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 #437 here.
It’s Episode 437 and I’ve got plugins for Biometrics, Event Tracking, Downloading and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #437
John: It’s Episode 437 and I’ve got plugins for Biometrics, Event Tracking, Downloading 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’ve got a couple of minutes, get out there and subscribe to the Newsletter. Hit everyone in the mouth, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and you can catch it live every Thursday at noon on our YouTube channel. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/live.
All right, all of that’s out of the way. Now of course this being the Christmas holidays and all of that jazz, well, things are not flowing exactly according to plan and news gets a little light, along with my workload is a little crazier than usual again. So, this’ll be a great show, but it’ll be off a little… maybe. Maybe not. I might just be off.
All right, let’s get off and join into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, what have I got for you right off the bat? Now, the plugins I’ve got for you this week, I have not had a chance to test them. I’m just looking them over and some interesting ones I’ve plugged – or I found – and I checked out whatever descriptions or testings that they may have had for them.
So first off, what do I have for you? I have one here that makes me interested and cringe at the same time. A biometric login for your WordPress website. This will allow you through a third-party service it looks like, to set up a plugin on your site that if you’ve got a fingerprint reader attached to your computer, your phone, or wherever it’s at, if you’ve got a phone, you’ve got a fingerprint reader. But what it allows you to do is it gets you in there and lets you set up and use fingerprints as a login for your site.
Now, while this would be very nice and secure, I guess I’m a paranoid one and I don’t want to have my fingerprint spread out over the globe and then… although they’ve probably done that anyway. Let’s face it: most of our personal information these days is not overly well-protected, you know. All you’ve got to do is check the news to find out how well-protected it is.
At any rate, nice and simple to install. You can install this plugin, enable it, enable the sign-in registration to your site, it leaves in the domain. Now, there is a bit of a warning. The plugin relies on sessions, so with some server configurations, it may not work well. All in all, it looks like it’d be pretty good and if you’re on bleeding-edge technology or you want to be there, go check out this Finger Login plugin and it will allow you to set up fingerprint logins for your WordPress website. And according to them, they tested it with Version 7.25 of PHP, so it’s pretty up there with the latest – not quite the latest and greatest, 7.3 and 7.4, which is out now.
All in all, it looks like it might be a good plugin. I’ll stick it right into the average zone and we’ll give this a 3-Dragon rating.
Next things we’ve got, we’ve got some news for you this week. A couple of pieces of news here. Now, this one here is kind of following along of where I think Gutenberg is headed, and that is to be a full-blown page builder. You keep seeing articles and other information. “Oh, it’s not a page builder. It’s just to help you edit this,” and then you hear the things from Matt, saying, “It’s going to be a page builder,” and then you hear the rumours that it’s going to end up replacing themes. It’s – nobody knows. Truthfully, I think it’s going to be a page builder, especially this initial document that was created. It outlines how to create themes based upon WordPress blocks, and this one here is kind of interesting. They’ve given out a basic style structure: CSS, the functions folder, and then block templates and block template parts. So this is what they’re looking at.
This is the initial wave of it, so it is coming. It’s coming; it’s changing. You might want to go check out this article here. It’s an interesting one from the WordPress Tavern and their new, cleaner look that I don’t overly like. I really liked the old look; it was more down-to-earth. This is kind of meh. It could be worse. But at any rate, go check it out.
Go check out the article.
Another article I’ve got for you here, if you’re looking at repairing, updating, running scans and checks on your site, this is a nice article from Security Boulevard and it is “Five Different Website Vulnerability Scanning Tools,” not just WordPress, but any website. It’s got one here for unmasking parasites, report, WP can, the manage engine vulnerability manager list – well, what’s that doing in there? Well, Manage Engine Vulnerability Manager Plus, okay. Rapid 7 Expose – these are some interesting tools, a couple of them I’ve never heard about, but I will add them in to my arsenal of things that I often need to deal with when I’m working on hacked or cracked websites, etc.
Go check out this article, something that may be of use and of value to you.
