Read the latest transcripts for the WP Plugins Podcast and training Videos.

Draft template – Transcript of Episode 325 WP Plugins A to Z

/0 Comments/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #371 here.


It’s Episode 371 and we’ve got plugins for Content Redirects, Plugin Notes, Conversion Tracking, Custom Author Profiles and Read-Only Admins. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #371

Marcus:           It’s Episode 371 and we’ve got plugins for Content Redirects, Plugin Notes, Conversion Tracking, Custom Author Profiles and Read-Only Admins. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we have the usual great show for you today but 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, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and hopefully soon, we will be up on Spotify.

Marcus:           Yeah, I want to say to the audience, you’re slacking when it comes to iTunes. We had one review in the last year.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           One – one.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           You are slacking, people – slacking.

John:                And that’s where the majority of our listeners come from.

Marcus:           Yeah, so if you’re listening to us and you download this podcast in iTunes or the Apple Podcasts, or whatever they’re calling it these days, stop right now, pause the show, go to our page, give us a review. That’s the price of admission for today’s show. Go do it.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           All right, next, you can check out all of our training videos, screencasts, watch us live, all the stuff on YouTube, and watch us live at noon the first of every month, and that’s actually next week, so be prepared. Come on, join us. Ask us some live questions. We’ll be happy to talk to you.

You can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and also while you’re at our website, subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where you’re gonna find special discounts on items, you’re gonna find all the latest WordPress news, security bulletins – all that kind of stuff. It comes out every single week on Thursday. You’ve got no excuse. You need to get our newsletter; that’s where we talk about all the other stuff because on this podcast we talk about plugins.

John:                Absolutely, and with that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]

Okay, first up this week I have a couple of plugins coming up that are replacement plugins. The first one here is called rw Quick Page and Post Redirects. Now, this is a replacement plugin for the Quick Page Post Redirect plugin. And one of the reasons for this is if you’ve had a website online for any length of time, being anywhere from two to five to seven years (which one of my clients I’ve been working with for several years now), we’ve got quite a few plugins there that we used way back when we built it.

But of course as time goes on, some of the plugins you like and you use that are really stable are getting older – three, four years old, they haven’t been updated in a while, they’ve got a couple of glitches. They’ve been abandoned. Well, you’ve got a choice: you can either redo the plugin yourself and upgrade it or go look for a replacement. And I’m noticing more and more and it’s something I’m actually doing myself; I’m hiring a small developer to help me do this is to take some of these old, abandoned plugins, fork them, update them, and re-upload them and use them to give away for people.

Now this one here, the rw Quick Page and Post Redirects plugin, this is a direct replacement for the Quick Page Post Redirect plugin. The author of the rw one, he took and forked the original one, used the original data – the original data blocks in WordPress, so this is a really simple replacement if you happen to have been using that plugin. You just deactivate the old one, reactivate the new one – all your data is still intact and in the same places except for it works a little better. It’s smoother, the bugs have been fixed in it and it’s a really great replacement plugin. So go check this out: the rw Quick Page and Post Redirects plugin.

If you don’t need it as a replacement and you just want something that’s a quick redirect plugin, this one here, what it does for you, it allows you to create 301 redirects quickly and easily directly from your post or page if you’re gonna redirect them, or you can create a list. You can also import a list that’s pipe delimited and insert that whole list of redirects into your site. A whole lot of nice, simple ways to do the redirects on your page and posts. So go check it out and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Awesome – that’s nice. All right, the first plugin I’ve got out of the gate is called Sys…ah, easy for me to say. It’s called Simple Custom Author Profiles and it actually simplifies the process of adding custom information to a user or an author account. It allows you to add custom fields to a user’s edit page without all kinds of crazy advanced custom field stuff or anything like that. It’s really easy. The new fields are automatically included in the user edit page once they are created and easily inserted into WordPress template files.

So if you’ve got multiple authors or you want to jazz up your own author profile, this really helps to improve kind of the off-the-shelf stock WordPress author page that is out there. It’s called Simple Custom Author Profiles and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s kind of nice! That’s similar to the plugin I covered up in that last episode or the episode before.

Marcus:           Yeah, actually. That’s what inspired me to bring this one.

John:                Yeah, absolutely. A great plugin. Okay, and this show here currently brought to you by…

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely, and if you’re tired of cheap hosting that doesn’t give you all your needs, come visit me. I offer up fantastic WordPress hosting that has no limits almost.

And we do have a contest currently running until the end of the month, only another week to enter it, and it is a premium licensed version of the WP Nearby places plugin. They are offering up the free license – thanks a lot, Al. We greatly appreciate your donation to the show, and WP Nearby Places is a great plugin that helps you use Google Maps to showcase all your neighboring businesses. A really useful tool. I’ve experimented with it a little bit and I’ve found it to be quite fun. And if you’re looking to just buy it right off the bat, use the coupon code FLASH and get 25% off.

And all the contests that are done by WP Plugins A to Z are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Thank you to them for giving us a pro version of the plugin to power our contests.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                It’s a really great plugin. It works great.

Marcus:           Yeah, I’m gonna actually either ask them to let me have a license or I’m gonna buy that one myself for my own new podcast – yeah.

John:                It’s cheap; I bought one for a client of mine who wanted to do it and I was like, “Here’s the plugin for you,” so yeah.

Marcus:           What is it? Like $20, $30 bucks?

John:                Yeah, it was $30. It wasn’t that expensive.

Marcus:           Huh!

John:                I can’t remember now — $30 to $40 – somewhere around in there.

Marcus:           Good.

John:                It’s a good license and the plugin has got a lot of useful tools. They do have a free version if you just need limited amounts, you know.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                They do have a free version of the plugin. The pro version just gives you more features.

Marcus:           Yeah, I want to find a giveaway thing that also not only just has somebody sign up —

John:                Mm-hm?

Marcus:           — but you have to do things. Like you’ve got to tweet it out, you’ve got to do – you know, you’ve gotta link to it or whatever. You know?

John:                No.

Marcus:           I’ve been in those kinds of things but anyway…

John:                There are plugins to do that, too.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                To enter the contests you must send this tweet before you’ll get the page that allows you to enter.

Marcus:           Exactly – or however many tweets you get and retweets you get, then that’s how many entries you get.

John:                Oh, the plugin does that.

Marcus:           Oh, it does?

John:                Yeah, this plugin here, it gives them a unique URL code that if they retweet it all out, they get additional entries into the contest.

Marcus:           Oh, excellent. Okay.

John:                And then you can —

Marcus:           It just might be the one I’m looking for.

John:                — you can set the number of entries they get. Like if the tweet it out, they can get one entry or if they tweet it out, they can get five additional entries.

Marcus:           Right.

John:                So you can set any number you want.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                But it’s like anyone who retweets our contests to refer people, they get an additional entry into the contests.

Marcus:           Oh! A secret for all of you contest people out there.

John:                There you go. And I guess we should talk more about that with the contests. I seem to have forgotten that feature.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                We will do that in future shows.

Marcus:           Great!

John:                All right, well this brings us up to our next set of plugins here. The next one I’ve got is another replacement plugin. This is Plugin Notes Plus, and this one here is to replace a plugin called Plugin Notes. And what this plugin does for you, if you work on multiple websites such as myself, sometimes I’ll install a plugin on a website and I’ll come back to it and I’ll say, “What did I install that for? Because I can’t remember it.” It was something one-off for that site.

Well, what this plugin does is it allows you – it creates a column in your plugin list and you can create notes there and write down what you put that plugin in there for.

Marcus:           Hm!

John:                What it does, why you created it, what it’s there for. I did this for a client of mine who wanted to know what all the plugins were and we were using the Plugin Notes plugin, and that plugin now is four years since it’s been updated and it’s starting to have a little bit of glitchiness and starting to have problems with PHP 7.1, so I needed to replace it. And I found this one here, which while not in the exact match, was close enough to – it still gave me the plugin notes in the same or similar format, which is what I needed. So it’s a really great plugin. Go check it out: Plugin Notes Plus and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! All right – boy, there’s a lot of cool plugins in this podcast and I’m gonna continue with that roll. One of the biggest gaps besides the shopping cart (which we talked about last week for WooCommerce) is conversion tracking. There’s a huge gap. If you want to use your own JavaScript or use a tag manager or things like that to integrate into your analytics tracking, really you have almost no out-of-the box tracking when it comes to WooCommerce. You don’t have variations as far as cart, what items are put in the cart, what’s checked out, what order confirmations are, or things like that. You have nothing out of the gate.

Well this plugin, Conversion Tracking for WooCommerce, actually fills that gap for you. It allows you to set different variables on URLs that represent the cart, the checkout, and the order confirmation, so that you can track every single stage of your website in terms of the e-commerce stuff. That’s huge, because if you can’t test it, you can’t improve it. That’s just the way that it goes.

John:                Absolutely.

Marcus:           So check this one out if you do any sort of e-commerce on a heavy basis and you get into tracking and analytics and things. This is the tool for you. It is called Conversion Tracking for WooCommerce and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                There’s a useful tool for figuring out what they’re putting in their cart, what they’re checking out with, and what they’re taking out of their cart.

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                You know, why do they take it out of their cart? Was it too expensive? Did they not like it? Not the color? Hey, good – good information. You can enhance your site.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay, and of course the show, we love listener feedback. We’re always looking for it and if you would like to get some listener feedback featured here on the show, reach out to us via our Contact page, SpeakPipe, leave us a message, email us direct. All the links are in the show notes for that. Reach out to us through our social media: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All of those areas there, we do try to reach back out at you through the social media, and if not, we’ll definitely get it into the show and answer questions for you. A great way for you to get some expert advice and not cost you any money, so leave us some feedback, folks. We’d really appreciate it.

And this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And because of that, we like to acknowledge when people give us $50 or more by reading out the note they give us and leaving them links in our show notes. Also, those below $50 are left anonymous, mostly because well, $50 is the break-even point.

And a big thank you to all our donors out there and we really appreciate your help with the show. And if you’d like to support the show, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show. Lots of ways there you can donate to the show.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                And our final set of plugins today is the last one I’ve got for you here is called Better Click to Tweet, and this is the free version of it, and it is a great plugin that makes it easy for your visitors to tweet out your content with a pre-prepared tweet. You write out the tweet, you put the hashtags in there that you want to go out, and all they have to do is two clicks away from sending out the tweet.

They click it, it pops up the Twitter window, they verify it, and it’s gone – provided they’re signed into their Twitter, which most people are on their computers anyway. So a really great tool. If you get the premium version of it, it gives you the ability to customize the tweet you’re going to send out, the way it looks on your site, to turn it into a block, give it colors, make it stand out more against your content.

We currently use this plugin on wppluginsatoz.com and I use it regularly to send out the tweets of when a show goes live. I go in there and click it to send out a tweet, so it’s a really great tool. It makes it easy, helps encourage people to tweet out your content to get it out there more than it normally is. Check it out: Better Click to Tweet, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! If you’re gonna use that, make sure you have them @youruserID, too —

John:                Oh.

Marcus:           — so that you can tell.

John:                This automatically does that.

Marcus:           Beautiful!

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           All right. Okay, I’ve got a very unique plugin to end the show with here and then the month. It is called Readministrator. It is short for Read Only Administrator. It sound kind of weird, but when I describe it you’re gonna be like, “Ah, that makes perfect sense.” So what this does is it allows users to get a “readministrator” role – not an administrator role, but a readministrator. In other words, they can just see things – no editing is allowed by this particular access level.

So these users have all the privilege of editors but they don’t have the ability to do anything with them at all. So they can see all of the admin settings, they can do a full audit, they can look at all the plugins, all the posts, all the themes – all that stuff. They just can’t change anything. Now this is perfect for any of those times that you want somebody to look at something to see if there is an error or something like that and you don’t necessarily want to give them edit access to the site. This is great – and by the way, clients, too. Don’t let them change things but let them see everything.

John:                Yep!

Marcus:           That’s a great way to do it. It’s called Readministrator and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Now this could be a very useful tool. I like it.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                I definitely like it. It’s a great way to get things to work properly.

Marcus:           Yeah – without having clients interfere and change things.

John:                All right, well that closes out this episode of the show and I am closing out with rw Quick Page and Post Redirects, which I gave a 4 to; Plugin Notes Plus, which I gave a 4 to; and Better Click to Tweet, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about Simple Custom Author Profiles, which gets a 4 out of 5; Conversion Tracking for WooCommerce gets a 5 out of 5, and Readministrator gets a 5 out of 5.

John:                Okay, and a couple of little quick reminders. For those of you that live in Victoria or here on the island. If you’re interested, we’ve got a Victoria WordPress Meetup group. Our first meeting is September 5th, so that’s like a week and a half away now. The sessions are going to be recorded and hopefully we will get them live up on YouTube at the same time. I will be doing two sessions; one session for how to install WordPress correctly and get it all set up and another session on how to set up Yoast SEO plugin and have it configured correctly from the get-go. And there’ll be more of these sessions from WordPress Meetup. We’re going to be having them once a month all the way throughout the rest of the year and into the next year. Go check it out at the Victoria WordPress Meetup group. If you’re a Meetup user, we are there. Just look for YYJ WordPress and you will find us.

Be sure to check out our YouTube channel for screencasts and a note to developers, if you would like to support the show and offer up a premium license for giveaway, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests and leave all of the information there.

And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 370 WP Plugins A to Z

/0 Comments/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #370 here.


It’s Episode 370 and we’ve got plugins for Shopping Cart Sidebars, Role Based Redirects, Duplicating Menus, Displaying Thumbnail Sizes, Amazon Links and Revisions for Widgets. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #370

Marcus:           It’s Episode 370 and we’ve got plugins for Shopping Cart Sidebars, Role Based Redirects, Duplicating Menus, Displaying Thumbnail Sizes, Amazon Links and Revisions for Widgets. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we 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 have a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over in Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show. And coming soon hopefully, we will be on Spotify.

And…we’re quiet.

Marcus:           Oh, sorry.

John:                That’s all right.

Marcus:           And remember that you can follow us every Monday month as we do our live show at noon Pacific time — that’s the first Monday of every month on YouTube. Also remember, you can follow this show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and subscribe to our newsletter while you’re at our website, and that’s where you get all the goodies, all the news, all the different stuff that we don’t talk about here on the podcast, because on this podcast we like to talk about nothing but plugins.

John:                Absolutely. And with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]

Okay, first up what I’ve got for you this week here is a WooCommerce plugin. This one here is called WooCommerce Cart. Now, when you’re throwing together your WooCommerce website and you’re working through everything, there’s several WooCommerce themes or even just themes in general I’ve discovered that just don’t display the shopping cart very effectively, unless you go through a whole lot of effort to make them stand out. Meaning that, you know, once someone adds something to the cart, the initial window pops up where they can go to the cart. But if they continue shopping there’s no real quick way to get to the cart except by putting it up the top menu, which often scrolls out of view depending on how your theme is developed.

So what wound up doing was went looking for a shopping cart add-on that would display the shopping cart somewhere where it’s always in their view. And what this plugin does for you is it puts down in the lower right-hand corner a little floating shopping cart that if they click on it, it pops out of sidebar and it lists up everything that’s in their shopping cart. It gives them the opportunity to change the number of items in the cart or jump over to make payments – whatever you want to do, but it makes the job for your client a lot easier to view what they’ve got and then go pay for what they’ve got if they have decided to do a little additional shopping.

