Last month, I participate in the Mega Meetup Plugin Draft. David Bisset invented the format. He invited five people on a panel, Elisabeth Reiner, David Yarde, Topher DeRosia, Brad Morrison and yours truly. Then we did 4 rounds of first picks on WordPress plugins. There were quite a few plugins I didn’t know about and are on my list for testing.
Before we got to this Plugin Draft, Adam Silver gave a talk on the tools and tips to run a small agency. I enjoyed it and compared each section with our agency’s process and tech stack. It was also quite timely as we review our tools and processes at the end of the year.
I appreciated Adam’s shout-out to my discussion with Peter Suhm on Billable Hours podcast on ways agencies adopt Gutenberg editor and what’s in store for the future.
Adam Silver’s slide deck (on DropBox)
Plugin Draft
During the draft ( starts here in the video) there was one rule that once a plugin was mentioned it wasn’t available anymore, just like a sport draft when a player was call isn’t available anymore.
Topher’s 4th pick was the Download Plugins Dashboard, and one of the 20 plugins, I started using right away multiple times. It allows you to download a plugin zip file from the WP Admin > Plugins page. That’s particularly helpful if you need to test use a plugin that not in the repository for troubleshooting. Or if you are using a plugin that was removed from the repository but it still works well and want to use it again on a different site.
Elizabeth Reiher brought back to the top of my mind Jean-Baptist Audras’ plugin Reusable Blocks Extended, which allows you to manage your reusable blocks better and also gives you an option to convert your reusable blocks into block patterns. That’s quite nifty!
Code Snippet, another Elizabeth Reiher pick, is a very useful plugin that saves you the need to add custom plugins to sites, or clutter up the Theme’s functions.php page with single liners to switch some core feature on or off. It keeps your Theme files clean of functionality, a site owner can switch themes unbothered, and you can export and import a set of snippets to your sites.
List of 20 curated WordPress Plugins
David Yarde would start each round first. His picks:
Topher DeRosia would go next:
Each round I was fourth to pick I brought lesser known plugins
- Genesis Blocks (former Atomic Blocks)
- Post Type Switcher
- LifterLMS
- Bulk Block Converter
Brad Morrison picks were:
Huge “Thank you” to the meetup organizers putting this together, foremost host David Bisset, who is a master entertainer and kept the technology running. David is also very generous with his time dedicated to the WordPress Community. A virtual event with over 100 people also needs a dedicated moderator of the Chat to catch the questions and also share the links mentioned. Guy Cicinelli, new lead co-organizer of the WordPress Meetup SWFL managed this brilliantly.
Big Thank you also to sponsor GoDaddy Pro!
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