Changelog 007: Introducing ArchiveWP

Steve: [00:00:00] All right, we’re live. 

William: Hey. 

Steve: Hey. How’s it going, William? 

William: Yeah, going pretty good. 

Steve: Awesome. 

Let’s see if everything’s working as it should.

It looks like we’re live on X, and let me check YouTube. Yeah. Looks like things are working alright.

We had a couple weeks there where we had some hiccups with the live stream, but we seem to have ironed out those problems. Cool. All right.

Today’s a big day, William.

William: It is brand new thing.

Steve: Brand new thing. We give people a little bit of time to join.

We’ve been cooking up something new, a new plugin, right? We’ve been pushing on it pretty hard for the last month. October was a pretty [00:01:00] huge push month for that.

And so how are you feeling about it? 

William: Yeah, I’m pretty happy with what we ended up at. It’s quite a lot nicer than the initial expectation that I had.

I thought it would be a quick build, then we’d move on, but that did not end up being the case. 

Steve: Yeah, I think so. I think from a product creation evaluation of what we went through, it definitely at first, you come up with an idea and you think it’s simple and the reality of making something that goes to market that could be used by anybody is quite different.

William: Yes. Simple is not easy. 

Steve: Simple is not easy. Let’s break that down.

That sounds like a shirt. Simple is not easy. 

William: I’m pretty sure that’s all on a shirt somewhere. 

Steve: Yeah, that’s pretty good. I like that. Cool.

I’m just making sure everything’s working, [00:02:00] giving people a little bit of time to join. It looks like we have some of our own people here from our own team, which is good.

So they can watch us and make sure we say the right things or not. 

William: Catalyst, when we accidentally leak license keys. 

Steve: We leak license keys. Yeah. That’s all the rage these days with AI, right? 

William: Yeah. I feel left out, I haven’t one score a notification that have leaked an API key. Sad. 

Steve: That’s right. 

Yeah.

It’s fun times. We came up with this idea for a new product. It was from a client need, and a lot of times that’s how these products are born. That’s how Accessibility Checker was born, was from client needs and from our own need to understand accessibility and how it works and to have tools within WordPress to help us, audit websites and see what the accessibility is. And this new plugin that we’re [00:03:00] gonna unveil here in a few minutes is the same. It was something we built for our client.

William: You’re back. 

Steve: I’m back. Oh, look at that. Restream leaked my unveil. I dropped. That was weird.

William: Okay. You’re gone for just a second. 

Steve: Okay. I’m back. But we’re good. We’re stable. Steve’s not gonna disappear again. William’s gonna have to do the whole thing if it, if I do. 

William: Sure. You better send me that demo link. I’ve got one. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Alright. Let’s see. Should we get started? 

William: Yeah. 

Steve: All right.

Let me make sure. Cool. I am stable. Good. Yeah, that’s really weird. All right, cool. Let’s do it.

This is the Accessibility Checker Changelog livestream. But today we’re not talking about [00:04:00] Accessibility Checker at all. We’re talking about a whole new plugin.

I just wanna welcome everybody here and, oh, we got a thumbs up from Amber Hinds that the connection is good. Thanks for that, Amber.

Today we are talking about a brand new plugin, and this plugin is called ArchiveWP.

ArchiveWP is a plugin that helps you organize and manage legacy content. It helps you keep legacy content online for reference or record keeping in a clearly designed, searchable archive.

So what exactly does it do? It allows you to quickly build and build a searchable archive. It makes a dynamically searchable archive page. It comes with three blocks, and three shortcodes, and it comes with [00:05:00] two block patterns to help you make the layout and it comes with an Archive Page Generator.

We didn’t think it was enough to just create a few blocks and say, “Here you go, assemble these how you want.” But, we also created a tool to help you generate that page and also comes with a shortcode generator page, so even if you’re, even if you’re using Classic Editor, you can generate an Archive Content Page with one click of a button.

It also has a Migration Feature, so you can archive post in a few clicks.

There is Term Level Migration Controls, so if you don’t want to migrate all of your terms over to the Archive Content, you can choose which ones you do want to move or if you don’t wanna migrate any of them at all, we automatically implement 301 redirects, so you can maintain your SEO on your archived content so there’s no change to the search engines.

[00:06:00] And if you make a mistake or if you would like to refresh some Archive Content and make it new content again, there is a Restore Feature that you can use to send that Post back to its original Custom Post Type and restore its Taxonomy Terms.

It also adds an Archive disclaimer and several places such as on the Archive and on the Single to help delineate this as Archived Content.

This sounds simple on the face of it but why did we create this and why do we have a need for this? Through our own audits and remediations there are exceptions for certain kinds of content to where you can categorize it as Archive Content and then you no longer have to remediate all of that, the accessibility of that Archived Content, so long as it meets the criteria of whatever accessibility laws or specs that you’re [00:07:00] following.

It saves time and money on audits and remediation. If you have tons of historic public information that needs to stay public, but you can’t necessarily afford nor have the time to remediate the accessibility of all that, you can categorize it as Archived Content.

That’s the rundown, but let’s let’s dive into it and take a look at it and see what exactly it does. ‘Cause on the surface, like I said, it’s a simple idea, but the plugin itself goes very in depth in helping you create these pages and giving you the design, layout, and controls to make this look however you see fit.

All right. So you ready to jump into a demo, William? 

William: Yep. Let’s take a quick look, see what we do.

All right, 

Steve: I will drive and you feel free to jump in whenever you want.

