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 #308 here.
It’s Episode 308 and we’ve got plugins for Duplicating Menus, Video Thumbnails, WooCommerce Stickers, Disabling the Cart and Multi-step for Contact Form 7. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #308
John: All right, the first plugin I’ve got this week is called Duplicate Menu. Now, I may have reviewed it previously sometime in the distant past, but it’s returned back to the front and center for me while working on a recent project. The reason for it is sometimes you’ve built out really fancy menus for your WordPress website and now you have to make minor changes to that menu, pull a few things out, or even strip out half the items and replace them or just drop items.
What’s nice about Duplicate Menu is you install it, activate it, and it’ll take any menu you’ve got and duplicate it and allow you to give it a new name. Then you can just go in there and adjust and change the menu items you need, without having to go through and remove a whole bunch of items or add a bunch of items or read a bunch of items that you’re gonna need, plus one or two more. So anyway, it’s a really great plugin. It’s one of those plugins that just works and because of that, I gave it a perfect 5-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Yeah! We need a cowbell.
John: Ding, ding?
Marcus: Something. Yeah, I need something on this end when we celebrate these 5 out of 5s – excellent. Okay, you know there are certain things on WooCommerce. I’ve got two WooCommerce plugins today, because I’ve been fiddling around with the WooCommerce store. It is like stickers that appear over your products when there’s a sale, say if you put a regular price and the sale price, then it kind of defaults to this sticker. But for the most part, John, don’t you think those stickers – they kind of suck as far as what they have on them or the limitations of them.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: So if you want to put a new ribbon on – anything you want to put on – I’m talking “New,” “Sale,” “Out of stock,” “Coming soon,” any of those things – any text that you want, any color you want, any image within it that you want, this is the plugin for you. It’s called Custom Product Stickers for WooCommerce. It does all those things. It allows you to set the custom image, it’s position, and overlay of the product, you can set the color and text of the ribbon, what it says, any of those things, and full CSS editing to fully customize, to fully make the fonts match, everything else that you need to do. It’s called Custom Product Stickers for WooCommerce, and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: All right, well that’s a great one to have and I’ve always fought with that when I have worked with WooCommerce sites, so that’ll save you some definite time.
Marcus: Definitely.
John: So next up here, I have a plugin for dealing with videos on your website. I’m helping someone out with a video website. It’s a gamer who is throwing together a website to showcase the videos off of their YouTube channel. This first one here is called Video Thumbnails and what it does for you is it automatically goes in and grabs the YouTube video thumbnail and then attaches it as a featured image to the post that you’re creating.
Now, a nice thing about this plugin here is it also supports Vimeo, Facebook, and virtually every other video platform out there, including local uploaded videos to grab a thumbnail and then automatically stick it right into your post and also to take the image and stick it into your media library, helping to increase the load speed of your website in the process. All in all, a really great plugin that helps you out with everything you need video thumbnail-wise, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating so check it out: Video Thumbnails.
Marcus: Nice. There are some contact forms that are out there, namely Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular because it’s free, and then second is Gravity Forms. The one thing that I like about Gravity Forms is the ability to kind of split the form up so that it doesn’t appear like it’s ten feet long as far as the form itself. You want to break it off into little steps. Plus, it helps to get people a different mindset when they’re in a different page. But Contact Form 7 doesn’t do that out of the gate, but with this plugin called Contact Form 7 Multi-Step, it does.
It’s a really simple plugin to use. There’s tons of different styles; you can do horizontal or vertical orientation within the form, works in all the browsers, you can combine different steps for validation or anything like that. It’s just a really nice way to engrain Contact Form 7 in your site and still allow you to do that kind of multipage form. It’s called Contact Form 7 Multi-Step and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s very nice. There’s some nice plugins added to Contact Form 7 to start to make it sort of an actual useful form plugin.
Marcus: It’s coming around.
John: Yeah, it’s getting nice.
Marcus: Took them long enough.
John: Nice, well, one of the biggest things with Contact Form 7 is a lot of the fancier themes you buy now have Contact Form 7 embedded in there, and ripping out Contact Form 7 or replacing it with Gravity Forms is really a bit of a pain.
Marcus: Right.
John: So having all of these nice features for Contact Form 7 is making it a lot easier to use those themes out of the gate, instead of having to work extra hard to make them work well with a contact form system.
Marcus: Yeah, and frankly, I’m kind of sick of paying $100 a year for Gravity Forms. It’s nice but I don’t do anything with it that Contact Form 7 doesn’t do, and now this proves it even more.
John: Yeah, that could happen. All right, the final one I’ve got here today is called Top Ten Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress. Now, in particular, the website I’m using this one on right now is the video website featuring videos. The nice thing about it is it goes through and it measures how many times people are looking at your posts and figuring out which ones are the top ten, which could be constantly changing, and then displaying those top ten posts for you.
This plugin here makes the job of doing that a whole lot easier. It allows you to track and display the top ten most visited posts on your website, then it allows you to display them in a widget or on a post page with a shortcode. One of the great uses is using this to showcase the videos so that he knows which videos are his top ten videos and showcase them right on the front of his website. So as soon as people get there, they can see which are the best videos viewed.
It’s really clean, seems to work very well, so I gave it a 4-Dragon rating. Check it out: Top Ten Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress.
Marcus: Nice! And it displays thumbnails, all that kind of stuff?
John: Yep.
Marcus: Or just a list?
John: No, it displays thumbnails. You can display it in multiple ways as thumbnails or a regular list or just a title.
Marcus: Hmm…
John: Yeah, it’s got multiple ways to display it. It’s really kind of nice.
Marcus: And does it do it based on —
John: Views.
Marcus: — just views?
John: Just views.
Marcus: Not comments?
John: No, just views.
Marcus: Hmm…interesting. All right, we’ll wrap it up here with one final WooCommerce plugin. One of the things that people that run e-commerce stores and such have difficulty with is abandoned carts, right? You put a product in the cart and then they bail. Well, there’s an easy way to get away from abandoned carts, and that’s to disable the cart altogether. We’re going to show you this plugin and it’s called Disable Cart Page for WooCommerce, and it does simply that. It just redirects your customers directly to the checkout page as soon as they “add it to the cart” or hit the purchase button. It forces them to buy only one product at a time from your catalogue, but it also kind of changes the way that the whole checkout process goes and the way that you get to finalize your orders.
Now, is this for a store that has thousands and thousands of SKUs within WooCommerce? No. But is it great for if you’re having somebody sign up to one of two different levels of a membership site, a book, or something like that that you want to sell that you don’t think you’re going to get multiple units for anyway? Yeah, it’s perfect. So check it out; it’s called Disable Cart Page for WooCommerce and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice. You covered exactly the only concern that I would’ve had with it. It makes sense that way.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: All right, this week I covered up Duplicate Menu, which I gave a 5 to; Video Thumbnails, which I gave a 4 to; and Top Ten Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I rated Custom Product Stickers for WooCommerce, which gets a 5 out of 5, Contact Form 7 Multi-Step gets a 4 out of 5, and Disable Cart Page for WooCommerce gets a 4 out of 5.