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

Transcript of Episode 380 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 #380 here.


It’s Episode 380 and I’ve got Scheduled Tweets, MailChimp Manager, Exporting Plugin Details and Increasing speed by Reducing HTTP Requests. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #380

John:    It’s Episode 380 and I’ve got Scheduled Tweets, MailChimp Manager, Exporting Plugin Details and Increasing speed by Reducing HTTP Requests. 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. And unfortunately Marcus can’t join me yet, but hopefully he’ll be back with us next week. It’s been a bit confusing with me moving around the show schedule and everything else to be able to get him here due to the way his work schedule works out. And well, it’s just unfortunate. But we have landed on the new day for the show. It will be live every week going forward after this. The time might change from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m., but we’re gonna see how it goes. If Marcus is more amenable to 2:00, it will become 2:00. I kind of like the 12:00 noon time slot myself.

At any rate though, that being said there, a couple of other quick things right off the top. You can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. If you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio and up in the YouTube – up on the iTunes and Google Play, subscribing to the show, and basically – well, subscribing to the show and – get my buttons all working correctly here – subscribing to the show and leaving us reviews. The reviews really help out the show quite a bit there.

Also, check out our training videos up on YouTube and if you’re listening to us on YouTube, it’s greatly appreciated. You can catch us here live on a weekly basis now. And also go check out the screencasts and training videos, and there will be more training videos coming as I prep for more of my WordPress Meetup groups that I’m doing here in Victoria, and the meetups are coming. You could also follow the show over at Twitter @wppluginsatoz and on our Facebook page. All the links for those are in the show notes.

With that being said, it’s time 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 this week here is one that I got from an interview I did with a developer that hasn’t quite hit yet. The interview is coming. And – buttons, buttons everywhere. I gotta get used to a whole bunch of new stuff here. I’ve got new software, new everything. At any rate, Scheduled Tweets is the name of the plugin. This is a great little plugin I have just recently got it set up on my website and getting my SEO person to start doing some work with it. But it allows you to schedule Twitter tweets directly from your WordPress dashboard.

You know, Twitter is a useful tool. It’s great for marketing, helping get your message out there in front of people. The hard part I’ve always found with Twitter is you’ve gotta manually send out the tweets. This tool here will allow you to go in, schedule tweets. You can set up a whole month’s worth of tweets or more. You can create campaigns – tweet campaigns – group them all together, set them out to go out in groups, all from within your WordPress dashboard.

This is looking to be quite an excellent plugin, completely free, which of course is a major bonus for it. They haven’t gone yet to a premium version of course; it’s a really new plugin. They just released it not too long ago and not enough people are using it yet. I suggest you get out there and give this one a try if you’re using Twitter in any way, shape, and form, and you want something to help you with the marketing of all of your Twitter stuff, go check this one out. This is a fantastic looking plugin. So far, setup and functionality on my site have been great, so I give this plugin a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, starting the show off with a bang today. All right, and currently this show is 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. Go visit JohnOverall.com for all of your WordPress needs. I can help you out with pretty much everything you need. And that’s me, moving things around on my screen. I’ve gotta be able to get to everything I need. I need to see the new recording software to see how well it’s playing the sounds.

Okay, and so that brings us up to – what else do we got going here? Oh, X2 Marketing is your full-service digital marketing and brand development agency. Whether you are a solopreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X2. From WordPress to click funnels, landing pages to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, InfusionSoft management and more. Visit X2 Marketing and get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs, and Marcus is really quite great at all that stuff, so go check him out at x2marketing.com.

And currently we do have a contest running for WP Plugins A to Z. We started it in the middle of October. It was a rough month getting things back in shape and it’s for the Interactive U.S. Maps donated by Botrous, which we reviewed in Episode 368. Go check it out. The contest is running until the middle of November. We would give it a little extra time this time and eventually we’ll get the contests rotated around to where they’re on a weekly or biweekly basis since it’s taken some time to work everything out.

Anyway, this is a great plugin and get yourself a free copy of this plugin. All you do is go over to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and enter the contest for all the info you need. Very simple – all we need is your email address and your name. Well, not even your name; just your email address. So go check it out. It’s a great contest. Win yourself a plugin. And we have in the queue three additional licenses coming up that more developers have been giving to us.

We’ve been getting more and more support from the show from all of the development community out there and as I’ve mention, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with developers. I’ve still got three more scheduled in the next coming weeks. I’ve got two in the hopper, I’ve released a couple in the last week, so you’re gonna hear more and more from all of the developers out there about the different plugins we use, so stay tuned to this channel for more of that stuff up and coming. Subscribe to the podcast to get the interviews. Those are not done live.

All right, the next couple of plugins for you – I actually have two plugins for you  in this segment. The first one is something to help you speed up your website a little bit. It’s called Reduce HTTP Requests, Disable Emojis & Disable Embeds, Speedup WooCommerce. This is a pretty long name for a plugin that basically helps you speed up your WordPress website. It helps you get rid of things by getting rid of the emojis, the gravitars, the embeds, the query strings, speed up WooCommerce. They’ve got support to disable pingbacks, disable trackbacks, close comments, etc., etc., disable WooCommerce scripts and CSS on non-WooCommerce pages. All of these things here can help speed up the performance of your website and help you obtain higher rankings in the search engines and higher speed for your users.

There’s a lot that this plugin does. I’ve just started experimenting with it to see how I can improve my websites with it and something I’m also going to do with client sites, because speed is of paramount importance. This is a really great plugin as far as I can tell. Again, it’s a free one – our favorite kind of plugins. You just set it up and go in and tweak and turn off and on all of the little things you want to turn off and on with it, and away you go. It might gain you a half a second, but hey, half a second can mean the difference between a sale and not a sale. Many people won’t even wait half a second for a page to load, so think about that.

So go check it out. It’s called Reduce HTTP Requests, Disable Emojis & Disable Embeds, Speedup WooCommerce, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and the next one I’ve got in here is a nice, simple, and sweet plugin. Now, from time to time, you may have the need to create a list of all of the plugin details for the plugins you have on your site. [This one is called Export Plugin Details.] And in that case there, you’re gonna want something that is going to make a nice, good, clean list besides you going in there and copying and pasting from the page to see what it has.

So at any rate, what this plugin does for you is it allows you to go in, create and export a plugin details list. So this is something that can save you a fair bit of time if you’re just working up around getting all of your plugin details in order, so simple, sweet. It exports out the plugin name, the description, the author, whether it’s active or inactive on your site, the current version that’s there, an update available (yes or no) and whether it’s got a new version available. A really nice plugin to help you with the managing of your site or in migration or things you’re turning off and on. This is just a way to help manage what you’re up to and what you’re doing, go check this plugin out. It’s very simple, sweet – our favorite kind of plugin. It just kind of works, so I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, listener feedback, clips, etc., etc. We like listener feedback, so if you’ve got listener feedback for us, drop in to wppluginsatoz.com, go down to the lower right-hand corner, click on the Ask a Question, leave us a voicemail via SpeakPipe, contact us through our Contact page, contact us through Twitter or Facebook page. We do get back to you – sometimes not fast because, well, I’ve still got to make a living, so I’ve got to work and things like this sometimes hit the back burner. Or if it’s an email, sometimes it gets buried in the inbox, but I do eventually respond – always. So feedback is always a great thing.

This week here, we’ve got a little bit of feedback from one person here. I got an email from the guys over at hapity.com and they’ve got a new plugin – uh-oh, something’s wrong with their site. Either that or my typo-ing on it – probably my typo-ing. Hapity.com…let’s bring it up here. There it is. Hapity.com – probably my typo.

At any rate, this is a plugin that allows you to livestream to your website and to other multiple screens. But what they asked me is they’re looking for someone to help them with marketing their plugin. This plugin allows you to broadcast to multiple places. It’s a really interesting plugin. I haven’t fully checked it out yet but it is in the queue to be reviewed since they brought it to my attention. But they’re looking for someone who might help them do the marketing for this. So if you’re that kind of person, go contact them over at hapity.com and let them know John from WP Plugins A to Z sent you there and that you are willing to help take their money and help market their plugin. They do have a budget so go check them out.

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’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over are read out and their note is published in the show notes. And those below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

This week here, Jezweb Pty. Ltd. sent us in a donation of $50 and he had to say:

This donation is on behalf of Hunter Valley Amazing Wine Tours https://www.huntervalleyamazingwinetours.com.au in 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

Jez, thank you very much. We really appreciate your support of the show. Your support really helps us cover the costs that we’ve got to put out on a regular basis, for the transcripts which are currently up-to-date and the new ones going up today, so we get the current transcripts for the show about four to five, sometimes six days after the show is published. But they do get up on time and on queue now. It’s amazing what happens when you’ve got an additional person to help you out with the work, so a big thank-you out to them. And a big thank you out to those who came in under $50, you know who you are and thank you for the weekly subscriptions and the small subscriptions that come in through Patreon and other donations. Thank you very much. Your support for the show is fantastic. Every little bit helps the show out.

And if you’d like to support the show, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where I’ve made it quite simple to donate now instead of all the complexity I had. It’s a simple form. Fill it out, choose the amount you’d like to donate, click enter. It takes you to PayPal and boom, you’re done. So that’s the way you can donate to the show as simple as I can possibly get it without standing in front of you with my hand and saying, “Just put cash here.”

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got for you today – at first when I discovered it, I was hoping it wasn’t a freemium plugin, but it is a freemium plugin. But it looks like I may go for the premium version. Who knows? Maybe they’ll send me a copy that I can test out. The freemium version though, this is called MailChimp Manager, and if you use MailChimp (which many, many people do and I use MailChimp for managing our mailing list). And if you’ve used MailChimp’s interface, you know what a chore it can be sometimes, and that chore just makes life difficult to work through and get everything functioning.

This plugin here allows you to do all of your campaign management including the templates you’re building out to send to your newsletter list from the backend of your WordPress website. You connect it up through the API key, you go in, you build out your campaign. They don’t show it in the images they have here, but as I was working through it, you can choose the template layouts that you want to do from default ones. They have more layouts available once you get into the premium version from what I’ve read. You also get the ability to have more than one campaign running from your website. You could just create a website if you have multiple campaigns, like I do for under the same account. You could have them all running through the one website, too. There’s a lot you can do with this and manage MailChimp from within WordPress.

The advantages to this – well, to me it looks like the advantages would be one, I could get to publish that email newsletter right on my website at the same time it’s pushed out to MailChimp. Yeah, you can do that the other way around, but it’s not as easy. The other is I manage the content in one spot and when you’re working on something and you have to pull together a newsletter for a particular website, you have to go back and forth between MailChimp’s thing. If you’re inside your WordPress dashboard, you have more information right at your fingertips. It could save you a minute or two, but in everything the more minutes you can save, it adds up to hours.

All in all, it looks to be a really great plugin. I would give it a 5, but of course being the freemium version, it gets knocked down one point just by default. Once I get a chance to look at the premium version, we may up the volume of it to a 5. But go check it out. It’s called MailChimp Manager, a relatively new plugin. It looks to be well-built and working well. They are working on some extensions on it to do additional stuff to it, according to their website. So this is something you’ll want to check out. So it’s MailChimp Manager and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, and that wraps it up here. I covered up Scheduled Tweets, which I gave a 5 to; Reduce HTTP Requests, which I gave a 5 to; Export Plugin Details, which I gave a 5 to; and MailChimp Manager, which I gave a 4 to. So all in all, not too bad. A good roundup of plugins.

And of course the usual reminders…be sure to go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts and training videos and more live stuff coming. I’ve been working with talking to my brother who is a gaming streamer and he’s helping me to set up some proper streaming software on my computer. As everyone knows, I’ve got a new computer. It’s just been up and running for about three weeks now, so I’ve got a whole lot that I’m reincorporating in here. New audio software – hopefully if you download the show from the podcast channel, you will hear the nice, cleaner, better sounding audio. Let me know what people think.

Also, I want new streaming software so I don’t have to use Google Hangouts and I can get better, cleaner software and have more interactivity with the listeners out there. I noticed there was three or four of you up on the channel there and it’d be nice to interact with the chats on that. I want to bring a little bit of interactivity back to the show and since I’ve been able to reorganize my time to bring back the weekly live show, this is going to happen over time. And it’s simply because I truly enjoy doing the show and that’s where we’re at at the moment.

So other things – note to developers. If you’d like to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and that’s it. Subscribe to our newsletter if you’re not already subscribed. We’re starting to include better quality news and information there. We’re upping our game, basically. We’ve been running along for a while just sort of moving, but everything else is slowly improving bit by bit.

And be sure to tune in here and it’ll either be 12:00 or 2:00 p.m. as the standard time. I’ll know some time over the next few days and just tune into the YouTube channel. You’ll see it posted as the next live time, so go check it out.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you. Thanks for coming in and listening to the show, folks. It’s greatly appreciated. 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]

John:    And that’s all we’ve got. Take care.

[End of Audio]

 

Transcript of Training video- Using WP Pro Advertising System WP Plugins A to Z

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

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for this video.

