The Disable Cart Fragments plugin is one of those WordPress plugins that will go unnoticed by the majority of WordPress users but, to anyone who runs an online store using WooCommerce, this extension will be indispensable.

So why will this plugin be indispensable for anyone using WooCommerce? Because it solves a problem that every WooCommerce shop owner faces … and it solves the problem for free.

The Problem
Whenever anyone … a new visitor, a returning customer, Google’s spider or even a speed bot … lands on the front page of a WooCommerce store WooCommerce looks for any evidence that the person … or bot … visiting the site has left and item or items in their shopping cart on their last visit.

The visitor might never have visited the site before or put anything in their shopping cart but WooCommerce will still search to see if the visitor left something in the cart,

It searches very slowly and the page doesn’t load until WooCommerce has completed it’s search.

You really only spot the problem when you start using a tool like GTmetrix to try and discover why the site loads so slowly.

Using GTmetrix and going to the Waterfall report you will see how and when everything that goes to making the page actually loads and tucked away in the line entries will be something that looks like this:

It’s full title looks like this:

At first glance it doesn’t look like much but look at the figure in the far-right column. In this case it took 2.69 seconds to load and, while other things loaded around it, there was still a large chunk of time taken up just for this one item.

And the solution is …
Disable Cart Fragments by Optimocha!

There are no settings to worry about. Simply install it … activate it … and the plugin will:

• Disable WooCommerce cart fragments.
• Check the cart cookies and if it’s not empty, loads the cart fragments script so the cart totals are still updated.

So returning visitors who have left something in the cart on a previous visit will get the script loading behind the scenes but everyone else will get a page that loads faster.

How much faster?
Well that depends on your website but on the last time I installed this plugin I knocked a whole second off the loading time. That may not sound like much but when you celebrate clawing back a few milliseconds saving a whole second can be a huge win.

Caxton … by PootlePress … may be a plugin with unusual name but Matt Mullenweg loves it so I guess that puts me in good company because I love it too.

Matt Mullenweg said this about Caxton: “The sites people are creating with it are just gorgeous” and he is right, I can see a time when this plugin … and others like it … will totally replace themes.

So what is it … apart from a rather unusual name? “Caxton is a collection of awesome blocks that make it easy for you to create beautiful WordPress pages.” It allows you to create pro page layouts in Gutenberg.

The blocks
Installing Caxton is done in exactly the  same way as you would install any plugin. Install > Activate > and … there’s an almost 3-minute video that explains some of the workings of the plugin.

I should say here that as I write this … on August 19 … the plugin has not been tested against the latest version of WordPress … 5.2.2 … but it works fine on the sites that I have installed it on.

The blocks that are included with the plug-in are:

• Advanced layout block
• Shape dividers block
• Posts grid block
• Photo slider block
• Call to action block
• Typography block
• Icons block and a
• Button block.

These blocks allow you to:

• Add backgrounds to sections
• Create nested rows
• Create parallax rows
• Create beautiful transitions between blocks
• Allow you to customise each block and
• Give you advanced mobile controls

What you see
To access Caxton when you’re working with a page or post simply start a new block and choose the plug-in from the menu that appears.

You will then be shown a menu that looks like this and there are two more tabs that are out of sight on this screen grab. Those tabs are ‘Shape Divider’ and ‘Posts grid’.

Click on the Caxton Layouts tab and you will see a screen that looks like this:

Once again there are more options than I could fit into a screen grab but there are five rows above the top one in the image and they give you the more basic page layouts.

For me, this is where the magic happens because there are so many layout options to choose from and when you put a couple of these together you can come up with your own template for a website.

For example, here is a snippet cut from a page on a website I’m currently building. It’s a site where I wanted different sidebars for some of the pages. You can combine a plugin with some themes to get individual sidebars and you can certainly achieve the same results with more expensive themes, such as Avada … but I wanted a bit more control for no extra money.

So what you see in the screen grab looks like your average web page combined with a sidebar (that is yet to be populated with advertising) but what you are really seeing is the Caxton layout option of two columns where the first column is about 2/3rd wide and the other column is 1/3^rd wide.

And because of the background options that the plugin gives me I can provide a coloured background for the pseudo sidebar.

There is so much more to explore in this amazing plugin … I’ve been using this plugin for several weeks and I still haven’t used everything … but if you’re looking for a way to change the look of your site to something a little less conventional then this is the plugin that will really do it for you.

My Rating:

If you’re like me, and you’re trying to locate a business that you’ve never visited before, you will either enter the information into your vehicle’s navigation system or you’ll head over to Google Maps and get directions there … but that be a problem for the business owner.

When you look at a Google map for directions you get what you’re looking for … and a whole lot more. You also get all the locations of surrounding businesses and some of them are going to be competitors of the business you’re looking for.

That’s no big deal if you’re the customer but it can be a very big deal if you’re the business owner. If your the business owner you don’t want people coming to your site only to lose them when they had over to Google Maps to find out how to get to your business.