Let’s take a look at the [00:08:00] front end first. So, I’ve rolled up a Insta WP install of it. I’ll go to Pages. So, this already has the plugin installed and set up. I’ll go to the Archive Content Page.

This is the Archive Content. This consists of three Block Editor Blocks, the Disclaimer Block, which you can see here, which has a Default Disclaimer Message that is displayed, but you can modify that. You have the filters over on the left, and we have the loop over on the right. This is dynamic content, so if I were to search by…. these are migrated terms from when it was migrated. It pulls ’em over into this Archive Content Custom Taxonomy. So I can just, I can search by that and you can see that the content dynamically [00:09:00] loads, and with the changes I can clear these filters. This is a typical Dynamic Filter here and it is accessible. We do announce to screen readers the changes. You can actually visually see what is going to be read out to screen readers when these dynamic changes are made. You can filter by the original Custom post Type. So, if I only wanna see Posts that were migrated over from the Post Type, I can filter by those, or like a notice, I can filter that, and the loop brings along Pagination. As you can see, it’s created in an effort to make these blocks adhere the theme as closely as possible as we can without us making many opinionated design decisions around that. We wanted to inherit the theme that’s being used.

William: Yeah. Do you want to talk a bit about the pain of how [00:10:00] different themes style, different form elements? Quite, sometimes I would say quite ad hoc. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

I don’t really wanna talk about that, but I can.

In creating these blocks, we could have been very opinionated on the way this layout and design looked. In some instance we wanted to, but actually what we did was we backtracked quite a bit. The first iteration of this plugin was implemented on a client website where a lot of the styles and stuff were just manually written to match the theme.

But, in this case, we wanted to inherit, we want the submit button, we want it to inherit your button styles. And the clear filters button, which actually should be a button. For accessibility, this is dynamic content. This should be a button, it’s not a link. But, I want it to look like a link, but I can’t style it like a link because I would have to make an assumption of what your links look like. So, in that instance, I [00:11:00] actually do wanna make it a link. I want to give it a role of button so that from an accessibility standpoint it’s accessible. But, from a design standpoint, it adheres to your theme.

There’s a lot of font issues that can arise when you’re dealing with trying to adhere styles from an existing theme such as, do they use rems or ems appropriately? We did a lot of testing on Twenty-twenty themes, and you get back to, which one was it, William?

William: The actual Twenty-twenty has the awkward rem count. 

Steve: Yeah. I think the base font size is 10, is that correct? 

William: Yep. 

Steve: Yeah. So, the base size is 10. So if I do a rem of like 0.875 thinking in my head, thinking that’s going to come down from 18 or 16, right? But, in that theme it’s actually 10. So, my styles could end up a lot smaller [00:12:00] than the rest of the styles on the page. You could use an M in that instance to try to adhere where it exists rather than the global default font size. So, we had to massage that a bit and make some decisions on how best to do that. I know looking at the Page here, the Published and the Archive Dates would end up really small on the Twenty-twenty theme. I could talk about that all day, William, because it was quite the undertaking. 

William: I didn’t have to fix this because we chose not to do it. But, in some of the themes that I was testing, they had some very opinionated choices on what those check boxes should look like. Specifically, a lot of people trying to enlarge them alone. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: Which, is maybe good for their design choices, but did not fit here for us. 

Steve: Yeah, totally. 

This is just our demo site there. It’s worth noting that there are some accessibility issues on the site by default because it’s to demo [00:13:00] the ArchiveWP and the Accessibility Checker. That’s just worth noting.

What you see here on our loop ,we are actually outputting the Publish Date and the Archive Date to signify when this Post was originally published and to signify when it was migrated over to be Archived Content. That’s just to help with compliance for content that can be excluded from remediation. We do have our disclaimer at the top stating that this is Archived Content.

Did I miss anything, William? 

William: Nope. I think that covers the general look how the fairers work. You didn’t show off that you can search, but 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Let’s do a keyword. If I just want to look up July, I’ll type July and the keyword search and hit submit, and so now you can see I have all Posts that are tagged with July as the keyword search. So your typical basic filters [00:14:00] and it’s worth noting that you can define how many terms are shown, and then you can toggle those you can show more or show less to keep this clean. When archiving content from multiple Custom Post Types the Archived Content Category Taxonomy can get quite large if you’re just migrating in tons of terms. 

William: Yes.

On one of my test sites, I had over 200 terms I graded over. 

Steve: So when you hit “Show more,” it just drops all the way to the bottom of the page. 

William: Yep. 

But at the time we didn’t have that “Show more” link and the entire length of the page was dictated by the number of Categories, not the number of Posts.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. 

If you’ve ever used something like FacetWP, this stuff will be very familiar to you.

Let’s jump over and look at a Single Page. This is a Single Page, and what we’ve done is we’re hooking in and we’re adding the Disclaimer to the Single Page too ’cause that’s a requirement when [00:15:00] you’re making exclusionary content in an archive for accessibility reasons. But other than that, we don’t do too much for the single. There is a template, correct, William? A Block Template. Is that for the Single? 

William: There is a Block Template for Archives. So, if you were to reach, so I don’t think this theme shows it, but if you were to reach some of the Categories for the Archive Content, this message would appear on those Categories as well.

Steve: Yeah. On the Taxonomy Term Pages. 

William: Yeah. 

Steve: Yeah. Yes.

What we’re doing is we’re trying to flag anytime that there is Archived Content and show this Disclaimer. The only difference on the Single or those Term Pages is that we actually do flag the date that post was archived.

That’s a little bit of the front end.

Let’s take a look at the backend.

