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 #431 here.
It’s Episode 431 and I’ve got plugins for Newsletters, Content Insertion, Flying Birds and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #431
John: It’s Episode 431 and I’ve got plugins for Newsletters, Content Insertion, Flying Birds 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 of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you could, go take a minute or two, subscribe to the Newsletter to get more information. 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 on our YouTube channel.
All right, with all of that little bit out of the way, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, I have the usual set of great plugins today interspersed with other miscellaneous stuff. But right off the top, you get one good plugin out of the gate. And of course this week here, what have I got for you? I’ve got a really cool plugin for you and it’s something I have done many, many years ago. I reviewed this plugin way back when I first started the show, probably five or six years ago. And I tried to use it a couple of times off and on over the years and then I sort of let it go and let it drop, and it would come back up to my surface once in a while.
Well, it came to my surface again and it is called Mail Poet. And if you have not checked out Mail Poet, Mail Poet is a plugin to give a good look over again. I had a great interview with the developer of the plugin. That is coming up next week. But in the meantime, I also needed to get a review done on the plugin and checking it out, it is in really great shape. It’s a whole lot easier than it used to be for creating newsletters in it. They also have their own mailing service built with the plugin itself.
So if you have a thousand subscribers or less, you actually get free access to their mail service, which is much like MailChimp – you know, sending out your newsletters. The difference is you’re not using their service for your newsletter; you’re using your local WordPress website. And it appears it’s going to work in ClassicPress. I haven’t fully tested it yet, but we’ll know that soon enough.
At any rate, it’s really great. It’s – the templates in the backend for setting up your newsletters are really excellent drag-n-drop stuff. It does automatic pull-in of your posts or pages. It does automatic categories. It’s got some really good design features to it to allow you to customize it up and make the newsletter easily to put out. It also has a really excellent integration into the WooCommerce system if you’re using WooCommerce.
So if you’re looking at a way to manage your newsletters and manage them from your website instead of depending not completely on a third-party service like MailChimp or someone else who’s constantly improving their customer experience (or your customer experience, I should say), you might want to give this one a go. Everything I checked out on it, it’s popping right up to the top of the list now for a plugin that is fully functioning and delivering on what it should deliver. They’re continuing to make improvements to it, and you’ll have to check out the interview I did with Kim about this plugin, which will be released next week. So at any rate, Mail Poet, I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Go check it out! Mail Poet is quite good these days.
All right, a little bit of news, information – what have we got for you this week? I’ve got a couple of the articles here. I got an article here for “A Complete Guide to Starting a WordPress Maintenance Business.” This comes from Managed WP. So if you’re looking for ways to improve your business and expand out a little bit to maintenance, this is a really good article you’ll want to check out and find what they have to say. They’ve got some really great ideas and tips in here for building out your WordPress maintenance business.
Now of course, if anyone’s been following the show for any length of time, you’ll know that I have been dealing with WordPress Multisite off and on over the years. At one point I even had the WP Plugins A-Z site tied into a MultiPress site and the experiment went well for a while and then it went sideways on me. But I’m having to work with WordPress Multisite again, and so I decided to do a bit more research, see how it’s changed, updated. I’ve noticed how the system has changed.
This is a really great article. It’s “Why Subdomains for Multisite is a Bad Idea,” and this I something you will want to go read if you’re contemplating a WordPress Multisite. And if you’re like me, initially I thought the subdomains was the best way to go, and initially it probably was. But things have changed, the internet has changed, DNS has changed. This is an article you’ll want to give a good read to. I’ve read it through, and I really like the information they present about what to do with WordPress Multisite and subdomains versus subdirectories. So go check out this article here.
One more article here is “4 Immediate Steps to Take Once Your WordPress Website is ready.” I don’t know why they keep calling it a blog. Well, I guess it really is a blog, but most of them are WordPress websites. These are things you’ll want to do once you’ve installed WordPress and before you actually get to creating content, such as your theme and plugins, such as getting the mandatory pages such as About Us, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, GDPR, etc., what process is, and then things to get going on. A really great article, some really great tips and information in there. Go check that out.
All right – for me, no real news this week. Keep aware, Plugin Dynamics is getting closer and closer. It will be out soon.
And we do have a contest running. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, a great little plugin for powering contests on your WordPress website. Go check it out.
And what do we got this week? I have the plugin – I have a tongue. It’s somewhere in the back of my head – there it is. All right, the plugin we have this week that we’re giving away a license for is Social Rabbit. Simple to enter the plugin – enter the plugin – enter the contest – simple to enter the contest. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests, enter your name and email address, and enter the contest. This is a really great plugin. I started using it a few weeks ago on WP Plugins A-Z and it works excellently for sharing out your content to the main four social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Excellent – it shares out content on a schedule, and although I’m still going, I need to…
I just lost my livestream for some reason. There we go! We’ve reconnected to the livestream. For those of you that are live, so be it. Anyways, we’ll continue on with the regular show and livestream may drop in and out. So, at any rate, go check out the contest, enter the contest, and for more information on the plugin, go check out Episode 428 where I reviewed this plugin.
