Transcript of Episode 467 WP Plugins A to Z

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. This is complete verbatim of John’s discussion on the weekly plugins that have been reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #467 here.

Episode #467

John: All right, so what do we got? Usually, this point here is where I jump into the ClassicPress Options. Well, I don’t have any ClassicPress Options this week. It’s another quiet week. I’ve just not had time to do anything for ClassicPress. ClassicPress is, unfortunately, at the bottom of my list right now because all of my projects have been in WordPress, and I go where the money’s at. What can I say? I don’t have the luxury right now of being able to focus on building a new business under ClassicPress. If you’re building a new business, I would suggest you go with ClassicPress. It will be much better than WordPress ever is right now. It may take them a couple of years, but I’m pretty sure they’re gonna dwarf them.

All right, so the usual resources for ClassicPress: ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress Forum, the list of plugins over there, the CodePotent directory. There are a few things there and I know more things that are in the works for ClassicPress, they just haven’t released them. They’re coming up on their two-year mark here pretty soon. I believe it’s August sometime is when it came into existence, so they’re about to turn two years old. So keep that in mind. WordPress itself didn’t make any inroads until they were five years old, because I found them about the time they were six, and they were so very raw at the time. It wasn’t until WordPress was eight or nine before it started leaping forward, so keep that in mind.

Okay, so let’s dive into the WordPress plugins. What do I have for you this week? Okay, first off, for those of you who have asked, I like to give this as a reminder from time to time in the show. I have a link in the Show Notes that takes you to the wordpress.org/plugins/browse/new. This is a listing of all of the most recent plugins that have been submitted to the WordPress Repository. Everything within the last couple of weeks, all the way up to even say yesterday, some of them were as quickly as a few hours ago. So you might want to check this out from time to time if you’re looking for a new or unique plugin just to see what’s being produced, see what the trends are. One interesting thing is to see the trends because you’ll see them pop up here a whole bunch of plugins of one particular type all at once. It’s like when the Rona first hit everyone, there was a slew of plugins that pop through about the Rona. So those sorts of things, you can pick out the trends from time to time with it.

Okay, the first one I’ve got here for you is one that I have reviewed before, but of course, I did the review without actually trying and attempting to install it, and I thought it looked like a pretty good plugin. I’m pretty sure that’s what I said when I reviewed it. This is called Master Image Feed for Elementor. Now, if you’re a fast reader and skimmer, which many people are on the internet, you skim through things you go, okay, this looks like a plug-in for me. And so you go to install it. Well, that’s what happened here. This one here, I felt like I got a little scammed on it is what happened, because I installed what I thought was the plugin.

It turns out this is a plug-in for all of their plugins or all of their addons that go with this plugin. And what happens is a number of their addons are free, but a large chunk of the addons are premium addons. So what happens, you install this, it goes to a page where you can then choose the other ones or pay for the license fee. Well, that’s okay. I’ve got no problem with that. My always complaint has been, be upfront about it. Put it in the first bloody paragraph where people actually read that. They don’t just put it in a paragraph that this is a standalone plugin for Elementor, which means okay, it’s a standalone plugin.

Well, it’s not a standalone plugin. It’s a plugin that is dependent upon this plugin that is needed to install it. So I felt a little scam from this, you know, I discovered this isn’t exactly what I want to do, not that I don’t like paying for premium plugins. I mean, I pay a large chunk of change every year out to premium plugins, you know, a good $2,000 to $3,000 a year go out to licenses for plugins that I have across the board. Not a problem paying for them, but when you hide it like this, it feels like a scam. So anyway, I have to do something I hadn’t done in a while, and that is I give Master Image Feed for Elementor a 1-Dragon rating.

Yeah, sucks to be them.

Okay, next item I’ve got up for you here is Economic Market News. And again, I haven’t had a chance to test this one out, but it does look like a pretty good plugin. Now, I have used Stockdio plugins before. I’ve got one running on a demo site somewhere, a sandbox page I’ve been playing with that gives me a listing of a stock list. This one here is designed for you to get news and information about markets from around the world, and their plugins work pretty efficiently.

I think you have to actually sign up for an API key to tap into their newsfeed, but they don’t charge you for it as long as you’re below a certain threshold of API calls. You exceed that, you’re starting to make a business out of it, then they want to charge you, fair enough. Anyway, they’re pretty decent plugins for what they do, and this one here was relatively new in the Repository, and I saw it and thought, okay, well, let’s check this one out. It seems to be alright. I can recommend you go check it out and see if it will work for you to provide economic a market news to your website, or it may be that’s the market you serve under your website domain. Go check it out Economic & Market News. I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

And the final one I’ve got for you here today, this is Timer Counter for Elementor addons, and this one here is an addon specifically for Elementor. It creates an Elementor widget, and it creates you three types of timers. It creates you a clock, it creates you a time countdown for days, hours, minutes, seconds, or creates you a regular countdown, which is just set a number and it counts down from that number. And if you’ve got premium Elementor, you’ve got a little more flexibility with it to play with it. If you just get the basic Elementor, it still works well. You set it as an element, set it up, set it where you want it; maybe you’ve got a countdown to an event. Maybe you’re counting down like the 2030 website, counting down to the end of the world, you know, countdown2030.com, and this is a really great little tool if you need a countdown, and you need an actual free plugin. So go check this one out. It’s Timer Counter for Elementor addons, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

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John: Absolutely, CMS Commanders is great. Check it out wppluginsatoz.com/cmscommander. Use that link if you do sign up. I get a little bit of kickback from it. It is an affiliate, not an actual ad.