Let’s run through [00:16:00] Settings. In the backend, you’ll notice that there’s this Archive Content Custom Post Type, and then if you go to Settings, ArchiveWP is listed under Settings.

William, you wanna run through some of these Settings?

William: Yeah.

Let me just pull them up on my site ’cause your screen is too small on my… 

Steve: Sure, no problem. 

William: The first one here is pretty clear. This is all of the Custom Post types that are available on this website. Or rather, this is all of the Public Custom Post Types that someone could pick from. And as you can see in, this test site, we have four out of the 10 in total, which are on this website. We have Posts, Pages, Documents, and Notices as Custom Post Tapes set up for Archiving.

The next Setting [00:17:00] down is the Taxonomy Settings. By default, we’ll copy Taxonomy Terms to Archive Content when you archive that content. However, that may not be something that you want, and if you do not want it, you can just come here, disable that. None of your Custom Categories, Custom taxonomy terms of kinds will be migrated. 

Next item down for the Archive Category Visibility, so if you do not wanna allow the Category Terms to be found on, like in the Search or on your Website in general, you can actually turn those terms off. Prevent them from being indexed, prevent people from accessing them.

As far as the Archive Post Template goes, so this was a rather complex piece of this plugin. By default, we’ll use your single .php template and it comes from your theme. We’ll display it the same way we, the other [00:18:00] Posts will by default.

However, you might want it to look how it looked originally, and if that’s the case, you can toggle this to use the Original Post Template and it will do its best to try and find the Original Post Template for the Original Post Type that the content was, which will, hopefully in most situations, make it look exactly how it looked originally. In the demo site we have here today, Single Post look the same across almost all of the Custom Post Types, but that isn’t the case on most people’s websites. Some people have a Custom Post Type because they want it specifically to look different. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: And if that’s the case, you can change this here. 

Steve: Yeah.

A big piece of this is say you’re migrating from a certain Custom Post Type that has Custom Fields, and your Custom Fields output, Custom Content on the front end. And if it then starts to pull from your Single Post Template that doesn’t have it’s not hooked into, and those [00:19:00] Custom Fields output are not on that Single, they won’t see that. Now the met is still exists on the post using the original Post Template for that Post will help pull in those Custom Fields again so you can retain that information. 

William: Yeah, and I will call it that this supports Classic Theme Templates. So, if you have a specific, news.php for your Single News Posts, it will support that just fine.

It does also support Block-based Custom Templates, however, I will also call it the Block-based Custom Templates in most cases will override PHP back templates. So, if you’ve created a Custom Template on the content originally in the backend, chances are it will by default use that Custom Template that is selected on the Post Type originally so no need to change that setting here to do that. 

Steve: [00:20:00] Yeah. 

William: Make setting down much easier, the redirects then, so you either allow all your posts to be redirected or you do not. You have the option here.

In cases where we archive the content, generally the URL is going to change. It is going to be like name spaced under the archive-content URL on your website. That is an expected part of building a discreet section for all of this content. However, the original URL we do generally want redirect. So someone visits the original URL, we want them to land on the new URL in the archive content section. That’s what they’re saying does here. I will say that this Setting is customizable on a per Post basis. You don’t need to adjust all or nothing. You can modify this on each Individual Post.

The final Setting we have here is the Disclaimer Text. This is the default Disclaimer [00:21:00] Text. Has a link to your contact us page, asks people if they wanna access this content that is archived, they should contact you to get an accessible version. You can change this. You might wanna link to your Accessibility Policy. You might want to open up a live chat. You might wanna send people to various different places. You can change that Default Content and that will reflect across all of the Single Archive Content pieces. It will reflect on the main search page. It will reflect on all of the Archives. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: So, If you update this default here, it will reflect everywhere. 

Steve: Yeah. Cool. And it looks like we have Jeff joining us and he says, he says “Sorry, I tuned in late, but what problem is this plugin solving?” The problem is that this plugin helps you organize and manage legacy content.

In a nutshell certain accessibility [00:22:00] laws or requirements allow you to choose content to exclude from accessibility remediation. And Amber has posted a very good explanation as well. Thanks for joining us, Jeff.

That is the Settings. And, we do have a First Time Configurator in here. It’s like an Onboarding Wizard. We’ll touch on that here in a little bit, probably towards the end.

There are some Systems Settings here to just delete data when the plugin is deleted.

Your license key can be added here, and then just some support documentation links.

In line with some Settings, there are some Settings at the Term Level.

So we talked about being able to migrate over Terms. When you’re archiving content you can actually choose to do that [00:23:00] at the Taxonomy level, which is a global for all Taxonomies, or you can do it at the Term level as well.

If I go to Post Categories, you’ll see that there is a toggle, a Custom Admin Column here for Archive Migration with a toggle. You can go in here and you can toggle On or Off which Terms you want to be migrated. If you’ve toggled all these Off, none of these Terms will migrate when moving over to the Archived Content Custom Post type. You can do that for Tags as well. You can see we don’t have any Tags selected to be moved over in these Settings.

Let’s take a look at how this actually works. How do you archive content?

If I go to Post and open up a Post, you’ll notice now that you have a new sidebar, and we’ve integrated with the Block Editor’s sidebars [00:24:00] rather than doing like a classic meta box. But, this actually works in the Classic Editor as well. There’s a fallback to the classic meta box, so you can still get these Settings.

These can be unpinned. These sidebars can be unpinned. Sometimes it can get kinda lost if it’s been unpinned, and you have to go to the little three dots menu and then go down and repent it or reopen it. But, we’ve also added this little helper sidebar area where you can, with one click, jump over and toggle open the sidebar.

