 Can you hear me okay? All right, was anyone here for the brand one that was right before this? Okay, so I'm the complete opposite Briar's Briggs from her. So I'm an INFP, and this is very painful, but we will all get through this together. So I'm gonna talk about how to use plugins without breaking WordPress. So hopefully, I'm very good at breaking WordPress. So I'm just gonna walk through all of the things that I do to try to not break WordPress as much as I used to when I first started. So you can find me on Twitter at Crisco Ninja. That's its own story, so you can find me later and maybe I'll tell you why. And speaking of brands, that is my brand. If I'm any online games or anything, it's Crisco Ninja, so. My slides are available at that URL. I'll also tweet it out at the end. So if you follow me on Twitter, you will find my slides. I'm not gonna walk around much. That INFP thing's gonna kick in. I'm gonna say right here. So the things I'm gonna talk about is why would you wanna use plugins? A lot of people here conflicting advice about plugins, like don't use them, they're bad, they sold on your site, and other people are like, no, you can have like 50, it's fine. So I'm just gonna talk about what's the right number of plugins to have, you know, what's that sweet spot. Choosing which plugins you need. Sometimes you don't need three caching plugins. It doesn't make your site three times faster. So that happens, so recovering from something that you broke. I do that a lot. Future proofing your site, and I put that in quotes, and other amazing miracles. And then hope and healing. Sometimes you can't save a plugin. Maybe it's your favorite plugin that you've been using for like five years and it's just not updated anymore or supported. And you have to let that go and find a new solution. All right, so now what? Why plugins? My talk is full of GIFs. And yes, it's a GIF and not a GIF. That's a whole nother talk. So a lot of times, like WordPress is amazing right out of the box. It does amazing things. But sometimes you want it to do more. And if you're not really good at like custom coding your own plugins and like just making it do things by willing it to do it, you need to use other plugins that other developers have written. Or sometimes you just don't need to reinvent the wheel. If somebody made a really awesome membership plugin, maybe you don't need to spend three months writing your own awesome membership plugin. And we all like to support each other in this community. So if somebody already built an amazing product that's gonna do what I need, I'm gonna give them my $30, my $60 and say thank you, thank you for putting that work in. You made my life easier. So there's nothing wrong with plugins. And they're everywhere. You can find them on the repository, WordPress.org. You can find them on paid sites like Code Canyon. You can find them on people's individual websites like Advanced Custom Fields, right? That's sold on the Advanced Custom Fields website. So not all plugins live on the repository. A lot of plugins live on the repository as the free version. And then you can upgrade to if you need the pro or the premium extensions. So all of these logos might look familiar. There's contact form seven up there, WooCommerce, Yoast, MailChimp, things like that, Jetpack. Do they all look familiar? Okay. Oh, and when I wrote those slides, that was how many plugins were on the repository. If it's a little over 54,000. So there's plenty. More isn't always better. I mentioned the whole three caching plugins. This was a client that came to us complaining that their site was slow. Oh, this is how many plugins they had. And on the plugin page, if there's a warning or an indication of something, it'll have that yellow background. So you can kind of see, they had kind of a lot of issues going on. The thing that I found is they had three different caching plugins going on. And that doesn't help because they just argue with each other. And all of those caching plugins do things differently. And sometimes, depending on where you're hosting your website, like if you're hosting on WP Engine, they have their own built-in caching, so they don't allow you to have certain caching plugins because it will interact with what they already have in place. So lots of factors go into caching plugins. Three does not make it better. As soon as we turned off two of them, their site improved immensely. And it turns out their images were too big. As soon as I resized all their images, their site was super fast. And they were like, you're brilliant. And I'm like, thank you. So try to do that. Just resize your images. All right. All right. So things I look for when I decide if I'm gonna use a plugin or not is what are the goals of the site? If your site is simply going to be your personal blog, you don't need WooCommerce on it. So just take a minute to go, what do I want my site to do and try to make your plugin choices around that goal? What is this plugin gonna do for you? What's the purpose of it? Does it bring value to your site? Maybe having a plugin that makes all your logos spin isn't going to bring you a lot of value. You might like it, but it's not really gonna give value to your