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 #428 here.
It’s Episode 428 and I’ve got plugins for Classic Editing, Social Sharing, Content Boxing, CP Security and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #428
John: It’s Episode 428 and I’ve got plugins for Classic Editing, Social Sharing, Content Boxing, CP Security and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.
John: Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.
And I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. Take a minute and subscribe to the Newsletter and get out there and hit everyone in the mouth. Spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and catch it live every Thursday at noon here on our YouTube channel.
All right, with all of that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, first off what do I got for you? I’ve got a great plugin here. Now, this one here was sent in by Angel Lemus from koadigital.com and a great listener out there, so thanks much, Angel. I really appreciate all your feedback into the show, and this is a plugin that I have used in the past and many people are using this. This is Classic Editor. He suggested I review it. I’m pretty sure I reviewed it last year sometime when it was first introduced, but let’s bring it back again. I mean after all, the Classic Editor is the one being used at WordPress and it’s being used by over 5 million plus users, giving you an idea on how much Gutenberg is enjoyed.
The Classic Editor, it’s an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team and this is supposed to be maintained until the end of 2021, and they say they may keep it longer but I’m not going to place too many bets on that one. I’d bet more on them trying to kill it, because they want Gutenberg. But if you’re still using WordPress and you want to maintain that comfortable look, feel, and the way it’s supposed to work, you’ll want to install this, the Classic Editor, onto your site.
It does work excellently, and it puts all of Gutenberg back into the box and brings back the Classic Editor, making it so you can still use the Tiny MCE editor and get all those nice, easy functions for your website. Really excellent little plugin; it’s a shame they had to produce it, but keep using it and being a great, free plugin, of course what do we give that? Only but a 5-Dragon rating.
There you go. Go check out the Classic Editor if you’re looking for a way to restore WordPress back to its regular functionality, this is the plugin for you.
Okay, a little bit of WordPress news and information. What do I got for you here? Well, we’ve got one going on and this has been going on for a little while, and it’s the new wave of buggy WordPress infections. Now, this one’s still talking about one of the main infections going on from Rich Reviews plugin. It seems that’s still being hacked.
They’ve also got a little bit over there about some cross-script and redirect issues that are going on, some injection stuff. This is a really good article to go read from the securityboulevard.com website, and they put out some regular information about hacks and other issues going on with WordPress at the moment, so go check that out.
Another great article I’ve got here for you is “The 10 Most Common Errors of WordPress Plugins.” Now, this is a really great article. You can follow through it and go check it out – is that it gives you a list of plugin problems and issues that you might face going down through it. It tells you some of the stuff that’s most common issues with plugins and what you can face. Pretty decent, intense article; it’s quite long but it could help you out if you’re having some errors with WordPress plugins.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about this next one here. This is a podcast that came to my attention. It’s from the Post Status and it’s a podcast talking with Matt Medeiros about the fear and uncertainty in WordPress, and this is a really interesting podcast. I took the time out to listen to it and listen to what Matt had to say about his thoughts on WordPress and where it’s going and what’s happening in the WordPress community. And if you’re at all interested, you will want to go check out this article.
I’ve got a link in the Show Notes which takes you to the podcast. The podcast is about an hour long, so it’s basically something you listen to while you’re doing something else, like most podcasts. But this is well worth taking the time and listening to. You might hear a few – you’ll hear a few decent insights on it. I can’t call them up to mind at the moment, but I did realize that they were talking about what’s going on with Gutenberg, etc. and where it is going, so this is something you’ll want to go check out.
And for those of you out there that are using Edit Flow on your WordPress websites, Automatic has discontinued active development of Edit Flow, and Edit Flow is a plugin that allowed for editors to manage and maintain the flow of content through their sites, especially if they have multiple editors. It talks a bit in the article about how they’re still maintaining it for their VIP customers over at WordPress.com, but they’re not going to maintain the plugin for the Repository anymore and they’ve got a couple of options in here for you to swap to if you’re going to get out of Edit Flow into something that will take care of your problem, like Publish Press and Publish Press has a seamless migration from Edit Flow to Publish Press. So this is something you’ll want to check out if you’re running a website where you are using multiple authors in it, creating content, and you want to maintain a flow of your articles. So go check that article out; the links are in the Show Notes.
