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 #299 here.
It’s Episode 299 and we’ve got plugins for Free Shipping Threshold Notifications, Timestamps, One to One Communication in WooCommerce, Plugin Notes, and Integrating Postmates to WooCommerce. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #299
John: All right, this week here the first plugin I’ve got is called Last Modified Timestamp. It’s a simple plugin and what it does for you is it adds a new column in your post or page list menu so that you can sort your posts or pages by when it was last modified. The advantage to this is we always have the column there that’s default that allows you to see it by post date.
But sometimes older posts will be modified and you’ll need to find them quicker or you might have more than one person working on posts at the same time, so you’ll what to know when it was most recently modified. So this is a column that allows you to just with a click, reorder everything by when the post was last modified. A pretty decent plugin; works quite well. Check it out: Last Modified Timestamp, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very nice! I like that. I like that a lot. All right, so an interesting plugin that I discovered here. It is called Client Admin Message After Purchase for WooCommerce – oh, what a mouthful. But what it does is it allows the admin and client to communicate whenever a WooCommerce order is completed. So let’s just say, John, you created a logo for me and I went and you said, “Hey, it’s ready. Pay half down or whatever through my WooCommerce store.” So I pay half down and the instant I paid half down with that custom link, it then opens up. Not only it gives me the logo but then it opens up a direct communication channel between you and I.
John: Nice!
Marcus: And we can talk back and forth about revisions, we can talk about anything that needs to get done, and then when you’re ready to give me the final version, you can send me the last half of the invoice and I can pay that off, then it gets delivered digitally. That all sounds awesome; this one doesn’t do it too well.
John: Ah…
Marcus: In fact, I think the idea was great but the execution needs some help. And it needs some help because not every time is somebody going to log back in just to check that little piece of communication. I didn’t see a lot when it came to actual email communication back and forth – maybe just something I could respond to via email that would go back into WooCommerce. So it’s a great idea. It needs a little work when it comes to the execution point of it, so I rated it a 3 out of 5.
John: Ah, that’s too back. Well, maybe they’ll improve it as time goes on.
Marcus: I think they will and somebody is going to perfect this process and I’ll keep my eyes on it and report back whenever I find a better solution for this.
John: Well, it does only have ten active installs currently, so that’s all right. I look forward to that one coming along. The next one I’ve got here is called Plugin Notes and I may have reviewed something like this many moons back, somewhere back in the hundreds episodes. But this is another one and what it is is it’s a simple plugin that allows you the ability to add notes to each of your plugins. You install it, activate it, and now you have a note area underneath each plugin where you can go in and make notes about what that plugin is being used for, why it’s there, notes for if you’ve got more than one administrator in the site so that each administrator knows why the plugin is being used.
It’s very useful. I recently pulled it together for a client of mine because they had a lot of plugins that they sort of knew what they were there and we needed to clarify what each plugin was for and whether we needed to keep it. This is also a good way to say, “Hey, maybe we need to look at replacing this plugin,” things of that nature. A great plugin; works very well. It’s called Plugin Notes and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very good! Okay, another WooCommerce plugin. For those of you – I’m not sure if this is a worldwide phenomenon, but I know it definitely is in the States and certainly in my area. People use this thing called Postmates, which Postmates is a delivery service that does kind of on-demand deliveries of different things. I’ve not had the advantage of using this myself. I was going to but just didn’t use the credit that they offered me. But what it is is it’s basically you sell something and somebody from Postmates will come and pick it up and deliver it to whomever hired them to do it.
So, with that being said, now we have a plugin called WooCommerce Postmates Integration and what it does is it allows you to use Postmates as the delivery service to locally deliver whatever the WooCommerce site happens to be. So this integrates right into Postmates through WooCommerce. You can do custom shipping, custom pickup notes for the courier, handle all of the backend delivery status stuff on the order page, and you can actually also email the administrator in case there are issues with the delivery submission, so that’s really awesome. It’s meant to handle kind of the infrastructure of Postmates within the WooCommerce environment. Pretty awesome – I gave it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice! I mean, that’s a cool service. I didn’t even know that kind of service existed.
Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
John: Must be in the States only though.
Marcus: Yeah, for now. You’ll get it eventually.
John: Yeah, well Canada always gets everything eventually. It depends on whether they find it valuable enough for the oh, you know, 30 million people that lives in this second largest country – actually, I think we’re – yeah, we’re the second largest country in the world.
Marcus: In the world?
John: Second largest country in the world behind Russia.
Marcus: What about China?
John: Yeah, our entire —
Marcus: Are you talking population or area?
John: No, no – we’re talking area. I’m talking area.
Marcus: Oh, I see.
John: I’m talking area. No, no.
Marcus: Got it.
John: No, the population? We’re way down the list. Thirty million people in the entire country.
Marcus: Yeah. Beers consumed? Number one, all the way.
John: Absolutely. All right, so the final plugin I’ve got here today is called WP Social Ninja. Initially, this one here was sent in to us by Hrove Krbavac – hopefully I got that name right. That’s kind of a tough one. And so it was sent in by one of our listeners out there, which we greatly appreciate. All the plugins that have been submitted to us are in a list to be reviewed.
Now at WP Social Ninja, I thought it was something different when I first read it. I thought it was a plugin that would allow when you created a post to automatically submit, and so I got it up and running. What it does is it’s just another plugin that adds social media icons to your site. Now, this one here, it’s just one of those basic plugins but it did have a couple of issues when I started to set it up.
I put it up on one of my test sites and it sent out the header errors issue, breaking everything, so it wouldn’t work there, so something was incompatible in that test site. So I thought, “Well, let me make sure it’s not just disconfiguration,” so I put it into another test site and it worked fine, so it was just my configuration. So it’s a pretty decent plugin; it allows you to choose the standard social media outlets. They’ve got a few different formats of the icons and the plugin is still in massive development it seems. There are several things that when I went to click on it, they said, “Oh, we’re still working on this. We’re still working on this.” You know, so there was way too much – over like 30% of the plugin wasn’t completed from what I saw. Other than that, it looks like it’s going to be a really great plugin once it’s fully completed. So check it out: WP Social Ninja, and I gave it a 3-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Good. All right, finally I want to bring to the attention a great new plugin. It’s called Woo Free Shipping Bar and what it does is it’s a bar on the top or bottom of the page, and it can be done in either desktop or mobile. You can select which one you’d like, both, or none, or any of that. And what it does is it gives you a threshold, say it’s $50 and you get free shipping after ordering $50 worth of merchandise, goods, or whatever it happens to be.
If I put $38 in, it says to me, “Hey, add another $12 into your cart and you’ll get free shipping,” and that’s exactly what this does. It just basically tells you how much more you need to add into the cart to get free shipping or lets you know that you qualify for free shipping. A very simple plugin; very good execution on it. I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: That’s very cool. That’s a great way to help encourage more sales, especially if it’s a visual thing —
Marcus: Right.
John: — at the top of the page. It sticks at the top of the page, I assume, right?
Marcus: Yes, it does.
John: That’s a very nice thing to have on your e-commerce store.
Marcus: Yeah! And make sure that you kind of do that single bill theory, right? So you want to make it so that, you know, some of your items maybe are $20 apiece but you get free shipping at $50.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Well, that means they’re going to order three items.
John: Yep, absolutely. Okay, well that covers up the plugins. This week here I covered up Last Modified Timestamp, which I gave a 4 to; Plugin Notes, which I gave a 4 to; and WP Social Ninja, which I gave a 3 to.
Marcus: And I reviewed Client Admin Message After Purchase for WooCommerce – long name, short score – gets a 3; WooCommerce Postmates Integration gets a 4 out of 5; and we just talked about Woo Free Shipping Bar, which I gave a 5 out of 5.