site. And then is it supported? In the repository, a lot of people just do their tech support right in the comments. And you can see exactly how the plugin author interacts with the people that use it. Some of them have their own external ticketing systems where you have to have a license key in order to get support. But you can usually see how they treat people that buy their plugin. Also a note on that, when you buy or when you get free plugins off the repository, just understand those are human beings that wrote those plugins that probably have real 40 hour a week jobs. Their whole job probably isn't supporting that free plugin that you're using. So have some patience when you reach out to them. Just say, you know, this broke, this is what happened, you know, can you help me? Instead of giving them a one star review and going, this plugin sucks. That's not gonna get you anywhere. So, all right. So choosing your plugins. How many do you need? So can anyone else hear the song in your head from this? I'm showing my age here. Oh, we can't hear it, but. I'll say it with you. Yeah, I know it's crazy. It's the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Hey, crookie. Okay. There is no magic number of plugins that's correct. It just really depends on what you would like your website to accomplish. Sometimes it's 12, sometimes it's 24. Sometimes it might be 50. There's nothing wrong with it. You just have to make conscious decisions about which plugin authors you're, you know, supporting which ones you're plugging in if they argue with each other. You know, there's no magic number. All right, here's plugins that I tend to use a lot. Like just today, like right now. This might change in a month, in a year. This is just what I use right now a lot. So I use Gravity Forms a lot. Like a lot a lot. We have the developer license and I am an evangelist for Gravity Forms. There's other form plugins that are just fine. It's just I'm comfortable with Gravity Forms and I know how to manipulate it to do what I want it to do. Contact Form 7, sometimes if all I need is a super simple contact form on the contact page and I don't need it to do magic. You know, Contact Form 7 is amazing and it's free and it's supported and it has a huge community behind it. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. If you're gonna use Contact Form 7, I suggest you use Flamingo, which is the counter part to that plugin, same plugin author and it just keeps the entries in the backend for you. Contact Form 7 by itself doesn't keep a record of submissions. So you need another plugin like Flamingo and there's some other ones out there that will keep the record of those submissions in the backend for you. I don't know anyone who doesn't use Yoast.io. I'm just kidding, I know there's other ones. But I use Yoast, it's just I'm comfortable with it. I know how to find all the settings. You know, if you use all in one SEO, that works too, nothing wrong with it. IE, you can pick your favorite page builder, the one that we use is integrated with our theme. And so it's not like you can go download it, it's hooked to the theme. But it's drag and drop. There's nothing wrong with page builders and if you talk to somebody who's like, oh, you use a page builder, there's nothing wrong with it. Like it saves so much time. Like we all probably could sit down and muddle out an HTML website, but let's not, because we don't have to. So if you want to use a page builder, use it. Don't let anyone make you feel guilty for it. Okay, Advanced Custom Fields, I use that one a lot. It has a free version and a pro version. And I use the pro version because I do some really ridiculous things with Advanced Custom Fields. So you can make your own custom fields on custom post types with no plugin. It's built into WordPress. I just like Advanced Custom Fields because it makes my life easier. And I like Easy, so. CPT UI, that's an acronym for custom post type user interface. That is one of my favorite plugins because we all can Google how to put the snippet in the functions file to get a custom post type in WordPress. It's readily available. You can Google it right now and find it. But this one lets me manipulate it. Maybe I don't know if I want it to have a hierarchy or not. Maybe I don't know if I want it to do some things. So this is just dropdown boxes of you choosing things. Maybe you want it to have a different slug. Maybe you want it to have that hierarchy. Maybe you want it to have custom taxonomies with it. And it just allows you to pick and choose. The nice thing about CPT UIs, once you get it the way you like it, it will give you the snippet that you need to put in the functions file. And then you can uninstall it and you don't need to keep it on your site. It's really an amazing free plugin. All right, Search and Filter Pro is not a free plugin that's paid but it allows me to run AJAX searches on custom fields. And so I use that quite a bit. I should have put some examples up but it just lets me loop over and search all those custom fields that I use with advanced custom fields. User role editor, use that quite a bit to give or take away capabilities for users. FACET WP is really similar to Search and Filter