Okay, a little bit of news. Well, the news from me is still the same. Plugin Dynamics, we came one step closer last week to making it to fruition. It’s looking like we’re going to have an official launch in January of our website and the plugins we’ve got. We’ve got three plugins that are ready to go for the most part. They’re being refined now, and the documentation is being created. That is our Date Calculator, our Metric Conversions calculator, and Tabular Data Dynamics, which is going to be our showcase plugin.
There’s going to be additional plugins coming along the line. We’ve got some plugins for Gravity Forms. We’ve got some plugins for a Tarot Reading and an Intranet Lockdown plugin coming, so we’re going to have a fair number of plugins when we launch in January, so I’m just going to keep bringing that forward so people can really anticipate it.
Okay, contests! We do have a contest this week, and our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, so thank you to them for providing the premium plugin which runs our contests. And this week, our current contest is sponsored by Social Rabbit, and Social Rabbit is a plugin I’m about to talk about in this episode and it is a plugin that helps you share out your content to your social networks. So you’ll hear all about the plugin here coming up next but go check this out and win yourself a premium license for this.
This is a premium plugin and the license is worth $69, so you’ll want to check this one out. And this contest will be running until October 31st and the winner will be announced on November 7th, so make sure you get in there and check it out and register yourself for this contest. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information. And remember, after you enter the contest, share it out on social media with the special link you get and earn even more chances to win the prize.
Okay, next up I’ve got for you Social Rabbit – this plugin. Now, this plugin here, I’ve gone back and forth talking to them, but they provided me with a key to give it a really good, thorough test drive – and I did give it a thorough test drive.
I was expecting to find warts, but I actually didn’t. This plugin, Social Rabbit – what it does for you is it allows you to connect up to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, connect those to your website, and then to start to share out your content. If you follow my Twitter feed or my Facebook feed in the last few days, you’ll notice a sudden increase in the number of posts that is being put out there and sharing my back catalogue of posts. Well, that’s what this plugin does for you.
You set it up, you choose the categories you want. You can choose random, older, newer posts. You can choose up what social network you go to, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, if you use all of them. The best part I found about this plugin was the setup. Most of the time when you’re setting up something that shares the social networks, you’ve got to go to each social network, you’ve got to create the API keys and the accesses, and it just takes forever and a day to get it all done.
This plugin made that task a really simple, easy thing to do. All you had to do was go in there, choose your network, make sure you were logged into your network, then click connect. It connects to your network; it tells you in Facebook’s instance what page do you want to use for sharing this. You can go choose the pages you’re going to share it to. Just make sure if you’re like me and you manage client pages, don’t share it to their pages – they’re liable to get upset. But it was very easy to set up. It worked the same for Twitter, then choose your content, and it even gives you some stats back about what’s happening inside the website, so you get an idea on what’s going on with it.
I found it to be easier than I expected with doing exactly what it says to do, a fantastic plugin – premium plugin – I got to check out the premium license so hey, this plugin here earned itself a top 5-Dragon rating.
Go check it out, Social Rabbit, a really fantastic plugin for adding to your promotions to your social media and driving traffic back to your website. I’m not certain yet because it’s only been a few days, but I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten some increase in traffic. I know I’ve gotten some increase in my Twitter feed and the number of people tweeting and retweeting my content, and those have been old posts that this plugin has pushed out there, so go check it out.
Okay, listener feedback! I do love listener feedback – good, bad, indifferent – please feel free to send me anything you want. You can go straight to wppluginsatoz.com/contact to do that and I do take your content seriously. And I had a suggestion last week for me to improve my Show Notes to make them easier to understand. Well, I am going to be doing that. I have been trying to work on a way to do it. A couple of suggestions that came in from Angel when he talked to me on it, I’ll be incorporating to make it easier so you can go in, find the Show Notes, be able to look at them, instead of just having them related to the way I’ve run them in the show itself, because I realize it is a bit confusing.
