact Form 7 CF7 Lightbox Popup Success create a popup for any Contact Form 7 form.?- Simple Download Monitor Simple Download Monitor manages your digital downloads; providing password protected files if you like and counts the number of downloads too. Poll Maker Want to find out what your visitors think – then this plugin will likely do the job for you. Poll Maker allows visitors to vote, choose or rate. Running a poll is a quick and simple way to gauge sentiment.

Learn all my Podcasting Secrets here. Hi and welcome to this edition of WordPress Tips and Tricks. This time I look at plugins include… Mailchimp for Contact Form 7 Plugin which sends form submissions from Contact Form 7, CRM Perks Forms and many other popular contact form plugins to Mailchimp. The plugin shows all mailchimp custom fields list and you can easily map any field. You’ll also see a complete log of all entry fields sent to Mailchimp. Connect any contact form to Mailchimp account by simply entering Mailchimp API key. Premium version available, but the free version will suit most users. Contact Form 7 Redirects to any page, any post or any custom URL. Simply install, activate, go to your form settings, choose the “Redirect Settings” tab and set the page you want to be redirected to. Mortgage Calculators WP   is a very easy-to-use plugin built to provide mortgage and other finance professionals with a mortgage calculator that not only delivers accurate home loan estimates, but also the ability for the users to instantly receive a free copy of those estimates via email – while also providing the website owner with an email lead every time a user requests a copy of their estimated values. Just be sure not to spam your visitors. Page Loading Animation  will load  an animation before loading your website/page. You can customize the animation and background color. But if loading time is an issue, then you may need to fix this before adding to the load with an animated graphic. Remove RSS Feed  will remove the RSS feed from your website. Not sure you’d want to do that; but here’s an option if that’s your thing. Please like and share my WordPress podcast – many thanks, Steve

Learn all my Podcasting Secrets here. Three super plugins for this episode of WordPress Tips & Tricks… First out the gate is WP Page Builder. WP Page Builder is a feature-rich drag and drop plugin to create websites easily. Whether you’re an experienced developer or just a beginner, you can build stunning websites independently with this tool. Create beautiful web pages effortlessly using the intuitive live page composer without coding in minutes. No design experience needed. WP Page Builder is a free and completely front-end based tool with plenty of design options. Free and premium versions. Post Duplicator Plus does what it says, and nothing more. Just a one-click way to duplicate an existing post or page. Finally, The SiteOrigin widget bundle gives you a collection of widgets that you can use and customize. All the widgets are built on our powerful framework, giving you advanced forms, unlimited colours and 1500+ icons. Widgets are great. No matter where you’re using them. In a Page Builder page or on your widgetized areas. It’s even compatible with other popular page building plugins. Once you enable a widget, you’ll be able to use it anywhere standard widgets are used.

Learn all my Podcasting Secrets here. In this edition of WordPress Tips and Tricks podcast I look at at plugins; Auto Insert Content, WP Quick Draw and YouTube Embed Plus. Auto Insert Content automatically insert specific content into all of your posts at a specified position. Great for automatically adding a newsletter subscription widget, PayPal donate button or a logo etc. The position of the inserted content if defined by a percentage number you type in and the plugin attempts to find a place between two block-elements (paragraph/list/div) to place your inserted content that is closest to the declared value. WP Quick Draw analyzes the images you upload and then resizes and optimizes them for faster delivery on your site. It also loads images as they are needed – so images that are below the line of sight aren’t loaded until the user scrolls down to see them – images are loaded as they are needed (which some themes already do). Best practice though is to optimize all content before you upload it. So if your site requires pictures of 1000px wide, don’t upload images that are 2000px wide. Use your common sense. YouTube Embed Plus  More than 200,000 current users of this plugin can’t be wrong. If you feature YouTube videos then this plugin may well be worth a whirl as it offers a bundle of options you might like; such as hiding the YouTube logo, automatic looping, hiding related videos when the video ends and hiding player controls etc.

