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

Transcript of Episode 397 with plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Shield Security

Transcript of Episode 397 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #397 here.


It’s Episode 397 and I’ve got plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #397

John:    It’s Episode 397 and I’ve got plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today but of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’ve got a few minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, leaving reviews, and those reviews really do help the show and it’d be nice to see some new ones. I haven’t seen any new ones in quite some time from any of those areas.

Also, take a few minutes to subscribe and check out the training videos and screencasts and all of the other extra stuff I do here on the YouTube channel. You can also catch the show live every Thursday at noon PST on the YouTube channel and on Saturday nights at 8:00. I do a show that is not always consistent, but it’s just based around my Saturday evening schedule, whether I can make the show or not, because sometimes I actually have a life and get out on Saturday nights – I know, astounding as that may be.

You can also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And while you’re on the website, subscribe to our newsletter where you get even more information that is not covered on any of the shows I do. My office manager, she does a fantastic job of putting out that newsletter. We’d really like some feedback on how people like it, so please try to let us know.

Right, with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first up as usual, I have a couple of great plugins for you that I have not used yet, but I thought you’d might want to know about and know that they exist. Then keep in mind that the ratings on these plugins are based on my reading of their descriptions, checking out their dev site if they have one – their demo site – and these are plugins that have been submitted to me by developers and I was unable to fit in anyway into a project I’m working on or find the time to get them into a testing site to test them out.

So first up, I have one here. It was sent in by Rameez Iqbal and it is called – it’s a premium plugin and it’s from webcodingplace.com and it’s called Real Estate Manager. The plugin is available over at CodeCanyon and what they have to say about it, this is a – Real Estate Manager is a responsive property listing plugin for full-feature real estate listings and it makes a nice portal too, where you can bring in anything from additional salespeople or agents where they can list their properties. It has integration features like property types, property videos, gallery sliders, an advanced AJAX search, Google Maps, and a carousel listing. It has front-end property submissions for it.

            All in all, it’s looking like a pretty decent property management plugin in case you are building out a website for property management. You can see it’s got a whole lot to it just by looking at the thing on the YouTube video. So all in all, it looks like a pretty decent one. Two of the map modes on it, which I’m finding interesting, and I’m seeing this more and more, is because of the way Google Maps started charging for their API keys this last year, it seems the open street mapping system (which of course is free) is starting to gain ground, and this is kind of a cool feature out there. So this plugin here has the leaflet open street mapping built into it.

So it looks like something that could be used by anyone to help keep their costs down, etc. So go check it out. It is called Real Estate Manager and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

The next plugin I’ve got for you was sent in by Chloe Hogan-Weihmann and it’s from appreciationengine.com, and the plugin is called AE Connect. Now this one here is kind of an interesting one to me, because I have a love/hate relationship with social media. And what this plugin does for you is it helps you go out there and collect information.

If you’ve got a website that your users sign into, this plugin will allow them to sign in with their social media. And if they sign in with their social media accounts, you get to collect certain information from that login: things they liked, things they’ve shared, etc. Basically, the stuff they share on social media. It can help you build a profile of your customers and user base, which is of course what happens every time you go to Amazon and Facebook and everywhere else out there.

So then you can use that information to build out something to more specifically target your market and audience. I don’t know if I’d ever use it because I don’t like doing that. It’s something I consider using because it would be a way to help fine tune my marketing. Like I said, it’s a love/hate relationship.

All in all, it looks like a very interesting plugin. I’m willing to bet the configuration setup of it is quite considerable, because it’s been a few years since I’ve set up one of those login systems for a client where social media could log in, but you have to go to the social media place, get API keys, and you go back and forth. It takes a while to get it all official and working correctly so that it stays working, and then you’ve got to stay on top of it because systems change, so it can be a challenge. All in all though, it looks like an interesting enough plugin. You might want to go check this one out if you’re looking at creating that kind of system and it’s called AE Connect and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Okay, and currently this podcast 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. Come see me for all your WordPress needs, especially WordPress hosting and hosting that won’t slow you down. Come see JohnOverall.com.

Okay, and contests – we still have the contest. I know there’s been a lot of tweets and stuff going out in the last 24 hours saying that yesterday was the last day, and it was supposed to have ended at midnight on the 28th, so I went and fixed that, so there’s still an opportunity for you to go enter our contest and get your entry in there to win a free license. And that free license is from WooCommerce Product Feed and this license is a $269 value. It’s a one-year license that allows you to set up a plugin, a product feed, on your WooCommerce store where you can directly upload to all the other major merchant platforms without the extra hassle. In a few clicks, you could be uploaded to Google Merchant Center, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Amazon, etc. This could be a way to increase your sales so hey, save yourself some money. Get one year’s license; all you do is enter that contest now.

And we do have another contest in the queue, which I’ll be talking about next week, so that’s coming down the line, so we won’t break in the contests this time – woo-hoo! And in a little bit just for Simple Giveaways plugin, they are the ones who provide us with the plugin for our giveaways system. It’s a very nice plugin. They provided us a premium version of their plugin, so I’d like to give a shout-out to them. Go check it out if you’re looking at having any types of giveaways on your site; an excellent, easy-to-use plugin.

And to enter the contest, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and just simply make a couple of clicks and enter your name and email address and you’re in. That’s all it is. And if you’re already on the mailing list, hey, you won’t be put on it again – I swear, honest. We won’t send you two or three, unless you give two or three email addresses. (Now, we know no developer has more than one email address, right?)

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Archived Post Status. This is a plugin that came about from a request from one of my clients. Now, if you’ve had your website for any length of time, you know how many posts you have in there. And if you start doing some cleanup and you want to remove posts, you have basically two choices in the default WordPress install. The first choice is to throw it in the trash can. The second choice is to turn it into a draft to take it out of view of the public.

Well, my client asked me, “Is there another way I could just archive this? I don’t want to throw them in the trash because there’s other admins and they might accidentally empty the trash…” which is a high possibility. They empty your trash, then you’ve lost everything. He was like, “Can we just archive them? Put them into the archive?” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s find out!” So I did some research and came up with this excellent little plugin. It is a little old right now. It’s a couple of years old. It doesn’t really have a whole lot of installs, surprisingly. I wish I would have known about it sooner or I’d have been bragging about it more.

But it’s a very nice plugin because what it does is it adds you a new section in your post editing or page editing block where you’ve got published draft and trash is all you really have. It adds an archive section, so you can then change a post to be archived and it puts them in that column there, which makes it easier to sort your posts and easer to add – to save something in an archive that you can then refer back to later. And then when you’re really, really sure you don’t want it, then throw it in the trash.

So this is a really great plugin. Very simple to use, very straightforward, it does it exactly what it’s supposed to do, and of course what happens when that occurs? This is a 5-Dragon rated plugin. Go check it out: Archive Post Status.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and listener feedback. We do love listener feedback here, and we do have a little bit this week. Well, I’m not sure if it’s listener feedback on the show, but it’s definitely listener feedback from the YouTube channel. And he didn’t leave a name for us, but I’m still gonna play it because it’s a really nice thing to have and we’ll let him take it away.

Hey John, thanks. I appreciated it. I bought a product with a complete website and it had Easy Appointments – you know, the free plugin in there – and their attempt at explaining how to use it was pathetic and I found I was in the dark. But then I found your video and I really appreciate the help.

There you go. Didn’t leave a name but thank you very much. I appreciate you talking the time to send us a SpeakPipe back on that and I’m glad the video for Easy Appointments has helped. It’s actually one of my higher reviewed videos, surprisingly. I need to update it and add some more information to it, but bits by bits. So hey, if you’re on the YouTube channel – anywhere – feedback. I’m always happy to get it and play it out for everyone to hear.

And this show, a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, if it saves you five minutes, 10 minutes – anything at all – please, give some value back to the show. You can do that simply by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, where you can donate to the show, and I would greatly appreciate it. The donations do not make it into my pocket. They help pay for all the little extras that the show does, such as transcripts, server space, etc. – all the little things that are just required to run a website.

And for donations, those who donate to the show $50 and over, they get read out here with their note and $50 and below, they all remain anonymous. And this week, I would like to give a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the podcast. Thank you! That is to me as good as donating to the show. I don’t give shout-outs in that area there but thank you very much for hiring me. If you’d like me to shout out after you hire me, I’ll happily do that. But for the most part, I just assume it’s anonymous.

Also, we have a donation this week from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., who donated $50, and this is their note:

This donation is on behalf of Damiens Newcastle Party Bus Hire https://www.damienspartybus.com/ — which is it looks like you can hire a bus and go party out in Newcastle, Australia, which would be kind of cool and fun! It’s the best bus for wedding parties and more. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor – and a big shout-out to Jez, who is helping me out with the Elementor stuff, and he’s built it with Elementor using the J Theme Jello.

Thanks, Jez! And they’ve created their own little theme. He’s turned me on to this little theme that they use for Elementor to give it it’s very basic settings and I’m just starting to dig into Elementor and switch out of all the other theming systems I was using. Jez has offered to help me work through this thing to create some of the fantastic websites that I’ve seen him do, so thanks a lot, Jez and thank you for donating and supporting the show. It’s really appreciated.

And again, if you want to support the show, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and just fill out the form, go straight to PayPal, and make your donation, and I greatly appreciate it.

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Post State Tags, and this is another one that comes from the same client with when we created the archive – put the archive plugin in for. And one of the things that happens if you get a great big long list of posts that are in various states, either, you know, password-protected, scheduled, pending – you know, all of those things. I can be hard to read on a standard install, because you only get that little thing you’ve got to mouse over, you see it.

Well, what this one does for you is it takes all of those things, including the archive button, and it colorizes them and makes them stand out for you, so you can know in an instant what state that post is in, whether it’s still private, whether it’s pending, whether it’s drafted, whether it’s trashed, published – whatever you’re doing with it.