Pro. The reason I might use FACET WP over Search and Filter Pro is because you can have a map be the search field. So if you drag around a map, it'll sort the search results depending on where your map is looking. And that's pretty nifty. Admin menu editor allows you to remove things from the dashboard menu. If you like, some of our clients don't want to see 30 things on the left menu. They just want to know how to post a blog. They just want to know real simple stuff. So they would rather only have four things over there. And that's perfectly okay, we can do that for them. So admin menu editor makes it easy to do that. You can hide things, you can disable access to things and change how like the editor view looks over there. White label CMS allows you to white label the backend for your editor users. You can add your logo, you can add, I added a little widget box with our phone number to our office. Like hey, if you're in here editing and you're having problems, you can call us, you know, and it's got our phone number. So that's a nifty little thing. Profile builder pro is what I use when I build membership sites. There's lots of them out there, that's just the one I learned and got comfortable with. WooCommerce, that's kind of a duh, of course WooCommerce. WP mail log helps me troubleshoot when I get the client who calls. I filled the form and it didn't work. That helps me narrow down some issues because I can see whether or not if the website actually sent the mail, where it got sent. Sometimes it's a headers issue, sometimes it's an SMT key thing. You know, trying to get forms to work, it's so fun. Better search replace helps me get rid of dev links when I go live. We give our websites pretty little client links like so-and-so.icebergwebdesign.com and that's where their dev link is. So when we go live, we need to make a lot of changes to those dev links if they get hard coded in there and better search replace allows me to do that fairly quickly. Regenerate thumbnails, that's awesome. Well, like when I optimize those photos, I just FTP'd and then drug them over, had the same name and everything and then I just regenerated those thumbnails for that. And it took care of all of the other thumbnails that WordPress made. Duplicate post, sometimes if you're making six pages that are gonna look super simple or just duplicate them and then go in and change the slug, change the content, do all of that, instead of having to rebuild the whole page. Maintenance plugins, like if you need to put it in maintenance mode while you're fixing something major and you can have a nice landing page and it's like, hey, we'll be back later, check back later, I use that sometimes. And then I don't know, does anyone in here know what this plugin Classic Editor is? Anyone have heard it? All right, yeah. I use that sometimes too, not all the time. But sometimes when Gutenberg came out, it's so new to all of us and it brings out some strong emotions in people. But it did conflict with some of my older plugins and so I just have Classic Editor on as a band-aid right now while I'm trying to make things work well together. So there's nothing wrong with Classic Editor. And you can have it so it forces everyone to use it or you can do it where the person can choose on the page that they're on. They can choose if they wanna use Gutenberg or the Classic. So that's pretty cool. There's a ton of other plugins, just all of them. They do all sorts of things. So how do you choose which ones you need? So I have up here an iPhone X and a Samsung S10. So if you were going into the phone store, I'm sure you'd have a pretty good idea of which way you were leaning before you even walked in the door. And so how do you choose that? How do you choose your brand? So speaking, yeah, not that brand, but you usually look at the specs. What does it do? Is it gonna do what I need it to do? Both of these phones are gonna take pictures. They're gonna watch YouTube. They're gonna play Candy Crush, right? They're both gonna do those things. But sometimes they aren't. There are some apps on the Apple store that don't exist in the Android store. And maybe one's really important to me and so that's why I went Apple. Reviews, read reviews. Even if the plugin doesn't have a perfect five-star review, that's okay. Sometimes user error is a thing that happens and it doesn't matter how many times you explain to the person, they're still gonna tell you your thing is broken. It just exists. But you can get a good idea of how they deal with angry people or especially if it's a paid plugin, right? You're paying for that plugin so they should have some sort of support with it. And you can get an idea of how they treat the people that buy their plugin. And then prior experience with it, the reason I use Gravity Farms is because I probably could make a form in my sleep at this point. So it would take an enormous amount of buyout for me to change what form plugin I use. It would have to be a big fancy new feature or something that Gravity Farms couldn't do. All right, so you found this most amazing plugin that you're gonna use. It's gonna fix all your problems and you install it and now you have the white screen of death or you get