Using WP Pro Advertising System – All in one Ad Manager

Hello, this is John Overall from WP Plugins A to Z.com and this is one of the training videos to replace the ones I currently have online and this one will be covering the WP Pro Ads Manager Plugin. So of course, like any other plugin out there, the first thing you’ll need to do is upload and install that plugin to your site. And I know people have done it a million times, but we’re going to go ahead and show you how it’s done again – just because.

So of course, go to your Install Plugins window. Click on Add New – it takes you there. You can upload the plugin. It asks you to choose the plugin you want and you will find it on your computer wherever you might have it lying. And in my case, I’m doing it off-screen, so it makes it just a little easier and we’ll have to go find it. Once it’s found, you’ll see it puts it right here in this spot here. As usual, just install now. It uploads it from your computer and installs it.

Now because I’m already in this point here and we’re going to be eventually showing the next plugin that is part of this is the paid Ads Manager add-on, I’m going to go ahead and upload that plugin to be used. That is the buy and sell add-on for the plugin. So we will upload that in the same manner and then from here, we can then return back to the Plugins page itself. Go find the plugin that was installed, WP Pro Ad System, and then you’ll want to activate the plugin. A quite simple thing to do.

Now they’ve got new statistics in here. If you’re upgrading the plugin, you’ll get this. If it’s going new, always go with Use New Statistics for it. That way, you’ve got the latest bits of information available. Now what it’s going to do for you is it’s going to create a menu over here called Advertising. This menu when you first set everything up is going to require you to do things in a very specific order, and that order is going to ask you to create ad zones, banners, campaigns, and advertisers. There’s an order for doing that and this is a pretty key element for building this plugin.

So we’ll click onto the Advertising. Now if you don’t do it in order, you’ll be double-backing upon yourself as you put it all together. So the first thing you actually need to create in here is you’re going to have to create ad zones. This is going to be the zones where your ad is going to be displayed. This is your typical ad block areas such as the 460 x 80 banner ad, a 728 x 90, a 250 x 250 block in the sidebar – whatever banner sizes you’re going to be creating. That’s what you’re going to want to create here with the ad zones.

What you’ll do – and I’m only going to create one ad zone to walk you through this plugin here. So you’ll want to go create a new ad zone, and the ad zone I’m going to create here is a 728 x 90 banner. That’s going to be top of the page. Okay, go here, select the ad zone leaderboard. You don’t want to hide it on any devices and always choose a variable. Now what this is for is the ad zone will adapt to the height of the banner if you happen to put a banner in that’s not perfectly the exact hight for it, and that happens from time to time when you’re creating banners. Sometimes it’s off a little.

So you’ll want to come down here – actually before we go down, you’ll see that it’s got three device settings here. Now you don’t always have to do this, but I always do just to make sure that the device has got it all set up correctly to use the correct size banner in this block. What it would allow you to do is allow you to still go into that block there and create different sizes for that ad zone, depending on the device. We’re going to have it all the same size.

Go down, create a description. This is the ad zone for the top of the website. Max amount of banners – now this one’s kind of important if you’re selling banners. You’ll want to limit the number of banners that can be placed into this zone, and the reason being is you don’t want to oversell your inventory. We’re going to select five here. Rotate the banners – I like to rotate the banners if I get more than one banner into an ad zone, simply because well, it looks kind of cool to watch the banners go through plus they get more impressions in there.

You use the default slider; it works well. The rotation time – this one’s kind of variable. I have found that about 11 seconds works very well for rotation time. It’s time enough for everyone to see it and time enough for it to change out if they’re on the page long enough. Lead to the default rotation effect. The banner loading order – you can load it in a fixed order, one, two, three, four, five, in equal views. Each one gets viewed the same number of times, or in my case, I like to just let it hit random.

AJAX Rotation – this one is really kind of cool because if you don’t choose AJAX rotation, what it means is the banner only changes every time it reloads the page. What this does with AJAX Rotation is every 11 seconds, it’ll change out that ad in an automatic rotation – really kind of cool. Now you could also have an ad grid. This is very useful if you’re using 125 x 125 ads, because then you can have it display the ads in say 2 x 2 or 2 x 8 high, or any combination thereof that’s going to work for you.

Now centering the ad zone, highlight the center of the ad zone, because it puts it right dead center on the block that it’s in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a webpage, whether it’s in the middle of any other layered area. Wherever you put the ad zone, it will automatically center it for the space. Hide it if it’s empty. I like to do that. That way, the ad zone is not displayed when there’s no ads; it just automatically disappears.

And then you can also upload a default banner into this zone. You can do that by uploading some sample banners to your website. I’ve got some sample banners or other banners. Insert it – this’ll be the banner that’s inserted into the site as the default banner for it – and the default link.

[Slight technical difficulties]

Okay, so that’s everything for that. Then you just come to the top and publish your new ad zone. Once that’s published, then what you need to do is you need to go create a couple of banners – excuse me – you actually need to go create a campaign first. And to add a new campaign, click on Campaigns/Add New Campaign – and I was off again. We actually need to create the advertiser first. So you need to get your advertiser, you did your ad zones – ad zones, advertisers, campaigns, and banners. You should have them in order; that would be much easier to do.

So let’s add a new advertiser. Okay, add the advertiser – it’s just the username and the email address. That’s just for tracking purposes. Then we need to create a campaign. This is so you can display your banners in a proper timeframe. Select the advertiser it’s going to be for. If you leave empty the campaign as always active, you could put dates, a start date and end date just by choosing it. Campaign timing – when it should be running – so you can have it run specific times of day. So say for instance you’ve got a specific campaign that can only run – maybe it’s a breakfast special advertising campaign – and you run it from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. You can do that sort of thing. We’re going to leave that blank, too. So we’ll publish that.

And now that we have a campaign ready, now we’re ready to get in here and create the ad. Okay, so now that the campaign has been published, now we can go in and create the banner ad. It’s going to create a couple of banner ads here, so you click Add New Banner and we’re just going to call it “Banner 1.” Stay on the page – Banner 1. Okay, select the advertiser (who’s going to get it credited). Select a Campaign – “Sample Campaign.” Link – this is where you want to link it to something.

Target – load it in a new window. Link masking – it’s always recommended but you could turn it off if you want. Status – we’re going to make it active. Banner type – banner URL or we upload a banner. You can have a banner elsewhere but since we’ve already created a couple here, we’re going to insert them. Okay, we’ll insert that one with 728 x 90.

You could put HTML codes such as a Google AdSense banners or any other advertising company out there that you get HTML code from. Place that in there. If you buy their add-on for visual banner creator. You can then use this module here to customize and tweak your banner in multiple ways. It doesn’t work for me because I don’t have that add-on. I create my own banners in Photoshop and other programs.

Link the banner to an ad zone, so you have to save it once before it can be linked to an ad zone, so we’ll be saving it and coming back to this feature. No follow – you’ll always want to set No Follow to your banner links because they’re advertising links and you want Google to do that. You could have it transition, contracts, and other things in here that we won’t be using. Okay, we hit Publish and wait for it to publish. Then we come back down, make sure everything is still good all the way down the line. And now we go plug it into an ad zone.

Once it shows the block here for the ad zone, then go back up and hit the Update button. Okay, that’s one banner, so now we’re going to add a second banner, “Banner 2.” User/Campaign – okay, load a new window. Use masking, change from draft to active, the banner is already uploaded so we can just go select it. Again, you could use HTML 5 code more, set to No Follow, back to the top, publish it.

Okay, once that’s published, go down and make sure everything is still set the way you want it. Link your ad zone – and for some reason pages didn’t load correctly, so we will reload the page. Okay, the page has been reloaded and what we’re going to do here is we’re going to go back down the page and choose our ad zone. There we go. Make sure No Follow, all of the other things set, hit the update on it, and these two banners are now active.

Now what we want to do is we’re going to look at a couple of quick things here. We’ve got the ad dashboard; this is your general dashboard here, and they show you the things you can do real quickly: go add new advertiser, campaign, banners, ad zones. Once you get your license key, you can insert your license key here to register the plugin to get auto updates. Check your statistics – it’ll show your stats. Basic plugin options – general settings, enable admin bar – yes. Uninstall option – no. This one here, if you are uninstalling a plugin because of errors, you don’t want to remove your data. If you’re just removing the plugin because you no longer want it, hit yes.

The other is the Ad Zone Class. The default class is WPPAZAS Zone. Now you can change that to something else you want and of course, what they say here is if you want to mislead or keep ad blockers from finding you, change the name from time to time to something random. It helps keep ad blockers from blocking your ads – one of the ways. Enable clean permalinks – you can do this and then it’s going to ask you for a link prefix, but you won’t need that.

Statistics enabled, disable impressions – do you want to enable impressions from being saved? I like to save my impressions. Disable clicks – do you want to disable the clicks? No, if you want to disable impressions, that needs to be a no. Statistics version – new version is recommended. Then you’ve got to go down to Statistic Data. You can hourly to daily stats. Now, hourly stats will grow your database fast. If you’re a busy website, you might want to just go with daily stats.

Enable user stats – yes. But the geo data will only be available if you get the Pro Targeting add-on for this, so that’s something to consider. The Pro Targeting add-on costs $13, so it’s probably worth the money if you want to track your stuff completely. Save impressions – do you want unique or all impressions to be saved? Now, sometimes you want all the impressions; sometimes you just want the unique impressions. You’ll have to experiment with that one.

Save clicks – unique or all clicks on ads, days to save the stats – now this one here is to help keep your database from getting too large. We’re only going to keep the last 36 days. You can block out IP addresses. Now what this is good for is it’s good for blocking out your own IP address. They tell you what your IP address is here, so you can place your own IP address in here to block it out.

Allowed origins – add the domain names for the external websites that’ll be able to use the asynchronous js tag to show banners. This is so you could actually create a website that hosts all of your advertising and then use the code and the asynchronous text on other websites to show the banners. You can have one central place for running all of your ad banners; kind of a useful feature of this plugin and one of the really powerful things I’ve found, considering once upon a time I used to use the Open Source Ad Manager program – not plugin. It’s a program. But it became too much trouble to keep it up-to-date.

Google Analytics – place your Google Analytics code in here. I won’t be doing that because this is only a demo site. But on your live site, you’ll want to put your Google Analytics code in and Google can track your ads for you, too. W-3 total page caching – if you use page cashing with W-3 Total Page Caching, you can enable this. I won’t be using it, so I’ll disable it.

Style it – You can customize the style sheets for it to your heart’s content. We’ll save those settings. What else do we got? Manage Ad Posts – Enable Post Ads. This allows you to add banners to all posts automatically. This one’s kind of useful if you want to have ads appear automatically on your post. You can just go choose your post type, either all posts or all pages, portfolio in this case on this particular theme has a portfolio theme, so we’re going to put it into posts just for fun.

Now what banner will show in these is important. Now you can put a top ad above the post or you can put a center ad in the post. So this is where you would create a specific ad, usually the 468 x 60. We’re just going to have it with the 728 x 90 for demo purposes. Center the ad – how many paragraphs after it do you want the ad to show? You can choose up to six paragraphs. The ad align – left, right, or default, which is hopefully centered. Bottom ad – this ad will show underneath the post, so you can put ads – three ads – on your site, just by coming to this one particular section here without a whole lot of extra work because it will automatically place them in there.

Manual updates – this is where you can update the campaign banner statistics. And then if you get the buy and sell ads, you can add it here, so you can download and add the buy and sell ads. Now that add-on, I’ve already uploaded it as you saw at the beginning, and I will be doing a training video on how to use that. But the big thing that’s going to happen is that video will not appear here on my YouTube channel for everyone to see. It’s going to only be available to those who support the WP Plugins A to Z website and the podcast that goes with that website. Everyone will be able to access it through the WP Support forums and membership section of the WP Plugins A to Z website. So look for it there and anyone who has left me a comment on my original YouTube channel previous to this being published, send me an email. I’ll happily make you a member of the site for one month so you can access the stuff.

Okay, so that’s everything in the plugin options. So now that we’ve covered those, now it’s time to go place an ad in a regular website or webpage. What we’re going to do is we’re going to bounce over to the front page of the website here, and of course this is my sandbox web page. Right now I need to have it load the page. Okay, this is the front page of the website.

Now what we’re going to do with it is we are going to place an ad banner right up above this slider here. To do that, this is the end fold theme and it uses a builder – the Avia Layout Builder program. So what we’re going to do is we’re just going to get a content element here and then we’re going to place the ad banner into that block. And so what this one’s going to do is we’re going to do it with the widget area. So we’ll grab a widget area, we’ll place it in here into the block, and of course I realized we forgot to build out the custom widget area, so we’re going to save that. Actually, we’re not going to save it; we’re just going to bounce on over to the widget area – leave the widget page – and go create a custom widget area.

And with this, we will then place the advertising – display your ads banner block here. Okay, we’ll select the ad zone for 723 x 90, top of block. And since it’s a custom widget area, it will be ready for us now when we go back to the front page to edit that front page. Then we’ll just select Edit Front Page again, come back in here, select Content Element, Widget Area. Use the top banner widget area (and yes, I have children as they’re looking for Pokémon emojis).