And that’s where WP Get Directions comes in. This plugin allows visitors to your site to enter the location and get the directions they need to reach your business.

Description

WP Get Directions provides an input where your customers can enter any location and get real-time directions on Google Maps to your business/location. There is also an option to use their exact location, provided this is enabled in user’s browser.
Simply set up the plugin by entering your location Latitude and Longitude coordinates, then insert the [wp_get_directions] shortcode into your page, post or widget.

Now that sounds easy so let’s see how it works in real life.

Installation

Well that wasn’t as easy as I was expecting. I went looking for the plugin in the Plugin Repository and, no matter how many variations of the name of the plugin I tried, I couldn’t find it.

However there was a direct link to the plugin in the WordPress listing for new plugins and I downloaded the zip and then uploaded it to the test website.

This is the link I used to get to the plugin page https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-get-directions

Installing the plugin using the “old fashioned” way was easy enough and it only took a minute or two to have the WP Get Directions plugin installed and activated.

Setting it up

Once the plugin is installed and activated you will find a ‘Settings’ link in Plugins list and a link under the Settings drop-down on the left-hand side.

Clicking either link will take you to this screen

… and I’m sure that the first thing most people will see are the fields for latitude and longitude and the first thing they will think is:

“Oh my god how do I get those?”

And the answer is simple. You just follow the ‘here’ link in the small print above those fields.

That link takes you to a very useful page where you are asked to enter the address of your business – add some text in the “Input Label” field (I used ‘How to find us”) … and click “Save Changes”

From there just take the shortcode that appears on the screen and paste it into any page that you want it to appear on.

As you will see from the above image, it’s not the tidiest result but …

The end result

Try it for yourself and you will find that it delivers good results via Google Maps and the results don’t show any surrounding businesses … at least they didn’t in my little test.

So what do I think of the plugin?

I think it’s great. It does the job you want it to do and setting it up is dead easy. If the display could be tidied up it would be even better.

My rating

and a bit more.

My partner is a web designer with a very busy practice and one of the biggest problems she faces is finding time to show new clients how their WordPress website works.

Of course she can … and does provide each client with a small manual … but not every website is the same.

Add to that the problem of not showing every other client what you may have in the backend of the website that you use to build the manual and you have a big time-sucking problem with no easy solution … until now.

Recently a new plugin appeared in the Plugin Repository called UserGuiding, by a developer of the same name, that just may be a game-changer for you if you have the same problem my partner has.

Description
In the words of the developer:

UserGuiding helps companies improve product adoption by designing interactive user manuals and product tours, without coding. By using easy-to-use software, non-technical product people can create interactive tutorials, in-app messages, and reusable guides in minutes

Features
UserGuiding allows you to:

• Design product walkthroughs and onboarding checklists
• Customize from colours to triggers
• Design fully interactive step-by-step guides
• Create segments based on user actions so that people only see the things that they need to know about
• Analyze how people are using the guides you have created
• And a whole lot more

So with all that promise I opened up a WordPress site I’ve had around for years, clicked on ‘Add New’ for Plugins and typed ‘UserGuiding’ into the search bar.

The search box turned up the plugin I was looking for and, in about as long as it usually takes to install a plugin I had UserGuiding 1.0.1 installed and activated on my website.

You can find the plugin at the end of this link – https://wordpress.org/plugins/userguiding/

As you can see there is a link for ‘Settings’ and a link has also been placed under the ‘Settings’ drop-down over in the left-hand column.

Clicking on the ‘Settings’ link brings you to this page:

Oh dear, what do I do now? What code does the plugin want me to put into that very large and very empty field?

A sense of panic began to set in. How do I write a review of this when I have no clue about the code?

In desperation I clicked the ‘Show in Admin’ box and then tried saving the settings … only to get a polite request to “Please fill out this field” … and of course it was referring to that big, empty code field.

BUGGER!

So I went back to the Plugin page and clicked on the UserGuiding link and that took me to their website where there were no obvious instructions … but there were plenty of links to sign up for their paid version.

Even clicking on the button that said “Get Started for Free” did nothing more than take you to their pricing page.

DOUBLE BUGGER!!

With a sinking heart I clicked on the “View Details” link back on the Plugin page and right down the bottom of the popup is a Documentation link. That takes you to a Help section on the UserGuiding website … but don’t get too excited.

This Help section appears to be entirely about their proprietary software and not about the free WordPress plugin at all.

I even went to their support forum on WordPress but there was nothing to see there.

Back on the ‘View Details” popup there is one line of information about support but it directs you to use Intercom messenger on their website … but when I went back to their website I couldn’t find their Intercom messenger link.

Perhaps the guys who developed this plugin have a great piece of proprietary software but dropping a plugin into the Plugin Repository that seems to do nothing is not the way to instil confidence in them.

Bugger … it was a plugin that had so much promise but ended up as a total disappointment.

My rating: