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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today! Coming to you LIVE from…
We’ve got a couple of great in-depth plugins to cover for you: Product Catalog Mode for WooCommerce which will help store owners to display products as a catalog without allowing for immediate purchases, and ACS Agenda Manager which is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that brings you a fantastic easy to use (and read!) event display!
And of course we’ve also got some recent news in both the WordPress World and the Tech World in general with additional WordPress Tips!
Don’t know about elsewhere, but we are getting the snow we missed out on during the actual winter right now – hope everyone is keeping warm and dry out there!
A few reminders before we start the show today….
Reminders:
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Join us here in person every Monday at 12:00 pm Pacific Time to enjoy our show!
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Show notes are added to wppluginsatoz.com within 24 hours of the show airing; you can find them either on the home page, or in the Podcast Vaults!
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This is a value for value show dear listeners, help us get some loven’ by hitting some like buttons, sharing an episode or two, or just turn our show on really loudly. We will catch somebodies attention!
If you stick around until the end, you will have a chance to hear some good questions – sometimes meant for the greenies, sometimes meant for the very experienced – and sometimes the questions are just completely random. Stick around and have a listen, might help! Or at least entertain!
(Don’t feel shy about sending in a message just to say hi! Send along suggestions, questions, recommendations, news, art – we always love to hear from our listeners!)
Let’s start the show with this weeks Featured Artist:
Artist:
Who is our artist today?!?
Today is…. Grok! He appears to be coming back to himself after the most recent lobotomy!
We would love some new art from our Producers out there! If you are so inclined, you can send it into us at amber@wppro.ca or john@wppro.ca. If you need some inspiration, you can always go to our site wppluginsatoz.com and check out our Art Vaults – you will find the link for it on the left hand menu.
We can NEVER have too much art!
Breaking News in the WordPress World at large!!
If you have anything you think should be added please send it into me at amber@wppro.ca!
News this week:
WordPress Vulnerability Report
(https://solidwp.com/blog/wordpress-vulnerability-report-march-25-2026/) – In this report there are 331 vulnerabilities. 275 are plugins this week, with 56 Themes.
Plugins: 162 patched, 113 left to go!
Themes: 49 patched, 7 left to go!
WordPress Vulnerability Report from PatchStack
(https://patchstack.com/database/) – These guys always have the latest information on what is going on regarding the latest in vulnerabilities.
WordPress VIP launches advanced professional WordPress Developer Certification
(https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-vip-launches-advanced-professional-wordpress-developer-certification) – This is the first of it’s kind, specifically for enterprise-level WordPress development. This covers eight domains – WordPress Core, Custom Development, Security, performance, Change Management, Debugging, Scalability and Architecture, and Disaster Recovery. Aimed at developers with 3-5 years hands-on experience across full site builds, custom theme and plugin development, performance optimization, security hardening, debugging, and scaling WordPress for high-traffic environments. Check out the link in our show notes to learn more!
WordPress AI connectors lack plugin-level controls – and the AI team is already working on it
(https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-ai-connectors-lack-plugin-level-controls-and-the-ai-team-is-already-working-on-it) – A post on The WP World blog by the site’s founder Marcus Burnette kicked off a conversation this week about a gap in the AI Connectors screen shipping with WordPress 7.0: once a site owner connects an AI provider, any plugin on the site can use it and there’s no way to control which ones can.
WordPress security team’s 6.9.2 retrospective details checklist gap behind 6.9.4 and backporting tensions
(https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-security-teams-6-9-2-retrospective-details-checklist-gap-behind-6-9-4-and-backporting-tensions) – A post-mortem published this week by WordPress Security Team rep John Blackbourn details how a missing verification step and a run of unexpected complications turned a routine security release into three unplanned updates in 48 hours.
Elementor launches Angie, a free AI plugin for building custom WordPress functionality
(https://www.therepository.email/elementor-launches-angie-a-free-ai-plugin-for-building-custom-wordpress-functionality) – Elementor has launched Angie, an agentic AI plugin it’s been testing publicly since September, along with its first capability: Angie Code. With Angie Code, users can build custom functionality for their WordPress sites using natural language prompts. Angie writes the code and tests it on your site in a sandboxed environment before anything goes live.
The WP community collective publishes open source contributor pay standard
(https://www.therepository.email/the-wp-community-collective-publishes-open-source-contributor-pay-standard) – The WP Community Collective has published a compensation framework for open source contributions, establishing baseline hourly rates for the WordPress ecosystem for the first time.
WordPress 7.0 RC1 ships despite core committer concerns over release readiness
(https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-7-0-rc1-ships-despite-core-committer-concerns-over-release-readiness) – WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 shipped on Tuesday, adding two features that didn’t make the cut for Beta 1 — a new AI Connectors screen and a keyboard shortcut for the Command Palette — while a last-minute fix for a significant issue with real-time collaboration (RTC) was merged just hours before the release. The RC1 release followed a five-day delay and an additional beta release. Beta 6, which shipped last Friday, removed client-side media processing entirely (it’s been punted to 7.1), switched RTC to opt-in by default, and included a 4x increase to RTC polling intervals to reduce server load.
(Go visit WP Shout Comics OR Word Chronicles OR MonkeyUser.com for a fantastic brain break – my favourite today is this one!)
Some Extras – check out our Facebook or Twitter!
WordPress is colliding with AI – and nobody had ‘none’ on their bingo card
WordPress.com gives AI agents access to create, edit and manage content via MCP
76% of designers fear AI. What does that mean for the WordPress Community?
WordPress 7.0 RC1 delayed to March 24 over real-time collaboration, client-side media, and package size concerns
WordPress plugins team calls for new reviewers as submissions surpass 500 per week
WordPress 7.0’s real-time collaboration heads into RC1 with key questions still open
AI experiments plugin gets two updates in a week, with WordPress 7.0 now in the focus
WP Engine acquires WPackagist. WordPress X account calls it a “parasite”.
Ollie moves into Ecommerce with full WooCommerce support
WordPress Community raises ₹3,50,000 to honour Zeel Thakkar with memorial Scholarship
(https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-community-raises-₹350000-to-honor-zeel-thakkar-with-memorial-scholarship)
How Cloudfest is becoming the most important WordPress business event nobody’s talking about
After FAIR’s co-founders step[ back, the WordPress community weighs in
(https://www.therepository.email/after-fairs-co-founders-step-back-the-wordpress-community-weighs-in)
Yoast launches schema aggregation in partnership with Microsoft, Giving AI a site-wide view of WordPress content
Checkout Summit is filling the WooCommerce Conference event gap nobody else would
Rogue’s Corner News and Extras
Be sure to go and check out the new and unique plugins now available from WPProAtoz.com!
Rogues Corner & Tip of the day
WordPress and Related News
Serious lack of professionalism from the official WordPress twitter act
in case they delete it https://app.screencast.com/6g9AYGRBUpfMg
Peanut gallery comments:
This Shows Featured Promotion
I will be promoting a premium plugin I’d like to help get others to buy it.
This week it is
Checkout Summit 2026
The Lowdown:
Hang with the Top 1% of WooCommerce Professionals
Ever built a WooCommerce plugin, optimized a tricky checkout flow, or launched a client site on WooCommerce—and wished you could swap stories with people who actually get it?
Checkout Summit is a two-day international conference for the people who build with WooCommerce every day: developers, service providers, agencies, and founders.
No marketing fluff. No generic talks. Just real conversations, real challenges, and real solutions.
You may wonder: is it worth the time and money? Well, if you spend two days here, you’ll walk away with connections, tactics, and ideas that save you hours, prevent costly mistakes, and actually move your WooCommerce projects forward—more than you’d get from weeks of async chats and random webinars.
Whether you’re building custom solutions, maintaining plugins, or obsessed with conversion rates, Checkout Summit is where WooCommerce makers meet, learn, and grow together—face to face.
Check the interview with Rudolfo here https://wppluginsatoz.com/interview-78-woocommerce-wizardry-rodolfo-melogli-on-mini-plugins-summits-and-community-secrets/
Small Guys People to follow on X:
V for V for the show
If you get any value out of this show then donate that value back to the show. You can do so through time, talent, or treasure – or all 3!! – through our website wppluginsatoz.com.
Click on the ‘Treasure Donations’ link on the left-hand menu, or on the ‘Time, or Talent‘ pages to find out more!
Note to our listeners out there using Overcast you are the winners for the most downloads.
Tip of The Day:
Talk about us WPProAtoZ.com as an agency and what we do
Follow WP Plugins A-Z on X @wppluginsatoz and Facebook WordPressPluginsA2Z
Upcoming Interviews:
Reminder that we have more interviews coming up in the coming weeks with more developers and community members https://wppluginsatoz.com/book-an-interview-on-wp-plugins-a-to-z-podcast/
Available dates: March 9 & 23, April 6 & 20, 2026 May’s dates will be available on March 1st.
Other Shows and places to get WP Info & Training
The WP Builds Podcast
WP Roads
WP-Tonic
Worlds Worst Web Developer
WP Mayor
wp Minute
Dragon Rating Time with John!