All right, next up what do I have for you? I have Simple Post Inserter. This is a simple plugin for inserting content into your site. Now, there’s lots of plugins out there to insert content into your site in varied ways, and this is another one that I took a look at and realized it’s a pretty decent plugin for doing simple content insertions. What it allows you to do is it allows you to create HTML content, text, whatever you want to do, and insert it into your site. You can choose which paragraph it appears after, you can choose which post type that the content appears in, or what post category to insert it into, so it can focus like that.
Now, it also focused all the way down to a single post ID, so this is pretty basic in what it does and it’s kind of focused in what it does do. It looks to be a very excellent plugin, it seems to set up very well, and the content does appear. So go check this out – not a bad plugin. It’s just got too much of a laser focus, I think. It needs to have a little bit more variance in it such as varying more than one piece of content or other things with it. Who knows? It’s a brand-new plugin. Go check it out, Simple Post Inserter, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, feedback. I do like feedback, believe it or not. I don’t get enough feedback; I would really like more feedback from people. So if people want to send me feedback, be it SpeakPipe, email, Twitter, Facebook – any of the many places that the show exists, please feel free to reach out to me. I will do my best to get back to you and get your content into the show.
This show is also 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 by becoming a Producer and helping the show out. You can do that by donating money – money is always good. It helps the show out, pay its expenses. Donations of $50 and over, the note from the donor is read out over the air and they get Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes. Submitting artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Submit articles, news, and information. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. You can also create a monthly donation over at Patreon.
And I do like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show. This week, I would like to acknowledge the artwork which comes from Angel Lemus from Koa Digital, so go check out his website at koadigital.com. The links are in the Show Notes. His artwork has been gracing the show for the last few weeks and I’ve only got a couple of pieces left, so it’ll be back to my artwork soon enough unless somebody else starts submitting some more artwork to me.
All right, this show here is brought to you by…
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All right, next up what do I got for you? All right, the final WordPress plugin of the day, this one here is just a simple, fun, little plugin. It’s called Black Crow CSS Flying Bird and what it does for you – once you activate the plugin, insert the code into your post wherever you want this to appear, you will get a small black crow flying across your screen. It looks kind of cool, doesn’t do a whole lot. It just adds a little bit. I have a new website I’m working on that has an outdoor kind of theme to it, and it’s kind of cool to have a bird fly across one of the images. It makes it kind of stand out just a little bit. It’s not in your face, a really excellent plugin, works well, does what it’s supposed to do, has no problems that I can notice or find. Go check it out – and of course a plugin like that gets a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, what do we got next up for you? A little bit of ClassicPress Options. What do we have for ClassicPress this week? A couple of pieces of news for you, and these are more articles than news but first up is an article from the ClassicPress website, the ClassicPress blog. It’s an article about “Translating a ClassicPress Plugin by AzureCurve,” and this is a really good article talking about how to go about dealing with translating the plugin. They’ve got a whole series of information on that, so if you’re looking for further information an education, go check out this article.
And CodePotent, he’s an active guy. He’s continually writing and producing training tips and articles on what you can do. This is a nice article about modifying the ClassicPress head section of your site and dealing with tags and other miscellaneous stuff. He puts in a sample code and other bits and pieces for you in there. A really good article; go check this one out from CodePotent.
Some good news here, the ClassicPress 1.1.1 security release is out and it’s got a couple of additional updates in it. Go check that out. It’s good to know that it is continuing to be developed and that people are paying attention to it.
They’re not abandoning this. ClassicPress is going to grow, I’m certain of it.
And make sure you go check out the ClassicPress forums from time to time just to see what’s happening. If you want to get involved in the community, that’s a great place to get involved. They could always use more help and have some more things come up and happen here.
All right, and I don’t really have much else from them this week. Oh, I do have one plugin from AzureCurve, and this is the ClassicPress Filtered Categories plugin to filter out your categories down through the system. A really interesting plugin; I don’t give it a rating because I haven’t tested it, but I just wanted to bring it to mind for everyone that there are plugins for ClassicPress, and it is going to be growing up and doing quite well as time moves along.
All right, and that’s pretty much all I’ve got there. The usual stuff for ClassicPress, just go check out the listings in the Show Notes for all the links to all the various items there.
So I covered up in this episode here, I covered up the Mail Poet plugin, which I gave a 5 to; the Single Post Inserter, which I gave a 4 to, and then the Black Crow, which I gave a 5 to.
A couple of quick reminders – again, I do have a new interview coming out next week with Kim Gjerstad from Mail Poet. Look for it; it’s a really great interview. It’s a little bit longer than most of my interviews. We had so much great information going that the interview just extended out.
The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is Monday, October 28th, so that’s next week – coming up next week. Now, it’s going to be covering site security for your WordPress/ClassicPress website and things you’ll want to do and it’s going to be down for a basic kind of use instead of advanced stuff. It’s going to be down for an average user who can’t really afford to do things with hiring developers, trying to do it themselves. This is what I’m trying to focus more of these meetups on is for those people there. So if you can’t make the meetup, be sure to tune in to the YouTube channel because it will be live, or you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/live and check it out live. Or, go check out – for the location, go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup to find out where it’s going to be.
And that’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you today, so I’m going to 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.