On a Post that has not been archived, we give a little description. The details are ” Move this Post to Legacy Content Archive. Archive content is kept for reference only. It is not updated and may be excluded from accessibility scans and reports.” We put out a little warning here too about what’s gonna happen when you migrate this. Currently [00:25:00] Taxonomy Terms will be copied to the Archive Categories when this post is archived. You can disable Term migration globally in the ArchiveWP Settings,” which William just went over and what I just went over is the next part to “exclude specific Terms from migration, edit them in the Categories Tags, and this will show all Taxonomies related to this Post format screens and uncheck include in archive migration.” We’re trying to help you with every step of these migrations giving you context of what’s going to happen so you don’t archive and then are surprised, “Wait, why did it do that?” Or “It didn’t pull over my Terms? Why didn’t it pull over my Terms? And now I have to restore it and then do it again.” So if this is what you want, this sounds good, you can go ahead and Archive the Post. There’s a button that says “Archive Post.” If I click that, I’m now presented with an alert [00:26:00] that says, “Are you sure you want to archive this Post?” So, since archiving is can be a little bit scary that you’re moving, you’re doing something to your Post what is it actually doing? And maybe here in a second, William can touch base on what it actually is doing behind the scenes. But, we wanna give you a confirmation. We want to give you an out if you accidentally click that Button. I actually do wanna archive this, so I’ll hit “Okay.” It says “Post Archived Successfully,” and then it refreshes. Now, you’ll notice if you look at the sidebar, we’re no longer in Post, we’re in Archived Content. That Post has been moved over to the Archived Content Post, and you can see that the Categories that were selected have now been moved over to the Archived Categories and selected.

William, do you want to touch on what is actually happening behind the scenes when you migrate? 

William: Yeah.

When you click that Migrate Button, in the background, what it is doing is, first off it is collecting all of the [00:27:00] Terms that are currently assigned to the Post, it’s also gathering some other data, like the current Post Type published date, just some genetic information about this Post.

Once it’s collected all the information, it saves the majority of the information inside Post Meta. It then proceeds to disconnect the old Taxonomies and does a Post Type flip. It changes the post Type over and finally it clears all the Accessibility Checker issues out of the page, which would no longer be applicable because the content of the page template has likely changed. And that will be the case all the time. It is quite likely the case in most of the tests that I’ve done. However, once this Page actually refreshes, the scan will run, it’ll kick off immediately and it will produce [00:28:00] fresh Accessibility Checker issues. 

Steve: Yeah. And I will put a caveat in there. That’s if you have Accessibility Checker turned on Archived Content.

I think our recommendation is that you don’t have Accessibility Checker enabled for Archived Content because the whole purpose around moving this is because it’s content that can be excluded from Accessibility Audits. 

William: That’s fair, and that is not how I have my local site set up, but that is likely how most people will have their Sites configured.

I will call it, if you have a Term disabled, that Term does still get saved in the metadata of the Post. However, it is not assigned in the Categories you see here in the sidebar. So I guess that, maybe I’m jumping ahead, but that is for… 

Steve: No, that’s good. 

William: Restoration. 

Steve: Yeah. Let’s pull up. So, when you are on the Archived Content Custom Post Type after it’s been [00:29:00] migrated, you have the ArchiveWP sidebar here as well, we do show you a little shortcut as well here. But the information presented that is a little different. Like William said, we are flipping the Post Type that this post is attached to, we are dropping the Taxonomy Terms and from a technical standpoint, we had a lot of internal back and forth on whether or not it was a good idea to actually remove those or to leave them dangling. This was a really nerdy software engineering kind of conversation we had on, is it ethical to leave them dangling it? Should we clean them up? Should we remove them? We actually decided on not leaving them dangling and actually storing an array of all the original Terms that were on that Custom Post Type so if you restore it, all those Terms actually get restored, not just the ones that were migrated, not just the ones that were selected to be [00:30:00] migrated.

On the Archived Content, in the sidebar here, we have a little bit more information.

We have Archive Details. We have an Archived Date, we timestamp the moment that it’s archived. We have the Original Post Type, which in this case is Post. And, we have the Original Taxonomies, which in this case it was just one it was a Category Taxonomy and the Term was Press Release. And then, we also have the original URL, and this just is to help you keep track of where it originally was to maybe test if it redirect is actually working like it should. And then, you’ll see we have some Redirect Settings.

William, do you wanna explain how we’re handling redirects with Archived Content? 

William: Yeah, so the Default Option for Redirect is that we will Enable Redirect. The redirect will automatically apply as soon as you Archive a content. You can disable them at the Global level. However, if you have [00:31:00] a Individual Page that you just no longer wanna redirect, you can disable it at the Post level. You can toggle that checkbox right there. You can disable redirects for this Individual Post only. This does not affect the global setting. This takes precedence over the global setting. So, you can do this both ways. If you have redirects disabled Globally, you can enable it for a Single Post, and if you have them enabled globally, you can disable it. 

Steve: Yep. I think that is smart. Like it does know what your Setting is and it will present a different message. Let me… 

William: Yes. 

Steve: Jump back over to Settings and I’m gonna disable Archive Redirects in the Settings. Hit “Save Changes,” and then I’m gonna jump back over to my Post and Archived Post and look at the sidebar. In the Redirect Settings now, there’s a notice that says “Redirects are Disabled.” They’re disabled [00:32:00] globally. And with a little bit of link to over to the Settings to enable those, if you would like. I’ll jump back to the Settings and re-enable redirects and refresh the page, and you can see in the ArchiveWP sidebar that I have the toggle again to disable to redirect.

