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 #432 here.
It’s Episode 432 and I’ve got plugins for File Uploads, Site Notifications, The Goose is on the Loose, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WP Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #432
John: It’s Episode 432 and I’ve got plugins for File Uploads, Site Notifications, The Goose is on the Loose, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WP Plugins from 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 a 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’ve got a minute or two, please go subscribe to the Newsletter. Get out there, 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 that out of the way, lets just dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right first off, what do I got for you? Well, the first thing I’ve got for you right out the gate here is a really great little plugin. This is called WordPress File Upload Freemium. This is a freemium plugin and is a plugin to allow you to do file uploads to your WordPress site. So if you’re in need of a solution to allow file uploads for your clients, this may be an excellent solution for you.
I would use it carefully though and be careful about who you allocate to allow files to uploaded and what types of files, because if used by guests you could open a way for them to upload malicious content into your site. It’s a pretty easy to use plugin. You can determine which roles can be used in it. It allows you to set the roles, either administrator, guests, editors, etc., what can upload. Maybe you’ve got a membership site and you want to allow your members to upload files. Probably the best way to use this is with a membership site of some sort.
Using the plugin itself, just dump it into a page via a shortcode, it creates the forms. You can get in there an customize the form up, add some custom forms to ask for additional information to the plugin. This is a freemium version; the premium version has lots of extras to it that allow you to upload multiple files, unlimited file sizes. The premium version also allows you to upload files to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, so there are some advantages to premium on it. But the free version looks pretty decent and it looks like if you’re looking for a solution to allow file uploads to your site, this might just be the ticket. So go check this out. It’s called WordPress File Upload and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
WordPress news this week – what do we got? Well, a couple of quick pieces of information. GoDaddy launched their e-commerce hosting plan in partnership with WooCommerce, and so what they’ve done now is GoDaddy is going to – has partnered up with WooCommerce to offer an onboarding process for people to set up their WordPress sites and WooCommerce sites, supposedly making it easier. But in the end, you’re still on GoDaddy hosting, so keep that in mind. You know, probably a great idea but you’re still on GoDaddy hosting.
There was a cyber attack this last week. Avast was busy fighting it off and this was going after – what was that plugin name again? I can’t remember – CC Cleaner, that’s what it was. They were going after CC Cleaner as the plugin and they – I believe that’s all been repaired up, but if you haven’t done your updates, make sure you get in there and go check it out. This is a really interesting article; you’ll want to go check this all out.
I’ve got a couple of other great articles here. This one here is, “What Are Fake WordPress Plugins?” Now, this is one that I mention from time to time and I talk a lot to clients or potential clients or anyone who’s doing their own development and they’re looking at the cheapest ways to get premium plugins. Many of them will go after the premium plugins that are given away on sites and go, “Oh, it’s a premium plugin. I don’t have to pay for it.” Well, you might be paying for it in other ways, so this is a good article talking about the security issues around not paying for a premium plugin and not getting it from the author’s source and authenticated sources for the plugin. So it’s something you’ll want to read and if you’ve got clients, you might want to share this information with them so that they can come to the understanding of the value of actually paying for premium version plugins. A really good article, well done, so go check that one out.
And finally, we have the October roundup of WordPress vulnerabilities. This is Part 2 from iThemes and I iThemes is pretty good about putting this out on a regular basis and they talk about some plugins that you want to get rid of. In particular, Broken Link Checker. This one here is vulnerable; you need to uninstall this plugin. I don’t believe it’s been updated in quite a while. And yeah, they say here, Manage WP, they don’t maintain the plugin and will not release a patch. So if you use it, turf this plugin fast.
Now, Broken Link Checker plugins have been around for a long time. They used to be of value; now I’m not so sure of their value. There’s other ways to check your broken links on a website. You can get something like Screaming Frog, do a scan of your website, find your broken links that way – much better than loading your website up with a plugin like this, because they take a crapload of resources to run. I’ve got Events Manager, EU Cookie Law – there’s just a whole list of plugins here. Now, most of them have been all repaired, but it’s a good list to review in case you haven’t done your updates. And also, you might want to follow these guys so you can be ahead of the game when something comes out. So go check all that little bits of information out.
That’s all I’ve really got this week on the WordPress news.
Contests! Yes, the contest is running through till the end of tonight, October 31st. We are giving away something.
Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, really great guys. They provide us with the premium version of their plugin to run our giveaways, and we are currently giving away a license for Social Rabbit. This is really a great plugin. It’s one that I’m using myself on the WP Plugins A-Z site. It allows you to pump out your content out to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the other guys. I forget who they are. You can tell I’m not a big social media person.
So at any rate, go check this plugin out. It’s a really great plugin; well worth the money if you can afford it. If you want to try and win it, get in there, enter the contest. Today is the last day to do that, and I reviewed that plugin back in Episode 428 of WP Plugins A-Z. The link is in the Show Notes. Go check it out.
And to enter the contests, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests.
Okay, the next plugin I have for you is called Notification – Custom Notification and Alerts for WordPress. Now, this one here is a really great one. I haven’t gotten it fully tested yet, but I’ve already started through it. And what does this one do for you? Well, first off, it replaces all the default emails in your WordPress website with some really great custom notifications and you can take control of all the emails that your website is sending out – a really great plugin for that. This is a freemium plugin; they do have a whole bunch of addons for it.
But with this plugin, you can eliminate all default emails, create your own set of emails with custom triggers, send them out through push notification systems or email or even merge in some useful data to those emails such as user info, post info. There’s some really great built-in options for this plugin. But if that’s not enough, you can add custom triggers of your own using some coding, and they help provide some of the ways to get that custom coding done in their documentation.