Okay, we’ll update this then we’ll go look at the front page, and we should have our banner ad right at the top of the page now. And there it is: nicely placed, nicely centered. If we sit here for 11 seconds, we should see it rotate through, and it’ll be all done and set. And there it goes, rotated through. So there you go; that’s exactly what you need for the WP Pro Ads Manager System and everything you need. So thanks for listening to this and I greatly appreciate your time. Hopefully this helps. If it does, feel free to contact me at my website, johnoverall.com or send me an email to john@wppro.ca. Or if you feel like giving me a call, I do take phone calls: (818) 850-7729. Take care now, bye-bye.

Okay, this is an addendum to the WP Pro Advertising System Plugin. A couple of things that I didn’t cover in the initial setup. These are kind of important features that as you go along, you’ll want to know about. Now the first one we’re going to talk about here is how to get the ad onto other websites or into other places within your website using short codes or additional code. Now we showed you real briefly back there how to create your ad zone and how to place banners into the ad zone.

One of the things you can do is once you go to the ad zones, it’ll list up all the ad zones you’ve created. So if you created multiple ones, you’ll see them all listed. The first thing you can do is you can look at the linked banners here and when you pop it up, it’ll show you all the banners that are linked to it. Then you can also change the order they are in. You can’t add or remove banners but you can see which ones are linked.

The next one is the Get Code. This here allows you to place these banners on other websites or in post short codes. So if you’re going to place it in another post on here, you can use this here, the post tag short code. And they have a short code editor that you can then open up and you can choose an ad zone, default options, whether it’s AJAX loaded, hi-def logged in, etc., etc., etc. Then you can go down to ad zone padding, style, border radius – you can do a lot of customizations to the ad zone code. Then it will give you a piece of code at the end of what you’re going to do.

The next thing down is a template tag. If you want to build your custom theme or template, you can embed these in here using a template tag. The other one is one we briefly touched on. We talked about the asynchronous js tag. It used to be a normal Java script tag, but now it’s asynchronous because of course that helps your website load faster. So you would need this piece of code here first and you would place that where you want the ad to appear on the other website. And then if you’re putting it on a website that’s not the same domain, you need to add this piece of code to it here so that it knows where to get the Java from. Plus, you have to add the domain you’re going to allow back in the settings. If you just want to I-frame the ad, you can I-frame the ad. I-frame works quite nicely but of course it loads slower.

Ten the final one here is the RSS feed. Now each ad zone has it’s own unique RSS feed and you can use this with Mail Chimp newsletters to import your ads directly into the newsletters you send out to Mail Chimp. Now I’ve kind of had a hit and miss success with this in Mail Chimp newsletters. I’m not sure why or what was happening, but I’ve had a couple of sites that it worked on, a couple that it hasn’t worked on, so it’s been kind of hit and miss. If you get it to work, more power to you. If not, don’t waste a lot of time trying to make it work because there’s something glitch about it. But that’s how you get the ads placed in other places.

Now the other thing you can do with it is you can go into the site here and I didn’t show you how the ads were displayed when you used that autofill function for a post. So if we go look at a post for the website, we can see here when we set it up, we chose to have three ads placed in here: one at the top of the post which comes in in this particular theme right underneath the main image at the top of the first paragraph. Then the second one is after a couple of paragraphs in. It places the center banner. And then at the bottom, it places the other banner ad. So you can do that with multiple banners in numerous ways you can do that and have it handed. This is something kind of nice to look at.

These are little features and little tweaks to the program. It is a great plugin to have to your website. And a couple of other little touchy things here, if you want to see what your advertisers are up to, you can go here, look at your advertisers, go click on the stats button. It’ll then pop up the stats for all of their stats, their impression. You can export it as a PDF file, so if you have people looking for stats, this is a great way to deliver those stats. It works fairly well. I have had some glitch displays with this here, the timeline of ad statistics, so it’s kind of hard to say.

Ad zones themselves, again, you can get the stats by going to the stats for a particular ad zone, and it does a pretty decent job of showing them. Campaigns, same thing. The same thing in the campaigns shows you the linked in banners, etc., and then the advertisers themselves. You can look up each individual advertiser.

So that’s all we’ve got for you. If you want more, please go visit WP Plugins A to Z.com and visit our YouTube channel there also. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks a lot for your time. Take care now. Bye-bye.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Training video- How to Place Image in WordPress Post Page WP Plugins A to Z

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

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for this training video.

How to Place Image in WordPress Post Page

This is one of the great training videos from John Overall at WP Plugins A to Z. This is a straightforward one for people to use on how to properly insert images into your post content. Now we’re going to run through this from basically the beginning and easy part, and once you’ve already got your content in, then you need to get your images placed up on here.

So what you’ll need to do is first, you’ll need to click on the Add Media button right here at the top of your post. Once you click on that, it’ll open up a window for you and you can go open up your window inside your computer, such as this, and you can go grab the image you want and then drag it over and drop it. You can get all the images you want to use in one easy shot, from all the different places you’re going to use. That way, you get them all uploaded and ready to go.

Once you have the image uploaded and ready, what it’ll do is it’ll give you the ability to then customize it up. You can go customize it up and change the title on it – you know, whatever you want to call that thing. You can give it basically whatever you want as a title. Make sure you fill in the ALT tag and the Description tag also in here as it adds a little bit more. If you want a caption underneath your image, you would then fill in that information here in the Captions spot.

While you’re at it, finish up the other image, get that information added. This allows you to have great titles on everything already set to go. And then you can then click Insert Into Post for the image, and it’ll insert it into the post wherever you had your cursor last set.

We’re going to back it out for a second and remove the images since we ended up inserting both the images, and we’re going to verify where we’re at. We’re going to put the cursor right here at the beginning of the first paragraph of text right below the headline. Then we go back to the Add Media button. Your images are already uploaded; you can click on the Upload Files tab and they should be right there (or it may be a Library tab, which is where they’re at).

We’re going to add in first this one here – our beautiful little headstone for this current post. You can go down to the bottom here, choose where you want that image to go, whether you want it right aligned, left aligned, center aligned, or no alignment. Link it to the media tab itself or you can even custom URL link, too. And custom URL for it is very easy. This gives you the ability to then – if someone clicks the image, redirect them to another page or post.

Then you can choose the size of thumbnail you’re going to have. You can have the full image, a medium size, small – generally choose something average on what you need, then you can insert it into the post.

Once it inserts, it just inserts it right into it, left aligns it, and then we’re going to drop down here real quick and we’re going to add in the second image. This time, we’ll add it to the left-hand side. So we’ll choose that image, we’ll come down, we’ll go have it left aligned, and this time we’ll choose a small thumbnail of 150. Custom URL it again, insert it into the post, and it places it right here to the side.

Now the other thing you need to do about your images on your post is you need to set a featured image. To do that, scroll down your post until you get to the box on your right-hand column called Featured Image. Click Set Featured Image, go choose the image you want to be the featured image for the post, select, and set it.

Then what you need to do is go save it all as a draft so you can take a look at it. Once the draft has been saved, you can then click on the View Preview Post button, opens it up, so you can get a look at what your post is going to look like – and this is how this post is going to look – all set and ready to go.

Okay, I hope that helps everyone out. Thanks very much for listening. This has been John Overall at WPPluginsAtoZ.com.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 379 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 #379 here.


It’s Episode 379 and I’ve got plugins to Customize Facebook Feeds, Create QuadMenu’s, Remove Pointers and some Halloween Fun. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #379

John:                It’s Episode 379 and I’ve got plugins to Customize Facebook Feeds, Create Quad Menus, Remove Pointers and some Halloween Fun. 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. And Marcus isn’t with me again this week but we still have a great show for you here today. Me, we, got my mouse, my computer monitors, and all the rest of the lovely stuff here.

At any rate, right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have a few minutes, please take your time and drop on over to Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us reviews and subscribing to the show. It really helps us out there. Reviews are really something great; we like to get them here and read out to the show.

And also, take a few minutes to check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live on YouTube every – well, maybe every Monday morning. There’s some changes that have been coming. My last couple of months, as many of you listeners have known, have been a little bit up in the air, so I’ve been in the process of revamping and changing a few things here. But at any rate, keep your ears tuned for that information coming.

And of course, you can follow us up on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and check us out on our YouTube channel and on Facebook or our social media platforms. With that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

And of course because Marcus isn’t here with me, I’ve got a couple of plugins for you right off the top to get you started. First up I’ve got one here that was sent in to us by Hari Maliya and it’s a freemium plugin. It’s called Customize Facebook Feeds, and this one here I don’t think actually made the reviews of when I was reviewing Facebook feed plugins several months back. I can’t recall entirely, but this one here is from Weblizar. It’s a very interesting Facebook feed plugin.

The setup is pretty easy for the most part. Once installed and activated, you gotta go create your feed, enter the URL of your Facebook page, group, or profile, make some adjustments to the layout. It’s got lots of nice adjustments to the layout as you see fit.

The free version, which is what I was reviewing – I don’t know if it was the free version or just something I wasn’t doing correctly. I was having some difficulties with it getting it to connect with Facebook and they have an – offer up a way to quickly click a button to create the Auth0 token that Facebook uses or you can try to use your own tokens, and that takes a real pain in Facebook to go create.

But no, no – I had some difficulties going back and forth. All in all, the plugin seemed pretty good. But with these difficulties here, I wasn’t sure if it was me or if it was Facebook, or what it was in the process. So basically what I’ve decided to do instead of panning this plugin, which it probably doesn’t need to be panned, is that I decided that I would just set this plugin aside a little bit and give it some time. I’ll come back to it at another time, so at the moment it’s currently unrated but it does seem to be pretty good for the most part.

So anyway, go check it out. It’s called Weblizar’s Facebook feed plugin and it’s Customize Facebook Feed. So it’s a really good looking plugin, so it could be of benefit to you, and if you can set it up, hey, more power to you.

That brings me up to the next one I’ve got here for you. This one was sent in by Ray Gillespie and this is called Remove Pointer from Blank Menu Items. Now this one here is one that I thought was really kind of cool in that every once in a while (in fact, it happens almost every site I build), you need a top-level menu item and you need a top level-menu item with no link to anywhere, not linking off to another page or something. Just a top-level menu item in your menu. Sometimes second- and third-level menu items to the same, and of course we all know how to create those. You go in and you create a custom menu and you put the pound symbol in there – hashtag – whatever you want to call it, and it goes nowhere. It’s just a default one.

Well, what happens with a lot of themes and such is they put a little arrow next to it, especially if you’ve got drop-downs in there. Well, what this plugin does is it removes that blank pointer arrow from the menu items so it doesn’t show up any longer. So a really sweet plugin; very simple, straightforward. Install it, activate it. It gets rid of that little blank pointer item on there for you and just does what it’s supposed to do. So being one of those simple plugins that’s free, it gets a top 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

This show 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.

That’s it. Absolutely – visit me and we’ll help you out with all your WordPress needs from hosting to sorting out that hacked website. Feel free to give me a call at any time.

Okay, and also is brought to you by X2 Marketing, which is your full-service digital marketing and brand deployment agency. Whether you are a solopreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X2 from WordPress to click funnels, landing pages to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, Infusion management, and more. Visit x2marketing.com and get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs.

And currently we do have a contest running right now for October, and because we had some difficulties getting it fully started and running, it’s running through to the middle of November. It’s for a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map which we reviewed in Episode 368. Check it out. The contest runs until the middle of November. It’s the WP Maps plugin at wpmapsplugins.com. They offer a wide variety of professional, interactive map plugins including Interactive U.S. Map, which gives you an easy way to install professional looking U.S. map, clickable states, counties, a well-organized dashboard to customize the map covers, hover information, etc. and more. It’s a really great plugin, so go check it out. We gave it a top ranking in our review.

Next plugin I’ve got here for you is another one that was sent into us. It was sent in by Juan Mastromarino – that’s it, get the name right. The freemium plugin is called Quad Menu and this one here creates WordPress mega quad menus that allow you to easily integrate the menu into your theme’s project. The plugin allows you to create mega menus, tabs, and carousel menus in a simple and native way, converting your existing menus into a powerful tool.

It’s fully customizable with filters to change the style and behavior of the menu, and this could be a great way to build out some custom, unique menus you may need for whatever project you’re currently working on. It does produce some very unique menus, so you might want to go check this one out if you’re just starting out and you need some unique menus. It’s called Quad Menu and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Listener feedback…we love listener feedback on the show here. And if you’d like to contact us, you can reach out to us via SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner of our website at wppluginsatoz.com. Hit us up on our Contact page. You can send us emails directly or you can reach out to us through our social media platforms via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And we do like when we get the feedback, so first up this week here, we do have a SpeakPipe feedback and this is from Mark, so we’ll let Mark take it away.