And of course, unless you were under a rock last week, this came out shortly after I did my show was when I actually noticed it when I went to post it up and I suddenly had this big, giant banner ad that was a pain in the neck to dismiss from Yoast. And I thought, “What a pain in the neck! Why the hell did they do that?” And then of course it hit everywhere. Everybody was upset, Yoast apologized. I’ll give them credit on their apology. They actually took full-on credit for doing something stupid and have promised not to do it again. But that still leaves the question. That means every plugin out there has that capability to do that in that you can write into your site code that will trigger on a specific date. Because if you read the articles about it, that code was set to trigger. It was introduced over a month ago into the Yoast during one of their updates and it was set to trigger on Black Friday, and that’s what occurred.
So this is something to think about and if they can do that with a plugin, what else can be done with a plugin? So you’ve got to make sure you’re getting your stuff from trusted sources and even your trusted sources sometimes fall down and do something stupid. Go read the article. It’s kind of interesting. It tells you a little bit about it and from my perspective, this was something that was really actually quite dumb for them to do. They could’ve done a bit better of a job of it and maybe a lesser size banner, maybe something that was less intrusive, maybe something that was easier to dismiss. I tried to dismiss it a couple of times and ended up landing on their site. It was really quite an irritant, so they should’ve tested it.
All right, and one final little bit of news from the Tavern, and this is a “Gutenberg One Year Later” article where from my reading of the article, this is basically a Gutenberg fluff piece and they’re wanting to assure everyone that everyone that’s using Gutenberg is loving it to no end. They’re all happy; nobody’s upset. Well, they sort of pretend that there’s some upset people, but they’re gonna be happy. Trust me, we know what you want. We know what’s good for you. We’re the doctor, you’re the patient. You have no idea what’s wrong with you, take this pill. It’s going to help solve your problem.
So at any rate, it’s an interesting article. It’s a good fluff piece on Gutenberg. But if you’re like many people, which of course there’s still over five million people using the Classic Editor, and they’re going, “Oh, but the Classic Editor use is going down. The number of people activating it on new sites.” Well probably, but that’s simply because maybe they’re just moving off to elsewhere and not going into WordPress, and only the ones that are sold on Gutenberg are creating new sites, you know. So who knows? At any rate, a good article; an interesting one. It tells you a bit about what’s going on in the Gutenberg world. Go check out the article.
What do we got up next for you? Just a little coverage over the contests. I still haven’t managed to make the time yet to get my contests in order. I will try and get that squared away by next week and we will get another contest up and running, and we’ll let you know as soon as that goes. Just follow us on Twitter, Facebook, the website. That’s where we’ll announce it all before we get it to the show.
Next up, what do I have for you here? The following the plugin, Events Tracker for Elementor. This is an addon to Elementor and this one looks quite good. It’s probably one I will give a good test to because I want to start tracking some of the things that happen on my websites. And what it does for you is it allows you to track things such as button widget clicks, image widget clicks, header widget clicks, from widget submit. They’re getting ready to add into it a sidebar widget, call to actions, pricing tables, icon box, image icon, social icons, etc.
Basically what it is, it’s an analytic plugin to help you find out what is going down on your website, where people are clicking, what they’re clicking on, what they’re doing, and it’s a great way to find out what people are doing. This is a relatively new plugin, less than 100 active installs. Get in early now while the getting is good. All right, a really great looking plugin. I really liked the way it’s sounding and what it can do for you. I’m going to give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out, the Events Tracker for Elementor.
Listener feedback – I do have some this week, so thank you very much to all my listeners out there that kick some feedback to me. Now, this one here came in and it says:
“John, in your Pugs No More Episode 434, you highlighted a master slider. It’s the thing I was looking for since those slider options are not available in Elementor.”
Yeah, that’s the reason I was hunting it down.
“But you said you can only enter one image at a time, and I have sliders for one of my clients with 100 photos or more, so I was disappointed, but I decided to try it and you can multiselect multiple images by clicking and drawing the selection over all the image icons. So it works perfect and I love it.”