a 500 error or like all of a sudden your site's not up. Because we all cowboy code, right? We just install plugins on live sites and pray. All right, cool. Okay, that's what I do. So then I do this a lot. I get a little worried. I just forced a really simple error that actually I think WordPress and the later updates doesn't even come up with this warning anymore if I remember right. But this just has, I have a lot of windows open when I'm working. I have 50 tabs and like six sublimes open and like Spotify going. And I think I'm typing in one window and I'm not. And so I'll think I'm typing in my Chrome and I'm actually typing in sublime and then I save it for some reason. And I have characters before my opening PHP tag in one of my files. And that's what this error is. There's what it's saying is I can't, I don't know what you're trying to do. You have something before the opening PHP tab. All right, so you have to learn how to hack into your own website. There are a couple of ways you can do it. Is anyone here not FTP'd into their own website? That's okay, it's all right. FTP can be your friend. You can also usually have a file manager associated with your hosting account. It's usually called file manager. I don't think I've ever seen it not called file manager. And I prefer FTP and it's okay, either way is okay. FTP just gives you, you can see on the left there, it just gives you a file view of all of your files in your website. And it's okay to look at your files. You aren't gonna break anything just by looking at them. You'll break them when you open them and save stuff to them. And I often do that too. So you should know how to get in there. You should at least know how to get into your website files, whether it's FTP or file manager. All right, so talking about this mythical future-proofing and other amazing miracles. I hear this a lot lately. It's an awesome buzzword. Let's future-proof things. And that sounds great, but it's kind of impossible. I don't know, the word proof, maybe they could have said, I don't know, I don't even know a better word. Future-proofing just seems so solid. So like, maybe some nerds in here will get this joke. Remember to turn your computer off before midnight on January 18th of 2038. Because that is when the UNIX timestamp, as we know it today, will stop working. So it's the Y2K bug all over again, I'm telling you. So the 32-bit UNIX timestamp will no longer work after that date. So I'm sure they'll just come up with like an amazing 64-bit or something, right? Some smart people, I'm sure, will fix it. We've got time. And then when you look up future-proof in the dictionary, it says that of a product, it means that it's unlikely to become obsolete. So it's kind of like you're trying to peer into the future and decide what's gonna stick around and what's not. So it's kind of like a myth to future-proof your site. But it is a good idea to go with things that you know are solid. My dad had a beta tape player and turns out VHS won. So we lost out in that future-proofing moment. And Blu-ray and HD seed disks, Blu-ray won. So sometimes it's hard to guarantee future-proofing your site. Things happen, things change. PHP 5.6 has an end of life. I don't know if you guys heard about that, but you gotta upgrade, just gotta do it. And so it's a good idea to keep up on those news updates. Like we've known about the end of life of PHP 5.6 for a while, and then it turns out everyone just waits till the last minute and panics. But you can start to put those things into place when you hear about them, or read about them, or just even keep up on it. The Google algorithm I think changes every six seconds. Not sure. That's just my experience with it. It has mobile-first indexing, which I'm sure you've heard a lot about today. And so that's the difference in how they rank your sites. Gutenberg's brand new. How many people actually enjoy Gutenberg in here? Woo, minority. Okay, that's okay. I am getting used to it. I'll just say that. And then what's next? I have no idea what's next. I mean, that's the amazing thing about the industry we're in. Like things change, and cool new things come about, and better ways to do things happen. It's awesome. It's actually a really, really fun thing. So how do you keep up with it? So you read, and you read, and you read some more. You go to conferences like these, make connections, trade business cards, emails, Twitter handles, whatever you need to do. Get involved in your local WordPress meetups, in groups. I'm from Minnesota. We have quite a few meetups in the Minneapolis area. And just go meet people, talk to them. Then you have resources of when something breaks, and they might know how to help you fix it. Read any news updates from your host. When you log in to your hosting, and there's a big banner that says, hey, we're gonna do this thing, you should probably take a moment to read what they wrote to you. They don't typically put meaningless stuff in those warnings. You should probably read it. And then ask questions of the community. Get in a Facebook WordPress group. Go to WordPress Meetup and be like, hey, I have a question. I've never been in a job career community where people are more willing to