“Hey Marcus, I was listing to the – I think it was the September 24th podcast – and you were pretty much badmouthing Gutenberg, and boy do I disagree with you on that. I think your comments were something about Elementor and the other page builders being so much better. Basically Marcus, they’ve done a real good job with Gutenberg and that is going to be a phenomenal addition to WordPress, especially when it goes into the other phases – you know, Phase 2 and Phase 3. So I’d like you to stick with plugins and not be so opinionated against Gutenberg. It upsets me and I’m not listening to your podcast to be upset. I like to enjoy the podcast, so, you know, badmouthing Gutenberg – we’ve been using it live for many months now and we love it. So anyway, thank you. Bye-bye.”

Thanks, Mark much appreciate that. And unfortunately, Marcus isn’t here this show to defend himself, so we’ll bring it back when he is back on the show. But at any rate, the big thing for me is I’ve not been overly happy with Gutenberg either, but sometimes I badmouth it; sometimes I don’t. I do know that page builders such as Elementor and others are slowly starting to embrace Gutenberg and as I’ve said, it may be something I’m not ready for but it’s being crammed down our throats. And it will eventually be there but everyone else will catch up to it sooner or later. So that being said, we’ll still have our opinions occasionally – we have to. That’s what part of the show is. Our opinions are about everything in the show. So hopefully you continue to listen to the show. Maybe you’ll even support the show by donating, so thank you very much, Mark. We greatly appreciate it.

That being done, we’ve got another one here – an iTunes review that came in in September and this one here is titled “Best Plug-ins Podcast EVER!!!!” from Kahuna in the U.S. store and this is what Kahuna had to say:

This is a “MUST listen to Podcast” providing fantastic advice about WordPress Plug-ins. I have discovered so much by listening to it and have saved so much time and effort. I also recommend John Overall for consultation work, he is a fantastic problem solver and his help is worth the time and expense because he will save you time and provide solutions to all your WordPress and hosting needs.

Thank you very much, Kahuna. I do remember who you were and that you called me up and I did some work for you. So Valhalla – I think that’s how it goes – something Hawaii. So thank you very much. Much appreciate that.

And of course, this show 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’d like to acknowledge those that have supported the show in the past. All donations $50 or over are read out and their note is published here in the show. There’s also a new form for donations at wppluginsatoz.com/donate – make it as easy as possible to support the show. For those of you who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

We’d just like to give a big shout-out and thank you for all of those of you who have small donation amounts supporting the show and the regular recurring amounts that come in through Patreon, so thank you very much for supporting the show. It really helps us out. The money doesn’t make it into our pockets. It basically covers the costs of the transcripts, the server bandwidth – all of the little incidentals that are required just to keep a website up and running. And of course, drop on over to wppluginsatoz.com to support the show.

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is just a little bit of Halloween fun to go along with your WooCommerce store. It’s called Halloween WooCommerce and what it does for you is it displays selected Halloween-related icons in random places on your website. In other words, it’s kind of like a hide-and-seek game or a hunt-and-pick. You know, they gotta search out these icons and gather them up. Once a user goes through your site, gathers up all the desired number of icons that you set out for them, they receive a selected WooCommerce coupon.

It’s an interesting way to have a Halloween promotion. You can put something up and say, “Hey, we’ve got 10 Halloween icons that look like this…” You know, you just show them the icons scattered throughout our website. You know, this also gets them to click through your website too, searching for these icons, and offer them up a 20%, 25 – something worth their time but also helps benefit you.

A really cool little plugin; something you might want to check out. I know it’s a bit late for Halloween now with five days ‘til Halloween shows up, but it’d be something you put in your arsenal for next year – or who knows? May it’s changeable and you can set it up and use it for Thanksgiving and Christmas. (Now there’s an idea, too.)

So anyway, go check this plugin out. It seems like a fun plugin and it seems to work okay, so I give it a top 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, well that wraps up this show here for the plugins and I covered up in this episode the Customize Facebook Feeds, which I unrated at the moment; the Quad Menu, which I gave a 4 to; the Remove Pointer, which I gave a 5 to; and the Halloween WooCommerce, which I gave a 5 to.

And just a couple of quick reminders: please drop into our YouTube channel, check out our screencasts and other videos that get loaded up there, and more are coming again, I promise. They do get there; it just takes me time to get around to building them. I had a lot happening. And for those developers who would like to support the show, if you would like to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to enter the details and submit your plugin for our contest.

Also, if you’d like to appear in an interview show and the interview shows, I’ve had a lot of interviews in the last couple of weeks with developers. I think I’ve recorded three or four of them and they’ll be coming out a little bit at a time over the next couple of weeks they’ll be presented, so you’ll hear those interviews coming — and more interviews are scheduled. But if you would like to be interviewed, just go to https://wppluginsatoz.com/book-an-interview-on-wp-plugins-a-to-z-podcast/ and schedule yourself for an interview. It’s really interesting that I’m getting to talk to all these plugin developers. I really like it.

And with all that being said, I’m just gonna take another moment here and let folks know what’s happening with the show right now. It’s been a little bit up in the air over the last couple of months. I mean, through September it was pretty steady, but that was because I had a whole bunch of prerecorded shows. As most of you know by now, if you haven’t heard, my father passed away in September and me being the executor to the estate, it put a major dent in my life. I had to take care of a whole lot of stuff. September actually was minimized in my business and work, taking care of all of that stuff there, and I’ve been slowly redoing and re-getting back to organization.

The show itself is gonna continue; it’s not going to stop. It’s been a bit jump-and-start for days in the last – for October. But it’s going to come back in November and possibly on a new day. Instead of the Monday live shows, we might be looking at a Thursday live show – Thursday being a better day for me after a reorganization of my schedules throughout the last time here. And it may or may not have a weekly live show, but it’s going to definitely come in probably on a Thursday and be done about midday. Just to put things back in perspective, it’s simply due to the way my life has fallen in the last month and a half. But life happens. You pick things up, you clean it up, you dust it off, you move forward, and you keep going. So the show will do it and the show’s only going to get better.

And like I said, there are lots more interviews coming, more and more developers are reaching out to – well, we’ve been reaching out to developers to get them to schedule their thing. Pretty much if you have a plugin and we reviewed it any time in the last three years and it got a four or five in our rankings, we’re reaching out to you to ask if you want to be interviewed for the show and to ask you to go and schedule the interview. I have time slots available and because we’re not all in the same time zone, the system I use for it picks a spot in your time zone that will fit your schedule, so that’s the way I do the interviews.

So we do have some great ones coming up. I’ve talked to some really great developers from across the globe, from California to India, England, Australia, Africa – all over the globe. I think I’ve even talked to one in Russia recently. So we’ve got lots of great developers and lots coming up with the show. There is more stuff coming. I know it’s been kind of hit-and-miss in the last couple of weeks, but it’s going to be fixed out and smoothed as life gets better.

So thank you very much and to all of those who support the show, I thank you very much for all of the support you give and for all of those of you who donate to the show, again, thank you very much. It helps offsets the costs I’ve put out for doing the show. All of you know nothing is free. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So this is my way of helping give back to the community. It’s a great community that helps me by helping cover the costs of the transcripts that I have done, the server space, etc., etc.

All right, well thank you again and with that being said, we’ll let my lady take us out. Take care now, 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 378 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 #378 here.


It’s Episode 378 and we’ve got plugins for Creating Web Directories, Using Any Font and Advanced browser Checking. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #378

John:               It’s Episode 378 and we’ve got plugins for Creating Web Directories, Using Any Font and Advanced Browser Checking, 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. And I’m all by myself again this week. Marcus couldn’t join me. It’s just troubling with the way my life is and current state and shape of all the additional work I have to do. I recommend to you if you’re ever asked to be the executor of an estate, you say no. It’s a lot of work.

At any rate, right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. 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 reviews and subscribing to the show on those various channels.

Take a few minutes also and go check out our screencasts, training videos, and more over on our YouTube channel, and you can also follow us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. And off our website, subscribe to our newsletter where you can get all the latest bits and pieces and information, news, and other stuff that does not make it into the show.

And the show’s format this week is going to be a little different than it has for the last couple of weeks. I’ve got four plugins I’m going to be covering up today. And just to add a little bit to it – and well, with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

Okay, first off I’ve got a couple of web directory plugins that I’m checking out. I have a client of mine that asked me for some information about them. He said he was looking at these and said, “Hey, I’d like your opinion.” I said, “Sure, why not? I can take a look at them and see.”

The first one I’ve got for you is called Web Directory Free. Now this is a freemium plugin. It does have a premium version available over at CodeCanyon. I think it’s $39 for it. But the free version is a very good plugin if you’re looking to create a basic website directory based around your local area, your local neighborhood, or your small town, city – whatever it’s going to be. And what this one allows you to do is go in there and create a directory for any purposes such as classifieds or cars, boats – all sorts of different things.

They make it relatively easy to set up using your current theme by using shortcodes to just insert onto the page themselves. This one here also has some nice advantages to it that a lot of other web directory plugins don’t have in that you can import and export .csv files. This way, you can make the job of building out your directory a whole heck of a lot easier than it would’ve been previously.

All in all, this is a pretty decent plugin. It allows you to do all kinds of things with it. It’s SEO-friendly, it’s got customizations for it, adapted for CAPTCHA. If you want to get some of the full advantage of it such as be able to set it up to collect money from people, putting up listings, PayPal, Stripe gateway, etc., you’re gonna need the premium version for this plugin. They do say it’s compatible with site builders like WP Break Free, Visual Composer, and Site Origin, and you can customize in numerous ways with it here.

So anyway, go check this one out. It’s called Web Directory Free and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Next up here, I have another one that’s a web directory plugin. This is another freemium plugin. It’s called WP Geo Directory. Now this one is a lot like the previous one, expect it’s more extensive. It has more items to it; more stuff you can do if you go for the premium version. The free version is still pretty much the same as the previous one. You can build out a directory website based upon your local area. You can set it up to bring in – set it up – it has built into it some of the free version – this one here has the reviews and other things built into the free version into it.

But to get the full functionality of it, you’re gonna have to pop to the premium version of it and start paying for the plugin. What you’re looking at here when I went and looked over their site of it, the premium plugin add-ons, they don’t quite nickel-and-dime you, but they do get you for all the different pieces. You can either buy the whole package at $199, which includes themes that are built specifically for this plugin, so you can base and entire website off of their themes and this plugin, or you can buy ‘em one at a time and I saw the prices range from about $20 to $40, depending on which item you buy, which could get expensive if you bought them all individually versus buying the whole package and the kit and caboodle.

The nice thing about this one here is that I believe the other one had it, where you can add listings. This one here has a better listing page for where the visitors can come in, add listing pages. They also had a claim page, so if you created a bunch of listings, the owner of that business could come in and claim that listing so that they could customize it up and maybe you could make a few bucks off it this way.

This one here – also, if you’re a developer, you can extend this one dramatically. They have their own hooks and filters built in and available with this, so if you’re a developer and you want to take it in your own direction, you could do that with this particular plugin. So it would help you out dramatically and allow you to take full advantage of what this plugin offers. So anyway, check this one out. This is called the WP Geo Directory and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, 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. Go check out my website. I can help you with everything from hosting, to fixing a broken website, to setting up and developing your website – everything WordPress you need. Give me a call: (818) 850-7729.

Also brought to you by X2 Marketing, a full-service digital marketing brand development agency. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X2, from WordPress to click funnels, landing pages to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, Infusion management, and more. Visit X2 Marketing. Get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs. He’ll provide you with pretty much everything you need.

And right now we are currently running a contest for October. We’re giving away a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map donated by Botrous, which we reviewed in Episode 368. The contest is running until the end of October and it is from WP Maps Plugin, which is a plugin reviewed and gave it high rankings, high ratings. It’s an excellent plugin for building out interactive maps across all of the world. They do a great job of producing these maps for you, so go check them out.

Okay, next up – next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Advanced Browser Check. Now, there’s not a lot of use for this plugin these days as virtually everyone has a modern browser. But every once in a while, you’re gonna have – such as one of my clients – they’ve got a website up and they – all kinds of people visit them and people who don’t have modern computers or their computers are lacking, or numerous things wrong. So they would have people hit them with older versions of Firefox or older versions of Internet Explorer being the biggest one – the biggest culprit here. And you need to let the customer know that if they’re not hitting your website with a modern browser, it’s not going to work.

Well, this plugin here, while it’s a little bit old – it’s a couple of years old. It hasn’t been updated in a while. It still works great. I recently needed it for a client that was being hit from the older browsers and the people using the browsers were complaining to them that they couldn’t do things such as make donations on the website, they couldn’t see certain pages correctly, etc., when they found out it was the browser. It was like, “We’re sorry. You have an old browser. Please update it. But we put this in there to help notify people what they’ve hit and where their problems are so that it takes care of the problem.”

Fantastic plugin. Even though it’s out-of-date, it works great, does exactly what it’s supposed to, so of course I give this one a top 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and listener feedback! We do like our listener feedback here on the show, and the more the better – good, bad, indifferent – please sent it all into us. We like to check it out. Even occasionally we get something from iTunes. We recently had an iTunes review and it was popped up – it’s from utilitylocator, United States, US Store, and it said:

“Hey guys! I love this podcast and seriously look forward to each episode. The team always have great new plugins for review and I have discovered a bunch of plugins that I would have never found otherwise!”

