When: March 3rd, 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Where: Chattanooga Public Library (4th Floor Downtown)
What: Plugin Roundup – The entire group shares the plugins that they recommend or the hidden gems you may not have heard of.
Meetup Notes
We want to thank everyone who came out to the March WordPress Meetup. This month was an open discussion about plugins. Listed below are the notes and links relating to the plugins that were mentioned.
Meetup News & Announcements
We now have a Facebook group! If you would like to join us, just follow this link: https://facebook.com/groups/wpchattanooga/ . It’s a closed group so you will need to request permission to join. We will allow anyone to join this group, we just want to keep the spambots out. The group will be used for helping to select content for future meetups and general Q&A of any members.
Presentation: Open Discussion about Plugins(everyone)
WP Maintenance Mode – This plugin allows users to add a maintenance page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance, or add a coming soon page for a new websites.
The Events Calendar – Allows users to set up event registration on specified dates and set venues. This also ties into other eCommerce sites and has great documentation on how to use the product.
SEO by Yoast – Helps user to learn how to write better content with the built-in content analysis function, and easily optimize site’s titles and descriptions for Google.
Google Analytics by Yoast – Tracks user traffic on your site.
WPMandrill – This plugin sends emails that are generated by WordPress through Mandrill, a transactional email service powered by MailChimp. This service can be set up on a local host. It does everything most SMTP services do but much simpler. Some of its more robust features include being able to set code to trigger emails and send emails based on targeted groups.
My Eyes are Up Here – Helps guide WordPress in cropping images allowing user to set a focal point on images.
Instagrate to WordPress – Allows you to automatically integrate your Instagram account with your WordPress blog.
Peter’s Login Redirect – Define a set of redirect rules for specific users, users with specific roles, users with specific capabilities, and a blanket rule for all other users. Also, set a redirect URL for post-registration.
Jetpack – This is a great all in one toolkit.
Soliloquy Slider – An efficient and fast slider plugin.
Custom Login – Allows you to easily customize your admin login page.
Envira Gallery – This is allows you to create galleries that are intuitive using all native WordPress features, and galleries are responsive right out of the box.
Akismet – This is a spam filter, it does come built in with WordPress you must activate and authenticate to use this plugin. If you use this plugin make sure to always mark your spam. Akismet uses user feedback to decide what is spam.
Batch Comment Spam Deletion – Deletes spam in batches instead of all at once, so not to slow down your server.
Enable Media Replace – This plugin allows you to replace a file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place. No more deleting, renaming and re-uploading files! You will need to turn off any caching plugins to see changes.
Page Builder – Allows user to build content into rows and columns using simple drag and drop functions.
Q & A
Question: What is the difference between Mailchimp and other mail clients like A Webber?
Kyle’s Answer: It’s kind of like Ford Vs. Chevy. It’s the same product just different company. James recommend to check out the Applied Filters podcast episode on drip. They discuss email integration in that episode.
Question: Is it a good idea to use theme with everything built into them?
James’ Answer: No, because if everything is built into your theme then it makes it extremely hard switch themes. You would have to practically rebuild your entire website to get off a theme that has everything built in.
Marylu Carl says
THANK YOU! Cool to see the info again!