All in all, it just makes the customer experience a little bit better when they’re on your WooCommerce website. So this is a really great plugin, very easy to set up, it works exactly the way it’s supposed to, and so far I’ve used it with four different themes and gotten the exact same results, so it works beautiful across multiple themes. Go check it out: WooCommerce Cart and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           That’s probably the most susceptible and ugliest looking page on the entire WooCommerce architecture is the cart. It’s ugly.

John:                Yes, yes. It is.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                It even if you spend a wacka load of time customizing it.

Marcus:           Right. So it looks like that plugin makes it a lot easier, which is great.

John:                It does.

Marcus:           All right, the first plugin that I’ve got out the gate here for Episode 370 is called Role Based Redirect, and this is a really simple kind of plugin. It basically redirects a user to a specific page or area based on what their defined user role is. You probably wouldn’t want to use this all the time, but maybe – maybe direct them to a specific member page or something like that if you have a membership site.

But what I thought of that you could use this for is actually redirecting an existing customer that logs in to a sale or perhaps a loyalty thing or an express coupon code for logging in to the site – anything like that. It could be maybe you’re doing some premium discounts and maybe only specific user roles want it. Or, maybe you’re doing a multi-offer blog and somebody who’s an editor or somebody like that gets to a specific page of maybe just new posts or whatever it happens to be so that they can review it and critique them. Who knows? There’s a lot of different possibilities that you can use this plugin for. It’s called Role Based Redirect and I gave it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s a very useful plugin and I like the way that – well, it can be helped out and used.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Yeah, I kind of like that one.

[smartphone ringing and vibrating]

Busy night. What can I say? Okay, and this show here currently brought to you by…JohnOverall.com. Off we go…

With all the changes in website requirements, pulled, compromised, and abandoned plugins out there, now is the time to update and upgrade your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely. Give me a call. I can help you out with all your WordPress needs. And currently we also have a contest running for a giveaway for WP Nearby Places plugin. This is another premium license that’s being offered up by WP Nearby Places, a great plugin to help you use Google Maps to showcase all the neighboring businesses around your business. Go check it out and if you’d like to really get a good discount on it before you win the contest, there’s a 25% off coupon code for WP Nearby Places. Use the code FLASH and find out more about the plugin with the interview I did with Albert Harlow from WP Nearby Places. There’s a link in the show notes for it.

And a quick shout-out to Simple Giveaways plugin who provides the pro version of the contests plugin that we use on this website.

All right, and our next couple of plugins for you. The next one I’ve got for you is one I may have covered before. I sort of recall doing it but since it’s been a while and I recently had to use it again, I thought I would bring it back again. It’s called Duplicate Menu and this is a plugin that is a really great tool, especially when you’re redoing a website. You’ve inherited a website or some client’s come to you and said, “I want to rebuild my website,” and they’ve got multiple menus or they’ve got a couple of really big menus, and you just want to shorten them down and clean them up. Well, you can go about it either by deleting things and hoping you get it right or you can start from scratch and try to get it right.

The nice thing about this plugin is you can make a duplicate of that menu, preserve the original, and then go through and edit it until you’ve got it right. And if you mess it up, you can just wipe it and go duplicate the menu again. It saves tons of time when you are having to redo a website and allows you to create all the menus again in a much faster format than one at a time.

It works great, very easy, very simple to use, sets up and does exactly what it’s supposed to do; one of those really great plugins that are out there in the WordPress Repository for free. Duplicate Menu and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           Nice. That might go along with the next plugin that I’ve got, and it’s pretty cool. It’s called Widget Revisions. We’ve all dealt with widgets and the big problem that widgets generate, right? You can’t really save them; you can’t really do anything with them.

John:                Right.

Marcus:           This is pretty cool. This plugin keeps a record of every single parameter change that you’ve ever made for any of your widgets. It enables you to roll back your widget, just like you would content when you’re creating a blog post.

John:                Oh, nice!

Marcus:           And you can restore those previous settings with just one click. This plugin maintains a log of all the changes that you’ve made to your widget and it shows a total list of the entire history, all of the parameters that were changed to every single widget, and like I said, just one click gets it right back to where you want it to go. It’s called Widget Revisions and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                I like that! That’s very useful and especially if you’re working on text widgets or HTML widgets.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Yeah, that’s – that’s a very useful one.

Marcus:           I would say in terms of a website that you’re setting up, you want to install this —

John:                Oh.

Marcus:           — so you can tweak out widgets and make sure that they’re exactly the way they were and if something screws up, you’re not having to store things in Notepad or lists in Excel as to how you had the widget or things like that.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           You’ve already got it saved.

John:                Yep, absolutely. Save you tons of time. Okay, this show here, we like listener feedback and if you would like to support the show and give us some feedback, you can reach us through our Contact page, SpeakPipe, lower right-hand corner of the website, or send us an email direct, and all those links are at the bottom of the show notes.

Also, you can reach out to us through our social media via Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube channels, where you can ask us questions and we do our best to help out for you. It’s a great way to get free advice from some experts.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. We like to acknowledge those that give us $50 or more by reading out their notes here in the show. And for those that might donate in between the live shows, when you hit the live show, you get some bonus callouts aside from getting the notes into the individual shows that the donations arrive in, because I monitor that and I put the notes into the shows, and then we give you an additional callout during the live shows. So there’s some ways to reach out and help yourself and your business.

If you want to support the show, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate.

Marcus:           Yes, we appreciate all your help. Thank you.

John:                Okay, and the final set of plugins we’ve got for you here today…the last one I’ve got for you is called Amazon Associates Link Builder. Now, this is actually an official plugin from Amazon itself and it is a really great plugin. If you’re like me, well, I’ve had my Amazon Associates Program for years, but recently I decided to revive it and start using it effectively after I’ve been doing some research. And I was trying to find the simplest and easiest ways to add links into the website itself, and to do that there’s multiple ways. You can go to Amazon, get a link, copy and paste, and then you can get the plugins. Some things bring in more than others. I was looking for something really nice and effective on a per-post basis.

What this one does for you is once you install it, activate it, insert all your Amazon connection stuff, choose the stores you’re going to use, whether it be U.S., Canada, U.K., etc. – whatever Amazon stores you want. Then all you’ve got to do is when you’re at a post, it has a little window up above in the editor window that says Amazon on it. You type in a keyword or two and it pops up a window and it presents you with all the products that are related to those keywords.

Now, hopefully those keywords are related to the post that you’re working on, so then you just choose those products, click on them, then you choose the format you want the products to be displayed, whether you want it to be displayed as a link, as a carousel, images, etc. Do that and it inserts the shortcodes directly into your posts for you and then you save it. Nice and simple, easy to use.

It’s a really great plugin and it might be a way if you’ve got an Amazon Associates and you’re not making full use of it, this could help you make full use of your Amazon Associate account into your WordPress website. Go check it out. It is the Amazon Associate Link Builder plugin from Amazon themselves and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

…and we’re quiet.

Marcus:           Aww…again?

John:                Again!

Marcus:           I was just caught in my head a brilliant comment for the Amazon Associates Link Builder, too.

John:                Ah…

Marcus:           I was gonna say, I gotta start using a lot more of that kind of stuff because there are so many products and things that you can talk about and share and believe it or not, you can make some money, even if they don’t buy that product that is featured on your site. So if they go to it, click your link and they go, “Ah…I don’t really want this,” chances are they’re gonna buy something from Amazon pretty soon and that cookie will still stay in there and you’ll still get credit, which is pretty great.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           All right, the final plugin I’ve got is called Show Thumbnail Sizes, and this is a simple but I’d call it a clunky plugin that presents you with the exact names and sizes for the different plugins that themes use thumbnails – I’m sorry – for the plugins and themes that use thumbnails. Sorry about that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actually had to dig into demo content of a theme and try and figure out what the actual thumb sizes are supposed to be.

Half the time when they create the demo content, they don’t even put in the correct size that is called for.

John:                Hm.

Marcus:           They just stick something in there and that’s the way it is. So I was kind of sick of my thumbnails getting cropped and cut off due to either improper sizing or proportions. But now with this plugin, I don’t have to worry about it.

So what it does, John, is it actually outputs this screen that gives me all of the fields, like custom field names, and gives me the resolution that is called for within that specific custom field. And so that will actually let you determine what your thumbnail size is going to be. That’s why I called this clunky, because it is still a little bit of work and you have to kind of decode what the fields actually mean, but it works quite well. In fact, it worked on a site that I just put together. I was trying to put some podcast art in there and it ended up being full-screen every time it tried to do a square image, and I finally figured out why, and it’s because I completely had my proportions wrong.

This is called Show Thumbnail Sizes and I gave it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s an excellent plugin. I will probably make use of that with many things I develop, because I end up with so many different image sizes that I don’t know what’s what and the way this one looks is it pulls up, gives you the listing of all of the thumbnail names – all the image names and their sizes.

Marcus:           Right.

John:                It’s not just thumbnails; it gives all of the entire listing of all the images that are named in the themes and the base WordPress.

Marcus:           Right, right.

John:                That’s —

Marcus:           So you can totally format it —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — perfectly.

John:                That way, you can get your images perfectly formatted and of course that is a major thing for speed of your website, is getting the images —

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                — formatted perfectly and proportioned and dropping compressed properly.

Marcus:           Yeah, because WordPress on its own stinks at doing it.

John:                Oh, absolutely. Okay, well that closes out this episode where I covered up the WooCommerce Cart, which I gave a 5 to; the Duplicate Menus, which I gave a 5 to; and the Amazon Associate Link Builder, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the Role Based Redirect, which gets a 4 out of 5; Widget Revisions, which is great and you should try that – gets a perfect 5 out of 5; and Show Thumbnail Sizes gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                And if you’re a Meetup user, go to the Victoria WordPress Meetup Group in particular if you’re on the island or over there on the mainland and you want to come over to Victoria, September 5th is the first meetup of the fall for the Victoria Meetup group. And in that meetup I will be presenting two presentations, each presentation about a half an hour long with about a half an hour for Q&A.

I’ll be doing a presentation on how to set up WordPress properly from the get-go and a presentation on how to configure the Yoast SEO plugin from the get-go. So two great presentations; I’m gonna record those, get them up on the WP Plugins A to Z YouTube channel so everyone can share them, and with a little luck, we’re going to livestream it. This is gonna be interesting if the livestreaming actually works. So look forward to that, so check out our YouTube channel and subscribe to it so you’ll know when that is going to be happening.

Other than that, that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Dragon roar]

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

 

Transcript of Episode 369 WP Plugins A to Z

/0 Comments/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #369 here.


It’s Episode 369 and we’ve got plugins for Extra Profile Fields, Facebook Groups, Language Translation, Envato Elements Template Kits, Gravity Forms Blacklists, and Using WordPress to Brew Beer. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #369

Marcus:           It’s Episode 369 and we’ve got plugins for Extra Profile Fields, Facebook Groups, Language Translation, Envato Elements Template Kits, Gravity Forms Blacklists, and Using WordPress to Brew Beer. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the smoky shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                Yeah, sounds like you’re having quite a time down there with the fires actually moved in close to you know.

Marcus:           Yeah, a little too close for comfort. It’s literally out my backyard so luckily no houses or anything like that have been burned yet but man, it’s close and the air quality sucks. So I’m looking forward to taking my mind off that and getting into some great plugins.

John:               Absolutely. And of course, we have the usual great plugins for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all of the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show there.

And don’t forget to stop in at YouTube. Check out our screencasts, the live shows often up there too, and the training videos – and new training videos have appeared, so go check it out.

Marcus:           Beautiful. And remember, you can also watch us on YouTube live every first Monday of the month at noon Pacific Time. That’s our new time that we’ve got. We just did one last week and boy, we really like the participation that we got. We’d like to get a little bit more, so look out for that. Also remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. We’ve had a couple of great questions from our listeners there recently. And subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we’re going to give you all the discounts, all the news, all the WordPress stuff that we don’t feature here on this podcast, because this podcast is about one thing…and that’s plugins.

John:                Absolutely. And with that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, first up here what I’ve got for you is a plugin called Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft, and this is a plugin here – if you’re building a membership site or you’ve got numerous people attached to your website and you need to collect more than just the basic information for the user profile area, this is a plugin that allows you to add additional profile fields. You can add any type of profile fields you want, be it numeric, text, collect addresses, phone numbers, collect their sex types – any sort of information you want to collect, this plugin makes it easy.

It integrates well with at least one membership plugin that I know of and I used it because we needed to collect a little more information that a membership plugin had in its forms or the profile system had. So we added this, added in the couple of additional fields we needed. It integrated well and now displays those fields where you want them. It integrates them into the form they have to fill out to register for the site and it just worked quite fantastically.

So if you’re looking for something to add that little bit of extra to your profile fields on WordPress, check out this plugin. It’s called Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! I have a plugin that I use that’s similar to that. Maybe I’ll bring that in the next week or two and talk about that one as well. The first plugin that I’ve got today is for Facebook Groups, and many of you know as I announced last week, I started a brand new podcast. It has nothing to do with WordPress; it’s actually sports-related and I have a Facebook group that I’m starting to promote in. And this is called WordPress Facebook Group Promoter and what it does is it lets you promote and invite your blog readers to your group.

It actually creates a nice little section on the bottom of the page and lets them see, you know, exactly what’s going on as far as a post or page widget or you can actually insert it via shortcode. It’s completely customizable, responsive, totally search engine-friendly. This is one of the very few Facebook group plugins that I’ve ever seen, so I jumped right on it and I’m gonna be using this one on a regular basis. We need a lot more of these kinds of plugins.

It’s called WordPress Facebook Group Promoter and I gave it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very good. That’s very useful. I kind of like the way that pulls together. The nice thing – the big thing about Facebook plugins I’m finding is anything that pulls from Facebook or integrates with it, they’ve really got to – the developers have to stay on top of it continuously, considering —

Marcus:           Definitely.

John:                — how often Facebook changes things. So as long as they stay on top of it, it could be a great plugin.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay, well this show here currently brought to you by…

Twenty eighteen is a year of growth. Your website should reflect the growth and change within your business. Show your customers where you are going in 2018 by letting JohnOverall.com work with you to update your website. Let JohnOverall.com take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your website with our maintenance program, hosting, emergency repair services, and more. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely. Contact me for all your WordPress needs. And it’d better be soon thought, because I’m booking my schedule up now for three or four weeks in advance.

Marcus:           Nice.

John:                Okay, and of course we have a contest currently running. WP Nearby Places has volunteered to offer up another license for us to give away for a contest. So if you’d like to win yourself a license for WP Nearby Places, a great plugin which allows you to integrate Google Maps and showcase all your nearby neighbors, it’s a really great plugin. So go check out the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contests and enter the contest. There’s also a link in the show notes directly to the contest.

And for more information on the plugin, check out the interview I did with the developer, from Albert Harlow. There’s a link in the show notes to the interview with him.

And if you’re in a hurry, there’s a discount coupon for it at 25% off. Just use the coupon code FLASH. And to let everyone know, contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, thanks to them very much for offering up the pro version of the plugin for us to use for all our giveaways.

Marcus:           Very nice.