Well, thank you very much. We appreciate that, utilitylocator, and that’s what this show is all about to try and bring you great plugins, and it helps me, too.

And this week here, we do have a SpeakPipe from Ken Richman, PDF Print Flyers, so take it away, Ken…

“Hey, thanks for reviewing my WooCommerce plugin, Print Flyers Lite – much appreciated. Four out of five? Yep, I’ll take that. That’s pretty fair. Obviously, there’s the premium version Print Flyers from print-flyers.com. That’s print-flyers.com. If you ever fancy reviewing that, let me know; I’ll send you a copy. Much appreciated, take care.”

Thanks, Ken. Much appreciate you leaving us a SpeakPipe, and absolutely, I’ll send you an email off so you can submit the premium version for us to review. We’ll bump you up to a five.

And this show, 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 week or month, depending on when we’re doing the live shows. All donations $50 and over are read out and their note is published here in the show notes.

And there is a new form for donations. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and you will hit that form. And for all those that came in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

This week’s donors are – came in October 9th from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., and his note says:

“This donation is on behalf of Mayfield Osteo https://www.mayfieldosteo.com.au,a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with the efficient and innovative Elementor. Thank you for continuing to review WordPress Plugins. Jez”

Thank you, Jez. You have been a fantastic supporter of the show and really appreciate it greatly – all the support you’ve given us.

Next one up here, this one came in from Botrous from WP Maps Plugin, which of course we’re giving that one away this month.

“This donation from WP Maps Plugin is on behalf of https://www.wpmapplugins.com/ who offer free and premium professional looking interactive maps of different parts of the world (continents, countries, states, etc.). Thanks for your time, effort, and for your valuable reviews.”

Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. All of that support really helps the show out. It helps us cover the costs of doing the basics of the show: paying for the transcripts (which get up just about every week as soon as we get them). They’re up now. Our transcripts are completely up-to-date. It covers the costs of having the server, bandwidth, etc. for the website. All of the little miscellaneous stuff – nothing ends up in our pockets – not yet, anyway. Not until we’ve got tons and tons of development and then who knows? This could become a full-time gig – although I tried that once; it didn’t quite work out and I went back to working for a living.

So a big thank-you to all our donors under $50. You know who you are, and for those who’ve set up small weekly and monthly subscriptions through PayPal or Patreon, thank you very much. And if you’d like to support us through Patreon, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/Patreon to get there, or click a link in the show notes.

All right, and the final plugin I’ve got for you here today…is called Use Any Font, the freemium version. Now, this one here is one I’ve got on one of my client’s websites, and the reason we went with this was she was looking for a very unique font. She wanted to make her website look like old typewriter on there. And now where there’s fonts available, she’d found a very specific font she wanted to use.

What this plugin allows you to do is use any font in such a way that all you have to do is have the original .ttf, .otf., woff file, and then you can upload it and it will convert it and play it onto your website for you. You can then assign it in quickly and easily without the hassles of CSS, etc., etc.

It’s quick and easy to set up, supports all major browsers. The font conversion is within the plugin interface font uploader. It also uploads directly into the WordPress editor, supports font formatting, and more into the site.

So hey…we’ve got a pinger here…go away. Messages, messages, messages…

Embed fonts – multiple fonts can be used but you have to go to the premium version. Now, the premium version of this is actually for a personal site; it’s only $10, so it’s really quite affordable. So you can use the fonts directly inside Divi Builder, Site Origin Page Builder, and probably other visual builders using the classes in them.

All in all, a pretty great plugin. But of course since I only checked out the freemium version, we have to give it a 4-Dragon rating. Take one point off because it’s got a premium version. I have to test the premium version before it can get a 5.

So anyway, that wraps that up. Go check this one out. It’s called Use Any Font [Freemium], and it’s available at the WordPress Repository.

Okay, so closing out this episode here, I covered up the Web Directory Free, which I gave a 4 to; the WP Geo Directory (freemium version), which I gave a 4 to; the Advanced Browser Check, which I gave a 5 to; and the Use Any Font (freemium version), which I gave a 4 to.

As – check out all the couple of quick reminders. We do have another WordPress Meetup. And for those that you watch the WordPress Meetup Live when we did it, it seemed to broadcast live, but it was reversed, and that was because I was using the wrong camera on my iPhone. That’ll teach me – something I’ve learned. So every time I do these things, I get better and better at the technology.

So the next one will be on November 29th and we’ll be broadcasting it live. I’ll be giving a presentation and maybe a second one; it depends on whether the other person lined up comes through or not. So at any rate, it’ll be a great presentation full of useful information and titbits. Be sure to tune in for that live show.

Also, you can go check out all our previous shows, episodes, and other things that we’ve done through YouTube over at our YouTube channel.

Also, stop in, sign up for the WP Plugins A to Z contest at wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest…and 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.

[Child giggling]

John:                Take care.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 377 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 #377 here.


It’s Episode 377 and we’ve got plugins for SmartLink Dynamic URLs, Ecommerce Merchant Reviews and Online Website Antivirus Protections. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #377

John:                And they’re off…It’s Episode 377 and we’ve got plugins for SmartLink Dynamic URLs, Ecommerce Merchant Reviews, and Online Website Antivirus Protections, 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. And I’m here doing the show by myself again this week. Marcus is still off doing things – show coming to you live on Canadian Thanksgiving Day up here in Candanavia. We are enjoying our Thanksgiving weekend and I decided to just do this show live this week because I haven’t had time yet to prerecord the shows and have a little extra time.

So for those that happen to join us, well welcome to the show. For those that catch it later on after it’s sent out, well, you missed a good show. At any rate – right off the top, 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 subscribing to the show. We’d greatly appreciate your support in those areas for us. It really helps the show out when you do those things.

Also, take a few minutes and stop in to our YouTube channel and check out the screencasts, our training videos, and you can catch us live the first Monday of every month as a guaranteed live show. But other Mondays may come in as I have time to do a live show with or without Marcus. I’m just going to continue getting this show moving forward the way I like it.

So at any rate, also take a few minutes. You can follow us on Twitter, contact us on our Facebook page, all of those places there where we like to make contact with everyone. With that being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

Okay, and first off today what I’ve got for you is a plugin that was sent in for review to us by Sebastion Rossi. It’s called SmartLink Dynamic URLs. This plugin here is a plugin that helps you redefine the meaning of what a web link is. It allows you to insert up to five URLs to a single link; each URL selected randomly on a page load as to what that link will go to. They’ve also added a new functionality for geotargeting, so you can geotarget the people who show up on your page and have the link go to specific links, depending on where they’re located or coming from out there on the globe. So it’s a pretty useful tool that could help you out quite a bit with your website.

And this is one that can actually be useful if you’ve got lots of different links available or if you’ve got links that you’re doing some marketing on, you’re doing some A-B testing, you want to direct people to different products depending on where they’re located. Maybe you run a site that has multiple stores and other things. You’ve got one link; you can direct them to the correct store depending on where they’re geolocated from. Now, geolocation does have its problems but it’s generally pretty good.

You can attach several URLs to a single anchor text also. It’s useful for all kinds of links and it’s really a great little plugin. Checking it out, it looks like something that could be very useful somewhere down the road. So anyway, give it a good checkout. It’s called SmartLink Dynamic URLs and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

And we’ve got next here – oh, the usual. This show 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. Give me a call. Me and my team take really good care of you. You can reach me at my website or grab my phone number: (818) 850-7729. We’ll do the best we can to support you.

Also sponsored by X2 Marketing, your full-service digital marketing and brand development agency. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X2. And go give them a call, get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs.

And contests – we do have a contest that will be live later this afternoon hopefully. For October we are giving away a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map that was donated by Botrous from the U.S. Maps plugin that we reviewed back in Episode 368 of the show, and this is a plugin that we gave a 5 out of 5 rating to – Marcus reviewed it. I remember reviewing it quite some time back and I gave it the same rating. It’s an excellent plugin – WP Maps Plugins – and it offers a wide range of professional interactive mapping tools. Not just the United States but also offers other countries. Now, we’re only giving away the United States map, but really a great plugin for helping building interactive maps and it is the pro version that they’re giving away for us. So go check out wppluginsatoz.com for contests to enter the contest and get more information on that plugin.

All right, next up what we have for you…we have the plugin that was sent in to us by Jonathan Acosto. It’s a premium plugin, third-party service. I didn’t fully check out the service but it does look like something very interesting if you’re running an e-commerce website.

What it does is it allows you to deal with all the merchant data and get reviews on your website. They have numerous ways in which they go through and figure out the reviews for the products that are listed in your store and they base their reviews a lot on chargeback ratios. They hook into your credit card processor data somehow – your IPN data that comes in to your website. They use that to help figure it out. They also take into consideration the reviews made by customers and they use all of these things in their own algorithmic formula to give out a review of the products on your website.

And it’s a really great, useful tool. It could be of value to you if you’re running an e-commerce site. This one here is for of course WordPress itself, so you might want to check this one out if you’re running an e-commerce store. See if it’s something that could fit you. From everything I looked at, it looks like it could be a 4-Dragon-worth plugin, so I will give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It is called the Boltron an Ecommerce Merchant Reviews Plugin, and it does look kind of interesting.

All right, so what do we got next here? Oh, we’ve got listener feedback audio clips. We don’t have any for you this week and I would love to get some sent to you – put some out there. All we need is for you listeners out there to drop in to our website and go in and give us feedback at wppluginsatoz.com. You can do it either by going to the lower right-hand corner and clicking on the SpeakPipe button or by sending us emails, get a hold of us via Facebook or Twitter. All those areas there, we will respond to you as quickly as we can. We do monitor the stuff; we’re not always on top of it, but I do the best I can.

And if you’ve got questions, it’s a great way to get free advice. Send us questions to the show, we’ll research it, answer your question here on the show, getting you an email on what to do.

And this show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And we like to acknowledge our weekly donors here, monthly donors, by reading out any notes that they provide us. Fifty dollars and over gets your note read out in the show and all links and everything you provide are provided there, so support the show. And for those of you that came in under $50, we greatly appreciate your small support. All donations to the show currently only go to pay for things like transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. – all the miscellaneous things that are required just to get the show produced, running, and on air. So make sure you go check those out.

There is a new link to donate. I’ve made it much easier to donate to the show. Simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, fill out the form, set your amount for the donation, and then just donate. It’s a whole lot simpler than it used to be. I had it too complicated; I really apologize for those that wanted to donate and it was too complex. Well, no longer. It’s a very simple and easy to do. Go check it out: wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Donations are all collected via PayPal.

And finally, what do we got? Oh, we just have the last plugin I’ve got to talk about here. This one here is another plugin that was sent in to us. This was sent in by Alan Wait. It’s a third-party service. It’s called WebDefender and this is a third-party service. I haven’t created my account with them yet to fully test it, so I’ve gone through and just reviewed everything that it does. But it is a free service at the moment. I imagine eventually they’ll have to charge for it because let’s face it: nothing’s truly free out there in the world today.

But what it does for you is it gives some smart protections on your website, help prevent hacker attacks, security, anti-spam protection, it helps stop brute force bot attacks, it provides a smart firewall, so it might be something similar to WordFence, which – who knows? If this one checks out, I might want to do it but third-party services, you know, I hem and haw about third-party services. They’ve got good things and bad things.

Hello, Manny. Nice to see you at the show. Yeah, it’s Canadian Thanksgiving here.

And it also provides some diagnostic information for you for vulnerabilities detection, blacklist monitoring, built-in malware removal, security hardening, and some GDPR tools for those of you that have to deal with the GDPR. (Well, which is a fair number of us, unfortunately.)

At any rate, it looks like a pretty great plugin. Being a third-party service though, I can’t give it a 5 because third-party services are always kind of tough, so I give this one a 4-Dragon rating. It’s called WebDefender and go check it out if you aren’t already happy with the setup on your site, looking for something different for security protection for your WordPress website, give this one a go and check it all out.

All right, so before I head to closing out the episode, I know that I’m doing things a little bit different. I decided to, you know, take my Canadian Thanksgiving holiday and do a live show instead of prerecorded shows, because I haven’t had the chance to catch up on my prerecorded shows as it’s been very busy the last month for me. It set me behind the 8-ball quite a bit. For those of you that have been following me, you know the full details of it. Simply to say, my father passed away and it was a tough go for a little while.

At any rate there, what I’m going to do I may do for a little while is do an occasional Monday show when I have the extra time to pop one in. You’ll just have to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notifications of when they’re happening and see what’s up. And Marcus may or may not be able to appear with me on those Mondays aside from the dedicated Monday which is the first Monday of every month and when we prerecord the shows. So we’ll see how it goes.

This month here is a little bit of an oddball for me, so it could just be me doing it and I’ll have to bring in a little more information just to make the show a little bit better than just me with three plugins. I may have to bring it to four or a couple others or bring in a little bit of information. I’ll try to put that here at the end of the show so that you’re not wasting all of your time.