WordPress Tips & Tricks episode 57 In this week’s WordPress podcast I look at three new plugins; Hidden Widget for users of Contact Form 7, a smart pop-up, and a scroll to top button. The Hidden Widget plugin is for users of Contact Form 7 who want to show more than a basic ‘message sent’ notifcation to their users. This plugin adds a widget area to Contact Form 7 that appears upon successful send (until then it remains hidden). The widget area can be used for almost any content and you can add more than one widget. Smart Popup can show any content in your WordPress post or page as popup. You can add popup with link or button or page/post on load.? You can use some nice themes and customize the button and colours. You can also add your Facebook page like and wall, a YouTube video, or content via a shortcode (such as a contact form). Want to give your visitors a quick way to return to the top of your site after they scrolled to the bottom? of course you do, and this plugin will do the trick nicely. Scroll to Top shows a scroll to top button at the bottom of your page. You can configure button background color, text color and alignment to your needs. Buy it today on Amazon, via The Book Depository, or order it by name at any bookshop worldwide.

A lightbox for your contact form Lightbox for Contact Form 7  places your contact form in a fancy pop-up lightbox. Just install the plugin – there are no settings to configure – and replace the normal Contact Form shortcode with:  f7lightbox form_id=FORM ID And you’re done. You’ll now see the words Contact Form on your page, click them and your contact form will pop up with a dark background. Members only content This plugin is as simple as it gets when you want to force visitors to become a member of your site to see selected content for members only. Simply install Anonymous Restricted Content, mark the content you want to hide from casual visitors (non members) – and it’s done. Non-members clicking to see a restricted page, post or category will be directed to your WordPress login page where they can join up. After successful authorization, the user is redirected back to the requested URL. 404 heaven The 404 error pages hurts the SEO rank of your site if you have lots 404 links (dead links to non-existent pages). A quick way to solve this issue of disappointing visitors and bringing on the wrath of Google, is to install Better 404 Redirect to Homepage. It is a simple plugin that handles all 404 errors by redirecting anyone clicking an out-of-date URL to your home page using 301 redirection. The plugin doesn’t have any settings. All you need to do is install it and forget. It will automatically do its job. Got a question about using WordPress? Use the contact form to send them over…

Disable Comments for Any Post Types (Remove comments) WordPress began life as a platform for bloggers, but over time it has become a far more flexible CMS. However, offering people the chance to comment on posts in a strong feature of the the CMS, but is not something everybody needs. Many of you might want to prevent viewers from having the option to leave comments, and for you the Disable comments plugin from WebCrafticwill be ideal. This plugin allows administrators to globally disable comments on any post type (posts, pages, attachments, etc.) so that these settings cannot be overridden for individual posts. It also removes all comment-related fields from edit and quick-edit screens. On multisite installations, it can be used to disable comments on the entire network. Additionally, comment-related items can be removed from the Dashboard, Widgets, the Admin Menu and the Admin Bar. VIBER Viber is really starting to make headway now after its launch about 4 years ago. Viber Contact Button for WordPress – WP Viber Contact Button Lite It is an alternative to Skype, and while it works well for messaging, sharing photos and video, and voice over IP calling, there’s still plenty of room for this app to grow. If you use Viver you’ll be interested to see there is a new Viber plugin – Viber Contact Button. This cross browser compatible WordPress Plugin allows you to easily create chat via Viber in WordPress. You can select from multiple color effects, color options and animation effects. This is advertised as the Lite version of the plugin which indicates a paid for version is available. DJ PLAYER I’m always keeping my eye out for new audio players so DJ Player caught my eye this week. DJ Player This is a fully responsive music player with tracklist. It supports mp3, ogg, mpeg file formats and you can add a file as an external link. The tracklist can include unlimited number of tracks. ArtistPress If you are a musician then ArtistPress will be of interest. ArtistPress This plugin will help you to easily create an artist profile page including photo, bio and contact information. You can create a list of upcoming events or shows that includes Google Maps integration to provide event locations and driving directions. You can also create photo galleries to show off your work or highlights photographs from your shows. The plugin is available now, but still under development. When development is complete, ArtistPress Pro will add playlist functionality allowing you to publish up to 5 playlists on your site using a simple shortcode. It will also add a social sharing tool for the some of the leading social media services, including Facebook, Twitter, and Behance.    