It comes with great extensions – well, it has some great extensions available – not comes with – has great extensions available that start at about $15 and go up, and they will expand this out to all of your specific needs that you might need. All in all, this is really a great plugin for taking control of those sent from WordPress emails and those emails that you can never seem to get the outgoing address changed that’s just a whole lot of additional work. All in all, a really great plugin. Being that it is a freemium plugin, you know, I have to give it a 4-Dragon rating. But, you know, with some of the other addons, who knows? It could pop right up to a 5. So it’s something you might want to go check out is Notification – Custom Notifications and Alerts for WordPress.
Okay, listener feedback – I’m still looking for it. Send me some listener feedback. Just go to the Contact page, hit the SpeakPipe button down in the lower right-hand corner – any number of ways to reach out and get a hold of me, and I will get your stuff on the air.
This show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. You can do that by donating money to the show. Donations $50 and over are credited with Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes and the note is read out on the show. You can submit artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Submit articles, news, information. Submit plugin suggestions for review. You can also create a monthly donation at Patreon or anything I haven’t thought of.
And this week, I want to acknowledge our show art, which the show art is really great. I really like having different show art from myself doing this and all you’ve got to do is submit it through the Art Generator. There’s – on the Art Generator page you can download my logos to incorporate it into the artwork, which will be really great. The artwork is used to showcase the show on iTunes. The artwork is showcased on the page post. You know, if I’ve got the planning up, I’ll even start work on incorporating the artwork into the YouTube videos themselves, so that one there is kind of an oddball; I would have to get people to create the elongated thumbnail for YouTube.
Anyway, this week I want to thank Angel Lemus of koadigital, who has supplied the artwork for this week’s show. A really great image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and just kind of works really good with today’s theme of Honk for Humanity.
For all those who come in below $50, thank you very much, and a big thank you to those under $50 and those who have set up weekly subscriptions. They help and they remain anonymous and I thank you very much.
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Absolutely. And please, use the links in my Show Notes. They are affiliate links; I would greatly appreciate it.
All right, and the last plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Honkify. I know, Honk for Humanity. All right, this plugin here, this is just for fun and for creating additional chaos to your website. All you get to do with this plugin is you install it, activate it, then you trick your users into pressing the Y-key and then every link on your website, every time they click it if they’ve got speakers turned on, they get a big honk from their computers. That’s all it does. It does nothing special; it just creates a little bit of chaos in this wonderfully organized world we have today. It’s just kind of fun. Go check it out, it’s a great little fun one. And because it’s just fun, actually works, we’re going to give it a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress Options. Of course, ClassicPress – that fast-growing fork of WordPress. I’ve been covering that for a little better than a year – almost a year now I’ve been covering it in my shows. Actually, I think I started covering it last November sometime. It might even have been December when I first introduced it, so as soon as I heard about it, I started including it into the show.
At any rate, right now it’s been kind of a – been a little lull. There’s not a lot of information coming out of them, but I did find a couple of pieces of information and articles here. The first one is an article from Rough Pixels, and they are talking about “The Future of WordPress Themes and ClassicPress Themes,” and this is a good article going into discussion about how Gutenberg is looking to kill the theme industry in WordPress and what they are doing about it and how they are staying focused. They’re getting to put some focus into making sure all of their themes work with ClassicPress. A really great article; you’ll want to go check this one out. Some good information, some good tips and stuff that you might not be aware of.
And we’ve got another article from CodePotent, who’s really great. He’s been a very active proponent in ClassicPress, and he’s been really active in helping me out and getting me information, so a big shout-out to CodePotent. This is his “2019 Year in Review” article about what he’s done, the things he’s done for his website, a list of his plugins, his plugin directories, tutorials, social channels, core contributions, etc. – a whole lot of information. So this is something you’ll want to go check out. Go read this article; it’s really well worth the time and a shout-out to CodePotent too for making mention of me in a post of his recently, so thank you very much.
That’s really all I’ve got right now on ClassicPress. I’ve got to do some more digging and find some more information. My life has been rather chaotic in the last few months, so it’s been taking me a little while to get everything going. I’ve kind of managed to keep this show going and a few other things going, and the chaos seems to be edging and easing off. Maybe it’s because we’re heading back into another Mercury retrograde and it’s time to do some retrospective and figure things out.
The usual resources are listed in the Show Notes for the ClassicPress Club, the must-have plugins list, the ClassicPress Forums for ClassicPress-specific built plugins, and CodePotent’s directory, all listed there in the Show Notes. So go check all that information out and I’m sure you will find it useful especially if you’re looking to move towards ClassicPress. Go join the forums; they’ll be happy to have you onboard because they can use – they’ll be happy to bring in all the hands that come in to help.
So what did I cover up in this episode? I covered up the WordPress File Upload plugin, which I gave a 4 to; the Custom Notifications, which I gave a 4 to; and then the Honkify, which I gave a 5 to.
A couple of quick reminders…. I do have a new interview that I forgot to get posted earlier this week, but I will get it posted later this week – probably on the weekend. After the weekend is over, I’m off camping but it’s with Kim Gjerstad from Mail Poet, so make sure you look for that – and I also reviewed that plugin in the last episode, so go check that out.
And the next WordPress Meetup – in case you missed the last one – it’s up on our YouTube channel so you can go check that out. The next one will be on November 28th and the topic, I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. We’re still coming up with a topic for it. If you’ve got suggestions, something you’d like to see, please drop me an email to john@wppro.ca and I’ll be happy to see if I can incorporate it in there. So you can go check that out at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for all the times and information for our upcoming Meetups for the rest of the year.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for you, 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.