A very simple plugin. You install it, you go to its configuration settings, you set the colors you want for things, then you save it and poof, it just works. Another one of those great, free plugins that just works, does something simple that could help enhance your life when you’re creating all those posts and managing all those posts in the backend of your WordPress website. So go check this one out. It’s called Post State Tags and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

And finally, we’ve got a little bit of a ClassicPress Option for you this week. And for the ClassicPress-specific – well, they’re not specific because right now we’re still running in parallel paths with ClassicPress, so a lot of WordPress plugins work in ClassicPress. But I’m trying to search for plugins that have either identified as working in both ClassicPress and WordPress or ones that are specifically identifying specifically for ClassicPress. I’ve brought you a couple of those, but most of them are working for both of them.

But this is another one that is working for both of them. It’s Shield Security for WordPress and they should go /ClassicPress just to irritate the WordPress.org system. But the one nice thing I’ve noticed in the WordPress.org Repository is that if you put ClassicPress into the search category, you’ll get a listing of about 75 plugins right now that identify as being as working with ClassicPress, and I imagine that number’s just going to grow as ClassicPress grows, especially since they just released Version 1.0, Release Candidate 2, which means they’re about to have their first official version out.

At any rate, this is a very simple shield system. It uses firewalls and a whole bunch of other little things in it, similar to – from what I can see from testing it, it’s similar to WordFence in the things that it does, except it doesn’t send you as many emails as WordFence does, which is one of their big claims. It’s, “Hey, you don’t need to see all the stuff about, ‘Hey, somebody’s bouncing against your site. They didn’t get in. Do you really want to know?’” If you do, well, you get emails.

But what happens is after a while, you get ad-blinded by those emails; you don’t even see them anymore. You just delete them because you don’t even know if they’re valid, so you don’t read them. So in this case here, they only send you emails when something really needs attention.

So this is one to check out. It looks to be a pretty good security plugin and it has stated that it works for ClassicPress, which is a plus, so you know it actually works in that system. Go check it out. It is called Shield Security for WordPress (or in this case, Shield Security for ClassicPress), and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, and that wraps them up. In this episode here I covered up the Real Estate Manager, which I gave a 3 to; the AE Connect, which I gave a 3 to; the Archived Post Status, which I gave a 5 to; the Post State Tags, which I gave a 5 to; and the Shield Security – you can say that five times real fast – Shield Security, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders. The next WordPress Meetup for Victoria is on April 3rd and I’m going to be taking it back to a bit of a basic level. I’m going to be doing a presentation on SEO 101: Basic WordPress SEO, and this is a little different than what I did back in the fall. This is gonna be a little more focused and on things to do and not do on your WordPress website, so it will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel, so you can check it out here if you can’t make it.

But we’d greatly appreciate it if you would show up for the meetup. And to get to it, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup and check out all the information and be sure to follow and subscribe to the YouTube channel for notification on when we go live with that show.

And be sure to subscribe to the channel so you can get notifications for everything that goes up there for be it an extra show or an extra training video or an impromptu video – you never know. A bug might get up me one day and just say, “I want to do a video.”

And a final note to developers: if you want to support the show and you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in future contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.

And also, stop off at the website and subscribe to our newsletter. And that’s all I’ve got for you now. I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 there we have it! All right, I don’t have a lot of time for questions today. I’ve got to go pick my kid up at school who got out early today. For those of you that listen to the show, this is a little snippet that’ll be on the podcast is there were a couple of great questions from giftedones1981 and you can go check out those by going back to the YouTube channel and watching the beginning of the video.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 396 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #396 here.


It’s Episode 396 and I’ve got plugins for Mobile Apps, Gift Registry, Time Clocks, Custom Fonts, and Site Info. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #396

John:    It’s Episode 396 and I’ve got plugins for Mobile Apps, Gift Registry, Time Clocks, Custom Fonts, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z.com!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today but of course right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to and reviewing the show in those places. It really helps the show out and I greatly appreciate it.

Also, take a little bit of time here. Don’t forget, if you’re on the YouTube channel, subscribe to our YouTube channel, hit the bell – notification bell – so you get notification of when we’re going live and the other events that have occurred or will be occurring or when I upload new training videos.

You can also watch the live show every Thursday at noon here on YouTube and I have a show on Saturday nights at 8:00. I make it most Saturday nights and it’s a roundup of all the WordPress news I have picked up during that week. Also a good time for Q&A if you’re so inclined, so check it out. Just follow the channel so you get notifications.

You can also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join me on the Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook and also subscribe to the newsletter. That would be greatly appreciated. You can get the newsletter which has even more information that is not covered in the shows – either of the shows that occur.

With all that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

Okay, and I have the usual selection of great plugins for you today and right off the top, I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use and these are plugins I thought you might like to know about. They’re ones that are sent in to me by developers. I don’t have a chance to get them into a dev site or I don’t have a project they fit into at the time. But I’ve collected so many of these over the last while that I really need to get these shared out to people so you know they exist, so that’s what these ones are for.

So first off, what I’ve got here is a plugin that was sent in by Robin Kumar and it’s called WappPress, and this is a premium plugin. There’s actually two flavors of this plugin. One flavor, what it does for you, is it helps you build an Android app for your website, and that’s the working demo of their site. It helps you build and Android app of your website and helps you build an IOS app for your website with some one-click installations, some quick customizations, and some tweaks to it.

They do have a free version over at WordPress.org Repository that you can download and check out for free to see if it’s even something that’ll be worthwhile for you. But if you’ve been looking for a way to make a quick app out of your website for people to use on their phones, this might just be the ticket for you. So go check this out and see if it’s something of value.

I have yet to check it out myself, but it does look like it could be fairly worthwhile, save you a heck of a lot of time and development costs of building an app if you’re just a simple website and you just want some simple ways to get it done. Go check this one out. It’s called WappPress Mobile App Builder for WordPress and I give it a 3-Dragon rating based on everything that I can see with it.

The next plugin I’ve got for you here was sent in by Moritz Bappert – hey, I think I got it right that time – Moritz Bappert – and this is a plugin for WordPress Gift Registry. It’s a simple wish list for weddings, birthdays, etc. and this is a plugin you can set up on your site. You can create your wish list out there. We all know that when it comes to our birthday or holidays and friends/family/whoever goes, “Hey, what do you want for your birthday?” and you go, “You know, there’s something I was wanting but I done forgot what it is,” this might be what you want.

Maybe you can create a private page on your website, create your list, and then when they ask you, you can give people the link to your private page and say, “Hey, go check out this list and just buy whatever is on that list is what I’m looking for for my birthday.” So you never know; it could save you some time.

Or if you’re setting up for a wedding and you don’t want to register somewhere, you just want to create your own registry on a wedding, use this plugin for it. Lots of great uses for this plugin, so go check it out. It’s called WP Gift Registry and it’s a simple wish list for weddings, birthdays, etc. A really great, little plugin. It looks to be quite a nice tool and I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out.

And currently this website is sponsored by…

Reminders for the show…

Whoops, wrong button.

…all the show notes can be found at —

Wrooong buttons!

…wppluginsatoz.com…

[Outro music]

Wrong buttons!

[cacophony of wrong buttons]

[laughing] That was good timing. Massive fail there. Okay, let’s try that one more time. This show is sponsored 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. Come see me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’re tired of the same old hosting that’s slowing you down. Come see JohnOverall.com for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down.

Okay, and contests. We do have a contest currently running and all our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin who kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin for running our contests. Go check out the plugin – really quite great.

We are currently running a giveaway for a one-year pro license for WooCommerce Product Feed Manager, a way to increase your WooCommerce store sales potentially by generating product feeds and uploading your products to the major merchant shops such as Google, Merchant Center, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Amazon, etc. So this might be something you want to check out and this free license is a $269 value, so it’s quite valuable, so make sure you go sign up for the contests. It runs through to the end of February. All you’ve got to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and go register for it. Just your name and email is all we need, so go check this plugin out. We also reviewed it in Episode 388.

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you is one that I started to use for a project I’m working on where we needed to display multiple timeclocks for multiple time zones where the organization has its offices in multiple time zones, and this is an intranet for all of their employees and they would like to know what times are in different zones nice and easy. This one looked like a really great feature to have. You can create multiple clocks really easy and quickly using a widget and I thought, “Okay, maybe they’ve got a shortcode and I can put it on a page because I need to put this on a page,” but no. You can go to their website and you can create JavaScript for it and insert all of it separately that way – a bit more work.

But I wasn’t completely put off at that point but what I was put off at was when I loaded it up to test it and all of a sudden, I was presented with, “Please turn on Flash,” and I went, “Oh, man. All the clocks are produced in Flash? Really? Not HTML 5?” We all know where Flash is eventually going; it’s not quite got there yet, but it’s on its way. You hardly ever see it anymore.

So being that these are Flash, I can’t thoroughly recommend it. It’s still a good tool and a good way to display clocks and times, and they have multiple ways to display the clocks. It just looks fantastic, but this one big Flash flaw is a big issue for me, so I’ll be hunting for another one, so we’ll probably see a few more plugins like this come down the line because I’ve noticed there’s a few of them out there.

At any rate, go check this out if it sounds interesting to you. It’s Local Time Clock and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Listener feedback – I still love listener feedback. Please, all you’ve got to do is go to the website, the lower right-hand corner, click on the SpeakPipe, leave me some feedback or hit the Contact button, send me an email question – multiple ways to get a hold of me and get yourself into the show. And I do try to get everything that comes in during the week into the show. Occasionally I get busy and it gets buried in my inbox, so it takes a week to get to it. But I do get to everything eventually, so make sure you get a hold of me.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you’re getting any value out of it (and I mean any value). If it saves you five minutes, what’s that five minutes worth to you for saving? Please kick me that funds there. It really helps the show out. If it saves you hours, think about that time. Plus, you know, create the contents, you know, on a week-after-week basis and I get lots of feedback that says the content is good. I occasionally get feedback saying the content is not so good. Whatever it is, if you’re getting any value out of the show, please get some value back to it.

You can donate to the show simply by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. Any amounts over $50, your note is read here in the show each week and linked back to wherever you want it linked back to. All amounts below that remain anonymous and I really greatly appreciate them. And I’d like to say thank you very much to the small, weekly donations that come in and the Patreon donors that are out there. Thank you for your support of the show. Your donations go to help pay for the things such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. I really appreciate all of that stuff, so thank you very much.

