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All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #509 here.
Aces over Queens It’s Episode 509 – We have plugins for Mail Tracking, Business Directory, Migrations, Custom user Profiles, Registration Management, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #509
John: Into the depths of plugin depravity we go. All right, first thing is ClassicPress options. What do we have for ClassicPress options? We don’t have anything for ClassicPress options this week. Again, it’s a quiet week; I haven’t had time to do any research, and nothing’s popped into my radar on what they’re up to. So you want to go check them out at classicpress.net where you can get everything you want along with their forums, and we’ve got links to all their stuff in the show notes. So go check it all out. But we do have plugins for you.
We have WordPress plugins for you. And the first one I’ve got here for you is an add-on for MailPoet. And MailPoet, I reviewed it quite some time back. I even did an interview with the developer on it before he sold it off to Automattic. And Automattic seems to be doing okay with it, so I’m going to continue using it. Hopefully, they don’t mess it up too badly or do what they did to WooCommerce and start charging through the nose for all the stuff that’s currently free, or currently at a low cost, but they probably will, and at that point there I may have to hunt for something else. But I certainly hope not, or just stick with whatever free version that has and make do. Because there’s — some of the stuff gets ridiculously priced through Automattic.
At any rate, this one here is a Mail Logger, and what it does — I’m not sure if it works outside of MailPoet, but what it does for you is it logs every email that your website sends. This is not only if you send it out the MailPoet newsletters, but it also logs any registration forms that are sent, any requests for password resets, any administrative emails that are sent from your site, basically every email that is sent for your site. Now, why would you want to log this stuff you might say? Well, maybe you’re having a problem getting those password resets delivered to people. You want to find out, is my site even sending them properly, you know, and track them down? Well, it allows you to track it from the point of leaving your site. So if it’s not being sent from your site, you can find the issue and resolve it. If it is being sent from your site, well, that’s the magic of the Internet. God only knows where it goes once it hits the Internet, and ends up in somebody’s spam filter somewhere, three layers deep. It’s like it’s notorious if you send something to Gmail, it goes into their spam filter unless it’s their officially approved stuff. So, anyway, this is a great tool for you to go check out. It’s called WP Mail Logging by MailPoet, and I give it a five-dragon rating
Amber: That seems like it would be a great plugin, and remove a whole bunch of work you have to do manually otherwise.
John: To help you track down some stuff.
Amber: So my plugins kind of have a theme today. These are the best plugins I was able to find for setting up a separate login for yourself away and apart from your guests to your site. First, one I have is RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms and User Login. This one allows you to create a pop-up for your users to sign in with your choice of pictures to represent your site in the pop-up. It also allows you to choose the color of the sign-in area. You can turn on CAPTCHA set up how the email notifications are set, payments, organize, user accounts. There’re a lot of things that you can do for this in the free version. Unfortunately, in the Pro version, they have the better options that make it more useful. Actually, like yes, they give you just enough to get this going for free, but unless you’re willing to pay for the Pro version, you’re not going to get it at its most useful, but it’s like if you’re going to use this, I would recommend that you do Pro as long as it’s doing what you want to do. The way they set it up for the options and everything is pretty awesome, very easy to understand, and set it up, and I think this is a great option if you’re looking to separate your sign-in from your user signing in. An extra note, I noticed when I moved on to the next plugin that I still had this one active and going, but it didn’t affect anything. This plugin seems to work really well and play very nicely with other plugins, so I rate this at four dragons.
John: Very cool, always nice to be able to control the access to your site. All right, the next one I’ve got for you, this one here has come about because I’m currently in the process of moving a website that initially, we thought we had the access to where the site was, well, it turns out that the access we got. It’s on the last server they were on, and the data’s never been deleted from the last server they were on. So they don’t actually have access to the current server, control panel to get in there and FTP out the files I need. So what we’re using here is All-In-One WP Migration. This is a pretty useful tool. It’s a free tool. It helps you set up and do a migration from a WordPress website when all you have is full administrative access. And you need full administrative access and the ability to install new plugins. If you can’t install new plugin, you’re kind of hooked. At any rate, you can install this one here, and what it allows you to do is it allows you to get in there and create a backup of the site, a complete backup of all the files and the database, and then send that data off to your choice of places. You can download it as a file, send it to Dropbox, FTP it off somewhere, Amazon S3 it, and many other places you can drop it off.