John:                All right, and our next set of plugins we’ve got for you here – the next one I’ve got for you is called Translate WordPress with GTranslate. Now, I’ve been building a site where the client wanted it to be translatable easily without a lot of work and a lot of effort. This is an excellent for doing just that. It’s very simple to use. It uses Google Translate and all you do is push the plugin in, then go in and make a few settings onto it. Choose the languages you want to be translated to, and choose the language you want to translate from. Maybe you’ve written your website in something aside from English. Then you insert the shortcode somewhere on the site where you want it to appear and it appears as a perfect drop-down and then they just select the language they want it to appear and it gives a machine-translated version – not a good translation, because machine-translated can have its problems.

But it’s a very quick, easy way to get what you want done. Easy to set up, easy to use, a really nice plugin. Go check it out: Translate WordPress with GTranslate, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Is it French? Are you translating French?

John:                No, no. No, he wanted to be able to translate into…I can’t remember all the 10 different languages.

Marcus:           Huh.

John:                Not just French but he wants – he’s doing something that’s going global and he wants to be able to hit Spanish and English – English, Spanish, French…I can’t remember beyond that.

Marcus:           Nice! Nice – okay. The next plugin I’ve got here really surprised me when it came out. This is called Envato Elements Template Kits, and this is actually a beta plugin. But if this is beta, I can’t wait to see what the final looks like. Envato Elements Templates are specifically designed for things like different page builders, like an Elementor or Beaver Builder or some of the other page builders.

So what you do is you just install this plugin to your site and then you can browse the growing library of different template kits that Envato has. So each kit is make up of kind of multiple small templates that work together visually and they’re kind of tailored to specific niches.

[rotary telephone ring]

Hey! Look, I’m getting a customer already…

John:                Yeah, that would be me. Go. Sorry about that.

Marcus:           It’s okay. Let me start this again.

John:                Yep, not a problem, man.

Marcus:           All right, so this next plugin that I’ve found is called Envato Elements Template Kit, and this was a shocker to me when I saw it. What it does is after you install it, it allows you to get access to Envato Elements Templates for Elementor, Beaver Builder, and even some of the other page builder plugins. So you install it, you browse their library of different template kits, and each kit is kind of made up of multiple smaller templates that work together visually. They are designed for different niches like real estate or car dealerships, or there’s other blank ones for agencies and anything like that.

So once you find the ones that you like, you import them directly into your library or you just create a new page based on that specific template, so they’re like page templates. You can combine templates to create, you know, inspiring quality, different websites, in a lot less time and a lot less effort. And John, like you, I love Envato Elements and all of their products. I have paid for the service since the day they announced it, and to me it’s worth every penny. This is called Envato Elements Template Kits and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Now with this template kit, I assume it signs into your Envato Elements account. Is that…?

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay. Yeah, Envato Elements is nice. I’ve had it for almost a year and a half now and I’ve used it quite a few times for little bits and pieces here and there, but I never thought about using it for template kits for a theme. That’s interesting.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Definitely it’s something to look into. Okay, and listener feedback…this show loves listener feedback and if you want to give us any, you can reach us via our Contact page, SpeakPipe on the lower right-hand corner of the page, reach out to us through any of our social media, via our Facebook page or YouTube channel or the Twitter – that’s the one. For some reason, Twitter keeps slipping out of my head (maybe because I hardly ever use it).

At any rate, send us your questions and we will be happy to answer them to the best of our abilities. Get yourselves some free advice by reaching out to us.

And this show here is value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, hey, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show with $50 or more in donations over the past weeks. And this week here, we actually have another donation from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. and they donated $50 with the following note:

This donation is on behalf of Classic Bike Spares https://www.classicbikespares.com.au who sell replacement parts for vintage Norton and Triumph motorcycles. It is a WordPress website with a customized Woocommerce store created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au .

And a final bit: Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez.

Thanks a lot, Jez. We really appreciate your support. And that’s —

Marcus:           Very nice. And yeah, that’s a great way to get a follow link from us —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — in terms of making that $50 or more donation. I had an interesting runaround, John, with somebody who emailed me at WP Plugins A to Z —

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           — for some hosting review site —

John:                Oh!

Marcus:           — and he’s like, “Yeah, we want to do some sort of a paid blog.” I said, “You know, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           “Why don’t you just donate to the show and we’ll take care of you that way?” and they decided against it. It’s like man, you people just don’t understand the power that we have here —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — in terms of our links.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           So, you know, it’s a great thing to do if you’re really trying to pump something as far as, you know, a particular property or something for a client, or things like that. That’s a really great way to do it, so you kind of scratch our back and give us some value, we give you some value back.

John:                Absolutely. And a big thank you to all of those who come in under $50 – much appreciated. Every little bit helps.

Marcus:           Yes!

John:                It helps cover the costs of this show, the transcripts, the bandwidth, and all the little essential extras that are required to run a website. And if you want to support the show, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show. There’s numerous ways there you can support the show.

Marcus:           What did you just call the show?

John:                wppluginsato(zed).com/

Marcus:           Oh!! You didn’t say ‘zed.’ You didn’t say ‘zed.’

John:                Sometimes the ‘zee’ slips out.

Marcus:           [laughing]

John:                Every once in a while, the ‘zee’ slips out.

Marcus:           Caught ya slipping.

John:                Yeah, it took me years when I moved to Canada to break using the ‘zee’ and go to ‘zed’ and now I’m at the ‘zed’ and it’s hard to go back the other way.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                The pendulum swings back and forth. All right, our final set of plugins we’ve got for you here today – the last one I’ve got for you is called BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist. Now, this plugin came – I found this plugin due to a need for a client. We’d already installed on their forms – we’d already installed ReCAPTCHA, set up the honeypot, and they were still seeing spam from specific domains or countries in particular. But the spam was coming through with a specific dot after when they fill out the need for an email address in the forms, so they were still spamming them.

So what we did was we went into this and this plugin here allows you to set up specific filters for blacklisting, and you can just go all the way down to – if you wanted to filter out .ru domains from ever being able to submit to your site, you set that up and it does that. If someone sends a form in with a .ru domain in an email address, poof, it’s gone. It will never arrive in your email box. It just gets turfed.

This is a really nice blacklist plugin for Gravity Forms and it’s free. It’s relatively easy to set up. I believe they have a bit of a premium version available to it, but the free version works quite well. Go check it out: BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! I’m a big Gravity Forms user, so I might try that one actually.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           Very cool.

John:                I’ve found it perfect for this client here and I’m thinking this might be perfect for a couple of other clients that are having just little niche – you know, every once in a while, some spammers, they hire some humans to actually fill out the forms. It’s the only way I can figure it because a bot wouldn’t be that meticulous.

Marcus:           Hmm…

John:                And they just spam ‘em.

Marcus:           Yeah. So I’ve got a final plugin here that’s a little crazy, John. But I saw it and I knew that this was for you.

John:                Ah!

Marcus:           …maybe.

John:                Maybe.

Marcus:           It’s called BrewPress and this is where we get into an area that I would probably classify this as the internet of things, but with a WordPress twist. This is a brewery controller that runs on a Raspberry Pie and allows you to brew beer by using WordPress. You can actually run BrewPress on any website to test and create the dummy batches, but you can enable the control of a physical heating element and pump if you install WordPress on Raspberry Pie – those little computers you —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — can get for like $30 or $40.

John:                Oh, yeah.

Marcus:           And it controls the entire brewing process as far as the pump and the heating element, all within WordPress.

John:                Thank you.

Marcus:           Very interesting, which leads me to believe if sometimes I get malware and get hacked —

John:                Mm-hm?

Marcus:           — and some hosting instances, does this mean my beer vat can get hacked, too? I don’t know.

John:                If it’s connected to Raspberry Pie, and the internet —

Marcus:           [laughing]

John:                — I suppose it can be. That’s one of the problems of the internet of things. If it’s connected to the internet and it runs a program, there is a way to hack it.

Marcus:           Absolutely. So anyway, I thought this was probably one of the more unusual plugins that I’ve ever seen. But I have no way to test if it works because (a) I don’t drink beer (b) I don’t have a Raspberry Pie and (c) I don’t have like a 50-gallon tank that I can actually create the stuff with. So somebody out there, if you’re into brewing yourself and making your own craft brews and all the rest of it, check this out. It’s called BrewPress and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s kind of a cool plugin! I don’t brew beer; I like to drink it, but I don’t brew it.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                So I just watched the brewery right across the parking lot and smell them like they were brewing beer today, so hey.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                It’s – but it would be a process. It would definitely be an interesting thing to play with.

Marcus:           Yeah, and actually now you’ve got something to talk about. You’re, “Hey, you know, our worlds can collide if you really want them to. I’m a WordPress guy and you’re beer people. We can…”

John:                Well, their website is built on WordPress.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                I didn’t do it, but it is a WordPress website.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                Okay, well that wraps us up here. I covered up in this episode the Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft, which I gave a 4 to; the Translate WordPress with GTranslate, which I gave a 4 to; and the BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the WordPress Facebook Group Promoter, which gets a 4 out of 5; Envato Elements Templates gets a 5 out of 5, and BrewPress, just because of its originality and uniqueness, I gave this one a 4 out of 5.

John:                All right, and don’t forget to support the show and also I’d like to put out a couple of other reminders. Please go check out the Victoria WordPress Meetup group and our first session is going to be September 5th and I’m going to be recording those sessions and getting them up on the YouTube channel, and they will be the first attempt at livestreaming or just recording for YouTube, so it should be great and it will be a good time and event here in Victoria, so go check it out.

Also, be sure to check out our YouTube channel for all the screencasts, training videos, and more. And a note to developers, if you would like to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests.

And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 368 WP Plugins A to Z

/0 Comments/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #368 here.


It’s Episode 368 and we’ve got plugins for Content Curation, Sale Countdown, Clickable Maps, Reviving Old Posts, Printed Product Flyers and Editing User Roles. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #368

Marcus:           It’s Episode 368 and we’ve got plugins for Content Curation, Sale Countdown, Clickable Maps, Reviving Old Posts, Printed Product Flyers and Editing User Roles. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the sweltering shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                Yeah, I hear it’s sweltering quite nicely down there in Southern California.

Marcus:           That’s all right. I’ll take sweltering over burning down to the ground any day.

John:                Well, there’s that problem, too. We don’t have that up here; it’s been rather nice.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                In fact, it’s been cool and overcast and about 70 degrees for you.

Marcus:           Wow. Our water temperature in the ocean is that right now. [laughing]

John:                Oh yeah, not ours. All right, well at any rate, welcome to the show and of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show there. And also take a few minutes, go over to YouTube where you’re watching this right now hopefully and check out our training videos, screencasts. There is actually a new training video up there so hey, subscribe to us there also, so check us out.

Marcus:           Right. And if you use Twitter (which most of us do), check us out at @wppluginsatoz. You can also subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we keep all the news, all the pertinent information, all the discounts, all the cool stuff related to plugins, but we talk about the news in our newsletter because we like to keep the plugins right here on the show.

John:                Absolutely. With all that being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, first up here I am revisiting a plugin I gave a fantastic review to a few years ago when I first started using it. It’s called Curation Suite, and this plugin used to be one of my favorite plugins. It was a great tool for bringing in news and information to your website. It was great for curating the news segment that we used to publish on a continuous regular basis at WP Plugins, and I’ve used it for many other areas.

Now, that being said, it’s a great plugin. I’ve had it for about four years. I bought into it back when they first started and they were giving out a lifetime kind of license and they grandfathered me in, which was really cool. I like when companies do that when they give out these really inexpensive licenses then they get successful and they grandfather in the original people.

But about six months ago, I started having some problems with the functionality. It was creating problems and the updates weren’t coming as well. And I started and I reached out to contact the support, and they had always been fantastic in the past whenever I had any issues, so I expected more of the same from them. Well, not so much this time. I reached out to them through their support system and since it was low-priority item for me, I didn’t give it much thought. I actually kind of lost track of it and a couple of months went by and I finally had the time to come back to it again, and I realized they never responded to my ticket. And so I reached out to them again for the same problem.

This time, I gave them a week or so – still no response – so I reached out with a brand new support ticket. No response again, and so at this point here, I really wanted to get this plugin working and functioning properly for my sites again and I also wanted to use it on a new site and I was unable to get it to set up. So I’d reached out through that; I found their email address, which is hard to find on their website. I emailed them directly, still no response. I reached out to them through Twitter, Facebook, every possible channel that they have available off of their website for contact.

I did this over the course of two months trying to get some help and support. I got zero – zero help and support – not even a contact to say, “Hey, we’re trying to solve a problem.” And yet every time I go to their site, they’re always trying to upgrade me to their new system and other stuff, so I finally just surrendered to it. I had to pitch this plugin out and unfortunately, I have to reach back and yank that 5-star review they had and drop them all the way back down to a 2 and recommend you don’t use it.

[sad horn tone]

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                I hate doing that to someone. But when I tried as hard as I did to get the support and I got nothing —

Marcus:           Yeah. It turned all of your enthusiasm to anger, and that sucks when somebody does that with little to no support on their end. It would’ve taken two minutes to respond to you.

John:                Yeah, and considering I reached out through all their social media channels – I didn’t reach out publicly because I’m not really big on trying to publicly shame someone until it gets to this point where I just put it into the show and that’s all the —

Marcus:           Right.

John:                — shaming they get.

Marcus:           Geez.

John:                So…

Marcus:           Well, let’s hope to – let me put a little sugar in this —

John:                [laughing]

Marcus:           — sour lemonade right now with one of my plugins. I had a project that I was doing for a friend and I came across this plugin called Interactive US Map, and it’s a premium plugin. I did pay for it. It was $29 at CodeCanyon. Basically, here’s what the whole thing was is they have a charitable organization in which they have a cause and they have different I guess activist things that you can do based on what state you’re in, right?

So this did exactly what I needed it to do. It put a graphic U.S. map up on WordPress. I inserted it with just a shortcode. It allowed me to do a description on the hover in terms of when they hover over any state or things like that. I can change the image, I can change the text, and then I can change what happens when they click the link and what page it goes to, so I literally set up 50 pages with a bulk page creator. And from that, I mapped it all. It took me maybe 10 minutes to copy all of the URLs and the state names and everything else into the editor and boom, it worked with just a shortcode. It was out of the box ready to go.

The thing I like about this plugin is beyond the functionality of it, it’s got a visual editor, so there’s really no coding whatsoever that you need to do. Very easy to do – you can do up to three different kinds of map variants within the plugin. You can use it on – it’s totally responsive, so you can use it on desktop as well as smartphones and graphically, it looks pretty amazing on either one, and this is a one-time purchase. There are no subscription fees, annual renewals, licensing, anything like that. Once you buy the plugin from them, it’s yours and you get free upgrades for life.

So for $29 to solve a problem that a friend needed on their site and literally had no way to do this, they had been searching for probably three years for something like this and I finally found it. I found it on CodeCanyon. It is a premium plugin – again, it’s $29. It worked absolutely perfect for me. If you want, I left a link in the show notes as far as a YouTube video that you can watch and see how it works yourself. It gets from me a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                That’s quite the plugin. I seem to recall running across this plugin a couple, three years ago when it was in its first original forms.

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Yeah, so by the way, it’s not limited to just the U.S.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           They have other variants on their site.

John:                Oh, yeah. I’ve been skimming around there and it’s nice.

Marcus:           Yeah, so let’s just say I was using the State of California and I wanted to click on the individual counties within California. I could do that, so that’s what’s pretty cool about this plugin is they have different variations. You could use Europe, Africa, the U.K. – any of those particular things, so they’ve mapped it all out for you. There’s really nothing else that you have to do other than put the destination links and alter what colors you want for the map itself and what the hover colors are. It’s an amazing plugin – well done. The site is wpmapplugins.com, so you should check them out.