At any rate, closing out this episode of the show here, I covered up the SmartLink Dynamic URLs, which I gave a 5 to; the plugin that allows you to put as many as five URLs into one link on your website or into an anchor text. The Boltron an Ecommerce Merchant Reviews Plugin, which allows you to set up and determine what your store ranking or rating might be. It looked like an interesting kind of plugin to check out. And also I covered up the WebDefender, which is the free website security protection plugin for WordPress – third-party service but still a free service. And as we know, most free services usually end up paid after a while – they have to. They’ve got to pay their bills, too.

And as a few reminders here, please check out our YouTube screencast. For those of you that like to watch live, tomorrow evening, the 9th of October starting at 6:30 Pacific Time will be the livestream of the Victoria WordPress Meetup group where we have two speakers: myself giving a presentation on how to choose the correct theme for your WordPress website and then my buddy Shawn who is giving a presentation on all the cool things you can do with GravityForms. He does some amazing things with GravityForms and he’s gonna showcase them all to us and he’s even got a link to his slide notes and everything else which will be published shortly after the presentation. So it’s something you’ll want to check out just to see what we’re doing out here on the West Coast of Canada as we expand our WordPress Meetup group.

And also, you’ll see more WordPress training videos up and coming. I’ve got my new computer online; I just don’t have it completely organized and set up. But as soon as that’s online, more training videos and other things will be coming your way.

So that pretty much wraps up everything I’ve got for you. I’ll let my girl take it out to say thank you very much for stopping in and listening to us.

[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]

John:               And that’s all. Take care.

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 376 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 #309 here.


It’s Episode 376 and we’ve got plugins for Drawing on Images, Switching Images and HTML Sitemaps and more, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #376

John:                It’s Episode 376 and we’ve got plugins for Drawing on Images, Switching Images and HTML Sitemaps and more, 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. And unfortunately today, Marcus couldn’t join me. He’s off doing some other things at the moment, so it’s just me for the show and it’s going to be a slightly bit different than usual.

But before we get into that and jump into that, I want to play and honor respects for my father who passed away on September 10th last month, and I wanted to play him Last Taps and respect for CW04 Gerald Wayne Overall.

[21-gun salute]

[Taps]

                        Okay, with that being done…many people who have listened to the show or watched to check out the show notes all month, you’ll notice I had dedicated the show to my father and it’s been a very busy month for me. So with that, let’s proceed with the show and of course right off the top, 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 on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to us and leaving us a review.

And don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel where you can catch the show live the first Monday of every month and usually it’s at noon on those first Mondays of each month. But occasionally I have to move it such as today I had to move the timeline simply because I had a couple more things to deal with in my – with my father passing away. So please follow us up on Twitter or on our Facebook page.

We do try to answer anything that comes through there on our social media platforms. And you could also jump over to our website and subscribe to us on our website. Just go to the lower right-hand corner. You can click to subscribe to the newsletter where we send out regular weekly information. And also if you want to get a hold of us, click the bottom button in the corner and leave us a voicemail. We get those up into the show as soon as we possibly can.

Okay, so with all that being said, let’s move on to the first plugin I have here today.

[Plugins lead-in music]

First up what I’ve got here is a plugin called Draw Attention, and this plugin here is one that helps you create interactive maps on your images for your website. You can map any image you want with it. The free version (which is what I checked out) allows you to edit up and have one image available. But if you need more than one image for it, you have to go to the pro version.

It’s a really nice, useful plugin. You can use it to draw all kinds of things onto a photo image and then it creates a popup window when people mouse over it for additional information. Very useful plugin; there’s lots of other tools out there that do similar things, but I thought this would be an interesting one to bring to the table for people. Okay, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out. The plugin is Draw Attention and it’s available in the WordPress Repository.

And 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.

Okay yes, come visit my website. I handle all kinds of stuff for WordPress – everything from development to hosting and specialize in fixing hacked websites, so come give me a checkout.

And also brought to you by X2 Marketing. It’s your full-service digital marketing brand development agency. Whether you are a solo provider or a small business enterprise-level company, you can power up your marketing with X2, so go check out x2marketing.com.

And to let everyone know, we have had a winner from last month’s contest for the ultimate bundle from WP Book List. Congratulations to Craig and his information will be going out to him shortly for it. It was valued at $83 and we do have a couple more contests that I haven’t fully prepared yet, but they’ll be coming back for next month, so make sure you check the newsletters for when they go live. So subscribe to our newsletter to check that out for when it goes live.

And what else do we have here today? Let’s see….no, I’m not doing 10 plugins solo, sorry. It’s only six and I’m only doing my three today and talking about a few other things, so thanks Larry. I will be more interactive though today than usual. Thanks to those that have joined us live. I really appreciate the live viewers that show up and say hello.

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you is a nice little – a great little plugin that can come in handy for folks. It’s an Image Switcher plugin. Now, somewhere in the past we’ve reviewed similar image switcher plugins, but this one’s brand new. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to put up two images and when people mouse over it, it swaps the image for them. It’s not a slide across and compare but a swap back and forth between the two images. You can put up before and after image, you can put up two different images that allow it to pop up. You can create a shortcode from the thing to put the images anywhere you want. You could create them as custom post types is what it does and allows you to use a shortcode to place it anywhere within your site that you’d like.

It’s a really nice plugin; it works great. It’s fairly easy and straightforward. Being brand new, they’re still working on the additions to it and stretching it out. But at the moment I found it to be quite an excellent plugin and it’s one that I had to give a 5-Dragon rating to.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, could make for a short show but I try not to leave it too short today. Now, we do have a fair amount of things up and coming into the future and right now, we’ve got a little bit of listener feedback and other things to talk about, and we do love listener feedback and the show and we put it back to the show to say thank you for your time. And this week here, we’ve got a new iTunes review which came in and the iTunes review came in by Utility Locator USA Store and it says:

“Hey guys! I love this podcast and seriously look forward to each episode. The team always have great new plugins for review and I have discovered a bunch of plugins that I would have never found otherwise!”

And so thank you very much, Utility Locator. I really appreciate those reviews in the iTunes store and if you can, take a few minutes if you haven’t already done it. Please give us a review in the iTunes Store. Let us know what you think – good, bad, ugly. We prefer the good but hey, we’ll take anything.

And show donors – this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past weeks and month since we only do one live show a month now and the other three are prerecorded. All the donations $50 and over are read out in the live show and their note is attached both in the live show and the prerecorded shows throughout the month. For those that come below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much. We would also like to thank out the Patreon donors.

Well, this show’s donors are from early September. We had Jezweb Pty. Ltd. who donated $50 and their note:

“This donation is on behalf of Hotel 77 https://www.hotel77.com.au/ accommodation with beach views in Newcastle, Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor.”

He’s using that more and more, so thank you very much, Jez. And,

“Thank you for continuing to review new and interesting plugins. It would be interesting to hear of your experience and reviews on disable gutenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like wp disable.”

My experience and reviews on Disable Guttenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like WP Disable. Thanks, Jez. Well, I think I’ll stick that one in the review queue – WP Disable – but there will be coming down the line as we hit Guttenberg stuff disabling plugins. And declutter plugins, I haven’t used one in quite some time. I used to use them all the time but I found more effective ways of doing the decluttering.

And September 11th, Jezweb Pty. Ltd. sent us in another $50.

“This donation is on behalf of Krosstech https://www.krosstech.com.au who sell storage and workshop equipment in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor, Woocommerce and the Yith Quote Request plugin. Thank you for finding new and interesting plugins to review. Thanks. Jez”

Well, thank you very much, Jez. Your support of this show has just been amazing over the last year. Really, truly – it’s been great. You’ve helped cover the costs of the servers and the transcripts that we get up, which actually are pretty current now that I have some help and support to get those things up and online and keep them up and current, so thank you for that. All the monies that are collected from donations, they go straight back into the show. They don’t make their way into our pockets.

And a big thank you to donors who came in under $50 and for those of you that have small weekly subscriptions and the monthly Patreon subscriptions. Thank you very much for your support. It’s really a big help. It helps offset the costs. If you’d like to support the show, you can go over to weppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show, so please help the show out there. We’d greatly appreciate it.

Okay and yeah, there’s the Jezweb site. All right, and what do we got here? Over at Patreon and you can support the show over at wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Yeah, I’m a little scatter. It’s been a rough month. Not only obviously I’m the executor of the estate, so I have a lot to do. I’m still not done. Quite a lot goes into it.

All right, my final plugin today is WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap. This is a sitemap plugin – I know sitemaps aren’t used all that much anymore, especially the old HTML ones, but this one I kind of like and it’s a brand new plugin and it’s reminiscent of what I used to do and occasionally I do need an HTML sitemap. And if you’re not familiar with them, the HTML sitemaps were the old navigation page where you used to land on or create for websites back in the beginning of the internet so people could find their way around your website better because creating the menus was a bit more work than it is now.

But occasionally it still comes in handy if you’ve got a really crazy, deep site. The other thing is it gives a lot of internal links to your site that can be useful, so it’s something you may want to check out. Go see this plugin; it allows you to build the sitemaps in multiple ways. You can do it for pages or posts or tags or a mixture of everything. It creates a shortcode that you then place on a page and it automatically generates the sitemap.

It’s a very nice plugin. It does an excellent job of setting things up for you. I found it to be quite useful. It also allows you to create a site map with images on the page using the featured images too, so there’s multiple ways you can create the site maps themselves on this. So go check this plugin out. It’s called WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap and again I give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Yeah, I think it’s definitely worth some SEO stuff there, so yeah. So it’s one you might want to – you do want to check out. I know that I’m going to be adding it into my WP Plugins site because I still have troubles navigating my own site since it’s been growing for eight years. Lots of stuff in there; the bigger it grows, the more it gets to locate stuff.

What else do we got here? Well, that’s all the plugins I’ve got this episode and I will be bring more stuff to the table. There’s a lot coming the pike for the show but closing out the show on the plugins though, I covered up Draw Attention, which I gave a 4 to; the Image Switcher, which I gave a 5 to; the WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap, which I have a 5 to.

Now I do have some more screencasts that are in production set up for it now. I have a new computer that’s being built this next week, so my production is gonna get a whole lot easier once I have a computer that’s more up to speed for everything. And so I’m going to be producing more of those training videos that I’ve been producing.

There’s also – for those who live here on Vancouver Island or Western Canada, if you want to come over to Victoria and visit, we have the monthly WordPress Meetups, which are all now scheduled through until June of next year. They’re up in meetup.com and you can join the meetups and I’m going to be livestreaming those out. After the bugs of my first meetup, I now know what I’ve got to do to make sure the livestream actually works the way it’s supposed to and we’ll get that out for everyone. That is some stuff that is going to be really great.

I’ve got several speakers aside from myself presenting, so it’s not just me talking all the time and bringing in some different points of views. Our next meetup is going to feature a speaker who is going to come in and talk to us about all the cool things you can do with GravityForms and he’s got a whole litany of types of forms and how you can use GravityForms in your website to do multiple things, so it’s something you’ll want to come check out or at least check out the livestreaming version of it, which will be October 9th. The link will be up on your YouTube channel for live events this week and it’ll happen at 6:30 Pacific Time. So if you’re on the East Coast, sorry, it’s a little late but the show will be up there on our YouTube channel after that.

For WordPress news, other information, related posts, please subscribe to our newsletter. We try to put in all news and other important information into the newsletter, so subscribe to that and get all of the latest in contest and other things that’s happening.

And some of the usual reminders here, well, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. All the notes of course at wppluginsatoz.com and I’m supposed to let my girl read it all out, so I will let her read this all out for us.

[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.

John:               I guess I’m gonna have to hope that Google got me a good cast this time because I forgot to start my backup tonight. All right, so thank you all very much and that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.

[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]

John:                That’s the main show. I’m going to take care of a couple of other little things here. So yeah, hi, Luis. Thanks a lot for popping into the show. Sorry, it’s a short one today but Marcus was unable to join the show and I’m just getting back to my normal life after three weeks of a lot of stuff on my plate. So check out the live show feedback. It’ll be great and I appreciate everyone coming out and more is coming along the line soon. And who knows? I may even do the occasional live show here throughout the month just for fun. Anyway, take care now. Bye, everyone.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 375 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 #375 here.


 It’s Episode 375 and we’ve got plugins for Enabling the Classic Editor, WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, YouTube Auto Posting, Payment Method Discounts, Jetpack Without Promotions and Tables from CSV. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #375

Marcus:           It’s Episode 375 and we’ve got plugins for Enabling the Classic Editor, WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, YouTube Auto Posting, Payment Method Discounts, Jetpack Without Promotions and Tables from CSV. 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 but sweltering shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                Yeah, you guys are getting nice, warm weather down there and up here in the North, it’s dropping down into the 10 to 12-degree area, or somewhere around 60 I think for you. I can’t remember; I’ve forgotten how to tell temperature in Fahrenheit. At any rate, we have the usual great show for you today. But right off the top, 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 subscribing to the show.

Marcus:           That’s right, and if you check out YouTube, you can check out our training videos, screencasts, watch us live the first Monday of every month. Pretty fun – we’ve always had good times interacting with our listeners on that. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and remember to visit our website, wppluginsatoz.com. That’s where you’re gonna find our newsletter signup. Please sign up. That’s where we keep all the WordPress-related news and security briefings because on this show we only talk about the plugins.