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that and you’re right, you can drag over. But what I also discovered after I’d said that is that you can hold the Control button down and click all the images you want, so you can click them randomly throughout the scrolling list of images. That’s the one thing I missed when I was in my testing; it just didn’t seem to work when I was trying it. I don’t know what it was. It’s one of those things. But yeah, it is a great plugin for creating slider galleries and that’s the whole reason I hunted it down was because I was building a site in Elementor and I needed that specific gallery, and I needed to add a whole bunch of images to it a couple of days ago to finish off the site, and that’s when I discovered the additional tricks.
So thank you very much for sending in that point – that information into me and there’s another tip is you hold the Control button down and click the images.
I’ve also got a little tidbit from Trinity Audio, which I reviewed in Episode 436, and it’s:
“Hi John,
Following up on my previous email, your readers can be part of the first wave of using our AI Text-to-Speech plugin for free.”
So just go to the link in the Show Notes and go check it out. That’s a pretty interesting plugin. It seems like it’s not doing too bad on my site.
All right, that’s all I got there.
Now, this show is supported by you, the Producers. As a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, then please give some value back by becoming a Producer and helping the show out. You can do that by one, getting out there and hitting everyone in the mouth, telling all the people you know about this show. Say, “It’s fantastic. It’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s the second best thing since the best podcast in the world, which of course is the No Agenda show.” But, you know, I can’t take their thunder but hey, that’s where – I’ve stolen enough from them already. We’ll let them keep their title.
At any rate, you can donate money to help the show out. Donations of $50 and over are credited with Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the show. You can submit artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. You can submit articles, news, and information. Submit plugins suggestions for reviews or even submit me a full-blown review. I’ll actually use it in the show. You can also create monthly donations at Patreon or anything I haven’t thought of.
This week, I would like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways. And of course, we’ll talk about the artwork first and the artwork is really kind of a cool thing because what I use the artwork for is it goes into iTunes, it’s used on the pages, it will – I’m working at creating the necessary gallery to display all of the artwork that’s been received over the shows into there and so you can check out all the artwork there.
This week’s artwork comes from Angel Lemus of Koa Digital, and Angel supplied me with a whole bunch of artwork. So if you want to knock him out of the title here, feel free to submit the artwork and we’ll start looking at it. Maybe eventually I’ll get so much I’ll have to judge it after each show.
This week’s Executive Producers goes out to Jezweb Pty. Ltd. with a donation of $50, so thank you very much, Jezweb. And his note this week is:
This donation is on behalf of Argyle Investments at argylediamondinvestments.com.au in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb at Jezweb.com.au and the site was built with Elementor.
So Jezweb, he’s the one that got me turned on to Elementor and actually got me moving forward in his base theme that I use for all my Elementor sites. It’s just fantastic because it just gives you a clean, easy platform to build on, nothing’s in your way so you can create some really creative websites. So thanks a lot, Jez. I really appreciate your support over the last couple of years. You’ve been fantastic. So if you’re looking for something and you live down there in Down Under, go check out Jezweb, man. They’re really great guys and they’ll make sure they do good work for you, I’m sure.
So a big thank you to all our Producers who came in under $50 and those who have set up weekly subscriptions. All those things really help the show out a lot.
And a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the podcast. Thank you – that’s as good as donating to the show.
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Absolutely. CMS Commander is a fantastic program. I’ve been using it for, oh, God, going on eight years now, I think. Ah, maybe not quite eight years. I’ve been doing this show for eight years, so maybe seven years for CMS Commander. It’s a fantastic system. It manages multiple sites. I’ve had as many as 100 sites in mine at one point and now I’m down to about 60 or so. But go check it out and please use the links in the Show Notes to go for your 14-day trial as it is my affiliate link.
Okay, next up what do I have for you? I have one here that is a download button for Elementor. This is another Elementor element. I keep hunting down additional Elementor elements as I need them and elements that I know I’m going to need. This one here, very simple to use; straightforward. It creates a download button for Elementor.