And the final plugin I’ve got for you here today – the last one is a freemium plugin. This one here is called Use Any Font [Freemium]. Now, this is a great tool. From time to time, you may have the need to use a unique font on your website or a website you’re working on a client. I’ve had it a couple of times when clients give me a very specific font they want to use. And we’ve gone with – there’s lots of ways to work around and get this. But this tool here is a whole lot easier. Now this tool, the freemium version only allows you to upload one font, and what you have to do with this is you install the plugin, then you go to their website. You create an API key and you can buy an API key from as little as $10 or as much as $50, depending on how many websites you want to use it on or how many fonts you want to be able to upload, etc.

The best one if you’re a developer, spend the $50; it’s a lifetime license for as many fonts as you want on as many websites as you want. But what it does is with the API key, you upload a font from your website. It gets sent to their conversion servers. Their server converts the font into a web-usable font for you, sends it back to your website, and it’s stored now on your website – not stored on their servers. So you get the font local. It’s delivered locally from your website, so it’s immediately served to your clients. No slowdown, no lag – nothing like using the Adobe font system unfortunately where there’s a lag or even the Google font system where occasionally you see the lag.

This can be just direct, fast, and simple. So if you’re using Open Source fonts or free fonts or fonts you’ve actually paid the license fee to use on your websites, this is a great tool for you to get those embedded in your websites. Now I would’ve given this thing a 5-Dragon rating, but I only used the free version and the rating on it is unfortunately at 4 Dragons, but otherwise this is really a great tool that you’ll want to check out if you’ve been doing some customized fonts and you’ve been going about it in the old-fashioned ways of converting them yourself and uploading them, or, you know, getting them from other services and sources.

So go check tool out, Use Any Font [Freemium], and again, a 4-Dragon rating.

And finally, the ClassicPress Options for this week, and this ClassicPress Option for this week here – and of course, these are not just ClassicPress-specific plugins at the moment. Well, sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. Today’s plugin is not just ClassicPress-specific, but they’ve done something kind of cool that I just recently discovered about developers.

You can search the queue term “ClassicPress” at the wordpress.org repository and there seems to be dozens and dozens of plugins there that are labeled as working for ClassicPress from their developers, because the developers had to label them. What this one here does – and I think a few more are starting to do – they’re putting in code to determine whether you’re loading this plugin into ClassicPress or loading it into WordPress – kind of a cool thing, I think.

This one here, when you load it up into your ClassicPress site, all the information that is pertinent to ClassicPress. If you load it up into WordPress, it’s all pertinent to WordPress. Now what this one is, this is a nice, simple tool. This is one to find out what shape your website service is in, what the site data information is. You know, what server you’re on, what themes are installed, what plugins you have, what type of database it’s using, how much memory, etc. – all of the stuff that’s used for diagnosing to help figure things out when you’re bringing information in. You need this kind of information.

It’s a really great tool, works very well in ClassicPress. In my ClassicPress install it works quite well, so one you’ll want to go check out. It is the ClassicPress – this is called Site Info for ClassicPress and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Okay, and that wraps it up! I covered up in this episode here the WordPress Mobile App Builder, which I gave a 3 to; the WP Gift Registry, which I gave a 3 to; the Local Time Clock, which I gave a 3 to; and the Use Any Font [Freemium], which I gave a 4 to; and the Site Info for ClassicPress, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders… if you didn’t make the WordPress Meetup last night, I’m told it was quite good and informative. I think I did a great job in my presentation. I haven’t looked at the YouTube video, but there is a YouTube video up for it. You can go watch that. It seemed to stream quite nicely. I don’t know if it caught me onscreen very well, but I think it caught the presentation screen and Dean did a great presentation on the different server types for email servers and the best ones to use, so go check that information out.

We do have another meetup coming in March – no, April. Yeah, we’re skipping most of March and we’re going to April 3rd I believe is when the next meetup is, and anyone in the Victoria area, come down and see it. If not, you can be sure to catch it live on the YouTube stream, so go check it out. All further information is at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.

And be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for wppluginsatoz.com. And a final note to developers, if you want to support the show and get some free advertising for yourself, donate a premium license to the show and we will showcase that in a contest up and coming and talk about your plugin week over week until the contest is completed. Some great, free advertising for you. Always looking for those great giveaways.

Okay, and that pretty much wraps it up, so we’ll let my girl take us out of here properly this time.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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]

It's Episode 395 and I've got plugins for Two Factor Authentication, Push Notifications, Polls, Surveys & Quizzes, WordPress Game List, and ClassicPress. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Transcript of Episode 395 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #395 here.


It’s Episode 395 and I’ve got plugins for Two Factor Authentication, Push Notifications, Polls, Surveys & Quizzes, WordPress Game List, and ClassicPress. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #395

John:    It’s Episode 395 and I’ve got plugins for Two Factor Authentication, Push Notifications, Polls, Survey Form & Quiz Maker, Videogames, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Great White North in snowy Victoria, British Columbia at the Brewery Overlook, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today, but of course right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher – oh, audio is cutting in and out. Still cutting in and out? A little better now – good enough.

Okay, I think I’ve got a problem with my noise gate for the YouTube. I’ve been trying to tweak it. The audio for the show usually comes through well. So at any rate, continue that up. If you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store where you can subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and extra shows.

And don’t forget the show is always live here every Thursday on YouTube and 8:00 on Saturday nights. That show there sometimes is hit-and-miss though. It depends on whether I actually have something to do on Saturday nights. Eight o’clock on Saturday night and that’s a roundup of all the WordPress events of the world and a time for Q&A with me.

You can also follow the show over at @wppluginsatoz on Twitter and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And if you’ve got a minute and you’re not subscribed to the newsletter, take a couple of moments and go to our website at wppluginsatoz.com and enter your name and email address and subscribe to the newsletter where you get even more information that is not covered in any of the shows.

With all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, to start off here I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but they were sent in to me by developers and I’ve been unable to fit them into a project or to get them into a test site to give them a test out. But these are plugins that I feel people should know a little bit about. They should know they exist.

So the first one up I have for you is called UNLOQ Two Factor Authentication, and this plugin here is one to add two-factor authentication to your WordPress website. And what they have to say about it is that it helps secure your WordPress account from credential-related risks such as phishing, password reuse or key login attacks.

Some of the features in it, it’s got, you know, a quick setup, multiple login options, it can be used with UNLOQ-only or with UNLOQ as a second factor and a password only. You can set it up in multiple ways. It does replace the WP Login and Registration pages and handles both registration and login, so it runs through its own little system here, help you secure up your website.

It looks like a pretty useful tool if you’re looking to add higher security to your logins for WordPress, something you might want to go check out. It’s called UNLOQ Two Factor Authentication and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

The next one up here I have for you, this one was sent in by Tudor Munteanu and it’s called Push Monkey Pro, and this is another push plugin to allow for push notifications from your WordPress website. I have one up on my website; I don’t use this one in particular, but I have another one – I can’t remember the – recall the name of the push notification plugin I’ve got. But the push notifications are pretty ambiguous out there.

They’re used a lot nowadays. You’ll notice it on a lot of websites. You’ll hit the website and they’ll ask you, “Can we send you notifications?” And while it might be getting overused and people blinded by them and constantly hitting no, you’ve still got a few people that want to know enough about your content where they’ll say yes. And then what happens once they do that, every time you update your website, a notification is pushed to them which shows up on their computer screen as a little popup in their browser or depending on their configuration somewhere on their computer to let them know that new content is available on your website and they just click that and quickly they’re popped right to your website.

So it is useful, and it does help you gain and retain your audience, and this one here looks to be a pretty decent one. As they say, it helps with increased engagement, it’s native, it’s – this one here allows you for filtering to decide what type of content it sent out for notifications. You can define segments of interest for your subscribers, it’s automatic, you get some statistics. You know – and this one here also has another feature. If you’ve got a WooCommerce store, if they abandon their shopping cart, it’ll send out a push notification for the abandonment of a WooCommerce shopping cart, which in and of itself could help you increase your sales in that aspect if they have accepted the notifications – maybe a nice reminder for them.

So all in all, a pretty nice little plugin it looks to be. It’s called Push Monkey Pro and I give it a 3-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

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.

And yes, the show is currently sponsored by JohnOverall.com. If you would like to be a sponsor in here, please contact me. I’ll happily replace my ad with one of yours.

All right, and contests – I do have contests right now. We have a contest and our contests are powered by Simple Giveaways plugin, who have kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contests on. This has been one of the smoothest giveaway plugins I’ve ever tested and all the ones I did test previous to this one, and they’ve been improving it nicely over the last year, adding new features to it and making it more usable. So if you want to run contests on your website, this is a great way to do it and it even does the automatic selection at the end. Just click a couple of buttons and it’ll even automatically send out all the emails necessary to notify you are winners.

Okay, currently we are running a giveaway. It is a one-year pro license for the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. It’s a way to increase your WooCommerce store sales by potentially easily generating product feeds and uploading your products to major merchant shops such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. This is a way to push your WooCommerce store out to those other feeds so that you’ll get a wider audience for your store, so check out this plugin.

It’s a great plugin. This one-year license is a $269 value, so come enter the contest if you run a WooCommerce or have a client that runs one and wants to do this, hey get a free license. All you gotta do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contest to enter the contest and get your name and email. That’s all it takes. And this plugin was also reviewed back in Episode 388, so go check it out. That is our contest that is running through ‘til the end of February.

All right, the next plugin I’ve got up for you here is called Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker. This plugin here is one that will allow you to create polls, surveys, and additional forms on your website. Now this is a third-party plugin service. Initially, I was really excited about it because of the way it was reading, it was something that was native, but it’s not truly native. You’ve got to go sign up for their service and their service ranges from free, which gives you limited access to a lot of stuff to $169 a month.

