Tag: plugins

  • WordPress Plugin Starter Kit

    Here are some of our favorite WordPress plugins to install when approaching new WordPress site builds.

    Block Visibility
    This is an essential plugin for sites that rely mainly on the Full Site Editor and Gutenberg.

    Two Factor
    Given how many bots target the WordPress login page, having multifactor authenticatoin for admin accounts is an absolute must.

    A Cache Plugin
    Most sites will need some kind of caching. The one chosen largely depends on your webhost and webserver stack though. Otherwise, some good choices include LiteSpeed Cache for LiteSpeed enabled webservers and Cache Enabler for webhosts that dont provide built in caching.

    Site Healthcheck and Troubleshooting
    This is a useful plugn that can help prevent minor errors from piling up into a major issue. It also includes a useful troubleshooting mode for identifying problem plugins.

    Safe SVG
    Because WordPress still doesn’t include native support for SVG files…

    The SEO Framework
    A great, lightweight SEO plugin that gives most sites what they need to increase search engine visibility without sacrificing performance or filling the admin dashboard with ads.

    WP Code Snippets / WPCode
    Many plugins can be repalced by a code snippet or two, and these plugins add a lot of convenience to the process. Be aware, with this type of plugin you must keep your administraor accounts secure due to the security risk of having the ability to rune executable code from your admin panel. Otherwise, its better to make a custom functionality plugin and put your code snippets in there. Note that WPCode is a newer plugin with a nicer interface than Code Snippets, though it has a lot of ads and upsells.

    An SMTP Plugin
    Because WordPress still doesn’t include native SMTP email support. Some of my favorites include PostMark and WP Mail SMTP

    Sucuri Security
    Some webhosts provide their own security plugins or explicity advise against using one. Outside of those situations, Sucuri is a great lightweight plugin that provides more than enough hardening for most lightweight sites.

    Post Types Order
    Allows for drag and drop ordering of posts and pages from the admin dashboard.

    Post Type Switcher
    For sites with custom post types, this plugin is a great tool to have during development and is also useful for content editors.

    Contact Form 7 + Flamingo
    A true O.G. WordPress plugin combo from Takayushi Miyigo providing a great way to build a simple forms.

    Debug Bar (Development Only)
    A great development tool with lots of features to help with custom development.

    Query Monitor (Development Only)
    A great development plugin that can help identify resource hogging plugins and troubling database queries.

  • YITH Role Based Pricing bug fixed with a reset

    Somewhere along the way with the YITH Role Based Prices plugin, a client of ours had a sudden complete loss of all their specialized discounts. An update of the YITH Role Based Prices caused all the settingss for the dicount rules to completely dissapear. Specifcally, the discount rules were created for specific product categories based on user role. Both the applied user roles and the product categories were missing after the plugin update.

    Contacting the YITH support team did bring somewhat of a resolution to the problem. The support agent was able to the restore the data using a custom script. However, the pricing rules still were not applying any discounts on the front end of the website. Several rounds of troubleshooting eventually lead to discovering a solution: disabling and enabling each rule.

    The simple yet effective restart restored the display of the rules on the front of the site and everything worked as normal. This whole scenario points toward a poorly coded database table migration along with a lack of a communication from YITH on a major plugin update.

  • Gravity Forms filer to disable CSS only works with Orbital theme

    When using the Gravity Forms 2.5 Theme, the action filter to disable the default CSS doesn’t work. Luckily, the filter does work when using the recommended Orbital theme:

    add_filter( 'gform_disable_css', '__return_true' );

    I discovered this while working on a legacy WordPress site that uses the Classic Editor and troubleshooting why my styling wasn’t applying correctly.

    My current version of Gravity Forms (2.9) includes a setting to called Output Default CSS which can be toggled on and off. Depending on the state of the Gravity Forms Plugin, this setting may have no effect. Unfortunately, there’s no indication or notification of this setting not working although it is mentioned in the docmentation.