help. Just ask. Even in teaching, people were not this open and helpful. I promise. So just seriously ask. Reach out, raise your hand. Ask, if you feel like it's a dumb question, it's not, just ask it. We all have had that question at some point. Back up your site and update it on the regular. Whatever that means. Once a week, once a day. Try maybe more often than once a month. But just do it. Make sure if your host doesn't have an automatic backup in it, look for some plugins that will help you do it. Or manually download all your files and your SQL dump. I mean, whatever. Float your boat. But you know, make sure you back up. Some problems can be solved simply by updating WordPress and your plugins. That's sometimes that's all it takes. You hit the update button and bam, the problem's gone. But sometimes you hit that button and that's what causes the problems. So it's kind of a 50-50. That's why I always hit the button and I'm like, ooh, let's see. Okay, so, especially when it's WooCommerce. Hit the button and go ooh, let's see. So, but seriously, back up and update your site. So what happens if your plugin doesn't have any updates available? What if it's like eight years ago that somebody touched the code? So it doesn't necessarily mean it's not gonna work. It really just means what was in that plugin, what code was in that. It might still work. I found one that did. Didn't break WordPress, I was pretty impressed. But chances are you might wanna find one that's been touched more recently than eight years ago. If you find out your plugin has several updates behind WordPress, you might just have to find a replacement. You might have to just bite the bullet. What happens if you get stuck in this notorious update loop? How many have been stuck on the screen? Okay, me too. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily mean everything's broken. WordPress has this awesome built-in thing that when you're updating stuff it puts up the splash screen to keep people from seeing all the gross stuff it's updating in the background. So if you go into your FTP or your file manager because you're an amazing hacker now, you will right see a .maintenance file. And now don't do this immediately. Give the plugin a minute or two. Give it a hot second to actually update. But if you're really stuck on the screen, it's been five, 10 minutes. There's this file in there, .maintenance. Just delete it. It's fine, I promise. And then your site will be back up. I've had this happen sometimes when I am not paying attention and I go update all and then I navigate away. That's usually when it happens to me. Let's see. All right, hope and healing. You can't save them all. And I just need to let this GIF go all the way through. If you haven't seen Big Hero 6, seriously go see Big Hero 6. Solid movie. Sometimes you can't save them all. Sometimes you have to find a replacement. Sometimes you reach out to the plugin author and they're like, eh, I don't do that anymore. And you just have to change. And that's okay, change is good. Change is fine, all right. So if you see these kind of errors on a plugin and you can't get in to deactivate the plugin, that's kind of scary sometimes. Does anyone had that happen? Yeah, so you can either FTP in or go to your file manager and you can rename the folder of that particular plugin and it will deactivate it that way. That's a really crude way to do it, but if you're in a time crunch and it's the only way you can get in, you can do that. And that's only good if you know exactly which plugin caused your problem. Because sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you're like me and you go, check all the boxes and hit update and you hope it works out. So this was a screenshot of Spotify not too long ago and that made me feel good. Because as a look, even Spotify screws up sometimes. Their CSS wasn't loading. I probably was like a CDN issue or something, but it was entertaining for me. My son didn't find it entertaining because he was trying to sign up for an account. But consult Google, ask people that you know, hey, is there something up with this? Or stuff like that. Last year when I came here at Plugin Palooza, the plugin that won was Plugin Detective. And that's gonna help you figure out which plugin. If you don't know which plugin caused your problem, Plugin Detective will run whether you have a white screen of death or not. It will run either way. And so if you don't wanna have to try to troubleshoot it by yourself, I recommend this plugin. It's pretty cool and it has some amazing animations that keep you entertained while you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your site. And like I said, I just mentioned this in the last slide, bulk updating super fast. But it can be super dangerous. So if you also like to live dangerously, go ahead and update all 40 of your plugins. And hopefully it all works out. When I am out of patience, sometimes I do that, but I learn the hard way. Just go one at a time. Update it, see if your site's still there. Update the next one, move on. All right, so I crammed a lot of information in a short amount of time. So if you have questions, I can answer them. I can try to answer them. Does anyone