Now, it does seem to work with what I’m doing right now, but you may run into problems if you’re on a super-cheap hosting where it might not have the ability to fully run that can happen. But for the most part, they’ve worked this plugin, so it uses minimal amount of resources while it’s packaging your site up for you. The other thing you could run into is if you happen to be on a hosting that has you limited on the storage. If you got limited storage, you might not be able to create the file, but it could create the file and FTP it off. So who knows? I haven’t run into that issue, but those are some of the things you could see with it. Other than that, it’s a pretty fantastic little plugin. It’s a great free one to help maybe get you out of the jam when you’re trying to, you know, head out the back door before your current hosting provider knows you’ve gone because they might be assholes. They’re actually a fair number of companies out there that are like that. “You’re leaving, how dare you leave?’ I’m going to make it as hard as possible for you to leave.” You know, there’s a lot of hosting providers that do that. They’re just not professional, unfortunately. And I’ve run into more than my fair share of those hosting providers over the years. At any rate, a great plugin, go check this one out. It’s All-in-One WP Migration, and I give it a five-dragon rating
Amber: A bloody brilliant plugin.
John: Yeah, nice plugin. It works well.
Amber: Next one I’ve got is User Registration & User Profile – Profile Builder. I think they like the word profile. So I found that this one did move a little slowly once I had to upload it. That might just be my computer though. It took a while to load up any of the options in the settings menu. It’s the only plugin I’ve seen that does it so far, but the options are great. They don’t put the Pro options in with the free options. I really, really appreciate that distinction. They have the Pro options on their own little section at the top saying, “Here are the options you get if you go Pro.” All the options that they have in the main settings area, those are the options that you get to use. You don’t have to guess. It’s awesome. I really like it. These guys will also give you a widget through Elementor if you use Elementor, which is also pretty cool. Now, what these guys do is they use shortcodes to do things. There is a specific shortcode to add a front-end login form, another to add in a logout function. So they give you all the shortcodes that you need. You just short-circuited my brain again with that noise. So you don’t have to guess or anything like that. Once a person registers with your site, there will be a pop-up for them to log into. They are able to set up their own profile from the front-end. You have the ability to control whether or not they get to keep their accounts, but they get to control what’s in their accounts, which is pretty awesome. This would be a really great plugin if you have a social site. I rate this at four dragons.
John: Excellent. Well, anything to help you manage your profiles is good. All right, the final one I’ve got for you today comes as both a free plugin and a premium plugin, and it is called the Web Directory, and you get the Web Directory free version directly from wordpress.org, so you can test this plugin out. I’ve currently been using it to build out the buyorganicdirect.ca directory, and this is a really great plugin. It has been working very nice. I actually purchased this some time ago with the intentions of doing something else with it, and never did anything with it, and it sat there. I sat there with a license that I haven’t been using. The license isn’t that very much, you know, I think it’s somewhere around 29 or 30 bucks. You buy it from CodeCanyon. And the premium version, though, is very nice. The premium version gives you lots of options for dealing with the markers on the maps, for setting up the maps, for setting up search for layout of it, for building lots of functionality into this. You can even build two directories at the same time with this plugin if you want or more. And that was what I was going to do with it originally, but that never worked out, and it just got erased from the Internet memory. But really great plugin. It’s built out really nice.