If you’re going to use this plugin, it allows you to create unlimited polls, surveys, and quizzes and to get the most out of it, you’d need their $65/month account, which would be great if you’re doing a lot of marketing and content creation. One of the things that attracts people out there now is polls and surveys, and everyone’s seen those polls or those surveys. You know, what kind of house are you or what kind of dog are you, or how do you match up to X movies? People love those quizzes. People love those quizzes and they attract a lot of attention, so you can get people to fill out their name, email information. They’ll give you all kinds of contact info. I know that just from watching my friends from when I occasionally hit my Facebook feed, the number of people that have taken these things and they pop up in my feed and I look it and say, “Another one?” They collect a lot of information, but this would be a great tool if you’re doing a lot of marketing and you need to market and collect information.

But you’ve got to make sure you can justify that monthly cost to make it useful, because before you can get to getting all the access and everything, you’ve gotta start paying for it. All in all, it looks to be a great plugin. Something that I didn’t thoroughly test because I realized I had to set up an account and go through and it’s like all right, well, I’m done here. But I still like the idea and it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen so far. Go check it out. It’s Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, and if you’re a regular listener of this show or you’re an occasional listener to the show or you’re just looking for some information or you’ve got questions for me, please take a couple of moments. Drop back over at JohnOverall.com or to wppluginsatoz.com and contact me with your questions and feedback about the show. I love the feedback, good, bad, or indifferent. Leave me reviews over at iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play – anywhere on there. We are also available at Facebook and also available on Twitter, so contact me at any of those places there. I’ll get your questions here on the show as they come in.

This show, also value-for-value. So if you’re getting any value out of it – any value – hey, feel free to donate back to the show what value you think it is worth. You can donate by of course cash – always works well. Just simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, fill out the form, go to PayPal, donate whatever you feel is you’d like. Anything $50 and over, leave me a note. It’ll get printed and read out here on the show and into the show notes.

So at this time, I would like to thank all of those who have the small donations. I have a few people out there that have small donations that come in on a regular monthly basis. Those donations really help out a bit. They help cover the cost that the show actually incurs such as transcripts, etc., so none of the money ever makes it into my pocket. But every little bit helps, and it would be great if you’re getting any value out of this show to give some value back.

And the final plugin for you here today – the last one I’ve got is WordPress Game List. Now, this plugin here has come about, and I’ve just started to work with it in particular. It’s from my brother who runs a YouTube video channel where he does gaming. He plays alpha and beta games and sometimes release games out, and this is a way that if you’re a gamer, you can start to list up all of the games that you have played with or your favorites, or any number of things there, and this will list up the games and allow you to connect up your affiliate links to go out, so you can make a few bucks on referring it.

The nice thing about it is what you do is you enter the title of the game and then the game list plugin goes out and scours the internet for all the possible information about the title, including cover images, Amazon reviews, game summaries, genres, links to Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, eBay. It tells what platforms the game is on, who publishes it, when it was released, alternative names for the game, similar titles. And if you get some of the extensions that allow you to add your affiliate IDs, you can also connect it to a WooCommerce store, add videos to demonstrate the game, and more.

This is one that I’m just starting to work up on his website at jadowan.com, and it looks to be a really great tool for a gamer-focused website publisher, a WordPress publisher, or YouTube person who wants to connect their YouTube channel to a website, so this is something you might want to go check out. Go check it out. It is called WordPress Game List and at the moment this plugin gets a 4-Dragon rating due to the number of freemium addons that you have to purchase for it, so of course that’s what happens with a freemium plugin; it gets knocked down a peg unless I’m playing with the full-blown paid version of everything. At any rate, go check it out: WordPress Game List, a really great plugin for gamers out there.

And the ClassicPress Options this week, I forgot to get the plugin in for it, but I’ve been reading a bit about ClassicPress and there is a few more people out there moving off to ClassicPress. I ran into a client of mine that we thought we could move it forward with their website to Gutenberg, but it turns out we’re not going to be able to, so this is another site that is going to disappear from the WordPress market just due to the Gutenberg integration. We can’t go forward with the way their site is designed and so we’re going to have to move forward into the ClassicPress era, which is going to be basically the business end of publishing.

And since they’re starting with WordPress core and continuing along that line, it’s probably going to be quite interchangeable for some time to come. That’s all I’ve really got on ClassicPress this week, so… I can see more and more of that coming as it integrates into my life and as I – you have to separate the clients out along those two different paths.

All right, well that closes out this episode and I covered up the UNLOQ Two-Factor Authentication, which I gave a 3 to; the Push Monkey Pro Web Push Notifications, which I gave a 3 to; the WooCommerce Abandoned Cart, which I gave a 3 to; the Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker, which I gave a 3 to, and the WordPress Game List, which I gave a 4 to. That covers that up for today.

And final reminders… don’t forget the next WordPress Meetup here in Victoria is next week on February 20, and it will be broadcast live on YouTube and I’m relatively certain I’m going to get it all correct this time with all of the setup of it. I’ve been planning for it to make sure the stream comes out a whole lot smoother than it has been for this and it should be a great presentation. It’s going to be a WordPress disaster recovery and planning presentation by me and then a presentation from Dean B. and he’s giving a presentation on email systems and how to use them, covering up all the different email systems that are out there, including Office, Exchange, iMap, and POP, so this’ll be a very interesting presentation on those two there.

Okay, and that’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you today. A final note would be out to developers. If you would like to support the show and donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. And be sure to check out and subscribe to the show on YouTube at the YouTube channel for WP Plugins where you can also find training videos, screencasts, and of course the live shows every week.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so I’ll set my girl take us out of here.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 394 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #394 here.


John:    It’s Episode 394 and I’ve got plugins for managing comments, Zazzle listings, rolling back updates, listing plugins, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #394

John:    It’s Episode 394 and I’ve got plugins for managing comments, Zazzle listings, rolling back updates, listing plugins, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, you can find all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, or in the iTunes Store, leaving a review for the show and subscribing to it there. You can also subscribe and check out training videos, screencasts, and more here on our YouTube channel where I’m putting up stuff semi-regularly now.

Also, take a couple of minutes if you haven’t already done it and subscribe to the channel. Hit the notification bell so you know when things come out. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginatoz and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook or go to the website and subscribe to the newsletter.

And of course, catch the show live every Thursday at noon here and Saturdays at 8:00 where I do another live show which is just a weekly roundup of WordPress news on 8:00 on Saturday evenings. That’s Pacific Time.

With all that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, to start off I do have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but, you know, I felt it was really important you guys might want to know about them and know they exist. These are plugins that have been sent to me over time by various developers and I’ve been unable to use them in any of my projects or make the time to go and give them a thorough testing in my sandbox website. But they looked interesting and I thought you’d like to know about them. They may be something of value to them.

First off one I have here was sent in by Mathias Blandin and it is a third-party freemium service and it’s called GraphComment and this is a plugin here that replaces your commenting system on your WordPress website – well, sort of actually replaces it. What it does is it allows you to have a Discus type of commenting system and if you want to gain control of your comments and you’re using Discus or any other third-party service (where your comments are not your own, but they’re stored on their servers), you might consider switching to this service here. This allows you to organize all your comments in multiple ways, it allows nice columns, but the best part is all the data is kept on your website – it’s kept in your WordPress database. So, if you ever decide to leave this system, you don’t lose all your comments, such as using a service like Discus.

So, everything is right there, located for you, easy to use. They’ve got their own graph comment administration where you can import and export comments. You can even – if you’ve got a previous comment on your WordPress website and you want to take them out to this system here, you can export them out to that. But this keeps all of your data under control and something you can use. It does look like it’s relatively useful, especially if you get a lot of commenting systems or you’re looking for a way to retrieve all of your stuff from social networks and get it back onto your website where it belongs. I’ve always been a big proponent of control your own data; don’t let somebody else control your data for you, and I do that to the best of my ability throughout all of my websites.

So, go check it out. It’s called GraphComment and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

So, the next one up I’ve got here, it was sent in by Mark HightonRdiley and it’s a freemium plugin and this one here is called NiftyGridZPro. And what this one’s for is if you use Zazzle or you know somebody who is a refer for Zazzle, and affiliate, and you want to sell affiliate programs through Zazzle, this might be of interest to you.

The plugin is kind of – it gives me a couple of questions with it. I mean, it does a great job from what they display and show of allowing you to create Zazzle grids and display them on your site. You can use it in multiple ways. One of the strange things with it this – and this is kind an unusual one that I’ve seen with plugins, if you use the free version, it automatically inserts their referral ID for Zazzle, so you would be setting this plugin up, so they can make money, which is a bit beyond me.

If you pay for the premium license which is, you know, $49 to $99, depending on how long you want the license for, then you can insert your own Zazzle ID. This is kind of a unique way I’ve seen for a plugin to be able to earn income. Oddball one – I can’t highly recommend it. It seems interesting. I do like the fact that they’re up front about telling you that their ID is gonna be in there. They’re not trying to sneak it by you in any way. It’s plain, bold, right in your face, and they tell you, so I give them kudos for that. So, for that I give them a nice middle-of-the-road 3 Dragon rating. It looks like it could be useful if you happen to use Zazzle in any way, shape, or form. So, go check that one out.

            Okay, currently this show, brought to you by…

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

Absolutely, and think about me if you’re really tired of your current web hosting provider and you’d like high-quality hosting that doesn’t slow you down in any way. Check out JohnOverall.com – and it’s very limited. You have to apply to get hosting; you can’t just sign up and get it. I’m very selective about the clients I take on my servers.

Okay, and we are currently running a contest and our contests are powered by Simple Giveaways, who kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin to run all of our contests. A very excellent plugin if you’re planning to run any contests or giveaways on your website, check out this plugin. It’s got all the features you need and in particular the most essential feature being the auto selection of randomization.

Currently, the contests we are a way a one-year pro license for WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. This is an excellent plugin that we reviewed back in Episode 388 of the show. It’s great for if you’re running a WooCommerce store and you want to push out all of your stuff to the different feeds such as Amazon and eBay and other places, this is a product that will help you push your products out to those different places. So, go check it out, go enter the contest. Just simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter to be the winner.

Okay, the next up plugin I’ve got for you here is one that is very, very useful and helpful. It’s called WP Rollback. Now, everyone knows that sooner or later if you’ve had a WordPress website for any length of time, you know that sooner or later you’re going to do an update and stuff’s gonna break. It’s just gonna go wonky on you, white screen – just break something – and it’s usually due to an error in the plugin update. They happen. It’s not the end of the world; you’ve just got to undo it.