Anyway, so feedback, I am always up for feedback and SpeakPipe – anything. In fact, I probably need to re-add SpeakPipe back to the website since I swapped it over. I should probably look into that one.
Okay, this show is supported by you, our Producers. As a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And that value can be anything such as donating money to help the show out, submitting artwork at the WP Plugins A-Z Art Generator. Submit articles, news, and information. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. You can also create a monthly donation at Patreon or anything I may not have thought about. Just go to the Contact page and let me know.
I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways. This week I would like to acknowledge our – my brain – I would like to acknowledge our Executive Producer this week. We do have an Executive Producer, and that Executive Producer is Jezweb Pty. Ltd, and they came in with a donation of $50, so thank you very much Jezweb, and this is their note:
This donation is on behalf of Argyle Diamond Investments at https://www.argylediamondinvestments.com.au/ in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor. Thanks Jez.
Okay, so thank you much, Jez. I really appreciate the donation – really great website. And I want to note out one more thing about Jez, and this is – he helped me out a bit when I was switching everything to Elementor about a year ago when I started moving stuff to Elementor in that he has a fantastic Elementor theme called the Jello theme, and it’s available up at GitHub. I’ve got links in the Show Notes which will take you to those and you’ll want to check out his Child theme and his Primary Jello theme, and so you’ll want to check these out. These are really great – it’s a really great basic theme which strips out everything unnecessary and gives you a really good, clean starting interface. So make sure you go check that out. The links are in the show notes for that.
For all of those who came in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much. And I do also want to thank – this week’s art came from Angel Lemus of koadigital.com. So the artwork, I’m really excited to see more artwork. I’d like to see more artists submit. That artwork is used on the show art that goes into the post, the show art that is showcased up in the podcast players, so submit that artwork to me and I will use it up and showcase it out. So thank you very much, Angel. I greatly appreciate your time in producing that art for me.
Okay, this show here – well, normally I have an advertisement in this particular block, but I’m changing that up. I’m going to leave it empty for a couple of weeks. One, while I redo my own ad. But the other is I want to talk about a couple of new advertising opportunities I have to go on the show, and these opportunities are quite simple. One of them is that I’ve wiped away all the other offerings that I had on the website previous to my changing over to the new theme and everything else for the site, and what I’m going to be doing now is I’m going to offer one simple advertising block for the website. It is a monthly offering to any single person, company, Producer, plugin developer – whoever wants to do it within reason and that matches the type of people that listen to the show, etc. It’s an offering of a 728 x 90 banner that goes across the top of the page sitewide and a top featured ad spot here in the show. This ad spot here, they will get featured there. It is done on a monthly basis; there is no other options. It’s monthly and it’ll go from the beginning of the month to the end of the month, so that’s usually four, sometimes five shows in a month.
The second one is going to be a featured plugin for the show. This spot will basically be a pay-to-play spot, but it’ll be one episode. It will be for a featured plugin that gets an extended review of its functions and a training video created for the plugin that’ll be hosted on my YouTube channel. Before you submit, make sure of your plugin, for I will cover it, warts and all. So if the plugin has issues, it’s still going to be covered, because you’re going to be paying for it and there are no refunds, so keep that in mind. But if you’re interested in getting that sort of thing happen, please contact me and I will get it featured here.
All right, that’s all we’ve got for advertising. Let’s move along to the next little bit here, but I do need something to drink. That’s what I usually do with that ad is that I get something to drink here and get a hit on my vape.
All right, what we got here? The next plugin I’ve got for you, this is Drop Shadow Boxes. Now, this plugin here is one I have been using for about three or four years on the WP Plugins site. It’s really great. I still have it in some places, and it creates a drop shadow box to highlight content on your site. Very easy and simple box to create. It creates a button up in the editor for you. You open up the button, you add your content, you tweak the box for all the settings you want. You push enter, it enters all the shortcode right into your post, and voila, it’s done.