So if a redirect is enabled like it is now, William, if I click on the original URL, this will redirect. Correct? 

William: Correct. It should now. 

Steve: Okay. I actually clicked on a link to the Original Post, which act has a different permalink than the Archived Post, and you can see that it redirected to Archived Content slash the Post name now, so the redirect is working properly.

Now, what may be a little fuzzy or a little confusing when dealing with redirects if you actually disable ’em is you might still see [00:33:00] a redirect because WordPress out of the box does try to match. Is is correct?

William: It does. The first thing it tries to match against is the slug, which in the case of in the Post, the slug has not changed, and as such, WordPress itself will try and find the correct place to send users rather than present them with a 404. However, the redirect code is different. It will probably do a 302. If it’s a 404 find, whereas we were doing a 301 specifically.

Steve: Yeah. So Jeff said “Are there any SEO things people need to consider before archiving content?”

William: Yes, and in fact, that is exactly where this redirect idea comes from. In talking to the SEO people, ie Gemini, Google’s AI, they [00:34:00] suggested providing these links when I was discussing it with them because, to preserve SEO. We don’t wanna break these links. We actually do want the original links to still reach the same content hopefully retaining all of its existing links for SEO reasons. However, if people do choose to disable these redirects, there is some implications of lost content that SEO might wanna consider. I would suggest that redirects are left on, however, someone more well versed in SEO might disagree and they have the option to pick and choose as they see best for each piece of content. 

Steve: Yeah, and this is still a Post, and while we recommend that you don’t modify this content after archiving it, and we do have a feature that we will properly implement after the initial version one release that will [00:35:00] block publishing, or at the very least, it will warn that publishing Archived Content may not make it considered Archived Content. It’s not a violation, but if this is truly Archived Content and you’re putting it here so you don’t have to make it accessible, then modifying it kind of nullifies that it’s Archived Content, but to the redirect piece, right? This is a Post and that is editable and you can modify this slug and we actually wanna retain the redirect, even if you do modify the archive content slug.

William, since this can be done with a plugin like Redirection, why did we build it into the plugin? 

William: This can be done with a plugin like Redirection. However, Redirection is not going to natively know that you have changed this content and the URL has changed because this, as far as a plugin, like Redirection or the redirect that exists, maybe in your SEO plugin, [00:36:00] it isn’t going to think this has changed because the slug has not changed, which is generally how these other plugins, it’s detect whether content needs to redirect. Also, we don’t want you to have another plugin and manage that.

Steve: Right. 

William: We can do that. We have all the data here. We know the operation. When it happens, we can set up this redirect. And also if you restore this Post, we can remove that redirect. There’s no way a redirect plugin is gonna be able to understand both operations. 

Steve: Yeah, totally.

What we’ve tried to adopt with this plugin is that we want you to be able to achieve these things with just clicks, or we want it to just do it automatically. With Redirection, you have to import these all, you probably have to export the URLs and get the new ones, match ’em up, import it with a spreadsheet, and, do it all manually. And, if one changes, you have to manually go back over there and [00:37:00] reconcile the change. While here it’s just doing it in real time.

I do wanna get to the Blocks because that’s the fun stuff, but… 

William: It’ll be fun for users, but I will say that it was not super fun for us to build.

Yeah. 

Steve: I do think this comment that Amber put in the chat is worth reading, this is a probably a more layman way of saying what the plugin does, but mostly ” I think of this plugin as a dumping ground of all the content you think your client should just delete, but they’re afraid to delete.” That’s a good way to put it. 

William: Yeah. 

I do think there’s legitimate reasons on a lot of websites that they want to keep their legacy content. There might be like one site I was considering when we were building this was like, my local council’s website and they’re gonna wanna keep records of prior years regulations forever.

Steve: Yeah. 

William: They’re going to always wanna keep them, but they’re not gonna wanna update them, and, in fact, they’re explicitly going to not ever update [00:38:00] them because the last year’s regulations, and I think this is gonna be a perfect solution for that kind of content. Content updates every year, or maybe laws that have changes, you’re gonna wanna retain the original as is while you provide the new updated version.

Steve: Yeah, totally. City council meeting minutes, things like that. Things that they are required to publish and keep out there. And it could go back several years and could be quite the accessibility remediation nightmare to go through all that content.

We’ve showed how to actually, before I do this, let me not get ahead of myself.

On an Archived Post, so I’ve archived this by mistake. I don’t really want this to be Archived content. I’ve made a big mistake. Now, how do I get it? Is there a way to like revert, get it back?

William: Yep. Basically the same process, but in opposite. You find the sidebar, you find the button. 

Steve: So, when I hit [00:39:00] Restore Post, I do get another alert saying, “Are you sure you want to do this.” Just to make sure. And you hit “Okay.” Then, you can see the Post flips back to the Post Type, and it restores the Categories even if I didn’t migrate the Categories it will attempt to restore ’em. The only instance where it won’t successfully restore it is one, is if the Taxonomy is gone, but if the Term is gone it’ll restore the Term. Correct, William? 

William: It will, if the term has been removed, it, we’ll recreate this Term. Again, the only situation where it can is if the Taxonomy literally no longer exists.

You might be able to show some restored Tags though ’cause all of our Tags were disabled. This Post might not have Tags. 

Steve: No. 

William: This post has Tags? 

