Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and I'm so excited to be here with you today because, for one, I've got this podcast recorded well in advance, so I know that it's going to be a very good show.

But I am right now at New Media Expo in Las Vegas. I am hanging out there with a few of my colleagues. We are running the WordPress.com booth at this trade show, and it's gonna be a lot of fun, and I get to work with and meet people face to face and answer their WordPress questions. So it's always a treat to travel, and it's always a treat to meet people face to face. And so I'm really excited about where I am today.

But, today, I have an episode that I wanna share with you because I get a lot of questions from people that wanna know how my website's powered, and how does it work, and things like that. So, today, I thought I'd take the opportunity to describe all the plugins that I'm using.

But, first, let's talk about the upcoming announcements or the announcements that are happening. I wanna let you know about the May webinar that's happening on May 1, 2015. That will be at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. And we're gonna talk all about custom post types, how we can add custom post types to our WordPress website.

And we're gonna actually go in and add some code to a site. You'll be able to see it. You'll be able to see how we can customize it, and we can make areas within our WordPress dashboard very easy for our clients to use, very easy for us to use. And so that's what that webinar's gonna be all about. You can register over at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar and get all the information right over there.

Also, I wanna let you know to just keep your eyes and ears and everything looking for WordPress 4.2. It may be out this week. It's probably going to be out next week. But, since I won't be recording this live, I just want to say, hey, keep an eye for it. If it comes out, make sure you back up your website, and then, once it's backed up, then you can update to the latest version and run Version 4.2. So there are some exciting things coming, but I've talked about that in other shows. So be on the lookout for that.

As we turn to the, "Is there a plugin for that?" section, I just wanna highlight one today that I heard about on a friend of mine's show, Adam Silver over at KitchenSinkWP.com. He had an interview with one of the creators of this plugin. And this plugin is called Give, and it is a plugin that allows you to start accepting donations on your WordPress site. It's a brand-new plugin, and it's really pretty neat.

I actually installed it because I have a nonprofit site that I'm helping build and run, and right now, I've kind of hacked together a shopping cart instance for people to give donations. And this is really cool because it gives you the ability to have one-time donations and to have name-your-own-price donations.

So maybe you have a few different tiers. You have, "Donate $50.00, $100.00, $250.00, $500.00," whatever, but you also want people to be able to put in their own amount. This plugin will do that.

It also integrates with Stripe and Authorize.net and PayPal. And coming soon is a plugin that will allow reoccurring payments. So that's one of the big things I was looking for, for this nonprofit. I was trying to look for something that could take one-time payments, work with Authorize.net, and take reoccurring payments. And it looks like Give is going to work perfectly for that.

The plugin itself is free. You can find it at WordPress.org/plugins/give. And then some of the additional add-ons, so the Authorize.net is a little bit of a charge, and then I'm guessing that the reoccurring payments will probably be an add-on, a premium add-on, as well.

So, if you're interested in that, go on over to check out that plugin in the repository, or listen to the episode at KitchenSinkWP. That's Episode No. 58, and there'll be a link in the show notes to that, as well.

So, like I said, at the top of the show, today, we're going to take a look at the plugins that I'm using on my new version of my website. So, if you've been following along in this journey I started back in September of 2014, I started building out my new website. I decided early on that I was gonna start over, start completely from scratch, and that was gonna mean that I could install only the plugins that I needed. I could clear out the database. I could get rid of the stuff that I didn't need.

And so, ultimately, what I was doing is I was running two versions of my website at the same time, and I was syncing them back and forth to make sure that the comments were updated and the posts and everything was updated.

But I knew, the day that I launched, I was just gonna start a brand-new site. And so I didn't wanna have any legacy plugins and their custom settings already kind of cluttering up the database. So that was pretty much the main reason why I did that.

And so I really took some time to evaluate and think through the plugins that I'm using. And I think I'm using the bare minimum as possible. As I was looking down through this list, there's a few that I could remove, just because they're plugins that have a one-time-use function, and then I could remove them and then bring them back if I needed to. And I'll explain which ones those are when we get to them.

But, today, I'm gonna go down right through the list alphabetically from top to bottom, highlight the different plugins that I'm using and why I'm using them. And then, if you have any questions or if you're interested in any of the plugins, be sure to reach out and let me know, and I can explain a little bit more.