It’s a customized widget. You drag-n-drop, put it in where you want it, customize it up the way you like it, then you choose the file you want from your WordPress media library for people to download.
This is a great way if you put mp3 files, PDF files, specific things that you need people to download. You can create it with this button. Set it up, put it where you want it, make it big, large, however small, whatever you want to do with it, and make it pretty. You can give them a nice, easy, simple download. A very nice, simple, straightforward plugin. Go check it out, the Download Button for Elementor, and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress. What do we have for ClassicPress this week? Well, the news has been light as of late in ClassicPress. I keep hunting and searching, and I catch little bits here and there. But of course we’re in that slow time of year for pretty much everyone and they don’t have a lot going on. But there is a couple of really great pieces of news that have come out and they’ve come out in the last week.
If you’re a Beaver Builder user, then you will be happy to know that it now supports ClassicPress and they have said that they are going to continue to support ClassicPress. This is a little note direct from one of the developers of Beaver Builder and it’s a really great thread in the ClassicPress forums. You might want to go follow the link in the Show Notes and read it out. And of course Beaver Builder is a really great page builder system. I kink of looked at that one before I settled on Elementor, but I had so much stuff that would help me with Elementor versus Beaver Builder, and I only know one other developer myself that uses Beaver Builder. But you may know more. It is a pretty big community and it is a pretty great plugin I’ve heard.
All right, and one other piece of news and I think I may have mentioned it in the last show, but that is that Installation, which is a one-click installation system that is on many hosting providers, now supports ClassicPress.
So ClassicPress will be available to the one-click installation processes on hosts, so that’s good news, too. So there’s more and more bigger and bigger companies and developers and others are beginning to embrace ClassicPress, which means they’re finally starting to take them seriously.
So ClassicPress is going to do very well as time goes on. This next year is going to be incredible to watch how they go and watch what happens when the WordPress community has more and more people flake off and move away from it. I’m about – 30% of my sites have moved away from WordPress. You know, in the next couple of years I’ll probably eventually get close to 100% of my sites out of there. There may be one or two that I may not be able to move out of WordPress just because of certain customizations that I will have to deal with.
All right, and of course we have the usual ClassicPress resources. Go check out the ClassicPress Club, which is a non-official ClassicPress forum and website with lots of ClassicPress news. So it’s information that is above and beyond what you might find at the ClassicPress forums. I think this one is starting to grow pretty decently, so go check that one out.
The must-have plugin list, these are the plugins that people feel are needed for ClassicPress and if a solution has been found yet. So this is a good list to find out if you have a must-have plugin and somebody may have already suggested a permanent solution for it, so go check that out. Then there’s also the ClassicPress-specific plugin list which is maintained by CodePotent and this one here still hasn’t grown any. It’s still kind of hanging out at 42. A few more developers, if you’ve got a ClassicPress-specific plugin, go submit it to CodePotent and he’ll stick it on that list for you.
All right, that’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you this week, so we’re going to wrap it up there. I’m going to close out this episode. The plugins I’ve covered is Finger Login, which I gave a 3 to, the Events Tracker for Elementor, which I gave a 4 to, and then the Download Button for Elementor, which I gave a 3 to.
And of course, the next WordPress Meetup will not happen until January. We’re not going to do any for December because nobody shows up at the holidays unless you’ve got booze and wenches and lots of partying going on.
And what else have we got? Oh, go check out my new website, theroguestavern.com, my YouTube channel of me getting out in the wilderness and away from my computers. Sometimes it’s, you know, cooking. But oftentimes it’s just out into the wilderness and where I’ve got a couple of gold claims up here in Vancouver Island and spending some time out and going to collect gold. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a giant nugget and I can just retire from all of this. Anyway, go check it out, theroguestavern.com.
And that’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here.
Uh, I don’t think that was her. Let’s wrap the show up this way…
Reminders for the show:
There we go!
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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.