Steve: No, it doesn’t. No. It will restore those back to the original Terms that they were, so your Post is back where it was, and essentially we’re not really changing much of anything when we migrate [00:40:00] except for the Custom Post Type and then dumping of the Taxonomy Terms.

We could have…

William: Yes. Everything is entirely reversible, which is the nice thing we store all the data required to just completely revert the change. 

Steve: Cool. That’s how you migrate and that’s how you restore a Single Post. But man, I have lots of Posts to migrate. Can I do this in bulk? The answer is yes.

Into the Bulk Editor… so if you’re on Post, on the Post Edit Page where you can see all your Posts in the Admin, you can select which ones you would like to Archive, you can select “Bulk Actions” and you can choose “Archive,” and then you can hit a “Apply.” And then “Six posts have been successfully archived,” and those have all moved over to the Archived Content now.

You can do the same when you’re selecting Terms as well. [00:41:00] I don’t know if I went over this. When you’re choosing which Terms to migrate, you can use the Bulk Action features there as well. If I wanted to turn all these on, I could go up here and I can hit “Include in Archive Migration” or “Exclude in Archive Migration.” If I hit include and then hit apply, the Page will refresh and you can see they’re all included.

Now, there is one little caveat with this that really drives me nuts, and it’s on the Uncategorized Default Term you cannot apply Bulk Actions to, and this is a WordPress Core thing, and there is nothing we can do about that. We probably could hook in and automatically flip it, but we stuck with the way the UI works inside of WordPress not to do something out of the box. But, if I go back and I hit exclude, I selected all of them, and you can see they’re all excluded. So just another way that the ArchiveWP Plugin is trying to come alongside and help [00:42:00] you do this archiving with just a one or two clicks of a Button.

So, that’s how you archive, that’s how you migrate, that’s how you choose your Terms.

Let’s get to the fun stuff, Blocks and Shortcodes.

We did make this backwards compatible for people not using the Block Editor. I’m gonna go to Pages, and then if I go to the Archived Content Page, which this is the Page we’ve chosen for this theme to be our Archived Content Page we don’t actually use an archive so that we can fully utilize the Block Editor.

So William, you wanna walk through some of these Blocks? 

William: Yep. On this Page, we have three Blocks, all three of the Blocks that we offer. I will say that this is a Pattern that we offer out of the box. So, if you wanted, no sidebar, we do offer a Pattern for that as well. So we provide two Patterns. [00:43:00] Both Patterns that we provide include all three of these Blocks. 

Steve: Yeah. I pulled up the Patterns sidebar, and I’ve searched for ArchiveWP and you can see we have an ArchiveWP Sidebar Left and an ArchiveWP Single Column. While I have this open, you can actually see below, you can see the Blocks, but I’ll go to the Blocks Tab and do the search as well, but you can see that we have the three ArchiveWP Blocks available here as well.

Cool.

The Disclaimer Block, William, this was one you worked on quite a bit. You want to explain us how this one works? 

William: Yes. This was the easiest of all of them. This is literally just a text field and we have one setting, which is to use the default message, which is what is set in the global sense. However, it’s possible that you want this message here to differ to the message that appears on the Single Posts, in which case you can toggle that off on the [00:44:00] sidebar, and now this field becomes entirely editable. You can edit any of this content, provide your content entirely. The placeholder content is the default, and if you were to save this Post right now, that would be the content that still gets output. However, if I want custom message, this is how you do that. 

Steve: Cool. And this pulls from the settings, the default message from the settings, right? 

William: Correct. If you change the message in the Global Settings, that message will change here, with exception to the fact that if you toggle off that saying in the sidebar for the Default Message and customize it, if you customize the message, your customized message will always be what gets used here.

Steve: Cool. Alright.

We made a design choice on this Block, which I originally, like I said, we’re trying to not be opinionated about design, but we thought the [00:45:00] disclaimer needed to be wrapped in something because it gets lost in the other content if it’s not. But, I wanted to implement this in a way that didn’t like that was still unop opinionated in some fashion. And what we’ve done is the Disclaimer Blocks all have a class called “ArchiveWP-disclaimer on them, and the class is actually what holds the styles. If I go to the Styles Tab of the ArchiveWP Disclaimer Block, you can choose a text color, you can choose a background color like you would on any Block. But, I didn’t want to set that by Default because again, I’m trying to be un unopinionated. So, what we did is we actually implemented a Class. When the Block is added, a Class is also added to it, and if you don’t want those Default Styles on here, you could grab that Class and restyle it or you could remove it and then you have just a blank Block that you can go in and that…

Let’s do something that contrasts… you can change the colors [00:46:00] of, and you can, we don’t have padding on this. We should add padding. 

William: We should. Yeah. We’ll add a ticket. 

Steve: We’ll add a ticket for that. The plugin isn’t released yet, but you can still use these Default Styles or clear them out.

Cool. The next Block is the Filters Block. This Block is for the Filters. The reason why the Filters and the Loop Block are two separate Blocks is because again, we want you to be able to take these Blocks and lay ’em out, however it fit. You can use a Loop Block and create their Columns to whatever width that you desire, and you can add these Blocks separately. But they are meant to be used together. In most cases, you want to use them together, unless you don’t want any Filters at all on your Archive.

Let’s look at some of the Settings on the Filter Block. We’re running a Beta version of the plugin, so there is a couple tweaks that we are making still before we go live.

We have Filter options. I can choose not to show the Search [00:47:00] Field, and you can see the Search Field disappears when I toggle that off. I can choose not to show the Category Filters. Then, we have implemented a third one to not show the Content Type Filters. That will be in the initial release, so you can fully customize what gets shown here. Say you don’t want the Filters and you just want the Search Box, you can have just that.