John:                Yeah, it’s very nice and it looks like it might help me with – I just took on a new project last week and they’ve got something similar to sorting out the state fair, and so I think this’ll be a very useful tool.

Marcus:           Yeah, it’s beautiful.

John:                Excellent! Well… [garbled speech]

Marcus:           Easy for you to say.

John:                Yeah, there goes my tongue. My brain just —

Marcus:           [laughing]

John:                — exited the head. Anyway, this show here currently brought to you by…

With all the changes in website requirements, pulled, compromised, and abandoned plugins out there, now is the time to update and upgrade your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

All right – well, and don’t forget —

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                — visit JohnOverall.com. I can sort out everything you need.

Marcus:           There you go. Hey, I got an announcement, John.

John:                Do you? What is it?

Marcus:           I started a new podcast.

John:                Excellent! What’s your new podcast?

Marcus:           Yeah, so this is kind of a regional thing, so any of you that are Chicago Bulls fans, I just started the Bulls Podcast, and I’ve actually already got two episodes in the queue, and the reaction’s been pretty amazing. I never really thought I’d be a sports podcaster —

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           — and you’d be surprised as to how fast I talk in the podcast.

John:                [laughing]

Marcus:           [laughing] It’s amazing! Like rattling off stats like I’m on ESPN. It’s great.

John:                There you go. [Inaudible – 10:54] your career.

Marcus:           Check it out: bullspodcast.com.

John:                All right, a new future career for you. That’s a nice one. Repeat that again; I think I stepped on you.

Marcus:           Yeah, it’s bullspodcast.com and it’s also bullspodcast on social, Twitter, Instagram, blah, blah, blah – all that.

John:                Excellent. Okay, and for July’s contest for the WP Nearby Places license, we do have a winner. He has been notified, so thank you very much for everyone who participated. And coming up this month, we do have another premium license giveaway for WP Nearby Places. It’s in the process of getting set up and should be ready later this week, so make sure you get in there and register and sign up for the contest.

Marcus:           Great, and I know you had that interview with the developer, Albert Harlow.

John:                Yep!

Marcus:           And I got that link in the show notes. Hey, also if you don’t win the contest or you didn’t win the contest, you can use the coupon code FLASH and you’ll get 25% off of the plugin, so check that out.

John:                Absolutely. And of course, the contests are powered by Simple Giveaway Plugin, who were kind enough to give us a pro version of their plugin to use for all the contests, so check out that plugin. It’s a fantastic plugin. It works very nicely and worth the money.

Marcus:           Cool.

John:                Okay, and this brings us up to our next set of plugins, and the next one I’ve got for you here is Revive Old Posts – Auto Post to Social Media. Now, this is an older plugin but it is kept up-to-date and it still works quite well. And if you have a site that has a buildup of content that’s still relevant – just older content, which we happen to have at WP Plugins – this plugin here helps you get that content back into the wild for people to see and view.

It lets you queue up posts to be scheduled and post to Twitter and Facebook, sort of. Facebook’s been going through so many changes, they’ve made it harder to auto publish lately, so that’s something you may have to dig into a little bit. But the Twitter portion still works quite well until Twitter starts messing with their system.

At any rate, you will have to look for some workarounds for Facebook, but all in all, a pretty great plugin. It’s really nice for getting your content out there to help keep people coming back to your website. Go check it out: Revive Old Posts and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Nice. Yeah, I’ve used that one myself. It’s really nice – especially in Twitter, because then you can maintain an active presence and social —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — and not really have to do anything.

John:                Yeah, and I recently connected it up for a client’s website that they needed to get some of their old content back out into the wild, and that’s why it —

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                — came back to my thing. I know I may have reviewed this sometime in the past, but it’s hard to say. I mean, after 368 shows and —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — 10,000 plugins we’ve reviewed – not quite that many, but pretty close.

Marcus:           [chuckle] Cool.

John:                We’ve done thousands of plugins, I know that.

Marcus:           That’s for sure. Okay, the next plugin I have is called Countdown WooCommerce Sale, and this is pretty unique. You know, we’ve used a lot of countdown timers and things before, but this is a pretty simple timer add-on to WooCommerce that actually counts down the remaining time in a sale. So once the timer reaches zero, the sale ends and the price is automatically adjusted back to full price.

Now, it’s really cool and I was inspired actually to research this based on Amazon Prime Day. I looked at all these windows that they had and it had like, you know, “16 hours left in this sale…” “12 hours left in this sale…” “Oh, this one’s gonna end in 30 minutes,” or whatever. So this does exactly the same functionality. So for retailers or developers out there, this is kind of your chance to run that Sale of the Day so you could alternate between different products and it has a nice little box that goes underneath the product image and basically says how much time is left.

This allows you to do a fixed discount amount, a discount percentage, discount rate, the date of the sale finished – all that stuff is displayed within the timer. A really nice plugin and I think anybody that’s got a WooCommerce store should probably think about something like this, even if you’re gonna make it so that every product might have a sale or at least your most popular. That increases the demand because it kind of gives a scarcity of that particular sale and you might get a lot more purchases from the consumer out of that.

It’s called Countdown WooCommerce Sale and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Very cool. I like that. I’m gonna have to talk to my client that I just finished a launch in their WooCommerce site about this one.

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                Absolutely – really nice tool there. They will be having sales on their products.

Marcus:           Yeah, this is perfect so you can kind of set it and forget it in terms of a start date, end date, all that. Preload it and you’re off and running.

John:                Start date and end dates? So you can – you set them in advance and it just…?

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Oh, that’s really nice for someone who has a store with a lot of products they can set up a whole system of sales for a month.

Marcus:           Yeah, I wish you could do – like okay, on the first of the month, this is on sale. On the third of the month, this is on sale. You can’t do that.

John:                Mm-mm.

Marcus:           But hey, for you plugin developers out there, that’s a fork you might want to think about.

John:                There you go. Okay, this show here, we like listener feedback. And if you have any for us, please go to our Contact page, hit us up on SpeakPipe, lower right-hand corner of the website. Or, send us an email or contact us through our Facebook page or through…Twitter! There’s the word I’m looking for. [laughing]

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                So contact us there and send us your questions and feedback. We’d greatly appreciate it, and thinking of feedback, a couple of people on the livestream. We’ve got Favorite Grampy and Larry, and Larry said, “Congrats, Marcus on your new podcast,” so…

Marcus:           Thanks! Thank you very much and hi, Manny.

John:                Yeah, hi Manny.

Marcus:           I’m so jealous of Manny. I’m like dieting right now and he has pretty amazing content of him going to different Disney things and all that.

John:                Oh wow. [chuckling]

Marcus:           Eating all the food that I’ve not been able to eat all year long, so…

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           Thanks, Manny for spoiling my appetite.

John:                Show us all the good stuff at Disneyland.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                This show here is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we would like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past month. All donations $50 or more are read out and their note is published here. Those that come below $50 remain anonymous and thank you very much.

And over the past month, we had a couple of donations that came in from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. and one of them came in on July 9th and he sent us in $50 with the following note:

“This donation is on behalf of Jennings Print Group https://www.jenningsprint.com.au who provide print and signage services to businesses in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au”

And on July 17th, he sent in another $50 for us with the following note:

“This donation is on behalf of Lakeside Air https://www.lakesideair.com.au who are a leading Daikin Air Conditioning installer in Newcastle Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez”

So thank you very much, Jez. We really appreciate your support of the show. It really helps us out and helps cover the expenses that are necessary for us.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                And for those of you under $50 and are Patreon donors, thank you very much. We did get the donation that came in there. It’s small but hey, every little bit helps us out, so thanks very much for all your support.

Marcus:           Absolutely. Yes, we appreciate everything. There are a number of ways that you can support the show. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. We are a totally listener-supported show, so make sure you help us out.

John:                Absolutely. Okay, and our final set of plugins today…the last one I have for you is called User Role Editor and this one here I recently ran into when working on a new project I took on and in it, they had some really unique settings for their user roles, and in particular, the one I found most fascinating was it’s a membership site. Certain levels of memberships get different widgets in there.

Now, there’s multiple ways to do it, but I hadn’t really thought about using a role editor to deal with that, and that’s one of the really neat things that this plugin does. You can assign widgets to only show up at certain role levels in the site, thereby giving your different members different access to different things along the way. It also allows you to go in and create new roles and to adjust the roles for any user level except the administrator. The administrator must always have all the roles.

But other than that, it’s a really great plugin. It’s does some fantastic work. It does have a premium version, so because I was using the free version, I had to knock one point off of it. But the premium version is probably worth the money if you need the extended capabilities of it. But at the current rate of it to allow you to customize so many different areas of the website just based on user role, check this one out: User Role Editor and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Nice! I have used that one myself.

John:                I didn’t – I never thought about the thing of controlling widgets with the user roles. I’d always used different plugins for it.

Marcus:           Hm…yeah, that’s actually something that’s very, very handy.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           All right, I’m going to wrap it up here with a pretty cool plugin that you can use for WooCommerce. It’s called Print Flyers Lite, so this is a lite version of a premium plugin. What it allows you to do is print product flyers straight out of WooCommerce. So there’s different options that are available via different dashboard settings that help you control the appearance of the printed page, like you could change the size and position of the featured image, choose the fonts.

You can choose to show the SKU – you know, the product id – or not. The in-stock status or not. It is not a perfect kind of, you know, designed formatted PDF but I’ll tell you, it’s a heck of a lot better than just printing the webpage verbatim. It allows you to get a really nice printed view in which somebody can actually print out what your product is, what it does, a full description, a couple of different images in there, and it’s a really nice presentation.

It’s called Print Flyers Lite and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s kind of nice. I like the way that works, so…

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                They got a lot of good tools for that one.

Marcus:           Yeah, it’s just another add-on, so all you developers out there that are developing a WooCommerce site, this is something you can actually say that you do as well, which is, “Hey, I not only want to do the WooCommerce site and put all those cute, little sale timers on it with that other plugin that we talked about. But hey, if anybody wants to print anything out, here’s what a typical WooCommerce site prints out as you print the webpage and then compare it to using this plugin.”

John:                Absolutely.

Marcus:           I think this plugin will help.

John:                All right, well that closes out this episode here for us, and I covered up Curation Suite, which I gave a 2 to; the Revive Old Posts – Auto Post to Social Media, which I gave a 4 to; and then the User Role Editor, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I reviewed the Interactive U.S. Map premium plugin, which I gave a 5 out of 5, Countdown WooCommerce Sale gets a 5 out of 5, and Print Flyers gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice roundup today. And a couple of reminders…now one, I would like to mention this is mostly for the Victoria area, B.C., the Victoria WordPress Meetup Group which I run, and I wanted to let folks know, especially the listeners out there. Going into September, I will be starting to make presentations at the Victoria WordPress Meetup, giving two one-hour presentations per session. And what I’m going to do is I am going to record these sessions.

I’m going to make an attempt at livestreaming them but I don’t know if that’ll work, but they will be recorded and they will be put up on our YouTube channel. There are different sessions about the different things that WordPress can be. For example, the first session I’m giving in September is going to be how to set up WordPress basics and then how to properly set up and configure to the Yoast SEO plugin. Then there’s going to be more in I’ve also got some guest speakers that are coming in, some developers from in and around the Victoria area that’ll be presenting. So anyone who’s interested in it, you can find us on meetup.com and it’s the YYJ WordPress Meetup Group, so check it out.

And if you’re a listener here on the island or even over in Vancouver and you want to come over to the island and visit, hey, check us out and come visit and check out the Victoria WordPress Meetup Group.

Marcus:           Nice. Yeah, I look forward to seeing that actually if you can manage to – if you’re gonna go live with that or recorded. That’ll be great.

John:                I’m starting to experiment with how I’m gonna pull it off and get it all together, so —

Marcus:           Do you have good Wi-Fi at the location?

John:                I’m not sure. Most of the locations have good Wi-Fi. They’re happening in the rec centers and the schools and other places where there’s good Wi-Fi. If we don’t have it, I have high-quality internet on my phone or my iPad, so —

Marcus:           Cool.

John:                — anyway, I can pull it off. All right, and be sure to check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. There’s a new training video up there right now I did last week on how to set up products in WooCommerce, so go check that out.

And a note to developers who would like to support the show: if you’d like to offer up a premium license to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests.

And that’s pretty much all we’ve got for you now, so take care. Bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 366 WP Plugins A to Z

/0 Comments/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 366. See complete show notes for Episode #366 here.


It’s Episode 366 and we’ve got plugins for Canadian Postage, Scanning Malicious Code, Removing Yoast Comments, Business Directories and Editing Images Within WordPress. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #366

Marcus:           It’s Episode 366 and we’ve got plugins for Canadian Postage, Scanning Malicious Code, Removing Yoast Comments, Business Directories, and Editing Images Within WordPress. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we have the usual great show for you today with all great plugins for you. But right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and giving us reviews there.

Marcus:           Absolutely! And on YouTube you can find us the first Monday of every single month at 10:00 Pacific Time. Here’s a special hint for you: if you go to our Facebook group, if you like it, then you can actually get notifications as to when we go live so you can see it for yourself and even interact, ask us a question – any of those things.

Also on YouTube, that’s where we have screencasts, tutorials, training videos, and more. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we have special contest links. We’ve got all the news related to WordPress, all the special stuff, comes out every Thursday. Check out our newsletter over at wppluginsatoz.com.

John:                That’s it! And with that all being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

And first up, the plugin I’ve got for you today is Canada Post (BASIC) WooCommerce Extension. Now, I’ve been doing a lot of WooCommerce these days and working through a client. We’re just getting her finished and ready to launch and this one here of course, being a Canadian client and shipping from Canada, well, the best way to ship from Canada is Canada Post. And it’s really nice to have a plugin that helps when your client buys the products, puts them in their shopping cart, and then they have an idea on what the shipping costs are going to be.

Now, this plugin here does have a premium version which allows you to access even more, senses instant labels, instant connection to Canada Post if you have an account with them to book the shipping, etc., etc. But the basic version is usually more than adequate for most stores where it produces the costs, tells the client how much it’s going to cost, and produce a basic label for you to prepare to take over to Canada Post.

Excellent plugin, really easy to get set up. The one caveat to using it is you’ve got to make sure when all your products have height, weight, and all the dimensions in it. So other than that if you don’t have all of the dimensions and the weight in the product, then it won’t show Canada Post as a shipping option. Other than that, a really great plugin. If it didn’t have a premium version, it would’ve got a 5, so we knock one off and we give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out: the Canada Post (BASIC) WooCommerce Extension.

Marcus:           Very nice. The next plugin I have here is a malicious code scanner and it is a plugin that was created by Magda Sicknick, and they created this – I’ll quote them: “Because my own WordPress site got hacked and I needed a quick way to track down files which have had code injected into them.” So what this plugin does is it actually scans your code on your site for specific keywords that are typically found to be common within WordPress code injection situations, and it actually reports back those vital results for you.

So it’s kind of a necessity out of need plugin that someone developed this and it’s very simple, really easy to use, doesn’t require all that bloatware or all those other things. It just kind of looks for the basic signs if there’s anything that might be infected. It’s called Code Scanner and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                I’m gonna have to add that to my arsenal of stuff for when I’m fixing hacked WordPress websites.