John’s Plugin
Product Catalog Mode For WooCommerce
The Lowdown:
Sometimes store owners want to display products as a catalog without allowing immediate purchases. This may be necessary during holidays, maintenance periods, sales preparation, wholesale-only operations, or limited-time sales restrictions.
Product Catalog Mode for WooCommerce allows you to instantly turn your WooCommerce store into a catalog by removing Add to Cart buttons with a single click.
You can enable catalog mode globally or apply it conditionally based on visitors, user roles, countries, or scheduled time periods.
Rating 4 Dragons
Plugin 2
WPProAtoZ YARPP for Elementor Related Posts Query
The Lowdown:
A lightweight WordPress plugin that integrates YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) with Elementor Pro’s Posts/Loop widgets. It overrides the default query using a custom Query ID to display smarter, algorithm-based related posts on single post templates.
Rating 5 Dragons
WordPress Tips
We would love to hear some tid bit tips from some of our producers out there – what did you figure out by breaking something? Or what did you need to learn in order to help someone? You can send these tid bits into me at amber@wppro.ca
My tip to you today…
With all the AI BS going on right now, don’t allow yourself to become so disillusioned that you don’t even let yourself appreciate the beauty online anymore.
I am watching as my teenagers are beginning to see nothing but rage-bait in things as innocent as a person who is unable to draw creating with an artistic AI – said person lost their hand in an accident, can’t seem to get their other hand to work, uses speech-to-text to give prompts to the AI to create art and it’s beautiful! This person who was an artist can create again!
But my teens see this as ‘theft’ from ‘real artists’, even though this is an artistic AI that has settings so that it cannot ‘steal’ art, but bases its art on the free use of the world.
The teens have become so disillusioned that they cannot see the beauty of this artist gaining their ability to create again, and it’s sad because it seems that a lot of the world is seeing this way now – so focused on the negative side that they do not allow themselves to see the positive, beautiful side of anything because they are too busy being angry.
Once I was able to get my teens to actually stop, think, and do some research so that they could physically see the boundaries written into the code of the AI that keeps it from utilizing anything not in ‘free use’ – also had to get them to understand what ‘free use’ really is online since they did not realize unless someone copyrights something once on the internet it absolutely is free use – the anger diminished, and they were able to start seeing the beauty again. but it took a lot of work, and they are still very disillusioned with everything online….
My tip to you today is to slow down, and rethink why you are feeling so angry about something you are seeing. Do some research perhaps, and find out if your thoughts on this are really that accurate?
Don’t lose yourself to the rage-bait mindset.
Dragon Rating Time with Amber!
Amber’s Plugin
ACS Agenda Manager
The Lowdown:
This was sent into us by Andrea Cristalli, and is meant to create a lightweight Agenda Manager for your WordPress site! This is available on both WordPress.org as well as on GitHub.com and is not a premium, so you can grab it up as is!
Once downloaded and activated, I found the settings for this in the lefthand menu as ‘ACS Agenda’. If you hover your mouse over it you will see ‘ACS Agenda’, ‘Settings’, and ‘User Guide’.
I really like that there is a user guide, so I went there first – and this is so well organized!! You got the various headers at the top that you can click on so you can just go to that section, so if you already got things going but you need to troubleshoot, you can click on ‘Troubleshooting’ and be taken directly there. And the way things are written out are fantastic! Very easy to understand, with examples and plain english. Translating from the techy to the plain english I have found can be a bit harder than expected, and they seem to have done a really good job here!
‘ACS Agenda’ shows you your upcoming and past events in list form – and you have an option here to ‘view agenda’, and this looks really cool! It meshed in pretty good with my site.
You can choose to ‘create new’ event from this page, and this will throw a pop-up at you, and you can fill in the ‘Basic Information’, ‘Location’ – which is integrateable with Google Maps and totally awesome! ‘Title’, and ‘Description’ for the first section.
Than we have the ‘Schedule’ section, where you throw in the ‘Event Dates’ – yes, more than one date can be tossed in here at once. You do not have to make seperate events for different dates when it is the same thing. I think that is awesome! Below the ‘Event Dates’, there is an option for ‘Partial Attendance. When I looked at this there are dropdown options with the choices ‘no – hide after first date’, ‘yes – hide past dates only’, and ‘keep until end – show all dates’. I’m not sure what this means, although I am certain that those familiar with creating schedules and stuff will probably know what this is and will find it useful? Let me know.
Last section here is the ‘Media’ section, and you can choose an image, throw in an URL or click on the ‘Select’ button to scroll through your library to choose an image.
Hit ‘Add’ and you’re done!
The ‘Settings’ area tells you a bit about this plugin, gives you a button to click on to donate to PayPal – should totally offer up some coffee change! – and allows you to change/fill in some basic information.