This week I have been playing with a few quiz plugins to add a bit of visitor interactivity  to one of my sites. I found Quiz Cat to be pretty basic, but that also means it is easy to use. Great if you are not bothered that you can’t change many of the colours so the quiz matches or blends with the branding of your site. Quiz Cat – WordPress Quiz Plugin Quiz Cat offered a refund as it would not work with the theme I was using, namely On Air 2, a paid-for radio station WP theme. So Quiz Cat is pretty basic, functional and will be fine for most people. But the front end design is not that sexy looking. HD Quiz is pretty flexible,  and like Quiz Cat there is very fast support that provided solutions to the issues I was facing – there was a conflict between HD Quiz and Quiz Cat – easily solved by deleting the Quiz Cat plugin. HD Quiz HD Quiz is a very easy-to-use plugin to create an unlimited number of quizzes and embed them onto any page or post. HD Quiz is equally perfect for building strong professional based questionnaires or fun Buzzfeed style quizzes. I used it for an 80s music quiz. WP Quiz Best Quiz Plugin for WordPress: WP Quiz You can create an unlimited number of Quizzes with the WP Quiz plugin, and each quiz is going to be responsive. So, your visitors can take part even from their smartphones as well as their tablets. You can have the entire quiz on a single page or stretch it across multiple pages if there are too many questions. You can enable the Quiz to scroll automatically to the next question. Unlike Quiz Cat, with the WP Quiz Plugin, you can change the background color to match that of your theme. A progress bar is displayed for your visitors to help them know their quiz status. You can change the color of the progress bar. And a late entry is Opinion Stage… Poll, Survey, Quiz, Slideshow, Form & Story Article According to the makers, Opinion Stage allows users to easily add engaging & visual interactive content elements such as polls, quizzes, surveys, slideshows, forms & story articles to your site. Opinion Stage is a powerful & easy-to-use interactive content (e.g. polls, quizzes, surveys, slideshows, forms) creation service. Opinion Stage’s highly engaging content formats are used to boost engagement, gather leads, generate revenue and to extract actionable insights. Opinion Stage works with world-leading publishers, brands & agencies as well as small sites & blogs, offering their audiences content engagement experiences that convert to measurable business values. So, plenty to choose from when it comes to quiz plugins. Let me know which one you prefer. Cheers.

Lightweight Contact Form Lightweight Contact Form is claimed by is authors to be the lightest contact form for WordPress. This plugin is designed for the fastest pagespeed. So, there is no settings page, no CSS stylesheet, and no extra files. If all you need is a simple contact form to take messages from site visitors, and fast page speed is your priority, this minimal contact form is for you. Although this form is lightweight and simple, it blocks Spam, and has both client-side and server-side validation. FluentChat – Live Chat for WordPress FluentChat is a dedicated WordPress plugin offering a free live chat option for your website. You can have unlimited operators, unlimited messages, unlimited live chats, and unlimited archives. You can view all the chat archives in the back-end and let visitors receive the chat logs in their inbox. This option can be disabled on the settings page. When none of your operators are logged in, you can show a contact form, asking their Name, Email, and Comment. WG Plagiarism Checker Pro Check plagiarism of your wordpress post with the click of a button. So when people add content to your site you can check if it has be used elsewhere and check to see if you are breaching copyright. The first 50 checks are free, then you need to pay with prices starting US$5 for 1000 queries.