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                That will be quite nice because a lot of times I just do manual scanning because I pretty much know where the hackers put their stuff until they start changing it up again.

Marcus:           Right.

John:                All right —

Marcus:           So this searches for keyword-based, like pharmaceutical stuff or whatever the typical kinds of —

John:                Yeah, there’s a lot of —

Marcus:           Hacks —

John:                There’s a lot of typical hacks that go into —

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                — WordPress websites because they don’t want your information; they want your website for spamming and sending out emails and SEO spam, etc., etc. That’s what they want your website for more than anything else.

Marcus:           Sure.

John:                It just creates a mess of your content is all it ever does. Okay, and this week we currently still have a contest running until the end of the month and WP Nearby Places has provided us with a premium license to give away. If you’ve been paying attention to the newsletter, you will have saw some surprises there, so make sure you’re registered for that.

So we’re giving away a premium license for the premium version of WP Nearby Places. It’s a really excellent plugin. I’ve used it myself and it helps you produce Google Maps for your site visitors. So go check it out at wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information. And if you also take a few minutes and go check out the interview I did with Albert Harlow from WP Nearby Places where we discuss the plugin a bit more in depth. There’s a link in the show notes to that.

And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, use the coupon code FLASH for WP Nearby Places to get 25% off the plugin, so go check it out.

And also, all contests on wppluginsatoz.com are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, so thank you very much to them for supplying us with the premium version of the plugin.

Marcus:           Yeah, we’d love the support that all the developers out there are showing to the show.

John:                Absolutely.

Marcus:           So we thank them very much.

John:                Lots of support from the developers from the show and we really appreciate it.

That brings us up to our next set of plugins, and the next one I’ve got for you here is —

Marcus:           Doesn’t support a developer [laughing]

John:                [chuckling] It doesn’t support a developer. No, but what it does is it helps clean out some extra bit of – an extra line of code in your website. It probably doesn’t save you much in speed but it’s to remove Yoast SEO comments, because they are just comments at the bottom of your website. If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, at the bottom of every page you get a tagline that says, “This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin.” This plugin does nothing more than remove that line.

You plug it in, turn it on, and that line vanishes from your website. It’s a way to hide what plugin you’re using. It’s kind of a useful way that way. At any rate, I give it a 5-Dragon rating because it is one of those quick, easy, and lazy plugins.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s pretty lousy that Yoast does that.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                He does a lot of things, you know. His plugins – great. Some of the things he does are great, but some of the things he does just make me shake my head. Really? Really, Yoast?

Marcus:           Yeah. Yep, all right – finally, I needed to do a business directory and I didn’t want to use a business directory theme. I just wanted a cool plugin to do it and it was simple because I only needed to put six business in that were around one specific town. So I used HSW Directory. It is a free business directory plugin with premium features included. It actually requires the Advance Custom Fields plugin, so if you don’t have that – which you can get at the Repository. You can’t get the premium version but you can definitely use the regular free version.

It helps to list any kinds of business. It’s map box powered, so it’s got mapping and geolocation, address finders, easy templates, customization, and auto-map stuff, so this is a quick and easy kind of free thing that if you had more than I’d say five, six, maybe ten businesses, you probably would want to use something a little more heavy-duty. But for simple business listings or maybe you have a small membership where you want to list a few people that might not even be location-dependent, this is a great way to do it. It’s called HSW Directory and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, that’s a pretty cool looking plugin.

Marcus:           Mm-hm.

John:                Okay, well that brings us up to listener feedback and donor support. We really like listener feedback and if you would like to support the show and give us some feedback, you can go to our website and click the SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner or send us an email through our contact page or contact us via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – any of our social media spots that we’re at. Go check it out and send us information and your questions. We really like ‘em.

And this section here is sponsored by WP Nearby Places, where you can customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your SEO, rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with your specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what’s around your specified location like no other map theme plugin. Using the power of Google Maps, WP Nearby Places also uniquely breaks down neighborhood locations by categories such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending on which version you purchase, provides the location’s names, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in miles or kilometers from the central location.

There are three versions available: basic, which is free and available through WordPress.org, pro, and premium, which is offered up at their website, so details about all their licensed versions, check out their website at wpnearbyplaces.com. You can show off your neighbors by categories. Featured neighbors – the most exciting feature is the ability to feature all the neighbors in and around your website or your business, and this is an excellent feature that allows you to pick and choose the neighbors in and around you that you want to showcase. You can just pick them because you like them or you can try to sell them the ad space to help earn a little bit of extra revenue for your website. So go check it out: WP Nearby Places.

Marcus:           Yep, I’m looking forward to checking that out, by the way. I can’t wait.

John:                I know; it’s coming your way. It is. All right, and this show here is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we like to acknowledge those who have supported the show with $50 donations or over by reading out their notes. And for those that are $50 and below, they remain anonymous, and this week we would like to thank all of those who came in under $50 and those who have set up small subscriptions, so thank you very much for your support of the show.

The money we collect from there does not go into our pocket. It goes to support the show by paying for things such as transcripts, bandwidth, server space, etc., etc. All of the general things that are required to just maintain and operate a website. Believe it or not —

Marcus:           Oh, can I say one of them? Can I say one of the cool things that we’re doing?

John:                Sure.

Marcus:           Is we are taking portions of our transcript of the reviews of plugins that we get in the repository and we’re having one of our staff people actually go in and put that review in the plugin review section within the Repository.

John:                Oh, yeah! That’s being —

Marcus:           So that we’re providing some feedback to the developer themselves and so that other people can say, “Wow, these guys really did their stuff in their conversation.” We literally paste the whole conversation verbatim into the review box so that people can get our full take on it.

John:                Yep, there you go. Yeah, that just started a couple of weeks ago when I hired on the second person to my staff.

Marcus:           Yeah, nobody else is doing that.

John:                I put her to work doing that.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                All right, and if you want to support the show, go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Lots of choices there for ways to support the show.

And this brings us up to our final set of plugins for this week, and the last one I’ve got for you here is another WooCommerce plugin. It’s called WooCommerce Product Disclaimer and this one here is a very useful one to have. If you have products that you sell that are one-off, once someone buys it and pays for it, there’s no refunds, etc., etc. Or it has special things that require with it and you need to make sure the client has acknowledged that information before they actually finish purchasing it. That’s what this plugin does.

So the moment they click on it to add it to their shopping cart, a window pops up with a disclaimer that you’ve set and they have to accept that disclaimer before it can be added to the shopping cart. So this is a way to ensure that you don’t get blowback from people that haven’t read the fine print or that pretend they haven’t read the fine print. Because even if they don’t read that fine print, they click the ‘accept’ button, which means they should have read that fine print.

So it’s a very useful plugin. I use it for my client’s site because they have a few products that are specific that way and we needed to control that. So anyway, easy to set up, useful plugin, free in the Repository. Go check it out: the WooCommerce Product Disclaimer and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           It’s funny, I just had the conversation with my wife today. I said, “In my next life, I’m coming back as an intellectual property lawyer.”

John:                [Laughing] That’s probably the biggest growth area for the next few years.

Marcus:           Oh, for the next few? Come on, all the devi- — we’re gonna be device-heavy and tech-heavy for the rest of our lives.

John:                Ah, that’s true. True.

Marcus:           I mean, it’s gonna need a disclaimer.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           Right?

John:                Oh, yeah.

Marcus:           All right, so [chuckling] this is probably one of the most groundbreaking plugins I’ve ever brought to the show. I’m not saying that lightly and I’m also saying this at the end of the show, so thank you for listening to the end of the show. I’m rewarding you right now with one of the most excellent plugins I’ve ever seen for WordPress. It’s called WP Imager and what it is is it’s an image editor – yeah, an image editor that lets you create all kinds of images with effects like adding circular text or curved text, gradient backgrounds, gradient text. You can take a screenshot on your desktop and paste it into the editor on WordPress.

Here’s what it’s got. It’s got the typically whizzy wig editor, it has layers like Photoshop does (hide, lock, sort – whatever you want). It can use icons from Font Awesome – there’s 500 of those. There’s 700 different Google Fonts you can use in this image editor. That’s something I don’t even think Photoshop does. I think you’ve got to download them one-by-one.

John:                Yeah, you gotta have them all installed on your computer.

Marcus:           It’s got a color palate with material design. It does circular, curved text, stroke, shadow, fill with your text. It draws custom shapes, polygons, you could upload images to put within the image, it does cropping, resizing, rotating, transparencies, transformations, you can blur stuff, gradient, radial, stripes, container shapes, you can alter by points, and it still does undo and redo, and then you can download the image right to your computer and check it out and, you know, give it to somebody for approval or do whatever you want to do with it.

It’s awesome. Really.

John:                Nice!

Marcus:           It’s WP Imager and it gets a 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Yeah, I was just reading through some of the features in it. It looks to be quite nice. It looks like a lite version of Photoshop for WordPress.

Marcus:           Yep, that’s exactly what it is.

John:                Yeah, it’s something.

Marcus:           Thank you, people listening to the end of the show.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           This is your reward. I’m not telling anybody else about this.

John:                Yeah, very —

Marcus:           It’s just on the end of the show.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           It’s for you guys. Don’t tell anybody.

John:                Don’t – don’t spread the word yet. [chuckling]

Marcus:           No.

John:                All right, well that brings us up to wrap up. I covered up in this episode the Canada Post (BASIC) WooCommerce Extension, which I gave a 4 to. I covered up the Remove Yoast SEO Comments, which I gave a 5 to. And then I covered up the WooCommerce Product Disclaimer, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the Code Scanner, which gets a 5 out of 5, HSW Directory gets a 4 out of 5, and WP Imager – if I could give it a 6, man, I would.

John:                Yeah, wow.

Marcus:           But it gets a 5 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, I’m gonna have to give that a shot because that just looks like it’d be very nice. I want to see what kind of images it produces. So yeah, I’ll keep that one in there.

Marcus:           Well – okay, how would you and I use it? Well yeah, covers of our —

John:                Oh, I’d use it for the – I’d use it for all the featured images in our podcast that are —

Marcus:           Yeah!

John:                — that I’ve got to change in Fireworks every week.

Marcus:           That’s right.

John:                So it’s like I’d use it for that. If I can do that and put one up there and use that same image to edit it and save a new one each week, it would save having to open Fireworks, edit, save the image, upload the image. Right there in WordPress?

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                It could probably save —

Marcus:           Just —

John:                — five.

Marcus:           — save it right to the Media Library and you’re done.

John:                Yeah, you’d probably save five to ten minutes of time per post.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Which adds up to a lot of time over the course of a year. I mean, consider this is Episode 366, so we now have over seven years of episodes —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — is what we’ve got of weekly episodes. So that’s a lot of time.

Marcus:           And also, some people don’t have Photoshop or Fireworks or things like that.

John:                Yeah, that’s true.

Marcus:           Or they don’t have them on their computer.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           This is all browser-based.

John:                Yeah, that’s expensive software. I know; I bought mine. [chuckling]

Marcus:           Eh?

John:                Okay, well that’s a wrap up for it and be sure to go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And if you’re a developer out there and you want to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests and give us all the details.

That’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

 

Transcript of Episode 365 WP Plugins A to Z

/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #365 here.


It’s Episode 365 and we’ve got plugins for Counter Widgets, External Post Links, Space Invaders, Google Fonts, and Social Proof. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #365

Marcus:           It’s Episode 365 and we’ve got plugins for Counter Widgets, External Post Links, Space Invaders, Google Fonts, and Social Proof. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we have the usual great show for you here 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 few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show there.

Marcus:           That’s right! You can also find us on YouTube the first Monday of every month at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time. That’s when we go live with the show. That’s the first Monday of every month. Also, you can check out our training videos, screencasts, and all kinds of other stuff. If you are on Twitter, you can follow us @wppluginsatoz. Ask us any question about plugins, reactions about stuff. We love socially interacting with folks on Twitter. Also remember to subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we keep all the news, we have all the contests, and all the goodies that you’re gonna get only by subscribing to the newsletter, so make sure you check that out at wppluginsatoz.com. We keep all that stuff there because over here, all we talk about is plugins.

John:                Absolutely, and also you can find out more about the live show by liking our Facebook page. We get notifications go up there regularly to remind everyone, so go check out our Facebook page, too. And with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

And first up today, the plugin I’ve got for you is Jellyfish Counter Widget. Now, this is one that I think I reviewed way, way back in a while and you, Marcus, were looking for this a week or two ago and —

Marcus:           Yep.

John:                — I went hunting for it and I went, “Oh yeah, this is it,” and so I decided hey, why not? Throw it back into the review lineup so people can check it out. It’s still a useful plugin; it’s still quite viable. It’s a couple, three years old, so it’s a little bit out of date but it still seems to work well. And what it does for you is it creates counters that you can put on your website. Different kinds of counters: speedometer kind of counters or you can count down or count up. You can have it count out up to a specific number. You can start it at specific numbers. You can give it fancy-looking counters. There’s a lot it does and it’s basically all around counters and you can customize it with your own CSS and Java – just a whole lot of stuff.

It’d be nice if it was brought up to date. Who knows? It may not actually require any updating but they should at least give it the appearance of being brought up to date so it’s not looking like it’s three years old, sitting in the WordPress Repository. But currently, it still works well. Go check it out: Jellyfish Counter Widget and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Yep, I bugged you on Skype about that.

John:                You did. [chuckling]

Marcus:           I have a need.

John:                And I went hunting for it. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Marcus:           I have an organization that is counting the actual number of cases that happens for this particular procedure and how many of these procedures get done every year, and it’s in the millions.

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           And it’s interesting to watch it count, so it really worked well for me. It was exactly as my client had asked for. It was really cool.

John:                Yeah, I have a client that it’s actually used on their website, which is how I remembered it because of their website.

Marcus:           Yep.

John:                And they use it for counting the number of deforested areas – acres being deforested per year.

Marcus:           Yeah. My next plugin – or the plugin – the first plugin – is called Lenix Post External Link. Now what it does is it gives you the option to replace any post on the site with an external link by replacing its link on the archive page to whatever external link this happens to be. You can open it in a new tab or whatever you want to do. All you have to do is edit the post and enter the external link kind of in the meta data at the bottom and it will go ahead and send it there instead, which is kind of cool.

There’s a lot of applications for it. Here’s what I did on a – I won’t say client, but somebody who needed some help. They needed help forwarding their old store page over to their Shopify page —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — and didn’t want to do any crazy redirects or anything like that, and it was pretty easy to do. I just used this plugin and on that same page that it had their store with WooCommerce, I instead put this in and it sent it right over there with all navigation pointing that way. Really nice plugin – Lenix Post External Link, and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, that’s actually quite useful. I know a few times that I could’ve used this plugin instead of creating crazy redirects.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                So…

Marcus:           Yep!

John:                I’ll keep this one in mind the next time that comes up, because it comes up more often than you think.

Marcus:           It does.

John:                All right, well this show here currently brought to you by…

Twenty eighteen is a year of growth. Your website should reflect the growth and change within your business. Show your customers where you are going in 2018 by letting JohnOverall.com work with you to update your website. Let JohnOverall.com take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your website with our maintenance program, hosting, emergency repair services, and more. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely! Think about me and my team. I now have a couple of people working for me, so business is growing quite nicely this year. So thank you very much to all of those out there that are supporting me. And if you need help, feel free to get a hold of me through my website.