have any questions? No, you guys. Yeah, oh yeah. Very time consuming. And it really depends on which clients that I'm working on. If I have a client that is in e-commerce and most of their business comes from their e-commerce store, I'm not gonna do the click and pray method. I'm gonna put it to a staging environment or a local environment, and then I'm gonna update WooCommerce. And then I'm gonna see if it's broken on my local site or my staging site, and then I'll still pray a little bit when I hit the button on the live site, right? So it really just depends. If it's somebody's local like, reality blog, I'm less likely to go, oh, I need to put this on staging, make sure it doesn't break. Like, really, I just, I'm gonna update that one because to fix that one is probably very less amount of time than to fix a giant e-commerce store. That's a little more intimidating. My favorite thing, by the way, is when WooCommerce changes hooks. Oh, that's my favorite. Solid, solid times. Yes. Okay, so the question was, how do I conflict, like troubleshoot conflicts between two different plugins? My first step is Google, because chances are I'm not the only person that has those two particular plugins. If I don't find anything there, I'll go to the separate support for both the plugins. Like recently, I'm having an issue with advanced custom fields and gravity forms. Not listening to a conditional logic thing, and the form that I'm trying to troubleshoot has, I'm not kidding, like 20 conditional logic rules going on right now, it's a ridiculous form. And so I'm just sitting in with an older version of gravity forms because I haven't had time to look into it, but I'm not the only one with that issue. It was nice to Google it and see, oh, it's not just me. And so hopefully they have that on their radar and they're gonna fix it in the, because those are two big, pretty giant plugins, so they'll probably more than likely talk to each other. If they're smaller plugins, free ones, you might be the one that has to write something to change it. WordPress, when you upload things to the repo, they do a pretty good job of being like, hey, your function names are super general. Maybe you could not do that so that there's less conflicts now than there used to be. But I just Google the heck out of it. I ask questions on Stack Overflow and try to duck when people throw paper balls at me when they're like, that's a dumb question. I'm like, okay, thanks. A lot of times I don't even have to post on Stack Overflow because somebody's already asked it and taken the bullet for me and then I just read through the answers and try to fix it. I wish there was like a list I could give you. Do this, do this, do this, do this, but it's so situational, but any other questions? Yeah. What are the things I do when I FTP in? I do a lot of customizing templates and so it's a lot of being in the PHP files of WordPress. Like if I have a custom post type of home listings, for instance. A lot of times I'm customizing that template so I'm in there messing with the single-dash homes page and I like text editors because it helps me see my code more clearly and so I usually FTP in when I'm doing code-based things or changing things in the style sheet even because I like the way Sublime, which I'm now gonna try VS Code by the way, but I like the way Sublime lets me see my style sheet. I feel like it's easier on my brain to see it in Sublime than it is in the WordPress appearance editor. So basically, it's just a personal preference. Any other questions? If I need to change the database? That's actually usually through a MySQL interface like PHP, the MyPHP, and in all our hosting that we use, it's just a button I have to click to get into the MySQL. But I try to do that as little as possible because I only have a very little working amount of knowledge of SQL and I don't wanna like fork anything. Like I don't wanna, it makes me nervous to get in there, but I can if I have to. Sometimes, like I don't know if this is, this must be a WordPress core thing, but like when you change the admin address, it sends like an email and is like, are you sure? And if I go change it in the SQL database, it doesn't trigger the email. But I don't spend a ton of time in the SQL database. I'm usually just in template files of the content folder. Did you have a question? Staging? Pilot.com? No, I haven't. Is that like a cool? Nice. That's awesome. Oh, I should have put that on my list. I use WP rollback sometimes. Okay, but yeah, there's so many cool staging tools out there. I've used Flywheel local by Flywheel. Even though I don't host at Flywheel, I probably should, but I don't. But I still use their tool local by Flywheel because it's just an already made lamp stack for you. It's just amazing. Any other questions? Or are we all ready to go drink and sing? We can sing the Sesame Street song. Come on, I need some people up on the stage with me. I can't do it by myself. No? All right, cool. If you have any other questions or you don't want to ask them in this forum, you can hit me up on Twitter or email me at Jennifer at icebergwebdesign.com. My slide, I'll tweet out my slide deck. I think that's about it. I think I get to be done now.