Then we have a Collapse on Mobile, which will take the Filters and collapse them with just like a Hamburger Menu to open them and they will expand on Mobile so that you don’t have these huge long Filter list output before you’re… if you’re William and you have 200 of Terms, you can have that collapsed by Default on Mobile.

Then, you can set the Visibility Limit as well. The visibility limit can be set to six, so like we showed on the front end where the “Show More” and the “Show Less” will collapse based on that number.

I think that’s the Filter Settings, so let’s [00:48:00] take a look at the Loop.

The Loop has a lot of settings here ’cause like I said, we want you to have full control over the layout and design here. We don’t wanna lock you into a design that doesn’t match your website. You can choose how many Posts per Page, so if I just want one Post per Page, you can see now I only have one Post. If I want two, I can go up to two Posts per Page. Let’s say I want 10.

Then, you can choose to show the Pagination or not show the Pagination ’cause this may be an archive that doesn’t have a ton in it. Say, maybe it’s 50 Posts and you want to have 50 Posts per Page, and so you don’t really need the Pagination. You can toggle the Pagination off and it disappears.

And then you have your Content Settings. Within the Loop on each Individual Article, you can choose to Show or Hide the Featured Image and it just collapses down. You can choose to Show or Hide the excerpt. If the Excerpt is on, you can choose [00:49:00] how many words it outputs, so say I only want 10 words, so it collapses down the 10 words. I want a Read More Button so you can toggle on a Read More Button and so people can click on that to read more.

And then, there’s some Metadata Settings. If we wanna show Categories… so these are the Archived Content Categories so we can hide those if we don’t wanna show those. We can show the Published Date or not show the Published Date. We can show or hide the archive Date as well, so if you only wanna show the Archive Date, you can just show the Archive Date.

I do believe that the meta output for these is filterable. If you’re a developer and you do want to go a little further, maybe you want to remove archived off of here, that is filterable. We haven’t surfaced all those settings into the block ’cause we’re trying to make this as streamlined as possible right now.

William: While you mention that, I do wanna call out that we provide Shortcodes for all of these items [00:50:00] and if someone wants…. some of the Shortcodes have attributes that might not be exposed here in the sidebar. So, if someone wants to customize the display of this and they’re not a developer, they may be able to customize it via the Shortcode as opposed to writing Custom Code.

Steve: Yeah. The Shortcode actually will accept all Parameters, not just Parameters that we’ve surfaced in the Blocks. We do have this all documented out in our documentation.

Cool. That’s the Blocks. That’s the Patterns.

And let’s see, what else? The First Time Configuration, I think that’s something we should probably go through before we wrap this up, William? 

William: Yes. 

Steve: What I’m gonna do though is I’m gonna pull up my local and show that.

When you first install ArchiveWP, you’re gonna get redirected to the Onboarding Wizard, the First Time Configuration.

The first step is going to be to Activate Your License Key, and in this instance, [00:51:00] we’ve already done that.

Then, the next step would be to choose your Page. Now, the plugin doesn’t use this Setting to really make any other logical choices, but this is just for the configurator to know which Page to implement the Page on. I want to choose an existing Page. By default, you can create an Archive Content Page and it’ll actually just create a Page called Archive Content. But I’m gonna use an existing Page, actually, I don’t think I have one called Archive. Let’s just use that. I’ll continue.

The next step, step three is to select the layout. I can choose from those Patterns. These are the Patterns that we have for Block Patterns that we’ve defined. We have a left, and then we have a single column. I think I already have left on here, but, so if I choose single column, and…. this is a new Page, so I don’t have to [00:52:00] override the content. If you’ve chosen an existing Page and it has content on it, this will actually override that content. So we’ve created a Checkbox for you to actually check that you do want to override that content. If you don’t wanna override that content, then you need to either pull the Patterns or the Blocks over manually on your Page. I’m gonna choose a single column and I’m gonna hit “Apply Selection.”

I must already have this page. 

William: Yeah, you do.

In the previous choice, it will detect whether you have the Block Editor that are completely deactivated, and if you do have the Block Editor that are completely deactivated, it will still generate those Patterns, but it will generate them purely with Shortcuts, as opposed to Blocks.

Steve: Right, and we’ll demo that here in a second.

So I do already have this Page, I was mistaken, and the plugin actually caught me and said, “Hey dude, this page already has [00:53:00] content on it. Are you sure you wanna override it? If you wanna override it, check the override existing content check box.” I do have content here, so I’m running just your basic, I think I’m on Twenty-twenty five, Twenty-twenty four, I don’t know what theme I’m on, but you can see I have just a basic theme and it’s already been applied and it is the Single Column. What I’ll do, so you can see the change is I’ll choose the sidebar left and then I will override and then, okay, so “Block Pattern Applied to your Archive Page.” If I go to this Page and I refresh, oh, look at that, I’ve got a whole new Page with the one click of a button. It’s applied that pattern layout for me and now I have a fully functional Archive Page with literally two clicks of a button. I didn’t have to go in and add a Group Block and throw the Filters Block into one side and throw the Loop Block into the other side and select all my Settings. [00:54:00] No. The configurator actually just did it all for me, and now I’m up and running. I’m ready to just start archiving content. You can see I already have on this page.

As you go through the First Time Configuration, we will prompt you to choose the Custom Post Types and the Taxonomies, whether or not you wanna preserve Taxonomies and whether or not you wanna enable Category Archive Pages.