And to let everyone know, we do still have a contest currently running, running through ‘til the end of July, and it’s from WP Nearby Places and they’re giving away a premium license for the WP Nearby Places plugin. It helps you create very useful Google Maps for all of your site visitors. It’s a great plugin. Just go over to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more and enter the contest. It’s very simple to enter; all we need is your name and email address. And if you send out a link to all of your friends, you can get additional chances to win the contest. For every time a friend of yours comes through your link, you get two additional entries into the contest so hey, get out there and share, share, share!

And if you’re in a hurry for the plugin, use their discount code – 25% off for WP Nearby Places with the coupon code FLASH. And all contests run on wppluginsatoz.com are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. A very nice plugin. They were kind enough to supply us with the pro version for use on the website.

Marcus:           Beautiful!

John:                And that brings us up to our next set of plugins, and the next one I’ve got for you here is another one from the Jellyfish plugin developers, and this one’s a bit older but still works and it’s really quite cute. It’s called the Jellyfish Invaders, and it’s basically like having little Space Invaders on your website. You can’t go pew-pew ‘em, but they do bounce around and you can lock them into specific blocks with the code. So if you want a specific area you just want to bounce ‘em around, they’ll bounce around and give some entertainment to your friends. And who knows? Maybe you want to go back to 1998 and build a really bizarre website.

So anyway, a cute little plugin.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                Just a lot of fun – nothing special. Go check it out: Jellyfish Invaders and I gave it a rating of 3 Dragons.

Marcus:           Nice! I would like to play some Space Invaders though on a widget if that’s possible.

John:                It is! I have actually seen it. I have run across it once or twice. Somebody took the original JavaScript and turned it into a plugin.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                I’ll have to find it again. It’s —

Marcus:           Good.

John:                — things like that pop up from time to time and then I set them aside and then forget about them.

Marcus:           Yep. All right, my next plugin is called Flip Counter and it’s much like – it’s kind of the need that I needed before, John, but you found that plugin for me. But I tested it, I thought hey, let’s bring it to the show. What it is, it’s a simple countdown or even a count up timer that’s easy to set up and pretty quick to implement. You just have to enter in the count setting that you want and it works right out of the box. It’s great for showing the deadlines to special offers, store sales, or anything else you are counting down to.

Pretty cool – it’s called Flip Counter. It works well on landing pages and things like that. It didn’t work for the need that I specifically had, but I’m gonna keep this one on the back burner for later. Flip Counter gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice! You never know where you might be able to use it.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Okay, and of course this show here, we love listener feedback. And none this week, but we’re looking for it so you can contact us, give us your feedback via any of the social media platforms or through SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner of our website, or send us an email through our contact page. Send us your questions and we will get you responses for them, or just send us the kudos or even if they’re not so kudos, so send it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This area here, also sponsored by WP Nearby Places. Customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your search engine rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with your specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what’s around your specified location like no other mapping plugin. Using the power of Google Maps, WP Nearby Places also uniquely breaks down neighborhood locations by categories, such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending which version you purchase, provides the location’s name, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in miles or kilometers from the central location.

There are three versions available: the basic version which is free and available through WordPress.org, the pro and premium version, which is on their website. Check out all the details about their license versions at wpnearbyplaces.com. You can show off your neighbors by categories, featured neighbors. The most exciting feature is the ability to feature neighbors on your website and in your maps of nearby places. There are places in any neighborhood where they are the main event, the main attraction of why someone would travel to that neighborhood. For instance, Starbucks – lots of neighborhoods, a winery, a park, a famous restaurant, and you get the bonus of even selling those advertising spaces around because you can select all of the nearby neighbors that you want to showcase, so you can use that as an added revenue stream.

So go check it out: WP Nearby Places.

And this show, a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we would like to acknowledge those that have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 or over are read out and their note is published here. For those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much. This week here, we would just like to thank all our donors who came in under $50 and for those who have set up regular, small subscriptions, thank you very much through Patreon and other sources.

And if you want to support the show, go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate.

Marcus:           Yeah, that goes a long way when you donate. Even if it’s a small amount, we do appreciate everyone’s support.

John:                And the money doesn’t go into our pocket. It goes to pay for the expenses of the website.

Marcus:           Yeah, I wish it went to our pocket.

John:                Yeah, well…

Marcus:           Come on, I need 20,000 people to donate $5 this week. Come on!

John:                That would be great! Buy a new house!

Marcus:           We’re holding a drive, John! We’re gonna get a telethon going.

John:                God says I need a new plane!

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                Please donate! God says I need a new plane!

Marcus:           Now look…

John:                [laughing]

Marcus:           Here’s how it works, folks. If you want to donate, great. If you don’t want to donate —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — and you still enjoy the show —

John:                Still enjoy the show.

Marcus:           — and propagate the formula. Let other people know about it.

John:                Yeah, let everybody —

Marcus:           Tell other people about the show. Leave us reviews, all that stuff.

John:                Absolutely, just tell other folks about it. We don’t whine about donations anymore; we just like to mention them.

Marcus:           Yep, that’s it.

John:                All right, and this brings us to our last set of plugins here. The last one I’ve got for you today is called Embed Google Fonts, and this is a pretty straightforward plugin. It’s really simple and easy to use and what its main goal is is to automatically replace registered Google fonts from themes and plugins with local versions so they load directly from your server. This could save you some really decent speed on your website, so it’s something you want to look into to see.

What it will do is when it loads up, it goes in, looks at your theme that you’ve got active and the plugins you’ve got active, and looks to see if they’re using any Google fonts. And if it is, it tries to download them and then cache them into your local website so that now whenever the fonts are served, instead of going from your website to Google to get the fonts to bring them back to your website, it serves them directly from your website, which may cut down anywhere from, you know, a fraction of a second to a second or two of load time, which can be very important in today’s age of speed is all important for website loads.

So go check this plugin out. It seems to be pretty good. I’ve loaded it up. I haven’t noticed any speed improvements yet, but who knows? We’ll see what happens when I get more tests into it. And currently, check it out: Embed Google Fonts. I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s the same – that’s one of the plugins I checked out lately too, and it’s really, really nice. I liked it.

Okay, finally we’re gonna talk about something called Social Proof, and if you’ve signed up for a webinar or looked at an e-book or any of those things, sometimes you get these little popups that say, “Hey, John Doe from Los Angeles just purchased whatever…” – purchased something. Or, “They registered for the webinar,” or whatever it happens to be.

Most sites that are out there that use that have a really expensive script. It’s a service called Proof.

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           And here is the WordPress version of that. It’s called Real Time Social Proof and what it does is it shows popups of recent sales and signups in the bottom left corner of your sales page, and you can configure the pages on which ones you want to show, the real time social proof. It’s performance-oriented, so it only loads on the pages where you want it to load and you can have an option to show an alternative action that your users take on your site. So it’s pretty cool to increase stuff like webinar signups, product sales, and landing page conversions. It’s really nice and it’s free.

It’s called Real Time Social Proof and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice! All right, well that wraps us up here and I covered up in today’s show the Jellyfish Counter Widget, which I gave a 4 to. Then I covered up the Jellyfish Invaders, which I gave a 3 to and then wrapped it all up with Embed Google Fonts, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I covered Lenix Post External Link, which gets a 4; Flip Counter, which gets a 4, and Real Time Social Proof also gets a 4.

John:                Absolutely, and a quick, final reminder: go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And a note to developers who would like to support the show, if you want to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests.

And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 364 WP Plugins A to Z

/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #364 here.


It’s Episode 364 and we’ve got plugins for Team Sliders, Free Shipping Notifications, Facebook Feeds, Media File Management and a Page-based Theme Switcher. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #364

Marcus:           It’s Episode 364 and we’ve got plugins for Team Sliders, Free Shipping Notifications, Facebook Feeds, Media File Management and a Page-based Theme Switcher. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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.

Marcus:           And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                Excellent. I hope you guys had a great Fourth of July down there.

Marcus:           Absolutely.

John:                I heard it was a really great time in many places. Many of my friends posting up on Facebook, so Happy Fourth – belated for everyone, even though we did remember it in the last show. So at any rate, we’ve got the usual great show for you today and right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show. It really helps out.

Marcus:           That’s right! And hey, if you use YouTube, you can check us out live the first Monday of every month at 10:00 Pacific Time on YouTube. Go to our website and you’ll find out more about where you can find us and once you’re there, you can also check out the training videos, the screencasts, and everything else that we’ve got to offer. On Twitter you can follow us @wppluginsatoz. If you’ve got a question or a plugin that you need, let us know. And also subscribe to our newsletter; that’s at wppluginsatoz.com and that goes out every Thursday. That’s where we keep all the news-related stuff about WordPress. We don’t like to talk about that here on the podcast. We like to keep it all about the plugins.

John:                And please subscribe to the newsletter. There are some treats coming that will only be in the newsletter, so stay tuned for those. Okay, well with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, first up here a plugin I’ve got today is WP Team Showcase and Slider Pro. This is the team showcase plugin I opted for as a replacement after I talked about the failed plugin in the last show that was just problem after problem. This plugin did not have those issues. It is a premium plugin, so you will want to consider it and it’s not that much. It’s about $40, so it’s well worth the money if you want to save yourself lots of headaches.

It’s set up very easy. It has excellent display of all the content, creates the grids perfectly, has multiple choices for how you can display the popups, has multiple choices for the types of grids and displays you can do. There’s a lot that this plugin has going for it and makes it really easy to set up and showcase your team in multiple ways. I use this for a client of mine who needed to showcase an executive board that changes every year or so.

So this is something you want to look into if you want something swift, easy to set up and change, especially if it’s something that has to be changed on a regular basis. So go check it out: WP Team Showcase and Slider Pro and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Plugins lead-in music – cut off]

John:               Wrong button.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           Yeah! [laughing] A little slippery on the buttons there.

John:                Yeah, fat fingers.

Marcus:           Okay, so – man, I’ve been doing a lot of WooCommerce stuff, especially this month. And one of the things that I see, you see it on – I don’t know if you have Amazon Prime now, John —

John:                I do.

Marcus:           — but Amazon has this thing. Yeah, so you’ve got to order X amount and they’ll deliver for free. Walmart does it here in the States, all kinds of other retailers do it. You have to order X amount —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — before —

John:                that’s not us.

Marcus:           — you get free shipping.

John:                That’s not our Prime. Our Prime’s different.

Marcus:           Oh! No, it’s Prime Now, actually.

John:                Oh, Prime Now, okay.

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s when they deliver it right to your house within two hours.

John:                Oh, we don’t have that. Nope, Canadians aren’t that worthy. [chuckling]

Marcus:           Okay, well the concept is the same no matter what. Sometimes you need to have a certain monetary threshold —

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           — in which people can then get free shipping, right? How many – you know, order $35, $99 – whatever it happens to be. This plugin, Free Shipping Notice for WooCommerce, does actually that. So you can now incorporate that into WooCommerce. It has individualized, so it can do it based on a cart total. You can do total customization of this, have a free shipping minimum applicable to only the countries that you happen to ship to. So if somebody in say Europe orders something from my store for just, you know, $20 or whatever the threshold happens to be, what if the shipping costs me $140 for that?

John:                Right.

Marcus:           So I want to be able to set that so it does that. It also has geolocation, whether that applies at all, so you can just do a geo-based and they won’t even see it, and it is mobile-friendly and compatible with all mobile devices.

John:                Nice!

Marcus:           So a really nice plugin if you want free shipping, if you actually do shipping within your WooCommerce store, and I rated this one a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice. I like that. It might be something my current WooCommerce client would consider using. Okay, well let’s roll on into this show here currently sponsored and brought to you by…

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

And we also do have a current contest running where we are giving away a premium plugin license for WP Nearby Place and it’s an excellent plugin. We’ve discussed it in the last show and we’ve got an interview. You can go find out a little bit more about the plugin. There’s links in the show notes for the in-depth interview. And we’re giving away a premium license for it and the date for the end of the contest currently is the end of the month, but there may be a couple of surprises and you’ll have to check the newsletter for the additional surprises for it, so stay tuned for those. But go check out the contest by going to wppluginsatoz.com/contests.

And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, use the 25% off coupon code for WP Nearby Places. The coupon code is FLASH. And all contests currently powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Go check them out. Links are in the show notes.

Marcus:           Cool. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming up.

John:                Yep, absolutely. Yeah, that brings us up to our next set of plugins here, and the next one I’ve got here – this one came about – I have a photography client and he was looking for a simple way to deal with his photos. Of course, he puts up photo galleries on Facebook all the time and then he had to get into those websites, so he was doing double duty work and he didn’t want to try and put them on his website and then have to get them copied to Facebook. He just puts in the Facebook shares and gets more play there.

So I went hunting and of course I’ve realized there are Facebook feed plugins out there. There’s a couple. It’s been a couple of years since I’d used one, so I went hunting and did some research and I thought I’d found a really great one, the WD Facebook feed. This one was from the Web Dorado and it is a premium plugin and I checked it all it. It looked good; everything I could do with their demo seemed like it was going to fit the bill. So I went ahead, bought it for the client, and installed it. And initially, it installed beautifully. It worked like a charm. It was great, all was done, I wrapped it up, closed it up, sent it to him, and said, “Hey, all done. Go check it out.”

The next morning, I went to double-check it because I like to double-check my work the following day to make sure it’s working. Well sure enough, something had gone wrong overnight with the plugin and all it was doing now was it would only display the photo album title. It wouldn’t display any of the images. So I go back in, dig through the plugin, and all of a sudden it’s getting errors from Facebook and I’m like, “What are these?” I go into their support to find information. They don’t really have a lot – no forums or anything to deal with. So I ended up emailing them for some support, telling them exactly what I’d done, where they had told me to create a Facebook API, etc., etc.

They sent back, “Well, go build a Facebook API. Follow these instructions.” All right, fine – I’ll go do it again – what you did. Still no problems, sent back to them. They sent back and they said, “Well, we’re updating the plugin,” because Facebook had made some changes a few weeks ago and I guess they suddenly caught up. So I’m like, “Okay.” I wait a few days. It takes them a week and a half to get the plugin update to me and then they have a whole new set of instructions for the API. You’ve got to do it a completely different way. So I go through all of that, all of that rigmarole, and still it won’t work – exact same errors.

Send it back to them and they come back to me and say, “Well, did you do all of this?” Yes, I did that. “Well, do all this…” and I did all these things and still nothing. So I went back and forth, back and forth. Finally, I just surrendered. This plugin here was not going to work, no matter what I did, no matter how I created the APIs. They couldn’t give me any information or any support towards the plugin, so I threw in the towel, said, “Okay, I’m done with it and that’s all I can do, folks.”

So unfortunately, this one here goes all the way to the bottom.

[sad horn tone]

Two-dragon rating for WD Facebook Feed. Avoid it, folks.

Marcus:           Wow, and that’s the debut of that sound effect.

John:                [giggling] Yeah, I know. [chuckling] That’s a cool sound effect though. It worked well.

Marcus:           [chuckling] Clunkers.

John:                Gonna make me want to hunt down some number twos for a while.

Marcus:           [laughing] All right. John, I’m just gonna say it. What the number one complaint about WordPress that I have? What section?

John:                The media library of course.

Marcus:           Hey! Ding-ding!

