Transcript of Episode 270 WP Plugins A to Z

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of Marcus and John’s discussion of the weekly plugins we have reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #270 here.

Episode #270

John:                All right, well the first plugin I’ve got here this week comes about because I had to do some research for a client and update a client’s website with a sidebar widget that would allow the categories in his WooCommerce store to be accordionized or collapsed. We had lots and lots of categories and we needed a cleaner looking widget display of it, so I went looking for some.

The first one I came up with here came from YITH WooCommerce Category Accordion, and YITH produces quite a few WooCommerce plugins and most of their plugins are freemium and you have to buy for the quality to get into their premium plugins. This one here, I was hoping it would be a little different than most of them. A lot of times, their plugins are pretty crippled with the free version and this one turned out to be not that much different. I wanted something that would be able to list the categories, alphabetize them, allow me to adjust which ones appeared first – that sort of thing.

This plugin didn’t do that with the free version. The premium promised to do that and if it came to blows, I probably would have purchased it. But instead of that, I thought I would do a little more research. Other than that, this plugin here is one of those ones that not often I do this, but I had to give this plugin a 2-Dragon rating; the YITH WooCommerce Category Accordion.

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s a recent low for us. We haven’t really had anything that low but that’s one of the things, you know? You want to get reviews. Sometimes, we’ve just got to let you know that sometimes things don’t work and you know not to waste your time on them.

John:                Yeah, it saves you wasting your time. I already wasted 20 minutes on it.

Marcus:           There you go. All right, the first plugin for me today is called Easy Bulk Subpage Creator and that lets you create multiple subpages in a bulk or kind of batch manner, saving a lot of time.

So it gives you a startup screen in which you can add as many subpages to any parent as you want. You just create a list and drop them in there and tell it what parent page you want that to go do. If you’re doing initial site setup, this thing can save you tons and tons of time. It’s called the Easy Bulk Subpage Creator and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, that could be very handy when you’re building out your website and you need to make those subpages.

Marcus:           Yeah, unless you want to do them one by one.

John:                Oh, I’ve done that. Okay, the second one here is again related to the first. It’s WooCommerce Collapsing Categories and it’s to allow me to create a widget for my client that would allow him to have an accordion of all his categories in his WooCommerce store. This one here is a free plugin; they didn’t seem to have a premium version but the free version seemed to be more than adequate to the task I wanted to do.

It allows you to create the accordion view of your categories, adjusts which ones appeared where, exclude categories as needed. You could even do custom CSS styling right there in the plugin settings. The only problem I really had with this plugin was that it hadn’t been updated in quite a long time, but for some reason the day I was working on it, all of a sudden it had what I thought was an update. It turned out to be all they did was update the file that said it worked with the latest version of WordPress, which gave it the indication that it had been updated but the code doesn’t appear to have changed any.

But other than that, a really great plugin. It’s called WooCommerce Collapsing Categories and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           All right. Yeah, a lot of cool WooCommerce stuff and as I’m getting more and more involved in WooCommerce because of the Membership Coach site, I’m finding some pretty cool plugins. So one plugin I wanted to talk about now is called Templatify, and what it does is it gives you the ability to select custom templates for each post type – even custom post types, just like what you have for Pages right now out of the box for WordPress.

So once you activate Templatify, it gives you the select template box that typically appears only in Pages in every post edit screen, filled with all your different page templates. That’s really, really nice to have, especially since you can – what I used it for was some sessions for a conference, so not only did I have a custom post type and a custom template for the sessions, but also for the speakers. Each one of those had a different template. It worked really, really well and I give this one a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Very nice! Yes, that would be an excellent way to customize and template up your post types.

Marcus:           Mm-hmm, it is.

John:                Okay, the final plugin I’ve got here today is one of our favorites: those easy, lazy plugins that just provide a feature that makes your life a whole lot easier. It’s called Duplicate Page. This is a plugin that I’ve been meaning to install for quite some time and just give it a test out so I could review.

But one of the biggest things that happens is when you’re working on a website on a regular basis, you often have posts or pages that use the same content over and over and over and over again. So it’s the same sort of thing with the WP Plugins site; every time I put up a new show notes, there are certain pieces in there that are exactly the same each time I create the show notes. And so in the past, I would go to the latest version, copy and paste it into the new one I was creating, then make my changes.

Well, this plugin eliminates all that. You install it, you activate it, you go to your post lists, and now you have a new menu item under your post that says, “Duplicate This.” Click that button and it duplicates that post for you and it duplicates it all the way down to the tags that you have inserted in the page, so everything is there. You just open up the draft version (because it sets it as a draft) and start making the essential changes you need to change for the post, and you’re off, saving you a fair chunk of time.

So of course any of those good, lazy plugins, what do we do with them? We crank them right up to the top and give them a 5-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Yeah! Getting all kinds of dragons today.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Finally, anybody that uses Infusionsoft knows exactly what I’m talking about when I say the forms are ugly and difficult to deal with. This new plugin is called Form Lift and it takes Infusionsoft to a whole new level.

What it does is it overhauls the way that the forms are displayed to be stylized exactly like your theme, so all you have to do is copy the unstylized HTML code of the form in Infusionsoft and paste it into this form editor and it styles it exactly the way that you want it to, and doesn’t go with that ugly little embed that you have to use every time for forms. So anybody that uses Infusionsoft, this is definitely one that you want to check out. I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice. And of course, I don’t use Infusionsoft, but if you do, you definitely want to check this plugin out.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay, well that covers up this week. I myself covered up YITH Commerce Category Accordion, which I gave a 2 to; the WooCommerce Collapsing Categories, which I gave a 4 to; and the Duplicate Page, which I gave a 5 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about Easy Bulk Subpage – gave that one a 4 out of 5; Templatify – gave that one a perfect 5 out of 5; and we just discussed Form Lift, which I gave a 4 out of 5.