One of the best features of having the premium version is the ability to allow your visitors to submit their own listings, and that’s all part of what the buyorganicdirect.ca directory is, is to get other people to submit the listings for all of the farmers markets, roadside stands, and everything else. So I don’t have to travel around town, the country, and everything else to find all the listings and get them listed. And they can do it directly from their phone, upload the images from their phone, and it puts it in the back-end for you as an administrator, creates it as a draft so you can go review it and make sure it’s not some scam or spam piece. You can verify the address, like if you’re questioning, you can take the address they give you, go over to Google Maps and go to Street View and pump it into Street View and see what the Street View shows you. You know, make sure that somebody is not sticking their neighborhood crack house in there for a directory listing. So that’s a really great tool, and if you’re trying to build out a directory of any sorts, this is an excellent tool for you, and it automatically maps stuff right into Google Maps. All they have to do is pump the address, click a button that says map it, and it automatically pumps it into the map. They don’t have to figure out the coordinates or anything else. All in all, it’s been a great tool. It does take a while to get set up, like anything complicated. Once you get it set up and functioning, then you can also go in and adjust colors and layouts and other bits and pieces to it to make it look and integrate fully with your website. Go check this one out. It’s Web 2.0 Directory Plugin, and I give it a five-dragon rating
Amber: All five’s for you today. Last one I’ve got is WordPress User Manager – User Profile Builder & Membership. This is a pretty cool plugin. This one even allows you — like they even have a section for excluded usernames in the login settings. I think that could be very useful for people who really don’t want to enter onto your site or be there anymore, pretty cool. The main feature I was searching for was the pop-up login, and this has it. You get to set up the form that pops up, and once a person is signed in, they will get their own sign-in pop-up to log in. It also allows you to add your logo to the signing-up page as well as the pop-up page. And you can restrict content for certain users, customize redirects, and this plugin plays really well with others as well. There are a lot of options to this plugin. A lot of ways to personalize your login and the signup pages. Once you have this going, it will allow you to have full control over the forms and gives you a Site Member Area, and it allows users to manage their own data. So things like creating profile and pictures, all that fun stuff. The Pro features are pretty nifty, but this does give you everything you need to really get it going for free. It’s a great option if you need a little more control, and I rate it at four dragons.
John: Very cool. I like the pop-up feature to it. All right, this show still currently brought to you by…
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John: Absolutely, nothing but the best. All right, this is a segment here where we usually — when we get them — listener feedback and listener questions, but we still don’t have any. But we still got another little piece here that will be coming back to life soon enough.
Stick with us folks. We expect to be relaunching this at the beginning of June. All right, so we cover up a couple of quick things to close out the show before we move on to the Q&A segment. That’s where we finally close it out. But in this episode, I covered up the following plugins, the WP Mail Logging by MailPoet, which I rated at a five, the All-in-One WP Migration, which I rated at a five, and then the Web 2.0 Directory Plugin, which I rated at a five.
Amber: And I covered RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms and User Login, which I rated as a four, User Registration & User Profile – Profile Builder, which I rated at four. Wow! I had long names. WordPress User Manager – User Profile Builder & Membership, which I also rated as four.
John: There we go, hence the name Aces over Queens wins every time.
Amber: You’re welcome, Hemdian.
John: Here you go. Yes, that was a special request from Hemdian for research on those types of plugins. All right, couple of quick reminders. We will be having a meetup of sorts in July, and more information will be forthcoming for this soon enough. Also, if you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, make sure you join us on Tuesday evenings for shooting the shit at the Rogues Tavern. We go live on YouTube every Tuesday evening at 8 pm, or you can just go to the roguestavern.com and download the podcast there. All right, off we go.
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: So if anybody out there has any questions that they would like me to ask, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them into the segment for you. Crickets.
John: I’m trying to think which one of my devices is giving me crickets? I don’t have that set for any sounds, but one of my device just suddenly kicked out crickets for some reason.
Amber: It’s on almost every show.
John: Is it in every show?
Amber: Pretty much, yeah, I hear crickets on almost every show, not usually that loud, but usually there’re crickets in the background sometimes during the show.