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

[Plugins lead-in music]

And we have our usual allotment of six great plugins for you and the first one I have for you is called The Classic Editor Addon. Now by now, all of you have seen WordPress 4.8 – or is it 9? I can’t remember – 4.8. And they’ve got these things when you update, it gives you an option: enable Guttenberg or enable the Classic Editor. And hopefully, most of you are enabling the Classic Editor to prevent the site from being updated to Guttenberg when it goes into the core with Version 5.

Well, what this plugin does is it doesn’t enable the Classic Editor; it’s an add-on for the Classic Editor, which with the Classic Editor that you’re enabling, what it does is it adds an option on the settings page with a checkbox to where you can uncheck the Classic Editor and have Guttenberg instantly reactivate for you. What this plugin does is it removes that checkbox so that there’s no accidental activation of Guttenberg. You have to manually remove the plugin and then manually activate Guttenberg.

So this is a way to help prevent maybe your client who goes in messing around with settings from accidentally activating it, because Guttenberg messes up a lot of themes at the moment. It’s something unless you want to go experimenting, you want to avoid. I’m going to be coming along pretty soon with a lot of information about Guttenberg as I write up one of the presentations I’ll be doing this year at the WordPress Meetup. At any rate, because this plugin does something does something very simple, sweet, and it does something I thoroughly enjoy such as preventing Guttenberg from being accidentally activated, I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           Yeah, it shouldn’t even be intentionally activated. Guttenberg stinks.

John:                [laughing]

Marcus:           In comparison to Elementor, Beaver Builder, and all the rest —

John:                All the other builders? Yeah, Guttenberg does suck.

Marcus:           Terrible – terrible. It’s the worst decision. This is going to go down, just like distraction-free editing: no one uses it.

John:                They’ll call it “When WordPress Jumped the Shark.” [chuckling]

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And by the way, I know I’m getting on a side tangent here, but did you know that Drupal people are going to be implementing Guttenberg, too?

John:                Really?

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                I didn’t know they built Guttenberg for Drupal. That’s interesting.

Marcus:           Yes, it works!

John:                Hm.

Marcus:           It works for Drupal.

John:                Oh, interesting. Okay.

Marcus:           Yeah, so you Drupal users, now you can be twice as dumb when you install it.

John:                [chuckling]

Marcus:           But though it might be good for Drupal people, who knows?

John:                Who knows? Good – you never know.

Marcus:           All right, so here’s one I’ve got – another one from Envato Elements. This is – and Envato Elements, by the way, is a cool feature. If you haven’t heard about it, just go to elements.envato.com. I’m not getting paid to say that. In fact, I pay for the service myself out of my own pocket and it’s pretty cool. So you can pay on a monthly or an annual and you get everything that they’ve got, which is hundreds of thousands of different things, including hundreds of WordPress plugins like this one.

It’s called WooCommerce PDF Vouchers. Now, last week I talked about something that gave invoices and packing slips and things like that. This does vouchers. So what it does is it allows you to sell voucher codes or kind of a printed PDF that can then be redeemed at a physical location. So this is even tickets or gift certificates or gift card type of things. It’s perfect for those kinds of stores that want to do that for onsite pickup even, class admission tickets, presentations – anything like that. You can give your customers the ability to set a recipient name, email, and a message to purchase these vouchers as a gift or for themselves.

So you can create unlimited – it’s totally easy to use. I tried it, it looks really nice. You can add custom logos, you can put the redemption instructions right in the PDF, you can add unlimited locations where the voucher can be redeemed. You can put anything on it, like the buyer’s name and email and any kind of identification things on that thing too so that you know that that person is actually the one that gets it, so it’s not just 50 people printing the same thing out. It is QR code-ready so that you can actually scan it in and see exactly what it’s supposed to be. You have the ability to use codes on an unlimited basis, so it’s the same kind of code over and over or you can assign them individually. It really doesn’t make a difference.

So it also will – if you happen to be selling some physical product and all of the vouchers get sold out, it can send an email to the vendor saying so: “Hey, we’re sold out. We need more.”

John:                Cool.

Marcus:           Very, very cool plugin. This did exactly what I needed it to do. It also works with plugins like WooCommerce Bookings, WC Vendors, Pay Your Price, the Social Deal Engine WooCommerce Extension, Multi-Vendor. It works with WooCommerce SMS Notification plugins – all kinds of stuff. It’s translation-ready, it works really nice. I put a demo link for the frontend and the backend of this plugin in the show notes, so check that out at our website. I rated this a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                That’s a pretty cool plugin. One thing I didn’t hear you mention, you may have, but it also has the ability to check if the voucher code is valid or not for a specific vendor.

Marcus:           Correct.

John:                So that’s kind of important. That was the first thing that popped in my mind: how do you check to make sure, because your PDF, they could print a million of them. What would prevent them from using them? So it’s got a way to make sure they don’t misuse the code.

Marcus:           That’s correct, yes.

John:                So that’s an important factor.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                All right, well 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.

Absolutely. Visit me for all your WordPress needs and especially for WordPress hosting when you’re tired of all the crappy hosting providers out there.

Marcus:           Yep, and when you’re done with that, you’re gonna definitely need some digital marketing help to grow your brand, your product, your store, whatever it happens to be, and that’s where you give me a jingle at x2marketing.com. I can handle any kind of project, whether you’re just a solo, one-person shop, a small business, or an enterprise-level company. Power up your marketing with X2. We can do WordPress, click funnels, landing pages, social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, and even InfusionSoft management. A lot of people spend hundreds of dollars on InfusionSoft every single month but have no idea how to effectively use it. So hire me, I’ll teach you exactly what to do. Set up to a year’s worth of campaign emails for you and get your cycle flowing. So visit x2marketing.com and get in touch with me about your digital needs.

John:                Absolutely. And of course, we are giving away an ultimate bundle license package for WP Book List and this is the last week for you to get in there and enter the contest. Go do that at wppluginsatoz.com/contests and this is a plugin bundle valued at $83 and WP Book List is a WordPress plugin that strives to be the ultimate book management tool. Whether you’re an author, publisher, librarian, bookstore owner, or simply a lover of books. WP Book List has something for you.

Just plug in the ISBN or ASN number and let WP Book List scour Amazon and other sources for tons of information about each title, including cover images, publication date, number of pages, and more. So this plugin provides everything you need to get yourself set up with a complete book list on your site, and as we talked about in the last show, it’s a really great way to create other types of book lists that might be handy for you. So go check it out and if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, we have a great discount coupon code offer from the developer. Just enter ULTIMATE20 (all caps) and save $12 off on the plugin, so go check it out: WP Book List.

And a big thank you to Simple Giveaways Plugin for providing us with the plugin that powers all our contests.

Marcus:           Yep, and you better enter because I’m gonna take it if no one enters.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           It’s all mine.

John:                You’ll sneak that in.

Marcus:           [chuckling]

John:                All right, and our next couple of plugins we’ve got for you…. the next one I have for you here was sent in by Szabolcs Istvan Kisded. Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator and YouTube Auto Poster Plugin for WordPress. This is a premium plugin from CodeCanyon and from everything I looked at, I haven’t fully tested the plugin but I did look it over real good and watched his training video on it.

It’s a fantastic YouTube plugin that will allow you, if you’re so inclined, you can upload the video to your website, put it in as a link on a post or a page. Once you publish the post or page, it then auto-uploads that video to YouTube for you. It uploads all the content from your post and everything and puts it up into your YouTube channel. Now, the other thing it does for you if you want to pull down videos from other YouTube channels out there and display them in your site, it’ll pull down the video and it will pull down the description, it’ll pull down the comments and everything, and put it into your site as a post.

So it goes on both directions for uploading and downloading YouTube videos, help you create some unique content on your site. It can be very handy if you can figure out how to make the most of it. But it looks like quite the interesting plugin as far as managing and using YouTube videos on your website. Go check this out. It’s called Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator and YouTube Auto Poster and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Be careful of that with duplicate content. Make sure you’ve got other stuff on that page, too.

John:                Yeah. Well, it’s a matter of what you’re trying to do or what you’re accomplishing. But according here, it helps prevent you from doing duplicate content because it’s also got a AI spinner in here to spin the posting information for you.

Marcus:           Yeah, if you want it to be completely unreadable. [chuckling]

John:                [chuckling] Well…

Marcus:           Yeah, okay. All right.

John:                It was an interesting one sent in by a listener and I thought hey, we’ll give it a check.

Marcus:           Yes. Okay, so the next plugin I’ve got is something relatively new but I thought it was pretty cool. It’s called WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts, and this is very intriguing. It allows you to actually add a discount based on specific payment methods. So let’s say, John, you take PayPal and Square and Stripe and credit card payments and all that different stuff. Maybe you want PayPal because you want that instant access to your account and you don’t want, you know, the chargebacks or anything like that.

So what you can do is you can say, “Anybody that pays with PayPal, you get a 5% discount on the pricing,” so it automatically enters that based on the total as they check out. So when they select their payment method, it actually can do a fixed or a percentage based on the methods that you choose. So in WooCommerce you always set up your merchants and your payment methods and things, and that’s exactly where this resides. It’s called WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts and it gets a perfect 5 out of 5.

[outro starts]  

John:                Whoops, wrong button.

[Dragon roar]

Wrong button. Do that again.

Marcus:           Drop the mic, end the show.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Sometimes the buttons just are too skinny for my fingers. Yeah, it’s a fantastic idea and it – even from what I just read real quickly, if you’re taking checks, give them a discount if they’re paying in checks or cash if they’re going that route.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                All right, and listener feedback…we do love listener feedback, and if you’d like to leave us some, hit us up on our Contact page on the website, SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner, or hit us up on our social media channels: YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. And we do get back to you as soon as we can. We’ll answer your questions to the best of our ability and you get a lot of free advice for it, so go check us out and send us some feedback.

And this show, 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 some value by donating $50 or more. We read out their notes in the shows and on the first of the month we acknowledge all of them live. And for those that come below $50, they remain anonymous. We thank you very much.

And if you’d like to support the show that way, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate.

And our final set of plugins for today and the last one I’ve got for you here is one that’s near and dear to my heart, although I usually remove this plugin if it gets accidentally installed at all costs. It’s Jetpack Without Promotions. Now, if you’ve ever installed Jetpack and there’s occasionally a reason I have to install and use it, but all of the notifications and ads and “Please buy this” or “add this” – all those things in the admin bar just annoy me to no end.

This plugin removes all that junk. It helps clean up and declutter your admin area of your website if you’re using Jetpack. This one here is like yahoo! Tops – I love it. It’s a great plugin. Go check it out: Jetpack Without Promotions, and of course it hits a top 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Marcus:           I gotta find this clip when I was interviewing Matt Mullenweg when I was doing WordPress Weekly.

John:                Mm-hm?

Marcus:           Of him talking about Jetpack and him asking me about something, and I said, “I don’t know, man. I don’t like using it.”

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           And he was [chuckling] he was confused as to why I would never use it.

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           And that’s a good reason why.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Right there. Okay, let’s round this one out with something that we use for tables. So a lot of times you want to have tables within your WordPress pages or posts, and here’s a really cool thing. It’s called Table Builder for CSV. It allows you to create a full HTML table by uploading a CSV file into your media library. So you can upload it then include the table in the page based on a shortcode and then insert the table right in there and it a creates a nice, responsive HTML table that you can use straight from a CSV file.

Now what’s really nice is you can actually update that CSV file and, you know, put a new CSV file in and it updates within that page too automatically, so that’s pretty cool. It also allows you to define new headers as far as the top of the column, what the names are and things like that. A really cool plugin and it worked for me right out of the gate. Rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s a pretty nice plugin. I kind of like how that works. I don’t have a need for it now but I have had a need for that in the past, so it’s one go check out.

All right, well closing out this episode, I covered up the Classic Editor Addon, which I gave a 5 to; the Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator, which I gave a 4 to; and the Jetpack Without Promotions, which I gave a 5 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, which gets a 5 out of 5; WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts, 5 out of 5; and Table Builder for CSVs gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                And of course we have a couple of quick reminders and promotions for you. One, please go check out the Victoria WordPress Meetup group if you’re on the island or planning to visit the island, please come check us out on October 9th. And we have two presentations, one by a guest speaker who’s going to present all about using GravityForms and how it can enhance your website, and myself will be presenting on how to choose a theme for your website. And after the troubles I’ve had recently, well, it’s gonna be something worth watching to help you figure out how to choose a theme for a new project.

And be sure to check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And to developers out there, if you’d like to support the show and you want to give away or offer up a free premium license for our contests, please 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 373 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 #373 here.


It’s Episode 373 and we’ve got plugins for Disabling Toolbars, Intro Pages, Site Cleaners, WooCommerce Delivery Drivers, Header & Footer Scripts and Private Media. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #373

Marcus:           It’s Episode 373 and we’ve got plugins for Disabling Toolbars, Intro Pages, Site Cleaners, WooCommerce Delivery Drivers, Header & Footer Scripts and Private Media. 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 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 leaving us comments and reviews there. We’d greatly appreciate that.