Then, I’ll just hit “Continue” to go to the next step, Display Settings. I can choose whether or not to use the Default single Page template or use the original Custom Post Types Single Page. And, the redirect behavior “enable automatic redirects from the original URL to this archive.” I can choose to, I do want these to redirect.

Then the Disclaimer, I can set the disclaimer just like William showed and I can hit Save and Finish.[00:55:00] 

I come to the final step, step seven here, and I just get a little Summary of, a link to my Archive Page, my layout that I’m using, the Archivable Custom Post types, the Taxonomy Preservation, the Template Preference and whether Redirects are Enabled, and a preview of my Disclaimer.

What we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to just take all this stuff. You install it, you get redirected here, you click through a few steps and you’re ready to archive content. And your page, your archive is set up. It’s got a layout. It’s got design. It’s all good to go.

What I do wanna show though is, what if I don’t have the Block Editor, right?

I still want to use this. How does this implement to shortcodes? Because a Shortcode’s just a Shortcode. We have three Shortcodes that just match the Blocks. They have all the same Parameters, actually, they have a little bit more Parameters available to you than the Blocks do, but, how did you get a layout from that, right? Because they’re [00:56:00] separate. Why don’t you just need one Shortcode that has a layout all built in? Actually, what we do is we just insert the Shortcodes into the Page with some custom HTML to go along with it. I’m gonna go back to choose a Page in the First Time Configuration, and then I will choose an existing Page. I’ll choose archive content shortcodes. So, this is a Page that I have the Classic Editor Plugin enabled on, I believe. We will find out.

Yeah. Now, it says, “Your current theme appears to disable the Block Editor for Pages. ArchiveWP can output the chosen layout using shortcodes with inline styles instead.” So the plugin has detected that the Page that I chose is a Classic Theme Page. Now, it’s going to it’s gonna present me with the Shortcodes. If I choose the archive column ArchiveWP sidebar left layout, [00:57:00] and I want to override content ’cause I already have this Page. And then, I’m presented with a couple more settings here. How should the layout be applied? ” Select whether to insert shortcode based markup, or attempt to apply a block pattern anyway.” We don’t wanna attempt to apply a Block Pattern anyway, we want to actually use the Shortcodes. 

William: Yeah, I will call out here that if you do attempt to apply the Block Pattern, sometimes that will be fine. Actually, if you install the Classic hit or plugin, you usually can switch freely between them and if sites are configured that way, this is the option for them. This is detected, this is a Classic Page currently, but they might still wanna apply the Block Styles and they can do that if someone wants to. And, I do think that’s a common configuration where people can freely swap between Block Editor and Classic, but the default might be Classic.

Steve: Yep. Totally. Cool.

Let’s go ahead and Apply. [00:58:00] Shortcode Layout Applied to your Archive Page. Let me find this Page. If I go down to Summary, I can hit View Page. So, Archived Content Shortcodes. It’s applied the Shortcodes to the Page. Now, I’m running Twenty-twenty five and it has a very small content area. I could use the Single Column Layout to make this look better, or I could change my template here with a wider content area. But, this is just the default content area for demo purposes.

But, what does this look like if I edit the Page? You can see I’m in the Classic Editor here and if I go to code, you can see this is the code we’ve implemented, the wrapper, the all the div wrappers around the shortcodes that you would need to give this a left column layout so you don’t have to do anything. It’s ready to go. It’s got inline styles, [00:59:00] uses flex, it should wrap fine, and you’re ready to go, and you can add your Attributes to these shortcodes to modify it how you see fit. 

William: Speaking of being ready to go, what if someone wanted to get this plugin? Where can they get it and when? 

Steve: Yeah. 

When will it be available? We got a drum roll. We need sound effects, William. This needs to be more dramatic. There you go.

ArchiveWP will be available for purchase tomorrow and so you can check in at EqualizeDigital.com/ArchiveWP and you will be able to purchase at that time.

We are finishing up the final touches on the plugin and getting everything ready to go today.

That’s only half the story though. What kind of plugin is this? Can I get this on WordPress.org? Is it premium? What’s the deal?

It’s a little different [01:00:00] than Accessibility Checker, where Accessibility Checker has a very full featured free plugin and it, and the reason why accessibility Checker has that, it’s just ’cause of our whole methodology around accessibility and extending it to making Accessibility Checker accessible to everybody with no price price guards there.

But, the ArchiveWP Plugin will be a premium only plugin and the pricing for it, let me pull down to this unpublished page that Amber Hinds has been working so hard on.

You will be able to buy it for one site for $59/year, 5 sites for $159/year, 25 sites for $299/year, and unlimited websites for $399/year. 

The plugin is the same throughout those tiers, and you just get more site licenses.

[01:01:00] Anything else to add, William, on your side? 

William: I will say that if someone wants to buy an unlimited license, please be kind to don’t activate 2000 websites at the same time.

You can activate 2000 websites, but, leave a little gap between… 

Steve: yeah. We can stage those.

ArchiveWP, is our new plugin. We’re very proud of it. We have been working extremely hard on it. William and me and Amber and the rest of the team have been putting together, sales and marketing and development efforts towards this.

We’re very excited. The Accessibility Checker is five years old, and we thought it’s time to bring in a new plugin to that kind of complements Accessibility Checker and helps people further make their websites more accessible.

Look for the release tomorrow and we’re glad that you guys joined us today and we were happy to show ArchiveWP to you.

We have these live streams every two [01:02:00] weeks feel free to join us. Feel free to follow us on social and find us at accessibility or at EqualizeDigital.com. Catch you all next time. 

William: See ya.