Well, most of the time and what you almost always had to do was you had to FTP in, delete the files, reupload the new files. It takes a little bit of time, not the end of the world. Well, what this plugin can do is help save that time for you. It is a rollback plugin that allows you to rollback to any previous version of a WordPress Repository plugin or a theme. It doesn’t work if you’re using premium plugins – it doesn’t help those in the least. But any other plugin, it’s a great little tool to have in your arsenal for helping to maintain and keep your website up-to-date if something goes wrong. Just click a button and it rolls right back to the previous plugin version that you had in there or you can select the versions that are available. You find a plugin, you select the version you want, click that, roll it back, and you’re done.

It can save you a fair chunk of time and make it real easy for you to do something right with inside your WordPress dashboard, and it’s something I could’ve used a few times a couple of years back. Now, I keep it in there just in case and it’s helped me out a couple of times, so go check this out. A fantastic little plugin. I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

WP Rollback.

Listener feedback! I am just begging for listener feedback. Sooner or later, I’ll get some, so please give me some listener feedback. I love it – good, bad, the ugly – give me anything. Let me know how things are going. I’d really appreciate some feedback on how the sound is these days for all the regular listeners out there. I’d like to know if the sound has improved to a nice quality finally. I think it is, but I haven’t heard from anybody, so let me know. I would really appreciate it. Let me know on the show, send me a tweet, here on the Facebook page – any place. I’ve been working hard at getting the sound. I do have another microphone coming that’ll help me get me a little bit clearer of a voice, so that should be ready by next week.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, I’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show over the past weeks. All donations $50 and over, they get their note read out here on the show. For all those under, I like to just thank you very much and they remain anonymous. This week here, I would like to just thank out the Patreon donors. Yes, I’ve been paid on that and I really appreciate it. Those small donations really help the show out. If you would like to help the show out, you can go to Patreon or simply go wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. Select any amount you want and donate via PayPal. That would be greatly appreciated.

None of the donations actually ever make it into my pocket. They help pay the costs that the show incurs, such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. But I really appreciate all support in the show.

Glad the sound is reliable for you, [unclear – 12:36]. Really appreciate it. I’m also after the ones that pick it up through the podcast, because it’s a different recording that goes out through the podcast feed on iTunes. So — and you’re listening live, so with the live one, Google helps clean that one up for me quite nicely, even when I’ve messed it up in the past, they’ve cleaned it up amazingly. But I’ve been working on my one that goes out to the podcast feed.

Okay, final plugin I’ve got here for you before we get to the ClassicPress plugin. The next one up I’ve got is the Export Plugin Details. This is a nice, little, simple plugin and this one here has a use if you are a builder of websites – multiple types of websites. Like I have a set of about seven or eight plugins that goes into every website I build. They’re just basic plugins that do certain functionality that is needed on every website in my opinion, and this set of plugins is a list I have. It’s mostly in my head.

But if you’re getting ready to hire somebody or bring on another person or hire a freelancer to do some work for you in setting up a website, you want to make sure that they install exactly what you need. So, you can take from one of your base sites that you’ve built. You can then use this plugin to export out all the plugin details and that would be the plugin name, its description, the author, whether it’s active or inactive, it’s current version, updates available, new versions, etc. – export all the details out into a nice CSV listing that you can then manage. Then you can take that list and you can pass it on to someone who’s going to build a website.

Now, another way to do this would be if you’ve built up a client’s website and you’ve got 10, 15, 20 plugins or whatever you’ve used – I know I’ve used as many as 40 plugins or 50 plugins for a website – and you want to make sure that those plugins are maintained and you have a list of them, you could export this list out for something for you to monitor for your clients, so there’s lots of ways you could use this tool. So, go check this one out. It’s Export Plugin Details, a very excellent little plugin, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, and the final thing I’ve got for you today is ClassicPress Options, and yes, ClassicPress is going to become a thing. I am relatively certain that the ClassicPress community is continuing to grow and one of the things that points to that is that plugins are starting to appear specifically for ClassicPress. And as this continues to grow, that will shed a lot of light on their community.

This week here I’ve got another ClassicPress-specific plugin and it is called Carbon Copy. Now, this would be a similar plugin in from the WordPress community like Duplicate Posts, which is a plugin I use a lot. But this one here, it’s for simply duplicating posts, pages, and custom post types with a single click. It includes taxonomies, metadata, etc. and this is a nice thing to do. I know I use it a lot, especially when I do things such as using a template theme and I import test data to help me get the layouts they want. I will duplicate their page that they’ve created so that I can then modify the front page to my liking.

But if there’s something on that other page that I like that I might have deleted, I can go back and look at it and say, I like that. How did they do that? And then recopy that information. So that’s one of the great things that this tool does for you. It also allows you to duplicate and archive content or change content up and save the old versions of it in another format besides the revisions. And one of the things with revisions I do with many of my sites is I limit the revisions so that I don’t have this massive, over-bloated database. But having revisions is a good thing or having a duplicate page is useful.

At any rate, this is great for you ClassicPress users who might be starting to pick up the show, so come check it out. This plugin here looks great. I give it a 4-Dragon rating and it’s called Carbon Copy for ClassicPress.

That pretty much wraps everything up for this show here where I covered up the following plugins: GraphComment, which I gave a 4 to; the NiftyGridZPro, which I gave a 3 to; the WP Rollback, which I gave a 5 to; and the Export Plugin Details, which I gave a 4 to; and finally, Carbon Copy, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders…don’t forget there is a meetup here in Victoria on February 20th and the meetup location you can find over on our Meetup page. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup and get all the information. I’ll be presenting about – brain – brain. I’ll be presenting about Disaster Recovery and Planning for WordPress. In other words, what do you do when things go wrong, when it hits the fan, and you’ve got to recover. Or better yet, how do you prepare so you can avoid disaster or be ready to recover from it with very little stress? The other thing that’ll be covered is we have Dean B. who will be presenting Email Systems and How to Use Them. He’s going to cover Exchange, Office, iMap, and POP systems, and how you use all them different email systems, so it should be interesting presentations.

If you can’t make the meetup, check it out here on YouTube. It will be live on our YouTube channel, so make sure you come check that out on the 20th of February.

And of course, a final reminder: be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel for more information and training videos that do go up. And a final note to developers: if you want to support the show, you’d like to donate a premium plugin, please just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and donate your plugin and we’ll create a contest around. You can get a bunch of free advertising, we get a bunch of things that help make our listeners happy by getting free, premium licenses.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you today, so I’ll let my girl take us out of here. 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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 393 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #393 here.


It’s Episode 393 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Tools, Automotive Listings, Displaying Pages in Widgets, Duplicating Menus and Classic Press Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #393

John:    It’s Episode 393 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Tools, Automotive Listings, Displaying Pages in Widgets, Duplicating Menus and Classic Press Options. 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And we have usual great show for you today. But right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving me reviews. They really help the show out and I really appreciate it when they arrive – and they do get read out on the show.

Also, subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and extra stuff here on the YouTube channel and remember to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell if you haven’t already done it. That way, you get notifications of when we’re going live and when the other events are happening, when new training videos, etc. are uploaded.

You can also watch the show live every Thursday noon – here – right now. I also have a live show every Saturday night at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, which is the roundup of all that happened in the WordPress world for the previous week, and it’s also a time for questions and answer – you know, ask me anything pretty much.

You can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And if you’d like, please subscribe to the newsletter where even more information is sent out – tips, tidbits, and other news articles that aren’t covered in either of the shows. Just simply go to the website, enter your name and email address, and you will be subscribed to the show.

With that all being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

And I have some great plugins for you today and to start off I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use, but I thought you might want to know that they exist. These are plugins that have been sent in to me by developers for review. That can be done off of the WP Plugins A to Z webpage. I know they exist; I can’t always fit them into any project I’m working on and I don’t always have time to get them into a testing site to see how they test, but I thought you might want to know that these plugins exist and are out there. They might be something you can use.

Now the ratings are based off of their descriptions and their demo site if it’s available. So first off, the one I’ve got for you here was sent in to us by Adam Bullas and it is called Opace Essential SEO Toolkit. This plugin here is an essential SEO toolkit and what it does for you, what they have to say about it, the SEO Toolkit is a very powerful suite of tools used by Opace every day and will be particularly beneficial in roles such as SEO, web development, and digital marketing, as well as many others.

As with any other toolkit, there is a range of tools. Each of them helps you get to a different part of the job done. The tools opened in their current URL, the settings can be modified from the Essential SEO Toolkit plugin installation screen. When you have configured the SEO Toolkit such as needed, you can then go to one of your posts or pages and use the plugin in the right-hand admin panel of the post and you will see the SEO Toolkit meta box. Click on any of your categories to drop down the list of the sources.

The toolkit includes things such as the following: audit tools, backlink tools, social shares, counters. All in all, not looking like too bad of a plugin – something you may want to go check out. It doesn’t look like something that’ll replace Yoast, although I’m really hoping something will come down the pipe that does that eventually. Other than that, not a bad looking plugin all in all. I give this a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: the Opace Essential SEO Toolkit.

The next one I’ve got for you is called CarDojo Lite. This is a freemium plugin also. They’ve got a free version over at WP Plugins and what this plugin is for is if you are a car dealer, automotive marketplace, selling RVs, motorhomes – well, pretty much anything that has a collection of stuff that you want to sell, this might work for you in that aspect. It’s designed for vehicles and car details and fields and filters in it. CarDojo is a powerful tool that manages the most important aspects of a vehicle sales website.

It’s used for more than just car dealers; it’s RVs, boats, campers, motorcycles, trailers, semi-trucks – even planes. If you’re building a dealer website, this might be a nice little tool for you to add in there. It’s kind of like a classified ads section for car dealers. All in all, it’s looking like a pretty decent plugin. They do have a more advanced version over at CodeCanyon, which is their premium version of it, so you might check it out there. But I give the free version a good to see if it’s a value to you. All in all, this looks like a very nice, simple, straightforward plugin. I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: CarDojo Lite.