Marcus:           That’s right. You can also check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live the first Monday of every month at 10:00 Pacific Time over at YouTube. We’ve got a lot of new stuff going up there. Remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we keep all of the news related to WordPress because this show is all about plugins.

John:                Absolutely. And before we dive right into the plugins here, I want to say a big thank you to those of you that showed up to the livestream for the WordPress Meetup yesterday. Thank you to the listeners out there that showed up. I know a couple did because of the thumbs-up on the video while it was streaming live, even with all the technical difficulties. So thank you very much to all of you that joined in on that.

All right, well with that that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]         

Okay, and first up today I have for you Disable Toolbar, and this plugin here is a nice, simple plugin for you that if you’re running a membership site of any sort, eventually you’re gonna run into the problem where you just don’t want your viewers to see that toolbar that shows up at the front of your website – the visitor side of the website – the toolbar that’s so handy for admins. It also shows up for visitors or members that are signed into your site.

This plugin here makes it an easy task for you to turn it off depending upon their membership level or their user level, be it editor, subscriber, contributor, etc. So what you want to do is you want to just plug this thing in, turn it on, go into the settings page, and then tick the boxes for the levels that you don’t want to see it, and it’s all done. It’s a really great, simple plugin. I like the way it works and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. Check it out: Disable Toolbar.

Marcus:           Very nice. All right, my first plugin today, I am going to all this month feature a plugin from Envato Elements, which is a great subscription, monthly service, or you can pay annually, and they’ve got all kinds of stuff. It started off with just kind of stock photography and graphics and things like that, but they’ve brought together video and moving backgrounds and, you know, after effects templates and Adobe Premiere templates and things – pretty great stuff. But then they just started putting a lot of WordPress themes and WordPress plugins in there. In fact, there’s over 300 plugins. So there’s a whole new reservoir to tap from in my eyes, and I’m going to start bringing these to light on the show.

And the first one is called WP Mega Intro, and this is really cool because it has like these full-screen hero images and it’s almost like a slideshow before you get to the main website, and I thought this was really intriguing. You can put it in the homepage or you can use it on any page or a post which was even more cool in my eyes, because then I could just make little slideshow presentations out of a page – really cool. So you can have three different types: normal, session, and cookie, so that it will not play the same intro the second time someone comes to the page, which is pretty cool.

It also has the ability to put a video onto the page and if the video finishes, then it can auto-redirect to a different page, like the main homepage or something like that. That was pretty cool. You can do logos, you can have a little button on there that says, “Skip it,” you can change the CSS, and the other cool thing is actually you could import and export the different mega intros to bring them onto other sites, which I thought was really nice because then you could template the thing.

So it does video, audio, different sliders, images, you can do a Contact Forms 7 form, or it just exports and imports pure HTML, which I thought that was really cool. This is a very, very nice plugin and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                That sounds kind of interesting and kind of reminiscent of the old Splash Page days to me is what it sounds like.

Marcus:           It is, and that is kind of making a comeback —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — especially in mobile.

John:                Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed in the sites I’ve been hitting but I suppose everything old is new again.

Marcus:           That’s right.

John:                All right, well that brings us up to this show here, currently sponsored 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. In the top right corner, you can find my phone number. Give me a call. I’ll help you with all your WordPress needs.

Marcus:           And new to the show [chuckling] —

John:                [chuckling]

Marcus:           — my company, X2 Marketing. We are your full service digital marketing and brand development agency. So whether you are a solo entrepreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, you can power up your marketing with X2. From WordPress to click funnels, landing pages, to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, Infusionsoft management – any of that kind of stuff – we can handle it. Go to x2marketing.com, get in touch with me about your digital marketing needs.

John:                Excellent. And of course this month here, we do have another contest giveaway. We’re giving away a premium plugin ultimate bundle license from WP Book List. This is a plugin that strives to be the ultimate book management tool for your WordPress website, whether you’re an author, publisher, librarian, or bookstore owner – or simply a lover of books. The WP Book List has something to help you manage it.

It includes things such as connecting up to Amazon and selecting the information from there to quickly load it into your website. It has an app that will allow you to scan the ISBN codes off of the back of a book and instantly download that information and more. This is really one fantastic plugin if you’re a book lover or you’re running a book website of some sort. Go check this thing out. And if you want to get yourself a hold of the ultimate bundle, which is valued $83, go sign up for our contest at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, they have a $12 off coupon right now. Just put in ULTIMATE 20, all caps, and save. So – and also, all our contests are currently powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, so thank you very much to them for providing us with the tool to provide these contests.

Hey, and that brings us to our next set of plugins. And the next one I’ve got for you here is called Transient Cleaner. Now, this one her is one I was stumbling across while I was looking for something else and I realized it’s a really great way to help clean up and declutter your website. One of the biggest problems of WordPress is the transients that are created in your database, and the transient data is data that’s created for temporary caching of the database. Their transients are created by your posts, your pages, every time you create a change in your post and save it as a revision. There’s transients created – plugins create transients – all kinds of things are creating transients. And these transients stay in your database and they don’t get automatically deleted and they only get deleted if you revisit that data for some reason, and then it’s automatically deleted but a new transient is created.

So what this plugin does for you is it goes in there and looks for all the transients in your database and cleans them out. Now, you can go in and clean out all the expired transients or you can go in there and set it up so that it cleans out all the transients on a regular basis. It’s a really great plugin. It helps clean up your database, especially if you’ve got a lot of stuff creating lots of transients, and that would depend. Maybe you’ve got a WooCommerce store creating tons of transients for all of the products that people look at, etc.

So anyway, go check this plugin out: Transient Cleaner and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! It’s always important —

John:                Oh, absolutely.

Marcus:           — to keep your database clean. All right – you know, John, one of the things about WooCommerce is it’s basically built for almost all frontend. There’s really no back office type interface – at least, you know, not without a bunch of plugins.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           But this plugin came about and I thought it was pretty cool. I looked at it, I tested it out. It works pretty well. It’s called Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce. Now, this is for you that use WooCommerce and also have local delivery. It allows you to take a product order and assign it to a specific driver and then it also allows you to track the status of the delivery in almost real-time. So the one thing I did not test was the driver’s ability to actually confirm that something was delivered, so that’s the one thing I didn’t look at.

It includes the sale amount, the items in the order, and the address for which the product is being delivered. It is a great plugin for specific uses but only if you do local deliveries, and in that case, it’s a game changer, so check it out. It is called Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That could be a fantastic plugin for someone running say a flower shop with WooCommerce. Or, I’ve run into the occasional local pizza place that has it, so yeah.

Marcus:           Right.

John:                That’s actually kind of —

Marcus:           Pizza might be too big of a volume [chuckling].

John:                Maybe, maybe not.

Marcus:           They have their own system.

John:                Yeah, well some local pizza places don’t.

Marcus:           Yeah. Truth be told, this plugin was developed out of the marijuana dispensary model.

John:                Oh, now there’s another good use for you. I hadn’t thought about that. I should, considering it’s —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — legal in Canada and starting in a month.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                In one month’s time, the entire country of Canada, it’s 100% legal.

Marcus:           Well, that’s a good opportunity for some entrepreneur that knows how to develop WordPress in Canada to clean up the market, so to speak.

John:                Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, well this brings us up to some listener feedback and we do love our listener feedback. And if you’d like to give us feedback, head over to our Contact page, look us up. Hit us up on SpeakPipe, leave us a message. You can even hit us up on our social media platforms: YouTube or Twitter – and our Facebook page.

Okay, and with that, we do have a letter from – or an email message from a listener today, and it goes like this:

Listen to and greatly appreciate your podcasts. I heard on your latest podcast that you could suggest if a plugin exists for some functionality I am looking for my WP site.

I am looking to sync information, most likely from a custom field using ACF formatted to an authenticated Facebook page. The video link shows what I am looking for (with some cool piano jazz music as a bonus!)

https://vimeo.com/220075296

Thanks and keep up the awesome reviews!!!!

-Tom

And well, I did send Tom back an email but for everyone else’s sake, I told Tom I’m not sure which plugin would allow for you the use of advance custom fields. But I did review a plugin that connects up to Facebook for auto-posting in Episode 364 from Web Dorado and I suggested he contact them to see if they can customize the plugin to suit his needs, because there’s quite a few plugins that auto-post to Facebook but I don’t know. Some of them work well and a couple of them I tested back then, they just didn’t work worth crap, and also they’ve got the problem of Facebook is constantly changing their platform, making it hard for people to auto-post. So this is something you’ll be in a constant fight and battle with.

But anyway, good luck with that, Tom. I hope it works out for you.

Marcus:           I agree. That is a complete custom job, and I wouldn’t commit too much to it as you said, because Facebook changes things all the time. Especially after this whole privacy thing that happened —

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           — and the whole bit. They’re very strict —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — and even in groups that I own, I’m having a big trouble – you know, a big difficulty getting things to sync over, so it doesn’t work like it used to. Before, the sky was the limit, but now it’s very tough.

John:                Now it’s tough. Okay, and this show 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’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week and at the live show of every month, we read out their notes, because the rest of the shows are pre-done and ready to go for you. Anyway, this show here hit it in just under the wire. We got a donation from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. and his note says:

This donation is on behalf of Hotel 77 https://www.hotel77.com.au/ accommodation with beach views in Newcastle, Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor.

He seems to be doing more and more sites with Elementor. And as a final bit:

Thank you for continuing to review new and interesting plugins. It would be interesting to hear of your experience and reviews on disabling Gutenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like WP Disable. Thanks. Jez

Well, thank you, Jez and appreciate that. I’ve actually got some stuff coming in this direction on Gutenberg because I’ll be presenting on Gutenberg at one of my upcoming meetups, so I’ve got a lot of research to do to write it up. And disabling it, yeah, that’s my main goal right now. And cleanup and declutter plugins, well, I’ve got one today but I’ve got more that are coming along the way, and I’ll check out the one called WP Disable. I don’t recall ever testing that one.

Marcus:           Yeah, me neither.

John:                Okay, and a big thank you to our donors who came in under $50. You know who you are and thank you very much for those who have the small subscriptions over at Patreon. Subscriptions came through for this month; thank you very much. And if you’d like to support the show, head over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate for information on how you can donate and support the show.

And that brings us up to our final set of plugins for the day. And the last one I’ve got here for you is called Insert Headers and Footers. Now from time to time, it’s going to be necessary for you to insert some code into the header section or the footer section of your templates, and you can do it of course manually by editing your page. But if you update your theme, you could wipe that stuff out – kind of a pain. Some themes make it very easy for you to do this by creating a blank spot for your header and footer. Other themes, they don’t put that in there for some reason.

And so what you end up needing to do is use a plugin such as this, Insert Headers and Footers, which creates the blank spots that you can insert any JavaScript, HTML code, plain text, or anything you want to put into your header or footer area quickly and easily. And I needed this recently on a theme I use regularly which doesn’t have a header and footer access easily to just insert some tracking stuff into the header area. This plugin just made it real easy. It’s a quick one; it’s one of my favorite type of plugins: plug it in, set it up. It doesn’t add any weight to the site and you just add your code and go.

Fantastic little plugin: Insert Headers and Footers and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

The Dragon wasn’t sounding right tonight.

Marcus:           Very nice. [chuckle] Well, keep the button handy. The final plugin that I’ve got is called Private Media, and this is pretty interesting. Have you ever wanted to make any media private? Like images or videos or any files that you upload? PDFs – things like that? Stuff that you don’t want hot linked or Google to index or people to look into your upload file and see? Well, this plugin actually will take care of all of that.

So basically you can lock the access to items in the media library by making it so that someone has to be logged in and when somebody actually has to have access level to see it, not only just being logged in. Pretty cool. It does not break the images that are not set to private; instead, what happens with the private images is it’s replaced by an access denied SVG picture, which is pretty cool.

John:                Cool!

Marcus:           So if you ever wanted to lock down anything within your site – let’s just say you sold photography and they were stock images or things like that. I know you had one of those sites one time.

John:                Oh, yeah.

Marcus:           I worked on a client that had a site like that and that was the thing. If they have the link, it would actually sometimes just give them that.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           So this eliminates all of that. It’s called Private Media and it’s rated a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John:                Very cool. Yeah, I like that. I did have one once and I ran it for a little while and realized it was more work than it was worth.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Okay, well that closes out this episode here. I covered up Disable Toolbar, which I gave a 4 to; Transient Cleaner, which I gave a 4 to; and Insert Headers and Footers, which I gave a 5 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about WP Mega Intro, which gets a 5; Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce, which gets a 4; and Private Media, which gets a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Okay, and a couple of quick reminders and promotions. Go check out the WordPress Meetup group. We have our next meetup on October 9, 2018 and again, I will livestream it and I’m pretty sure it’ll go much better this time, because after the glitches I had in last night’s promotion, then I worked out the problem, so it’ll be fantastic.

And I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to Angel in Hawaii. Thank you for your support and I much appreciate it and I’m glad we solved the problem with the website you’re working on. And thank you to everyone else who supports the show.

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]

 

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