John: One of my devices must have a timer on it somewhere.
Amber: So my first question for you is, what is Netword? I’ve seen a few plugins that talk about being able to login from their own Netword, though there’s no definition for this word. There’s a link here to a site that says there is no definition for that word, but there are also multiple sites that came up when I tried searching for it that said that was selling Netword, or saying you can log into Netword. I don’t know what it is though.
John: You know what? I saw that earlier, and I actually have no idea. I’ve never heard of it. I looked at and said okay, what is Netword — and I don’t know — when I searched for it, I get nothing. I get — trying to define networks for some reason. I think some type .
Amber: Yeah, that’s the problem I got when I told it to — like, I put Netword into quotes — so if anybody out there knows what Netword is, do let me know. I find this really confusing. I can’t get an answer, but I mean there’re plenty of sites telling you that they sell two Netword, or that you can log into your own Netword.
John: Yeah, I have no idea. This is something completely new. There’s app for netword.com, and then, Netword plus social, Netword, Inc. on LinkedIn.
Amber: You see my confusion. By the way, Hemdian said one of your devices is needy and feeling neglected.
John: Yeah, well. It can feel neglected to his heart’s content. At least Siri hasn’t today. I said Siri and my iPad kicked up.
Amber: Okay, well, someone out there knows what Netword is, please help me understand that.
John: No that one’s beyond me. I have no clue.
Amber: Okay, so my next question for you is, I’ve noticed that when I sign into WordPress lately, I try to use my main login, and it comes up with a note saying error security checks fail, and then, I choose the second login, its fine. But if I use the one main login, it always says that. It doesn’t matter if I switch up the login names, like, I’ll try my second login first, and that one will have the security issues, but the other one will be fine. There’s no logic to it. They’re both fine, but I get this. Do you have any idea why that happens?
John: Possibly, and it has to do with the session cookie that is set by WordPress. Every time you — when you log into WordPress, it sets a session cookie, and the session cookie is usually valid for two weeks. And when you log out, the session cookie supposed to be held in your browser — when you go back to the website, you shouldn’t have to login again. You should be able to pop right into the back-end of the website because you’re still technically logged in because it’s still got — the session cookies held in your browser. If the session cookie is corrupted or something it doesn’t recognize, something when you go to login again, or you login with a different username, it can break. That’s the only thing I can think of. I’ve never encountered where I’ve gotten security checks failed. That’s one I would have to do a little research on to see what’s happened on that. You know, it’s kind of a different one. I don’t know exactly what it would be — especially, if you’re using two different logins, you know, like if you do try logging in with the exact same login a second time, does it work?
Amber: No. So like, a login — like I’ll call one of them login A and login B. I’ll go to login A, and it’ll have the error security code, login B is fine. Next time, I choose login B first, error security code, login A is fine. But if I do login A — then do log in A, is still a security code.
John: Okay, that’s something new I’ve never seen that. Do you have a plugin on the website that is managing security?
Amber: Just Blackhole bots.
John: That might be your problem there. Disable Blackhole bot and then try it and see if that’s the problem. That one there might be the problem. It might be messing things up on login, and that’s the first place I go. If I’ve got plugins, I first go to the plugins, suspect one of them, but if you’ve got a security plugin or a plugin-managing logins or anything like that, disable it, and then, try it and see if it’s giving you the same problem.
Amber: This last question I have is more so a request for definition. What I’ve got is a report from Blackhole bots, and I’m wondering about what a Net Range CIDR .
John: Okay, so we’re going to go into discussion the inner workings of the internet itself. All right, we’re going to be discussing IP addresses and blocks and names, and all this other cool fun stuff. We’ll do that after closing out. So those of you that are just so riveted by this piece outcoming information, make sure podcast is over. Go wander on over to YouTube. Fast forward it to somewhere around the 40-minute mark, you’ll be right there. All right, let’s close this out. Let my girl take us out of here and let me enjoy my shot.
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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