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. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’d really like some good quality WordPress hosting that’s pretty much unmatched. Limited hosting, exclusive. Not everybody who wants to be on my servers gets to be on my servers, so come check it out: JohnOverall.com.

And contests – we are currently running a contest. All our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Thanks to those guys for providing a premium version of the plugin to run all of our contests. It’s an excellent plugin if you’re running contests on your site, this is a plugin you should look at.

Current contests – we are currently giving away a one-year pro license for WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. This is a plugin that allows you to feed your WooCommerce store out to multiple product feeds such as Amazon or – I can’t remember the other ones at the moment. A really great plugin. It’s a value of $269, one you want to check out. We also covered this plugin in Episode 388, so go check this one out and enter the contest. Just simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest. All it requires is your name and email. And if you’re already signed up for the newsletter list, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Page in Widgets. This plugin here is a little bit older but it still works well and it even works in Gutenberg. I’ve been testing it out as I’m rebuilding an intranet site for a client. And what we needed this plugin for is we have a page that listed up a whole bunch of documents and we’re building a custom front page that has movable widgets so that any of the users that sign into the site, they can move those widgets around to their preference so every time they login, they get a different front than everyone else that logs in. They get the most important stuff up there.

But we wanted a way to display certain pages on that front page and since the front page is made of widgets, we needed to be able to display the pages in widgets. This plugin works fantastic for that. Now what I have found out is that it tends to work best with simple text and HTML, versus if you’ve got a fancy page built in a page builder, so keep that limitation in mind. It’s mainly made for simple text and simple pages, versus the more complex pages to display them in a widget, and then you can put those widgets wherever you put widgets on your website.

It works well. You just install it, activate it, choose which page you want to display in the widget from the drop-down of pages that are available in your site, and you’re good to go. Fantastic plugin, works excellent, sets up well. All in all, it might be an older plugin but still great. I give this one a perfect 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Feedback – listener feedback. I do like listener feedback. It’s been a while since I’ve had any. I’m looking forward to it. You can do it by simply going to wppluginsatoz.com, the lower right-hand corner, hit the SpeakPipe bell on the corner – right in the lower right-hand corner. It the SpeakPipe bell or you can email me directly off the Contact page of WP Plugins A to Z. Send me your info, feedback, tell me if I’m doing well, doing not so well – any feedback is great. If you’ve got a question or you’re looking for a very specific plugin, feel free to send it to me. I’ll do my best to find it for you, so send it all in.

This show also a value-for-value model, meaning if you’re getting any value out of it – I mean any value – if this show saves you five, ten minutes, hey, what’s five or ten bucks for that? You know, please give some value back. You can do that by simply going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where you can fill out the form, donate $5 through PayPal. It only takes a couple minutes of your time, and virtually everyone who works online now has a PayPal account. If they don’t I’m not sure how they’re making transactions. It’s like with their credit cards.

Also, if you donate $50 or more, your note will be read out here and any links you put into it will be linked right back to there, so all that information gets yourself a link back and a good readout of your note, and our appreciation – my appreciation – for helping with the show. But you can support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate or you can also go to our Patreon page and donate there, and I’d like to thank the Patreon donors and the people who have given small, monthly donations to the show, so thank you very much for all your donations.

The final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Duplicate Menu. Now this one here is one that will save you tons of time if you’re working on a site rebuild. You know, you get a site that’s got a fancy menu, lots of different items in it. You’re not gonna use them all but you’re gonna use the vast majority, so you’re gonna use 50-60% of that menu. You’ve got to remove them anyway but you might want to add more items back to it, so you can build everything from scratch, which you know how long it takes to build out a menu in WordPress.

What this one does for you is it duplicates that menu for you, allowing you to have a duplicate of the old menu for safekeeping in case you need to go back to it and start over again, which, believe it or not, it does happen. I know. Mistake? Nah! They never occur.

So at any rate, you get in there, figure it all out, duplicate your menu, put it all in. It saves you tons of time. Fantastic plugin, very simple, works, does exactly what it’s supposed to. I really like this plugin. I’ve been using it off and on for years as I go into redeveloping websites. Go check it out: Duplicate Menu and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

And of course I do have ClassicPress Options. Everyone knows that WordPress has made a few mistakes in the last few months and one of those was, well, Gutenberg in some aspects. But what that did was it caused problems with a large segment of the WordPress community, in particular business websites that used very customized versions of pages and metadata and everything else. Gutenberg doesn’t seem to handle it very well. I’ve got that exact experience with one of my clients and a couple of websites that they have where we just can’t use Gutenberg. We actually tried. I activated it on a test site and it just broke everything – just by activating Gutenberg – that’s all we did. We went to 5 and it broke, so we’re gonna have to stay with Version 4.9 which has actually been forked off into ClassicPress, and ClassicPress is starting to grow. As I follow that community, I can see it growing and I knew it would be a matter of time but this is one of the first ClassicPress specific plugins I have run up against.

Now currently, ClassicPress plugins can’t be gotten through the Repository or they don’t have their own repository yet. They all seem to be on GitHub and other repositories such as that. You have to go download them and upload them manually. It takes a little bit more time but probably worth it.

The first one I’ve got for you here today is called Username Protection, available on GitHub. And what this one does is this is ClassicPress, it provides many helpful REST API endpoints. (Some of the endpoints left over from WordPress, I’m sure.) And for the most part, they’re handy, they’re useful, but you want to block off certain endpoints. And what this one does is this blocks off the endpoint for users to access your users, blocking that REST API in it. A very simple plugin, very straightforward. You just install it, activate it. They even give you a couple of ways to test to make sure that it’s working properly, so a very useful plugin, something you will want to check out, and I have seen a couple other ClassicPress plugins appear in the last week which I will be bringing forward in further shows, so stay tuned. We’ve got more coming down the line from ClassicPress and this plugin here, Username Protection, I give a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, so closing out this episode, the plugins I covered are Opace Essential SEO Toolkit, which I gave a 3 to; CarDojo Lite, which I gave a 3 to; Pages in Widgets, which I gave a 5 to…and I seem to be missing one. [chuckling] Absolutely. The Duplicate Menu, which I gave a 5 to and the ClassicPress plugin, Username Protection, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders…the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be held on February 20th, 2019 and will be broadcast live on YouTube. I believe I’ve actually figured it out for the next one. You know, it’s taken me a few. I’m slow, but I actually get there, believe it or not. I make a lot of mistakes along the way but I do get there. It’ll be a good broadcast I’m sure this time. So for more information and location of it, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup, take you to the Victoria Meetup page so you can get the location and the time for it on February 20th, which it’s gonna be 6:30 at any rate. So I will be doing the presenting in February. I haven’t found another presenter yet at this time, so I’m thinking it’s just going to be one presentation and it’s probably going to be on WordPress security – securing up your WordPress website and backing things up, etc. – the presentation I was supposed to give in January but I put off.

And a final note – oh, and be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel – just one more reminder on that. And a final note to developers who would like to support the show… if you’d like to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter all the information there, and we will happily take your donation and create a contest around it and get you all kinds of promotions for your plugin.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you the show here today. I’m going to let my girl take us out of here.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 392

Transcript of Episode 392 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #392 here.


 It’s Episode 392 and I’ve got plugins for CMS Management, Site Security, Site Backups, Gutenberg Blocks, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #392

John:    It’s Episode 392 and I’ve got plugins for CMS Management, Site Security, Site Backups, Gutenberg Blocks, and Classic Press Options, 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have usual great show for you today. But of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you got a few minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes store, leaving us a review for the show. Also, take a few moments here, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Hit the notification bell so you get notifications of when we go live and notifications on when new videos are uploaded.

Also, take a couple of minutes out and follow on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page or you can subscribe to our newsletter which goes out every Friday with additional news and information that is not covered in the show or even on the new Saturday evening wrap-up show.

All right, and with that all done, let’s take it and jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first off as I’ve been doing and to start off with, I’ve got a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but thought you might want to know about them and know that they exist and they may be of interest to you. These are plugins that are submitted to me by developers and sometimes I manage to get in and test them, but many times I’m not able to test them for various reasons. Either they don’t fit the projects I’m working on or it’s not something I have time to test. But I’ve accumulated such a backlog of these things, I want people to know they exist. So now what I’m doing is I’m bringing to you every week a couple of them, give you my opinions and ratings on them, based up on what they show in their descriptions, their demo sites that they have available, etc.

All right, with that being done, let’s move on to the first plugin. The first one I’ve got for you is Groundhogg. Now, this one here I found it in my list but it turns out that it had been reviewed way back in Episode 381, but that was when Marcus was with me and he was the one that did the review. So I’ve checked this plugin out and Groundhogg is a plugin that provides essential tools for your client management system. It allows you to create emails, contact information, etc. to help you keep in touch with your clients, send out marketing emails, manage your content, contacts, automate follow-up, sending emails, and more – without leaving the comfort of your WordPress dashboard. So this is something you can do all within your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin is free, except for it does have some additional items for add-ons. The initial content system looks to be pretty decently full and you can do a lot with it. But if you want to integrate it into WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WP Forms, Gravity Forms, Contract Signing, Advanced Form Builder, and a few other items, you will need to go get the premium version of the plugin. And if you don’t already have a client management system, this might just be what you’re looking for.

Go check it out. It’s called Groundhogg and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. And also, drop into Episode 381 and check out the review that was done on this plugin.

Next up, I have another plugin. This was sent in to us by Akshat Choudhary – I’m getting better. I really am. It’s called MalCare Security Solutions. It’s an anti-malware plugin. It helps you deal with viruses and spam and other issues on your website. It’s got a scanner that goes through and scans your site. They do have ways to help you fix your hacked websites. Again, I haven’t tested this one, so it does look interesting. It looks like something that may be of value to people.

They have one-click automatic malware removal features. The plugin comes with a login protection feature that helps protect the login page against brute force attacks. They make it easy for users to do site hardening measures on their website and it comes integrated with a complete website management module that ensures you can update your plugin’s themes and even WordPress core from the MalCare dashboard. So it may or may not be of value, but it does look like an interesting one if you have not settled on an anti-malware plugin for your site. You might want to go check this one out and it’s called MalCare and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, this podcast 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. Think of me for all your WordPress needs, especially hosting and if you’re tired of poor-performing hosting, come visit JohnOverall.com for exclusive, fast WordPress hosting.

And contests – we do actually have contest up and I forgot to get it in my show notes but I can just pull it up off of the website. We have a contest now that is running from now until the end of February where we are giving away a WooCommerce Product Feed Manager license. It is a way for you to increase your WooCommerce store sales potentially by easily generating product feeds and uploading your projects into major merchant shops such as Google Merchant Center, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Amazon, etc.

What it does is it allows you to connect to all these different merchants with your WooCommerce store, upload your products there, and help and maintain and update that stuff. It looks to be a very excellent plugin if you’re looking to expand your WooCommerce store outside of just your website into all these other merchant areas. So this is a really nice license that we’re giving away and it’s a one-year license to the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager, so go check it out and go check out the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contests, where all you’ve gotta do is enter your name, email address, enter for the contest, and it is live and running.

The next plugin I have for you is one to help you with backups of your website. This is WP Time Capsule, and WP Time Capsule is a plugin that will really help you with backups. It’s a little bit different than most of the other backup plugins. Most other backup plugins out there do a .zip file, allow you to upload it to your cloud places such as Dropbox or Amazon, etc. But it’s always a .zip file, it’s always a complete backup, and if you’re on a shared hosting environment – one of the cheaper hosting services; definitely not with JohnOverall.com – but doing those can use a lot of resources and get your site limited for periods of time.

So what this one does for you is it makes a full backup but it doesn’t zip up all the files. It downloads all the files intact and it ships them off to your Dropbox, your Amazon S3, Wasabi, Google Drive – wherever you want to send it. And then once it makes that first initial backup, it does incremental backups on both your files and your database, meaning that it only updates the files that have changed since the last time it made the backup.

And you can set it to do this on whatever schedule you’d like. Have it do it daily if you make daily updates to your website. Have it do it weekly if you only make weekly updates to your website. But do it – make sure you’re making backups of your WordPress website. I can’t count the number of times my clients have been saved simply by the fact that I make regular backups of their website and something went wrong and it wasn’t even necessarily a hack. It could just be an update that’s gone bad or it could be something broke in the server and corrupted files. Any number of things can happen, so make sure you’ve always got good backups.

Check out this plugin. It’s called WP Time Capsule and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, listener feedback! I do love listener feedback and please people, give me some listener feedback. I would love to have some here. All you gotta do is go to the website, go to the bottom right-hand corner, click on Leave a Message, and leave me a SpeakPipe message there. If you don’t want to record yourself, simply send an email to john@wppro.ca or hit us up on the Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com and leave your comments there. You could also pop over to our Facebook page, leave your comments there. We do get to them. Also via Twitter – direct message me at Twitter or @message me at Twitter and I will get your questions brought to the show, so I look forward to your questions and I look forward to answering them. Think of it as getting free advice from a very expensive professional.

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. All donations $50 and over, their note is read out and published here. This week I would like to acknowledge and say thank you to all of those who have made small donations in the past week and the past month and to Patreon donors, etc. Thank you very much. Your small donations really help out the show. They help pay for things such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. None of the money from donations has ever made it into my pocket; it’s always gone out to pay for expenses. So a big thank you to everyone out there.

And if you would like to support the show, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and fill out the form, select your donation amount, and off you go, donate straight to PayPal. And every little bit is definitely appreciated.

And the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is a Gutenberg plugin. This is called Gutenberg Design Library and with Gutenberg here, unfortunately we all have to deal with it now if we’re going to stay in the WordPress environment. You just can’t escape it. I imagine it may eventually get better and more usable.

This one here is the first of what I see as a major future for WordPress and I predicted this with the rise of the freemium plugins. I’m kind of predicting the same thing here, although I’ve heard the predictions also from others. But what it is is gonna be the custom blocks, and this is the first set of custom design blocks. What they are is blocks for your Gutenberg site that you go in, you click a button, it inserts the block in their particular design format, already laid out with all the information, all the columns, everything you need, and then all you do is go in and customize and change the content based upon that layout.

This saves you having to go through the time to create your layouts in this manner here and saves you a bit of grief, and these are going to become more and more prominent and the blocks are gonna become fancier and fancier as time goes on, and there’s going to be a few more new companies evolving around creating customized Gutenberg blocks, and they’re gonna create some pretty unique blocks as it goes along. So this plugin here, it works fairly well. I liked it. The designs were kind of meh.

Initially when you set it up, this one here is a freemium model, actually. You set it up, you gotta click a button to say “Download 50 Template Designs.” You download your 50 template designs. Now, you go to their website. You can sign up for their newsletter where you can get an additional 50 – and I don’t remember the price on it now, but if you want even more, they’ve got thousands of other designs, they say, and you can download the other thousands of other designs by paying their annual subscription fee for it. So this is something you may want to look at especially if you’re getting heavily into Gutenberg.

So all in all, a pretty average plugin – nothing super special about it. It did do what it’s supposed to do. I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It’s the Gutenberg Design Library.

And finally as promised, each and every episode now has ClassicPress options, and this is a segment that will stay for a while I think because I have to live in the ClassicPress world, too. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I have a client who requires ClassicPress based upon what Gutenberg has done and it just won’t work – Gutenberg will not work with their site. We’ve already tried; we can’t get 5.0 to work with the customizations we have and it’s too expensive of a website to completely rebuild at this point in time, so we’re gonna be going to ClassicPress. So I’m testing out plugins to make sure and I’m going to be testing the plugins used on that site.

And this one here is a staple, one that I use across many sites also. This is the Events Calendar from Modern Tribe and it is a really excellent events calendar. It wasn’t my favorite for a long time. I mean for like two or three years I didn’t like it and I used another events calendar. But that other events calendar went down some really odd paths for their calendar and destroyed what was a perfectly functioning better than the Events Calendar and they just killed themselves by trying to get too fancy. The Evens Calendar stayed simple; they’ve gotten better. Their design has gotten better and their usability has gotten better, so I’ve been using it for the last couple, three years.

Excellent plugin; it works well in ClassicPress. The particular theme I’m working with, I had run into some CSS issues with it. It’s just breaking a few things. I wasn’t sure if it was the theme, ClassicPress, or the calendar yet. We just hadn’t gotten into figuring it out, but the calendar works and it works well the way it’s supposed to. So go check it out if you’re going to ClassicPress. The Events Calendar is going to work there for you, plus there’s also a link that’ll take you off to ClassicPress where they have the listing of all the plugins there (and currently virtually every plugin will work, but it’s good to test them).

Anyway, go check this out. It’s the Events Calendar and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, well that closes out the plugins I’ve got for today and I covered up Groundhogg, which I gave a 4 to; the MalCare Security Solutions, which I gave a 3 to; and the WP Time Capsule, which I gave a 4 to; the Gutenberg Design Library, which I gave a 3 to; and then the ClassicPress option which is the Events Calendar, which I gave a 5 to. Just stumbling all over everything here today.

All right, and a reminder about the meetups. We do have another meetup. If you missed the January 22nd meetup which was a couple of days ago, you can catch the stream recording on our YouTube channel where we recorded the event where I gave my thoughts about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress and Jacob Buurma came in and he spoke about life as a WordPress freelancer – a couple of very great presentations. They were lots of fun and it was well attended. We had a lot of – probably about 20 people there, which was really quite nice. So come check it out. Come check out our next one which is in February and you can sign up for it on our Meetup page. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup and it’ll take you directly there to our Meetup page and February 20th is the next meetup and the presentations have yet to be set.

Okay, and be sure to check out and subscribe to this channel. We’d greatly appreciate it. And one more reminder to developers: if you would like to support the show, offer up a premium license to give away for contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to submit all the details for that. And if you want to suggest a plugin for review, just go to Plugin Review and we will take ‘em all.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you, so we’ll let my girl take us out of here.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 391 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  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #391 here.


 It’s Episode 391 and I’ve got plugins for Page Speed, City Events, World Weather, Auto log-offs, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

Episode #391

John:    It’s Episode 391 and I’ve got plugins for Page Speed, City Events, World Weather, Auto log-offs, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

[Intro]

WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And of course we have 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, greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes store, subscribing to the show and leaving us reviews. And don’t forget, if you’re really liking it here on YouTube, don’t forget to subscribe to the show and hit the notification bell so that you can get notified when I go live and also when I put up a new show, or a new training video, or any of the other things that are coming down the pike.

You could follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page at WP Plugins A to Z, and if you’d like, subscribe to the newsletter where we send out every week a weekly newsletter that goes out on Fridays. It’s got more information that is not covered in the show.

All right, with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first up here I have a couple of great plugins and these are plugins I have yet to use, but I thought you would like to know about them that they exist, and keep in mind the ratings for them are based on descriptions off their site and using their demo if it’s available. These are plugins that have been submitted to me by developers that I don’t always get a chance to test out, or use, or I don’t have a use for them in my current project lineup, etc. But they seem interesting and they look like they might be valuable plugins to people out there, so this is my way of getting those out and I do have a serious backlog of them.

So first off, we’ll start off with one sent in by Vaishali Soni and it’s called Events in the City, and this is an events calendar plugin for WordPress for setting up and having events into your city. Now, they do have a good demo site for it that displays how well it works and you can – they showcase how it’s for businesses, concerts, parties, exhibitions, sports, etc. in it. It’s a great way you can go and engage your site visitors to display the latest events right into your website. This looks like it integrates well with most themes that you can use. You can sort the events by city, simple shortcodes for placing the calendar into the site, the viewers can book tickets right through the plugin on your website. So if you’ve got something that has tickets for booking, this might be something to investigate and see.

It’s easy to manage as these good things that they say about it – user friendly – and it’s got an organizer plugin. Some of the features let viewers follow you instead of you following them, follow all events, tickets, simple shortcodes, and they’ve got shortcodes for the calendar. You can set it up for the calendar in the city if you’ve got more than one city you have events for. You can set it up by city categories, so there’s a lot to this plugin. It looks like a fairly useful plugin.