John:                I think —

Marcus:           We need a sound for that now, too.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Okay, so I found this thing called FileBird and I checked it out and it’s really nice. It’s a media library category and folders file manager. Now here’s what I liked about it. It’s drag-n-drop, so you can move – you can put things in folders – images in different folders and rearrange the folders. You have full control in your tool bar as well. You can have unlimited folders and subfolders and organization things.

Now here’s the cool thing that I liked, John, and is excellent at doing the things that I like to do on Windows, which is right-click things. So you can right-click your mouse right there and quickly create, rename, or delete folders just like what you do on your typical computer. So it really acts as kind of a file media library explorer, so to speak. Really cool – it’s called FileBird and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Nice! Excellent. Anything that helps the media library is a plus in my book, because that definitely needs some help and work.

Marcus:           So developers out there, take a look at FileBird, see the stuff that it does, then take a look at the plugins that allow you to do hashtags and little notes and subtags and all that kind of stuff with images —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — and media that you upload. Merge these two plugins together and you’ve reinvented the media library just as I want it.

John:                Absolutely. Okay, now we do like listener feedback and this section here is sponsored by WP Nearby Places, where you can customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your search engine rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with your specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what’s around your specified location like no other mapping plugin.

Using the power of Google Maps, WP Nearby Places also uniquely breaks down the neighborhood locations by categories such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending on which version you purchase, provides the location’s name, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in miles or kilometers from the central location. There are three versions available. Basic, which is free and available through WordPress.org, pro, and premium, which are offered on their website.

For details all about their licensed versions that are available, including the add-ons, go check them out at wpnearbyplaces.com. Show off your neighbors by categories, featured neighborhoods, the most exciting feature is the ability to feature all your neighbors around your website in your map of Nearby Places. This allows you to create ads and sell those ads in and around your site. Show off the wineries, parks, or famous restaurants nearby you, so go check it out: WP Nearby Places.

Marcus:           Yeah, that looks cool. I know that we put in for a license for me —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — to come check that out, so.

John:                I actually haven’t sent an email yet, so I will get —

Marcus:           [frustrated sound]

John:                it in tonight. I know, it’s been a really busy week.

Marcus:           [chuckling] Okay.

John:                I have been buried in work all week.

Marcus:           Understand.

John:                So – okay, so listener feedback – we do have a listener feedback, an audio clip this week from Frank Branker, so take it away Frank…

Test…Hi, John. I am looking for something similar to a blog manager where I can categorize and post a series of pages. Let’s say I would like to have two blog managers, the second one I wouldn’t call it ‘blog,’ so I’ll categorize it to something else. But that’s the look and feel I’m looking for. Any suggestions? Frank Branker, pro –

[outro music, plugins lead-in music, and sad horn tone]

Marcus:           [cracking up]

John:                [quietly chuckling]

Marcus:           You broke the sound board!

John:                I did hit everything on the sound board at once. Yeah, that just trashed it. Sorry about that but hey, not really. At any rate —

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                — thanks, Frank. That was a really good question and as far as I can tell what you’re looking at is you’re looking at something that’s gonna create you custom post types, and there’s many plugins out there for it. I don’t know the specifics of it because you weren’t very clear on the specifics. If you get this, please send back an email or something with more specifics on what you’re looking for and then I can probably help you out. I don’t know, from that did you get anything, Marcus?

Marcus:           No, but here’s the thing by the way, and this applies to everybody who asks us anything about plugins. If you see something you’re trying to do or recreate, give us the link to that site.

John:                Oh, absolutely.

Marcus:           Say, “Hey, look at this thing on this site and here’s the URL it. What’s the cool plugin to do that?” That’s really the only way that I can disseminate it. I can make anything with plugins. I can bridge – you know, I’m the duct tape guy when it comes to plugins. John, I know that you are, too.

John:                Oh, yeah. I’ve bridged a lot of things with plugins.

Marcus:           I will find a way.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           One way or the other and, you know, just – that’s the only thing I ask. So I wish I knew a little bit more. If there’s a pagination thing of a series of posts, I’d have to see how he’s categorizing it, how the date structure is, if that matters or if it’s a series, or if you can see Post Number 2 before Post Number 1 —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — of if it’s a technical manual or things like that that need to be indexed as far as the Table of Contents. We need to know a little bit more, so tell us more, Frank.

John:                Absolutely. So feed us a little more info, Frank. So thanks for the question though and for all the rest of you out there listening, send us those questions via SpeakPipe. That’s how that one came in. We will get them on the show and we will answer them to the best of our ability.

All right, this show here, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past. All donations $50 and over are read out and their note is published here if they provide one. For those who come in below $50, thank you very much. You remain anonymous but we still thank you very much for your support.

This week here, we did have another donation from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., who gave us $50 donation. The donation is on behalf of Vital Building & Pest Inspections at vitalbuildingpestinspections.com.au, a service industry in Australia – in Sydney, Australia. A WordPress website hosted and maintained by Jezweb.com.au., so go check him out and it’s a really nice looking website. Thanks, Jez and thank you very much, Jez. We really appreciate all the support you’ve been giving the show.

Marcus:           Yeah, and if it seems like yeah, we are getting new sites all the time that get developed by Jezweb, that’s good karma coming back to him, you know?

John:                Oh, absolutely.

Marcus:           And there’s no secret as to why they are getting all these great projects where they work and what they do. So if you want the same for your agency or development service or whatever it is that you happen to do, please contribute. We give a lot to the community and all we ask is just a little bit back to help offset some of the costs.

John:                Yep, and he gets a nice link for that show feedback out, because they are follow links. They’re not no-follow links from our site.

Marcus:           That’s right, that’s one of the perks actually of donating $50 or more, so give it a shot.

John:                Okay, and you can support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, so there’s several ways you can donate there. And also you can do it through Patreon. There’s links on the website to Patreon and thanks a lot to our Patreon donors. We got your donation for this month and it was much appreciated.

Okay, that brings us up to our final set of plugins for today. And the final one I’ve got here today is called Custom Facebook Feed Pro. Now, you can get the free version that they offer. They offer a freemium version so you can test it out quite well. I went straight to the pro version. It seems I’d bought from these guys in the past another plugin, so I went ahead and got it from them and this one here solved my Facebook problems in under an hour.

Initially after I set it up, I had a minor issue similar to the problem I was having from the other plugin, so I thought I was in failure zone. But when I went to their support for the help, they had listed out not only all the errors but ideas and ways on how to get them fixed, along with an easy way to create your token you have to create through Facebook. These guys made it a dream to get it installed.

The plugin worked like a dream. The layout was actually much better than the other plugin. The layout was more controllable. It allowed you to do a better layout, create multiple feeds. There’s a whole lot that this plugin did that the other one didn’t do, and unfortunately I missed this one in my research so hey, that happens. But I caught it in the end and these guys here get kudos for their high-quality work and their ease of installation and they get a 5-Dragon rating for the pro version.

[Dragon roar]

And for the freemium version it gets a 4 because freemiums always get a 4. They get one down for the pro, but I used the pro so I gave it the 5.

Marcus:           Wow, I’m gonna have to check this out.

John:                This one works like a dream and it’s well worth the – I think it’s $40 for this plugin versus the other one was $25, so I ended up pitching $25 into the trash even though I did ask them for a refund, and they never responded to that. I think I asked them three times for it and they just – they avoided the question entirely.

Marcus:           Wow, what did you do? Go through PayPal or anything?

John:                Ah yeah, I always go through PayPal.

Marcus:           Oh, you can get it back.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Just dispute it.

John:                Well, there’s an idea.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                I may give it a try. It was just such a pain in the neck it might be worth it for me to do it. [chuckling]

Marcus:           Cool.

John:                At any rate, check that one out, folks.

Marcus:           Yeah. So I have been working on something on the backend that I’ll probably announce next month that’s very heavily WordPress-related and I needed to find a way to within my install have a couple different pages that I could switch the theme on, because there’s just some things that a plugin can’t do. I need a full theme framework in order to run something.

So how did I actually achieve this? I found this plugin called Switch Theme that allows you to load a different theme for specific pages both in a permanent way and also to use as debugging your theme, so you can copy a specific page and then change that copy to be on say the default theme and see if it screws up and debug it and see if it still works. Or make it look – you know, check it on a different theme in terms of how a specific plugin outputs. You can do that.

So you’ll find a section for each single page and post within the meta box section and then you can select the theme that you want to activate just for that page. You can click on the related checkbox to decide if you want all visitors to see that or just you as the administrator, which is really nice that you have that control. This is really nice in terms of how it runs. It doesn’t have any backend controls as far as that theme, so you gotta kind of set it up and then switch themes and then it kind of picks up the old load for it, but this works really, really nice.

It really didn’t give me any setup problems at all. It’s just an amazing plugin and it came along at the right time. It’s called Freesoul Switch Theme and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Very cool. So it actually works. That’d be the first theme switcher plugin that actually works, because I’ve tried a few of them in the past because I —

Marcus:           That’s what I’m saying.

John:                I really wanted that to happen and that would be nice, so I’m gonna have to try it because I still have a couple of things that I wanted to use a different theme on specific pages for it.

Marcus:           Now imagine having a page —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — and then taking a few backend themes like the common ones, like Divvy and XTheme.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           You know, and stuff with Elementor built-in and all of that and then being able to just kind of switch the exact same page without having to go through that process of actually switching the entire theme of the entire site to where fronted people are seeing something that shouldn’t even be there.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           So this is great all around.

John:                Very nice. Okay, well that’s a wrap for us. I covered up in this episode the WP Team Showcase and Slider Pro, which I gave a 5 to; I covered up the WD Facebook Feed, which I gave a 2 to; and then I covered up the Custom Facebook Feed Pro, which I gave a 5 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the Free Shipping Notification for WooCommerce which gets a 4 out of 5, FileBird for your media library gets a 5 out of 5, and we just talked about Freesoul Switch Theme, which also gets a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                And that’s all we’ve got for you here, but be sure to go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And a note to developers who would like to support the show. If you’d like to offer up premium licenses to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

[Child giggling]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 363 WP Plugins A to Z

/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #363 here.


It’s Episode 363 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Currency, Showcasing Your Team, WooCommerce Convertkit Integration, Nearby Places, and Mailchimp for WooCommerce. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #363

Marcus:           It’s Episode 363 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Currency, Showcasing Your Team, WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration, Nearby Places, and MailChimp for WooCommerce. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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 Victoria, British Columbia, the Brewery Overlook, I’m John Overall.

Marcus:           And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we have the usual great show for you today but first off, happy Canada Day, which just happened for all the Canadians out there yesterday, and a happy July 4th to all our American listeners.

Marcus:           Yes, and for everybody else, happy WordPress.

John:                That’s it.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                Go out there and shoot of fireworks anyway just because.

Marcus:           Yeah, yeah.

John:                Yeah, it’s the holiday weekend United States and Canada seem to tie together. Ours is on the first, yours is on the fourth, and when it happens on a weekend, hey, it’s one great big party here.

Marcus:           Yeah, I can imagine.

John:                So – oh, it was actually quite good. I actually managed to film the Fourth of the July – or the – Canada Day fireworks down in Inner Harbour yesterday.

Marcus:           Yeah, I saw that. Very nice.

John:                So yeah, they came out better than I thought they would. So, at any rate, of course – usual great show for you and all the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and giving us reviews. We could really use some there. We haven’t had any in a while.

Marcus:           That’s true. If you can, take a few minutes, leave us that review. In iTunes it does help to bring a new audience to the show and drive show awareness for others, and I think there’s one or two people out there that use WordPress, so why not help the audience to discover what it is that we do? We are 362 shows deep, times – you know, multiply that by six plugins, and boy, that’s a ton of plugins – almost 2,000 that we’ve reviewed. So give us some credit, give us some love, give us your attention, and check us out at the iTunes Store.

Also remember, you could check out our training videos, screencasts, interview, and watch us live just like right now. They are on YouTube every first Monday morning of the month at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time. Also, go to wppluginsatoz.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We’d like to keep all the WordPress news stuffed into the newsletter and not in the show, because we talk about plugins here.

John:                Absolutely, and the newsletter is getting much better out there. There – there’s my new mascot for the show. All right, so that being said, it’s time for us to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, and first off the plugin I’ve got for you here today is called WP Nearby Places. This is a relatively new entry into the WordPress marketplace. It is an excellent tool to add to your site if you’re running a destination business in particular. Maybe you’ve got a bed and breakfast, a hotel, even just a bar or a pub and you want to showcase all the stuff that’s around you. One of the things this plugin does for you is it uses Google Places to enhance a Google Map on your website and then you put your address at the center, and then it showcases all of the businesses and location around you of interested, depending on the Google Places categories you choose. And you can set that zone any distance you want from 1 to 100 kilometers and showcase all of the places in and around your neighborhood.

I tested it out, I’ve thrown it up on one of my test sites, which I probably will use this plugin to enhance that site even further. And what I used it for in particular, I needed a new place to get my hair cut. My barber decided to retire and I needed a new one. I couldn’t figure out where they were located around me, so I plugged it in and sure enough, boom, a whole bunch of them appeared around me. It’s like, “Well there they are. I just can’t find them.” But it is really great in helping you do that.

It’s relatively easy and straightforward to use. It comes in three flavors; it comes in a basic which is free over at WordPress.org, it comes in a pro, and then a premium version – adds on different things as you go up to enhance it. I got to test all of it and as a free version, it gets an absolute 4 because, you know, if they’ve got a premium version, they always get one point off. But the pro version, I found it to be fantastic, worked excellently. All you have to do is make sure you get your own Google API and of course, I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           Pretty cool! I wanna check that out.

John:                It’s a really nice plugin. I really like the way it works. It produces the map – it also – when you get the pro version or the premium version, you get an additional function to where you can showcase specific businesses around you in another strip above, so you could go around to those businesses and try to sell them advertising on your site and say, “Hey, we’ll showcase your business in these little ad spots.” It’s kind of like one of the things they had on their website when I looked at it.

Do you remember when you checked into hotels and used to get that big little map that showcased all the businesses and all the ads around the edge of the map —

Marcus:           Yeah, yeah.

John:                — for all the prime businesses?

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                That’s what this does for you, except it does it in digital format and it’s all mobile-ready, so…

Marcus:           So do you get to – excuse me and start it again.

John:                Hm?

Marcus:           Do you get to pick the different categories —

John:                Yes.

Marcus:           — or types of businesses —

John:                You do.

Marcus:           — that end up being in there?

John:                You get to pick all the categories based upon what the Google Places offers up —

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                — and there’s a lot of categories in Google Places.

Marcus:           Wow, that’s great!

John:                So…

Marcus:           All right, let’s talk about my first plugin here, and it is called Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Boy, that’s a mouthful.

John:                That is!

Marcus:           Let’s talk about what it does though. If you use ConvertKit – which ConvertKit is sort of an email platform. It’s much like InfusionSoft in the sense that it does different types of campaigns and funnels and things like that, except it doesn’t cost $700 a month; it’s $45 a month. And now you’ve got this plugin which is Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration, which merges the two together.

So what you can do is create custom fields in ConvertKit and then integrate it through this plugin and what happens is anyone who either – that you can sign up for something. Let’s say a registered user comes in and looks at something in the cart but they don’t buy. Well, ConvertKit can actually recognize this, that they put something in their cart and – or they viewed something, and you can actually do a follow-up email campaign around that. Give them a special discount code or something like that for something that they put in their cart and didn’t buy. That’s a really good way to actually make somebody convert. Or perhaps you just want to add them into your email list. This does that as well.