Really simple plugin, it works very well. He’s improved it quite a bit over the last few years. I’m really happy that he’s kept it up to date and kept it free, so thanks to Steven for doing that with this plugin. We’ll make sure you get a shout-out on Twitter for that, too. Anyway, a fantastic plugin, Drop Shadow Boxes, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
ClassicPress Options. Let’s talk about ClassicPress. Eventually, I’m going to get this stuff interspaced into the rest of the show so that it’s no longer sitting in its own little corner of the web. But ClassicPress this week here, I talked a bit about it last week. ClassicPress 1.1 has been released with some new features such as the security page, and we’ll talk more about that in a moment. Make sure you go check out the ClassicPress forums for latest news, updates, and other things that might be going on there.
And the ClassicPress plugin to talk about this week, which I alluded to last episode, is the CP Brute Force Login Protection plugin. Now, this plugin here is a fork of the Brute Force Login Protection from WordPress and it’s a very nice plugin. But what they added to it was they set it up to take advantage of the new security page in ClassicPress, and this new security page, this plugin lands on that page so you know it’s connected to security, and that’s where you click through to go do all the settings on this.
Now, if you go through and you download this plugin from its current GitHub repository, there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind, and I didn’t realize it when I was testing this plugin out, is that it needs to have the proper name for its folder, and they’ve got it labeled up as a dev when you download it from the website. They’ve added development to the end. When you get rid of development and all of a sudden, the plugin works exactly the way it’s supposed to.
I initially installed it and it wasn’t working and I’m like, “What?” Well, I’ve got a link to the forum address where they’ve got a good discussion going on about this plugin and what’s been going on with it – and that’s not the forum address. The forum address must be in another link here. There we go, here’s the forum address. They’ve got a good discussion here going on with – about this plugin, and partway through this they talk about that specific problem and went, “Oh, duh. There we go.”
So hopefully the developer gets in there and solves that issues and makes sure that when people download it, that it contains the right code so that when it unzips the folder, it gets the right name. Most people won’t want to do what I did, which was unzip it, change the name, then manually FTP up the file. What they want to do is download the zip file, upload the zip file through their administrative area, and have it just work. Anything beyond that is too much work, so that’s something to think about with it.
Other than that, a great plugin. It’s a great Brute Force Detection stops, helps slow down brute forces against your website. It adjusts your HT Access file to make sure that works the way it’s supposed to. A great little plugin. Make sure you go check out this plugin and I give the plugin itself a 5-Dragon rating, which of course is great!
But I have to give it a 4 for its deployment. You know, the deployment on this one is just kind of – eh, not so great today. But that’s an easy enough fix. The plugin? Fantastic. So go check it out and you will enjoy having it, and ClassicPress is coming up with some great stuff. I’m looking forward to more and more stuff as it’s developed.
Okay, check out the other areas of ClassicPress. You can go check out the ClassicPress Club for other news, information, and articles, and they are putting up some regular articles there about what’s happening. They’re starting to see more content there; in fact, he did a great article on that one specific plugin I talked about, showcasing how it looked before and how it looks with the new security page. So make sure you go check that stuff out.
All right, well that wraps everything up here. Aside from that, my little note for me. My experiment with migrating to the fully mature WordPress, the WP Plugins A-Z site to ClassicPress has been great. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’m slowly removing WordPress-specific plugins and replacing them with ClassicPress plugins or ClassicPress-supported plugins, so that I can have a better running website, because it runs fantastic and I’ve had good reports about the site. So if you’ve run into anything while using the WP Plugins A-Z site, let me know. I’m always open for information.
So closing out this episode, I covered up the Classic Editor, which I gave a 5 to; the Social Rabbit, which I gave a 5 to; the Drop Shadow Boxes, which I gave a 5 to; and the CP Brute Force Login Protection, which I gave a 5 to. Hey hey, that’s a full hand of aces. I haven’t done that in a while!
All right, and one quick reminder: The WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be on October 28th, and it will be covering site security for WordPress and ClassicPress and will be broadcast live on the YouTube channel. For the location and more information about the Meetup, please check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so thanks everyone for showing up and anyone who wants to ask questions after the credits roll, stick around and I’ll happily sit and chat with you. I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.