Okay, listener feedback. I do have some this week, I’m really happy to say. And I got a small snippet of a letter from someone and I’ll just read that out. Okay,

“John, just back to catching up on the podcast after starting back to work again a month ago after the COVID shutdown. I listened to your podcast on the bus, on the way into work, keep up all the good work that you do.”

So a while ago, you were asking if people were moving to ClassicPress or staying with Gutenberg or something like that, and I have to admit, I have started to experiment more with the Block Editor since I was using Elementor, and they are not supporting the ClassicPress. So I was looking for other options to move away from such a reliance on Elementor. I started by creating a few blocks using create-Gutenberg block and have now moved to create a plugin based on create-Gutenberg block that has multiple blocks for the company that I work for. Don’t hit me,

Nah, I never would do that.

But I actually like it. Since being a developer, I like to get my hands dirty and into the code using create-gutenberg-block. I am able to manipulate the code the way I want both front and back-end. In addition to creating guten-block, I have started working on theme development using WP Rig in an effort to create a lightweight current theme. That and the local development environment has given me a good boost to my productivity.

I’ll let you know how things progress in the future. As unfortunately, due to COVID, the company I work for is at half capacity and a lot of my time is now being spent on maintenance; fixing things, plumbing, carpentry, electrical, et cetera, rather than in software development, which is my main job there. Take care and keep supplying us with great information. Martin.”

Well, thanks a lot, Martin. No, I’d never beat you up. It’s like I said, people are going to choose, and they’re going to find out what works best for them. And some people will find Gutenberg works well, and Gutenberg is about to go full-blown editor with the next release of WordPress. It’s going to be an editor for not only the content but widgets and sidebars and headers and everything else. So keep that in mind.

Gutenberg is probably better than I give credit for because – well, I don’t like it for the way it was shoved down our throats. And I just don’t want to mess with learning it because yeah, I’m stuck in the Elementor camp too at the moment. And while I almost moved to BeaverBuilder, I just couldn’t pull the extra $300 out for a brand new license after I just paid for the Elementor license. So, it was a matter of, you know, compromises. But I found Elementor and Astra to be fantastic development tools together, and yet still into WordPress.

And yeah, I’m gonna keep the Gutenberg editor disabled and until they force it enabled. So we do what we do, and everyone will find their best way of doing these things, and that’s the way it’s gonna work. But thanks a lot, Martin. I greatly appreciate it and appreciate the letter. Keep sending me stuff, folks, and I will get it read out and we’ll talk about it, and get some stuff going back and forth.

Okay, no questions this week and no contest. The contest still hasn’t been taken care of. I still haven’t had the time to finish dealing with that issue. I’ve got some new help here that I’m slowly turning on to doing things, and pretty soon, I’ll get her to doing other stuff to deal with the show.

Okay, that’s pretty much it. I covered up in this show here the following plugins: The Master Image Feed for Elementor which got a 1; the Economic & Market News, which got a 4; and then, the Timer Counter Elementor addons, which got a 4.

And a couple of quick reminders, the Meetup for last month was a pretty great success. You know, I had one attendee from the group and a few others showed up, some friends I know of. So it wasn’t a full-blown WordPress Meetup, but it was still a meetup of people that hadn’t really seen other humans in a good couple of months.

The next WordPress Meetup was set for July 12. I’ve decided that since my July has gotten pretty crazy for my weekends, I got several things I got to do. I’m just going to cancel it for July this year. I’m looking to see if I can set one up in August, maybe the first or second week in August, and maybe have a meetup then. I’ll know over the next week or so how everything is coming together, so I’ll let folks know. If you want to find out more, keep up-to-date, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. We have left meetup.com, although there’re still some remnants of us there, but meetups through WordPress WP plugins A to Z will always be at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.

Want to know more about me? Find out how complex a person I am? Go check out theroguestavern.com where you can check out my adventures into the wild, searching for gold, hiking, camping, out in the gun range, building out my own oasis, all kinds of interesting stuff. In my last 12 weeks, I’ve been building my own oasis. It’s an interesting journey. I’ve got like 12 videos, 13 videos up there taking a backyard of pure grass into an oasis of a garden of wonder.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you. I’m gonna wrap it there, and it is time for the tequila shot. Thank God for tequila. All right, I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here.

Reminders for the show: All Show Notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A-Z is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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John can also 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.