Tools to help simplify the WordPress backend
Introduction
A few news items to kick us off here in December on our Google Meet gathering.
WordPress State of the Word happened this past Tuesday. You can watch it on YouTube. Search for State of the Word 2021. Matt Mullenweg had a nice announcement about creative commons licenses for media. See the new site at wordpress.org: Openverse – All types of media available for reuse. This project has been quickly ramping up. Stay tuned to it for easier processes to quickly add content from here to you website through the Add Media blocks.
The WP Weekly – WP Awards were announced this week. This is a good resource of popular WP plugins, themes communities, page builders and more. While it is a relatively small sample, it does offer a number of items that may be new to you. Take a look a see if anything is useful in your website.
Today we move into WordPress website administration and management. Maintaining your website requires time, energy, and attention to the little things. Today I’ll talk about a few tools and techniques that may help you in ways you may not have previously considered.
But first, let’s kick off a new segment to dig into some topics of interest to fellow SIG participants. These topics were sent in to me asking questions about their own site, or a site they are managing for others. We will call this “Topics from the trenches”.
Topics from the Trenches
- Ron Stolof
- Add new user
- Turn on Beaver Builder for posts
- Instgall a plugin from wordpress.org
The Tools For Backend
1. Temporary Login Without Password
Temporary Login Without Password – Invaluable if you need to get help with your website, or want to provide time-limited login capability to someone. Really useful when you need to give admin access to a developer for support or for performing routine tasks.
2. Contact Form Backup
Do you use Contact Form 7 on your WordPress website? You are in good company if you do. There are over 5 million sites using it. It looks very basic, but it has everything you need to offer an easy-to-use, robust form to your website. Your theme may have come prepackaged with CF7 already included.
CF7 does not store any of the entries made on your forms. BY design. It just works. If something goes wrong you could go days, weeks, or even months without a form notification going out. Since the form is the primary interface between your market and you, this is serious.
Enter Flamingo, originally created for Contact Form 7, but stores data collected through other forms on the site as well, including Contact Form 7. Flamingo helps save them in your database so even if you don’t get an alert, you can still view them. You can even use Flamingo to generate sign-up lists from such contact forms.
We got just about here and we ran out of time. We introduced the topic of sending mail from your WordPress website. In January we will pick up with looking into two SMTP plugins – WP Mail SMTP and Post SMTP.
Resources & Links Referenced
Source Post: Simplify WordPress Backend from GoDaddy’s Garage
Notes & Questions
N.B. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on the recording for our Google Meet virtual gathering. I was most disappointed, but life goes on. Hopefully next time I will remember this.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year folks. Hopefully, in 2022 we will have an opportunity to gather together as we have in the past.
Featured Image Photo Credit – https://aamplugin.com/