So check it out. It’s called Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration. If you use both WooCommerce and ConvertKit, you must use this plugin. I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s pretty nice. I kind of like that. I’m not sure I’ll use something like it, but you never know since I’ve picked up another WooCommerce job, so…

Marcus:           Yeah, so let me tell you also some of the other kinds of things that it does. Say a customer that is a repeat regular customer and they may have just placed their tenth order, or maybe their orders have now surpassed $1,000 or $10,000, or whatever it happens to be. Then you can send them a special thank you. You can send them, you know, an invitation to go out to dinner or whatever it happens to be, so that’s one of the nice things that’s involved in this. So it doesn’t always necessarily have to be based on a purchase; it can be based on some other account statistics that is in the backdrop.

John:                Nice! All right. Well, that being said —

Marcus:           Some other accounts statistics that is in the backdrop.

John:                Excellent – nice. All right – and we’ve got a feedback. Why did we get a feedback? Well, that being said – Hang on 30 seconds.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                There we go – got it. [chuckling]

Marcus:           Talking to yourself, are you?

John:                Talking to myself. I was hearing you repeat exactly what I commented on and I was like, “Wait a minute. What happened?” Oh, I realized I opened up another window and it started feeding back. Okay, let’s move along here then.

That being said, what we’ve got is this show here currently brought to you by:

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Okay, and yes, give me a call. I can help you with all your WordPress needs —

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                — from hosting to fixing up your website. And we do have a contest currently running, and this is thanks to Albert Harlow over at WP Nearby Places. You can listen to the interview I did with him in Interview Show #22, and this contest is starting this week. We’re giving away premium licenses from WP Nearby Places and it’s the premium version which has all the great stuff I just recently talked about. It helps you create very useful Google Maps for your website and site visitors. Get more info there. You can go up and sign up for the contest at wppluginsatoz.com, and we’re looking to be giving away possibly a license a week for this contest here —

Marcus:           Wow!

John:                — instead of holding it for an entire month. So this could be kind of an interesting one although we’re only live once a week, it could end up that way. But follow the newsletter for the specific information on that. And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, you can go get a 25% discount off the plugin and it’s using the code – wrong code written in my notes and I’ve been —

Marcus:           ILOVEWPAZ.

John:                No, that’s the wrong code.

Marcus:           Oh no.

John:                That’s from the other one. You need to go to their site and it’s FLASH is the code.

Marcus:           Oh.

John:                F-L-A-S-H is the code. Twenty-five percent off coupon – so I got the wrong notes in there. That happens once in a while. At any rate, it’s a really great plugin. Go check it out, go sign up for the contest – wppluginsatoz.com.

Marcus:           Yes, and hey, remember that if you want to submit a plugin for a future contest – if you’re a developer and you want to get some exposure for your plugin, go to our website. You’ll find all the details there on how to do that.

John:                Absolutely. All right, our next set of plugins we’ve got for you – the one I’ve got for you here is called Team Showcase. Now this is a plugin initially – and there’s just a slew of team presentation plugins, and this one looked pretty good for this specific task I was working on for a client. And it started out really well, it worked really well, we started entering the data, we got it up there, and then I started having some layout issues with it and it wasn’t quite pulling the information correctly from the plugin to display on the website. I was – okay, kind of off a little.

They do have a premium version, so I thought, okay, well maybe the premium version will help solve it. Let’s see what they want for it and maybe it’s worth taking the chance on the premium version. I do that sometimes when they have a premium version that’s around $20, $25. I figure it’s worth the risk; roll the dice and see. At any rate, I was having such problems with it and I wanted to give it a really good, fair shake to make sure it was a good plugin.

So I went to their website to buy it and of course I couldn’t figure out where to buy the plugin, even with the link they provide in the plugin or off of the WordPress.org site to go to the website and buy it. It didn’t land. I go through their website, couldn’t figure out how to buy the plugin, and then I decided, well let me just contact them and see if that helps. Their contact page was not very clear, it was hard to get it, difficult, and all in all, I just had a very poor experience around the support for it. I did finally manage to get the contact out to them and then sent them an email, and that was over a week and a half ago and still nothing back.

So hey, this plugin here is one I can’t recommend and I really hate to do it. It’s been a long time since I brought one in this low, but I’m giving this plugin, Team Showcase, a 2-Dragon rating. Wah…wah…wah…

Marcus:           Ew…womp…womp…

John:                It happens, man, and I just have to warn people when I actually tried to make an effort to use the thing.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                So…

Marcus:           All right – well, they can’t – sometimes that’s why we separate the junk from the gems, right?

John:                And sometimes we’ve just gotta tell you about the junk so you don’t —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — waste your time, because I wasted several hours on this and now I’ve got to redo everything that we did with the plugin with another one.

Marcus:           Yeah, it sounds like they spent more time on their logo than they did the actual plugin. I don’t want to slam them, but…

John:                [chuckling] Yeah, they did. I don’t know.

Marcus:           [inaudible – 13:52]

John:                Though the plugin is relatively new but hey, it looked like it was going to be something good.

Marcus:           Give some feed – you know, respond to people when they talk to you.

John:                Yeah, respond – that’s the thing. Respond when you get an email, man.

Marcus:           Yeah. Okay, so the next one I’ve got for you is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart and I hope that this one actually does something that’s of good value. It’s called Export Media Library and what it does is it does exactly what it says: it exports the media library. With just a few clicks, you can actually download all of your media as a zip file in one shot. It just adds a new subpage under the media section in your WordPress dashboard and with one click, it just starts downloading a zip that has all of your media in it.

Now, what’s scary about this that I haven’t really tried yet – like I should put it on marcuscouch.com and just try and export the 1.7 GB —

John:                [chuckle]

Marcus:           — of podcasts [chuckling] and videos and things like that that I’ve done and see what happens. I don’t know if it would make a zip file that —

John:                See if it chokes?

Marcus:           — if it’s that big. But who knows?

John:                It might, so…

Marcus:           So this is a little bit easier than what you might find in terms of downloading FTP – you know, downloading an entire FTP of your uploads directory in WordPress, because then it would still be splintered off. But I think if you wanted to just backup all the media that you had, this is a really good way to do it. I would do it mostly for backup purposes, but there’s probably other uses as well.

So it’s called Export Media Library and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Excellent.

[Dragon roar]

Yeah, it looks to be really nice. I wonder if it would choke? I’d have to try it on my site and see how bad it would choke because we’ve got six years of podcasts up on my site.

Marcus:           Right. Yeah, I have about 1,200 episodes of all the different shows that I’ve done and been on and things —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — on my site, so I’m curious to see how it works.

John:                All right, now listener feedback period, this section here is sponsored by WP Nearby Places. Customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your search engine rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with you specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what is around your specific location like no other mapping plugin.

Using the power of Google Maps, WP Nearby Places also uniquely breaks down neighborhood locations by category, such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending on which version you purchase, provides the location’s name, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in either miles or kilometers from the central location.

There are three versions available. The basic, which is available at WordPress.org, the pro, and premium version, which you can click the link in the show notes and it will take it to you at WP Nearby Places. For details, check out all their licensed versions. You know, show off your neighbors by categories, featured neighborhoods, the most exciting features, the ability to feature neighbors on your website and in your maps of nearby places.

There are places in any neighborhood where there are, main event, the main attraction of why someone would travel there, and to that neighborhood. For instance, Starbucks Nearby is the main attraction for a lot of neighborhoods – a winery, a park, famous restaurant, and more. So go check out WP Nearby Places.

Marcus:           I’m gonna have to.

John:                And —

Marcus:           You keep talking about it so much!

John:                Well, we’ll be talking about it for a while. They have sponsored this show for a little while.

Marcus:           [chuckle]

John:                They have sponsored this show for a little while. So one of our – a sponsor for us – been a while.

Marcus:           Nice.

John:                So at any rate, listener feedback… we would really love to get some. You can leave it on the website at wppluginsatoz.com; just go down to the lower right-hand corner, click on the Ask a Question, leave a comment via voicemail, or you can contact us via our Contact page. Leave us – ask us questions. We will answer them if they arrive – when they arrive.

And show donors…this show, value-for-value, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that, we would like to acknowledge those who have supported the show over the past month with donations of $50 and over and their note is read out and published here. And for those who come in below $50, they can remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

And this month here, we have had Jezweb Pty. Ltd. They gave us $50 back in the middle of June, so of course any donations that arrive in the middle of the month get all shouted out in the live show. And his donation was on behalf of Transcend Health at https://www.transcendhealth.com.au who are physiotherapists and exercise physiologists in Newcastle, Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb at https://www.jezweb.com.au. One of the plugins Jezweb used on Transcend Health is an Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon, and it works really well to embed images and has a bunch of easy adjustments, so thanks a lot, Jez. You have been a really great support for the show over the last year and a half, and your support has been truly appreciated.

Marcus:           Yes, and I love it how our listeners connect with us —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — because I use that exact same plugin.

John:                There you go. I haven’t tried —

Marcus:           And I don’t think I’ve ever brought it up or recommended it.

John:                Yeah? No, it hasn’t been to the show. It hasn’t been to the show. I don’t – I didn’t recall it, so…

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                At any rate, thanks a lot, Jez, and a bit thank you to those who came in under $50. And for those of you that are still on the Patreon subscriptions, we still get those small amounts – thank you very much. And if you would like to support the show, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate or go to our Patreon channel, which I left running because we had some small ones and you can support us there with a small amount on a monthly basis.

So thanks everyone and to that supports the show.

Marcus:           Yes – yes. It goes a long way. Believe me, we’re very frugal with the money that we get donated, and —

John:                Yeah!

Marcus:           — and it goes to transcripts and hosting, and just pretty much straight back into the show.

John:                Back into the show, man. Back into the show, and I’ve been spending a lot of my own money on the show this year and that I’m building myself a new computer system with new recording and everything else that’s gonna be done.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                Take me about four or five months to pay for it all, but it’s a good chunk of change going into it, so by the end of the year, the whole sound for the show will change – and change for the better again. And if you’ve been listening for any length of time, you will notice that the sound has gotten better over time. [chuckling] At any rate —

Marcus:           Almost too good, because sometimes I listen to the show and I hear my chair squeak.

John:                Yeah, well that’s your microphone so…

Marcus:           [chuckle]

John:                Put more sound dampening – I need – I’m getting the blockers. What are those? I forget what they’re called.

Marcus:           Like you stick foam?

John:                Yeah, something – no, no. The – ah, never mind.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                It’s gone out of my head. It’s to block all the external sounds and pick up only the mic. It’s what they use on the No Agenda show.

Marcus:           Oh.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Noise gate.

John:                Noise gate, that’s what I’m looking for. Noise gate. I’m getting noise gates for it all, so that we’ll actually get true silence. So that being said, our final set of plugins we got for you here today. The last one I’ve got is called MailChimp for WooCommerce, and as I’m finishing up one of my WooCommerce projects, I realized, well, we haven’t connected the MailChimp up to the WooCommerce yet and I wanted and easy way to do it with the least amount of problems.

And it turns out MailChimp actually creates a plugin to connect MailChimp to WooCommerce, which was very quite sweet. This one here was a very excellent plugin. It sets you up, it fits the bill perfectly for connecting up your MailChimp and your WooCommerce together. It inserts the checkbox for the checkout page for people to sign up for your newsletter and it also allows for the integration of your newsletter into added bonuses, such as allowing you to get the abandoned shopping cart back. You know, someone abandons their shopping cart, you can have an email that is generated and sent out to them if they manage to set their email address before abandoning it or they have an account.

It allows you to send follow up emails for purchases after they purchase something. You can set specific emails to follow up with them and more, and the integration was really quite easy. It went together quite smoothly and all around, just a great plugin for connecting MailChimp up to your WooCommerce store, and of course I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           So there you have it. If you use WooCommerce and you use MailChimp —

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           — or ConvertKit, those are the two biggies —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — in terms of email delivery. This one episode gave you two different options on how to do that.

John:                Absolutely. There’s some serious value for you folks.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Save some time.

Marcus:           Okay, and I’ve got one more WooCommerce plugin actually, and this is not intentional. These just come up like this.

John:                [chuckling]

Marcus:           This one is called WooCurrency, and actually what it does is you get to select the currencies that you’d like to use on your website for the countries that you service, and it automatically changes the exchange rate every day through a web service and it makes sure that all of them are accurate. Based on what their IP address is, you actually get to see your products within your WooCommerce store change the currency and automatically update itself.

If their country, whatever they select, has not been selected in terms of – you know, if it doesn’t pick it up, the actual default WooCommerce currency will be used. So check it out – it’s very handy if you’re doing sales over the border. Let’s just say if you had a US and Canada customer base, this is something really, really good for changing the exchange rate out. It’s called WooCurrency and I gave it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice! I like that.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                I’ve got a client which is gonna be taking US and Canadian dollars, so this one here could be quite useful.

Marcus:           Yep.

John:                All right, well that closes out this episode here. I covered up WP Nearby Places, which I gave a 4 and a 5 to due to the free and the premium versions; Team Showcase, which got a womp-womp 2; and then MailChimp for WooCommerce, which got a 5, so that’s a good roundup.

Marcus:           And I reviewed Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration – gets a 4 out of 5, Export Media Library gets a 5 out of 5, and WooCurrency gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice, and be sure to go check out our YouTube channel where there will be some training videos coming up there, because I have to produce some for a couple of clients, so you get the bonus time. I get paid for my work and you guys get the benefit of seeing the added stuff, so that’ll be coming up real soon and that’s also the live show gets placed up there as a permanent fixture.

And a note to developers, if you want to support the show and offer up premium licenses to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to donate that and more. And of course, take some time, sign up for the newsletter. And as one last thing, I’d like to say thanks to all the listeners that showed up to listen to us today. There was actually a few of you there. Hey, very nice to see a few people show up and listen to us, so thank you very much.

Marcus:           Nice. Yeah, we’ll have to plan this out as a Q&A one of these days.

John:                Well, I’ve got more help. I hired another person to work for me.

Marcus:           Oh!

John:                And she is helping me get everything organized to the point where I hadn’t been able to. She’s quite efficient and she’s pulling together more stuff, so this included in the stuff that’s happened. She managed to get all of our transcripts up to date up on the website. They are now current as of Episode 362 and she’s actually started taking our reviews that we’ve done and placing them up in the WordPress.org site.

Marcus:           Yeah, the Repository.

John:                The Repository for all of the plugins we’ve reviewed there, so she’s started doing that, so those things are starting to happen now that I have someone that is dedicated to those tasks. So more and more stuff is happening, folks.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                You know, I’m still keeping the show alive while, you know, working my business forward, so look for more great stuff coming your way as time moves on.

Marcus:           Yeah, and I’ll be honest with you. I’m building a new site right now for a client and it’s kind of challenging. It’s taking some of the plugins that John and I have talked about – gosh, two years ago.

John:                Yep —

Marcus:           — and implementing them.

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           And there’s bound to be – every time I come up with a new project or John has a new project, we have a different need —

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           — for that particular client and we love to share some of the things that we’ve done in terms of the plugins that we used and some of the problems that it solved.

John:                And problems that it solved or the problems we’ve run into with plugins too, so…

Marcus:           Yeah, so we keep them here, right on the show.

John:                All right, well that’s a wrap. That’s all we’ve got for you now, so take care. Bye-bye.

[Female speaker]

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[Outro]

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.

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