You can change the Agenda Page Name – I threw in CRAP APPLES!, and that totally showed up as the title! It’s great! lol
Add in your Google Maps API key, and than you can click off the ‘remove all plugin data (events, settings, database table) when plugin is deleted – I can understand why a person may not want all that information deleted when they remove the plugin down the road.
Lastly, you have the shortcode you can throw in to whichever page you want to show off this awesome agenda you have created: [acsagma_agenda]
Although, when I went in to create a page for this, I found one already created! Which honestly I think is pretty awesome as it makes your life WAY easier!
Also, when I changed the name in the settings, it did actually change the name on the page created for me – it also changed the Permalink, so be aware of that when creating and changing things up in the settings of this plugin. SUPER useful when first creating, but don’t want to change that name in settings down the road once things are situated, be sure to only change the name on the page itself so that you can keep your SEO going good.
This is an AWESOME plugin! I highly recommend people go and check this out, grab it up, use this! It’s fantastic and plays well with others!
And if you don’t like the colour scheme, you can go through and use CSS to change it up. The plugin took well to that when I tried it out. ;)
Rating: 5 Dragon
Miscellaneous Announcements from all:
Have an announcement like a meetup, or to announce you’ll be on stage at a WordCamp? Let us know and we will add it here and help get your news out to the world!
WordPress Campus Connect Ribera del Duero – January 30-June 17
WordPress Campus Connect Universitat de Lleida – February 18 – May 1
WordPress Campus Connect Keiser University Latin American Campus – March 20 – 27
Women WordPress Day Latam 2026 – March 21
WordPress Women Day Cartago 2026 – March 28
To see the entire list you can follow the link here in the show notes, then click on ‘More WordCamps’ right below the list of the next 5. https://central.wordcamp.org/
If you are interested in finding a WordPress Meetup somewhere around the world you can go check out the places here: https://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress/
Keep checking back every week to find out what else is going on!
Make the Value for Value Pitch
V for V for the show
If this show saves you time, headaches, or helps level up your WordPress game, or if we have showcased a plugin you never knew you needed that wound up saving you hours of time – go out and plug people in!
Consider giving back through our V4V model: Time, Talent, or Treasure (or all three!). Head over to our site wppluginsatoz.com.
Click on the ‘Treasure Donations’ link on the left-hand menu, or on the ‘Time, or Talent‘ pages to find out more!
This show is supported by the V4V plan which means Time, Talent or Treasure.
How to Support the Show
Submit your Art work
Submit your art work or the best AI slop you can create submit it here https://wppluginsatoz.com/submit-plugin-review/
Donate Cash to the show this is our favourite way to get support
Book yourself an interview, https://wppluginsatoz.com/book-an-interview-on-wp-plugins-a-to-z-podcast/
Get us to make your announcement for you, let the world know you have something to say or a company worth checking out!
Today’s Plugins we covered were:
John’s Plugin:
Product Catalog Mode for WooCommerce By WP Artisan
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Instantly turn WooCommerce store into a catalog
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Specify dates available
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Build in inquiry form
Rating: 4 Dragons
Amber’s Plugin:
ACS Agenda Manager By masteracs
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Multi-date support
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Google Maps integration
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Linked pages
Rating: 5 Dragons
How to reach us:
Feel like sending us something through the snail mail system? You can do that thanks to our brick and mortar address that we provide for you!
You can also reach us the more common way of the internets – have both of our internets available down below for ya!
Brick & Mortar Address
WP Plugins A to Z
C/O John Overall
20-754 E Fairview Rd.
Victoria, BC V9A 5T9
Canada
Internets Addresses
John:
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My website: http://www.johnoverall.com/
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WordPress Emergency Support: http://wppro.ca/wpemergency
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email: john@wppro.ca
Amber:
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email: amber@wppro.ca
Q & A Time with Amber – Catch this info on our YouTube Channel
If you have questions you would like to have asked on the show, send them in to me at Amber@WPPro.ca – !
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How has security changed over the years since you started with WordPress? Do the security ‘tricks’ you used at the beginning still work today?
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Do you think people stepping into this world right now should focus on learning the AI’s coming out and making that a main capability of theirs, or just keep that as a peripheral capability, just making sure they have a basic understanding rather than an in-depth understanding of how the AI’s work?
Questions asked after closing credits:
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Can you share one piece of advice you either got handed early on or figured out the hard way in the beginning of your WordPress adventure that still holds up strong today that can work for both the greenhorns and the pro’s alike?
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Can you think of a Homer Simpson ‘D’oh!’ moment you had when you first started out that you’re willing to share with everyone? Those are always the best stories. ;)