So, right now, on YourWebsiteEngineer.com, at the time of this recording, I have 23 active plugins. And I know that sounds like a lot, but there are four plugins that are extensions of another plugin, and then there's two plugins for the MailPoet plugin that I'm using. So, essentially, that's like 17 plugins itself. There's extra ones there or whatnot.

But I'm gonna go through all of them. We're gonna talk about them. And then there'll be links in the show notes for Episode No. 228 where you can go and download either then from the WordPress repository, or if they're a premium plugin, then you can download them from their plugin's website.

So the first one up is Akismet. This is one that I use. It's the best way to protect your blog from comments and trackback spam and just all kinds of other nonsense that computers and robots and things try to jam up your inbox with all kinds of nastiness.

And so I run Akismet on every site. I turn it on and make sure that I'm using it. So, that way, I don't get a lot of comments and a lot of spam coming through my contact forms and all those types of things. So Akismet is a plugin by Automattic, and there's a whole team of engineers that are behind that to make sure that it's doing its best job. So that's the first plugin that I have.

The second one is one called As Heard On. This is the plugin that I created. It displays the album artwork for other shows that you've been a featured guest. And this is actually − on this version of my website is actually a newer version.

So there were some features that I needed to add to make it look good on my new website, and I haven't had a chance to take those updates and those changes and package them up as part of the plugin and then distribute that one back out to the WordPress repository.

So some of the things that you see on the homepage or the ability to scroll side to side and all that functionality is not built into the current version, but I'm looking to get that into an upcoming version, as well. So As Heard On is my second plugin.

The third plugin that I'm using is called Broken Link Checker, and it basically checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

I'm using this, and it's taking me a little while to go through this because I have a few hundred broken links on my new site, mainly because of the commenting system that I was using before, and a lot of the broken links are the links that people put in as their website or their website blog address or something when they left a comment a few years ago, and those sites are no longer around. So I've been slowly going through it ten at a time, either looking through, seeing if it was a typo, or if the link is no longer valid, and just kind of removing those as I go.

So Broken Link Checker is one of those ones that could be uninstalled. And once I get everything kind of taken care of, if I get everything caught up, everything looks good, I could deactivate this and disable it, get rid of it for a while, and then bring it on once a month or every quarter or whatever and then run it to see what types of things are broken and what things need to be updated. So that's one that I could get rid of.

The next plugin is one that I absolutely cannot get rid of, and it's called Gravity Forms. This is a premium plugin, and it gives you the ability to easily create a custom web form and manage your form entries within your WordPress dashboard.

So my contact form, any survey that I do, I use Gravity Forms for a lot of different things, and I just absolutely love this plugin. It's a $39.00 plugin for one install. I still have the developer license because I use this on all of my WordPress sites, absolutely love it, and it makes it the easiest way to create a form.

I really like it because you can do dropdown links, or say, for example, you're trying to do something custom, and you want people to pick their state, all you have to do is pull in a little dropdown menu that's all their states, and you don't have to go in and type out every single state.

I know that Contact Form 7 in the early days − I'm not sure exactly how it works now − but I used to have to go in, if I wanted something like that, I'd have to add, okay, Alabama, Alaska, I'd have to add each one of those states as part of that dropdown menu, and it was kind of painful.

And so I really like Gravity Forms in that aspect. It's a drag-and-drop interface. You click on what you wanna add, and then you can drag it around. And you can do − another cool thing is − it's called Custom Logic or Conditional Logic. And so, basically, you can show certain fields if certain other fields are shown.

So, if you have a yes or no question, if they say yes − maybe you ask, "What's your favorite podcast?" and if they say yes − or, "Do you listen to this podcast?" or whatever it is − you can ask a question. If they say yes, you can show some sort of textbox. If they say no, you could show them something else. And it's just really, really cool, lots of functionality. It's totally worth the $40.00 to have that plugin up and running on your website.

The next one that I have is called iThemes Security Pro. And, basically, it protects your WordPress website by hiding vital areas of your site. It prevents brute-force attack logins. It detects and attacks − detecting any attacks that may come. You can lock out people with certain IP addresses and stuff like that, so people can't get into your website.

I like this one. I activate it. I turn it on. I configure it at the very beginning of every site installation. So that's another plugin that I really like, and that's made by the folks at iThemes. And there'll be a link in the show notes on how to get that one, as well as all the rest of these plugins.

The next one is Jetpack. You can find out more at Jetpack.me. And this basically brings the power of WordPress.com cloud computing to your self-hosted WordPress site. It has some really great features.

I love the Photon feature, which gives you the ability to − it syncs all of your images to a WordPress.com server, so it loads your website and your pages much, much faster.

I like the notification − I forget what it's called − but it gives you the notifications when your site's down. You get an email as soon as your website goes down. You get an email. Oh, it's called Monitor, the module called Monitor. And you get an email when your website's back up and all of those things.

I mean, there's 35plus modules inside of Jetpack, and there's a lot of things that I use. I like the commenting − or not the commenting, but the ability to share with social media. And there's just a lot of really cool things that I like to enable with Jetpack. So that's a must-install on all my sites, as well.

The next one is called LeadPages Connector. And this basically interacts with and connects to my LeadPages.net account, and that gives me the ability to create login forms or signup forms or webinar registration forms or 404 pages, landing pages, all those different types of things. And then I can map them to a specific page within my WordPress dashboard.

So I can build them on LeadPages, and then I can map them to a page. So maybe it's a page that I've created, but I want a custom URL that's like YourWebsiteEngineer.com/something. And, from there, with this little connector plugin, it basically will take whatever the default URL would have been when it's hosted over at LeadPages, and it creates it so it looks like it's hosted right on my site. It's a really nifty little plugin, and it works really well.

The next one is called MailPoet. MailPoet Newsletter actually is the real name or the full name. And it gives you the ability to send and create newsletters or automated email messages. You can capture subscribers with this, and that's basically what I use it for. I use it in place of MailChimp or Aweber, Constant Contact, any of those other ones.

I use that so people can sign up for my free ebook, sign up for my email newsletter, and then I can manage all of them within my WordPress dashboard. I don't have to go to two different places and manage two different things. Everything is done within my WordPress dashboard.

And then I have the add-on. It's called MailPoet Newsletters Premium. And this basically adds a few more custom features, and it's for the premium version. So I paid the $100.00 for the year, so I can have more than 2,000 subscribers. And you get a few other bonuses that you get with using MailPoet Premium. And so I'm running that plugin, as well. So that's a two-for-one. It's basically just one plugin, and then all the extra functionality is added in the second plugin.

The next one is called OptinMonster. And this is what I use to capture email addresses. So any of the forms that you see, any of the popup menus, any of the slide-up from the bottom, all of those email capture devices are running OptinMonster. And OptinMonster works hand in hand with MailPoet. And so they work really well together as a team, and I absolutely love just the integration and how they work.

OptinMonster is very, very customizable. It's a premium plugin, and it costs probably about the same as Gravity Forms, maybe a little bit more, but it does a remarkable job. You can have the ability that, when people are trying to exit your page, it shows a popup. You can have things slide up from the bottom.

You can have your popup form actually only appear when people are on their second page view. So they come to their home page, and they're, like, "Okay. Now, let me look at something else," or maybe they come to your website from a Google search, and then they go click to another thing. And, now, all of a sudden, now they see your email popup box, which I really like. It gives you a lot of control.

The next four are actually just add-ons for OptinMonster. There's an after-post, an effects, a sidebar, and a slide-in. So the after-post does what it says. It adds a signup form at the end of each post.

The effects basically give you some cool zoom-in features and some zooming and spinning and different effects, CSS custom animation effects to do the light boxes for your popup thing, so people can see that popup box. So I use that one in there.

There's a sidebar add-on, and this basically gives you the ability to enable a new opt-in sidebar type. And then there's the slide-in option, so that's the one that slides up from the bottom, and you can customize this to say, oh, after five seconds, slide all the way up, so people can see, and they can add their email address and whatnot.

So I really like OptinMonster and those plugins. Those add-ons are all free once you buy the main plugin. Then you get all the add-ons, and I think there's two or three others that I haven't even installed quite yet.

Pretty Link Lite is the next one. And this one gives me the ability to shrink URLs, and I can easily track them, and I can change any URL to point anywhere in the world. And so I love this one. This is a perfect one for podcasters because there's a lot of times that I say, "Hey, do this. Go to this URL," and I don't wanna give a super long URL.

The best example is, "Go to YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar," and that actually is redirected to the webinar jam login page or the registration page. And I just change that. I update it. I can see how many people click on that link from month to month.

And so it gives me some analytics there. So it's really nice to see, "Oh, well, I had 400 people click, and I only had 10 people sign up. Okay. What's the deal?" So then I can look and see, "Okay. Maybe I need to make the registration page more enticing," or, "Maybe I have to do −" you know, whatever I need to do. I can see that with all of those tracking type things. So Pretty Link Lite, it's a must-have for me, especially as a podcaster.

The next one, this one is one that I had never heard of before. I just recently implemented it probably about a month or so ago. It's called Q2W3 Fixed Widget. It's got the weirdest name in the world, and it's in the WordPress repository. It's free. And it basically fixes the position of selected widgets when a page is scrolled.

So, if you head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer.com and click on the Podcast Episodes tab, and you'll start scrolling down through all of the podcasts, there's, like, ten of them at a time. And, as you scroll down, you'll see there's a sidebar on the right-hand side that it will scroll with the page, and then, all of a sudden, it will just stop, and it scrolls, and it stops, and it stays at the top of the right sidebar, so you can see it as you scroll all the way down to the bottom.

This is extremely valuable because some people may see that opt-in box right at the very beginning, and then, as they scroll, they kind of forget about it, and they might not opt in.

Another thing that I think is really cool is, visually, it moves, and so, as you're scrolling, it moves for a while, and then it stops. And so, if you're not really paying attention, if you're just kind of looking at it, and off to the corner of your eye, you see something moving like it should, and then, all of a sudden, it stops, it kind of draws your attention to it.

So I really like that. It's a really lightweight, simple plugin. And so you can go ahead and install that one and check that out. It basically just adds, in the widgets area, for your sidebars, it basically just adds a checkbox and says, "Become sticky," or, "Keep sticky," or something like that, and then that will allow that widget area to not move once it's been scrolled past, which is really cool.

The next one is called Regenerate Thumbnails. This is another kind of a utility plugin that could be uninstalled, and I don't really need it right now. But I like to have it there just because it's easy to use. I'll probably, once this podcast is episode, actually get rid of it.

I was using it mainly because I was adjusting the different sizes of images on my page recently, and just within the last few weeks, I was changing and messing with some of the sizes of the images on my webinar page. And because of that, because I was trying a different size, I had to regenerate those images again to get them to be the right dimensions for that page.

And so, basically, you just go in, and you do that, and it regenerates all of the pages. So, if you have thumbnails that are different sizes than when you originally started, or maybe you've changed themes, and it needs a different thumbnail size or whatever, you can use this plugin to regenerate those thumbnails and get everything back up and running perfectly. So Regenerate Thumbnails, that's a free plugin in the repository.

The next one, as we get to the S's, is called Smart Podcast Player. And this is the one that I use to display my podcast episodes on each page. It also pulls them into the front page. I use them to display just an audio player on my webinar replays, as well. It just gives people the ability to click and play and download all right from the website.

I really like the Smart Podcast Player. It shrinks. It looks good responsively. And it just does a really good job. It's got sharing icons built right in. And so I like it. Visually, that's one of the main reasons I changed is because, visually, I like the aesthetics and how it looks.

The next plugin I have is called SumoMe, and this is by the folks at AppSumo. And it's basically tools to grow your email list. You can use it to grow your email list. You can use it as an email list collector with an opt-in form and stuff like that.

I'm mainly using this plugin to add social share buttons on my mobile site. That's about the only feature that I'm using right now on it. And so you won't really see that even working on the main site. And that's the reason why. It's just on mobile right now. So I'm experimenting with it and seeing how I can grow and help me reach a larger audience. So that's SumoMe.

The next one is another lightweight plugin. It's a simple widget that shows recent Tweets, and it's called Twitget, T-W-I-T-G-E-T. And that's what's displaying my Twitter notifications or my Twitter messages at the bottom in the middle column. That's basically the plugin I'm using for that. It takes a little configuration. Then I added some custom CSS to get the little Twitter bird there to show up. But that's what I'm using to display Twitter on my website.

Only a couple more here: The next one is called VaultPress. And this is a plugin by Automattic, and it basically just backs up my website. It does it real-time without any need to configure. It's probably the simplest backup solution. All you have to do is purchase it. There's a few different plans. You can start as low as $5.00 per month, and then I think there's a $10.00 or a $15.00 a month plan.

And, basically, you activate the plugin, you give it your license key, and then VaultPress does all the rest. There's no configuring. There's no set it up to run at this certain time. It does everything that you need all by itself.

So I'm a big fan of BackupBuddy, but I also like VaultPress. And since VaultPress is made by the company that I work for, I tend to go that route, just to see if there's any bugs or anything that I can help fix and improve the product. So that's why I'm using VaultPress.

And the next one is called WPSEO. And this is the WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is the one that gives you the all-in-one solution for getting your search engine optimization taken care of. It includes the on-page content analysis, XML site maps, many, many more things that I don't even use.

The main things that I use this plugin for is to customize my titles and my meta description to get higher search engine rankings. I don't spend a lot of time configuring and setting this up. But that's what I use it for. And so that's what WordPress SEO is.

And then, finally, the last one, another premium plugin, and it's called WP Migrate DB Pro. And it gives me the ability to export, push, pull, migrate, sync my databases between different places. So, if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I love building my websites locally. So I build everything with DesktopServer locally here on my computer, and then I push the contents to my live version.

Well, when I create new content, I add new podcast episodes, I tweak things, I normally do that all on my live site. And so I do that on the live site, and then, when I'm getting ready to make some edits and some changes, then basically what I do is I suck down all the data that's on my server, all the stuff that's in my database, and it does a find-and-replace and changes all the URLs to my development URLs. And then my local site is exactly the same as my live site.

So I can do that if I want to − if, this week, when I'm on an airplane, if I do a lot of changes and some edits, I can go ahead and then I can push all of those changes live to my live server. And then my website will be updated with what the local version looks like. So you can push and pull both ways.

I absolutely love it. It saves me so much time, effort, and energy. It is just probably one of the coolest plugins. I've got a fairly large site with lots of comments, lots of pages, just lots of data in the database. And it normally takes two minutes from the time that I press the button to the time that it's completely synced. So I really like that. And you can find out more at the links in the show notes or YourWebsiteEngineer.com/WPDBMigrate, which is all just one word, lots of letters in a row.

So those are the plugins that I'm using. I actually have one more that's installed that's not being used, and it's called Your Website Engineer Admin Color Scheme. And it's a plugin that I created that − I found some code online, so I'm using it as a plugin to just try to figure out if I can actually do it.

And if you've ever tried this before, you have some experience, please let me know. I'd be really, really interested in hearing about it. But I'm trying to figure out a way that I can use in my WP config file, or somewhere kind of manually in a source file that I can exclude from my version control, how I can keep the admin colors of my local site, my development site, and my live site different.

So, in theory, I would love to have the dashboard of my development site be blue or green or red or some other color than the standard black and blue that I like, the color scheme that I like. That way, so, visually, when I'm looking − because my sites look identical on the backend, except for the URL − and so I'd really just like a way to try to figure out, okay, how can I keep both of my sites that are a local one that's on my computer and one that's on my server, how can I make the dashboards look different, and every time that I sync and I push and pull from WP Migrate, how can I make sure that that setting isn't pushed or pulled?

So, if you've ever tried that or have done that before successfully, please let me know. I'd be very interested in hearing about how you did that.

So those are the main plugins that I have installed. I do have a few more, as I scroll up here and take a look of ones that are in the must-use folder. And so these are basically plugins that will just − they're plugins that you can't deactivate, and they don't show up in your plugins list.

And so there's one called Dustin's Custom Login. These are all ones that I've created myself because I don't need them to show up because I'm probably not going to update them ever. I just needed them as a plugin, but I didn't want them to show up in my plugin dashboard. So Custom Login basically gives me a cool login for my page.

I also have one called Custom Post Types. And that one gives me the ability to add custom post types to a theme. So I have all of that information in one place in a plugin.

And then I have one called Short Codes. And the Short Codes are one − that's a must-use plugin that I created for some of the new short codes that I created for my website. So those are a few of the must-use ones that I have, as well.

So those are the plugins in a nutshell. There's 23 of them that I talked about today. And so, if you have any questions about any of them, please let me know, and I'd be happy to explain why I'm using that plugin versus some of the other plugins that are out there. There's tens of thousands of plugins out there, and it's all about, you know, I haven't had time to play with all of them. But these are the ones that I've found that work best for me.

So that is going to wrap up this episode. Is there anything that I missed? Is there one that you think that, "Hey, Dustin, you should be running a plugin"? Head on over to the show notes for Episode No. 228 and let me know, and I'd be happy to take a look at it, evaluate it, see if there's actually some value or I'm missing something that would really help me in my website.

That's what I wanted to share with you today, and I'll probably make this kind of an annual thing and just share some of the plugins that I use as I continually, constantly change my website. That's all I've got for you now. Take care. Bye-bye.