It’s a free plugin from the WordPress Repository; something you may want to have a look at and check out. At any rate, based on everything I see and the usability on it, well, I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: Events in the City.

The next one I have for you is called Asset Cleanup, and this one looks like something I may actually get a chance to have a look at. It’s a paid speed booster plugin and what it’s designed to do for you is it’s to go through and clean up the assets on your webpage. What it does is as you’re creating a post, it lists up the assets that are gonna load on the page and you can look through and uncheck boxes to not load those particular assets on that page.

So this one here is designed to work with a caching plugin of some sort. They recommend WP Rocket. But it helps decrease the number of HTTP requests loaded and it helps reduce the HTML code load of the page. It makes source code easier, removes possible conflicts between plugins, and a few other things with it. This looks like it would be a pretty decent plugin to use on a page-by-page basis if you’re looking at improving some of the things on your site little by little, so this could be a real handy one.

All in all, from what I can check out of it from just reading it over, taking a look at everything in it, it looks like a pretty decent plugin so I have to give this one a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It is the Asset Cleanup Page Speed Booster plugin from – you can get it at the wordpress.org repository, so go check that one out.

Now they do have a pro version of it available and it unlocks even more features to it, so their pro version here, $39 to $129 of it, go check it out. See the additional features that it unlocks for you. If you find the free version good, you may find the pro version even more worthwhile.

All right, 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. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’re looking for quality WordPress hosting that doesn’t slow you down.

And contests…we are still working through getting the contests set up. I know we’re a week overdue on them now but they should be ready by next week, so keep tuning in here, follow the website, get the newsletter. All of it will be announced in there when it happens.

Next up, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Weather Atlas Widget. Now, this is a really nice plugin if you’re looking to add weather to a website or you need multiple cities in a setting. This is a plugin that works both as a widget and as a shortcode on pages and you can set it up to have as many cities as you want on a page or as many widgets with different cities if you have multiple widgets. All of that is very nice and easy to set up. It’s a fantastic one.

I currently use this plugin in a project I’m working on for an intranet for a company, and they’ve got multiple offices in multiple cities across the country that they have to deal with, and sometimes people want to know what the weather is going to be like. “I’ve got to go to Atlanta this week; I’m coming from California. How bad is the weather in Atlanta?” So they can go to the page on the intranet, they can look it up, they can see the weather in all these cities.

One of the interesting things I found about this plugin was that what it does is it sets up – when it gives you the weather, it color codes the weather from cold blue a hot orange or a hot red and a mild orange-ish color to tell you mild weather. It’s color coded to give you an idea on what the weather might be across those and it’s actually kind of fascinating to look at when it’s on a page with multiple cities on it, because you can see how cold and hot it is across the country.

All in all, a pretty fantastic plugin. I like the way it’s set up, I liked its functionality, and it just worked like it was supposed to – all in the free version. So give this one a check-out. It is the Weather Atlas Widget and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

And feedback – I love customer feedback, whether it’s good, bad, indifferent – whatever it might be, please give me some feedback. I haven’t had any for a while now, so just drop in over to wppluginsatoz.com, send us a SpeakPipe from the lower right-hand corner of the site, you can just click that, record a message, get us through the Contact page, send an email direct to john@wppro.ca, go to @wppluginsatoz on Twitter, Facebook page – anyplace – even comments here on the YouTube channel. All of those I will respond to. Sometimes not immediately but I always do respond to them. Let me know how the show is going, what you’d like to see, any plugins you would like to see. In fact, if you’ve got plugins you’d like to suggest, go use the Suggest Plugin for Review window, and it’s just the plugins that be reviewed, so anything like that. So feedback, feedback, and feedback – keep giving it in.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And that value can be anything from helping me with the sound of the show to helping me with the logo, helping me with anything for the show, producing content – all of those things I’m happy to accept. Also, cash – I just love cash. You know, just…

[President George W. Bush] We just need cash. I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water… just send your cash.

Absolutely, just send your cash. But donations can be made $50 or over, they’re published here. Notes are published here and read out. For those below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much. This week I would like to thank the small donations that come in through PayPal and the weekly Patreon donations. Those are very helpful. They help defray the costs of doing the transcripts and the server stuff, etc.

That plugin that I just talked about, that can be displayed in Celsius, too as well, and you can actually multiple display Celsius and Fahrenheit across the page. Just got that comment, so there you go.

So anyway, thank you to all our small donors out there. We thank you very much for all your support. The money does not go into my pocket; it just simply helps support the show. One day it might, but not at the moment.

Okay, the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Inactive Logouts. Now, a couple of weeks ago, someone had asked me about an inactive logout plugin and I had recommended one. I’m not sure if it was this one here, but as I’m redoing a project for a client, I realized I had used this plugin in their site to deal with inactivity. They have an intranet site and that intranet site where they’ve got dozens of users on it, they had a problem of people not remembering to log out of the account and people finding it. They’ll log into their kid’s computer or their wife’s computer, or a café or whatever, and they wouldn’t log out, so we had to set something up to ensure that everyone properly logged out of the site and that weren’t left logged in.

This turned out to be an excellent plugin for dealing with that issue. It works very well. You can set up a countdown popup on it to determine how long – you know, after it’s been idle for a little while, it pops up a reminder that says, “You’re inactive. We’re gonna log you out,” giving them a chance to stay logged in. If you don’t need to log them out, you can set a wakeup message where the user will not be logged out, but instead a wakeup message will be showed when they’re inactive. You can set custom popup messages and you can use concurrent logout functionality with it. One of the really neat functions of this one (and this one was particularly important) is if you’re a crazy user like me on web browsers and you might end up with 20 tabs open at a time, you’ll log into a site, you’ll go open up another tab, be doing information you need to get for the other site, and you might spend 10, 15 minutes elsewhere before you come back. In that time period you could be logged out. This has a multi-browser tab support and what it means is that if you’re on another tab and you’re still active in the browser, it won’t log you out. It only starts to count down when the mouse stops moving on the computer. So if you’re doing anything, your mouse hardly ever stops moving if you’re not looking at it. So that was one of the really cool features about this plugin that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Other than that, it worked great. It’s still in use; we’ve been using it for quite a while. They’ve got some filter hooks and additional tweaks you can do to the plugin. All in all, there’s a whole lot you can do. I ended up tweaking this plugin a bit to customize it for my client’s site so that we got it so that the users were logged out if they left it idle. Great plugin, a fantastic one. Go check it out. It’s called Inactive Logout and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, the final thing I’ve got for you today is ClassicPress options. And this is here because I feel that ClassicPress is going to be continuing its growth for quite some time. They are going to siphon off – in my personal opinion, they’re going to siphon off approximately 30% of the WordPress community as it currently was in December when Gutenberg launched, because there’s a lot of people that just can’t use the Gutenberg functionality. Now of course, WordPress has promised they’re going to support the Classic Editor for a couple of years, but that’s only guaranteed until 2021.

Believe it or not, 2021 will be here before people know it, and what happens then? Are they gonna extend it? Probably not. They’re probably going to turf it at the time. And then what’s gonna happen to the people that have been dependent on the ClassicPress Editor for that whole time to hold their sites together? Then they have to switch and move. Well, many of them are switching and moving now over to ClassicPress. This is why I’m covering these plugins because I have to switch one site for sure to ClassicPress and I may have others. The nice thing about ClassicPress is it’s just like working in WordPress; it’ll just be cleaner and leaner is what they’ve been doing to it. They’ve been making it cleaner and leaner and a little bit faster. We’ll miss out on some things, but I think the ClassicPress community is gonna grow up quite nicely over the next couple of years.

At any rate, I’ve got a plugin for you here and the plugin of course is a standard plugin. For a while I’ll be covering the basic, standard plugins for ClassicPress because there’s some essentials that you need, and one of them is a good SEO plugin. Currently, the Yoast SEO plugin which I use – I use it across virtually every site I build. I use the Yoast SEO plugin because it’s very nice, it’s user-friendly, and it’s something you can explain to your clients quite well.

It works well with ClassicPress. It seems to have no problems with it. The compatibility is nice, the setup is the same, the functionality seems to be the same, so all in all, it seems to be working quite nicely. Hopefully it will stay it that, hopefully Yoast will see the value in keeping it compatible with ClassicPress as they age. If not, I’m sure somebody will fork it and move it along for a ClassicPress version of it.

Also as a side note, one of the things I noticed when I was doing this today – testing this plugin – is that when you are searching for a plugin in the Repository using ClassicPress, of course it searches the WordPress Repository, because that’s where all the plugins are right now. Well, they’ve added a note that appears in the plugin listing to tell you if this plugin is currently compatible with the current version of ClassicPress that you have installed. I thought that was a nice touch.

What it shows is it shows the vast majority of plugins are going to be compatible, but that is going to change over time. So keep that in mind if you end up going to ClassicPress. Eventually, your plugins and things are gonna change and unless your developers can see the money in it, they probably won’t change with it.

At any rate, that covers up everything for this show. I covered up the Events in City, which I gave a 3 to; the Asset Cleanup, which I gave a 4 to; the Weather Atlas Widget, which I gave a 5 to; and the Inactive Logout, which I gave a 5 to; and the Yoast on ClassicPress, which I gave a 5 to.

And final reminders here…don’t forget, we have a WordPress Meetup here in Victoria coming up next week. It’s on Tuesday, the 22nd of January and this seminar here is going to be me talking about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress and how I think about what it’s gonna do and how it’s impacting WordPress. Also, I have another speaker, Jacob, who is going to be talking about life as a WordPress freelancer. It should be a very interesting presentation and seminar. If you can make it and you live in the Victoria area of British Columbia, Canada, come on down. It’s held at the local center. You can get all of the information off of meetup.com. If you’re not in the area or you just can’t make it, this will be broadcast live on my YouTube channel as a livestream and it will be up there after it’s over. So please come check it out; either come check it out via YouTube or come check it out live. We’d really appreciate seeing you there.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. It would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, and the end. I actually have a Yoast tutorial up. There is a Yoast tutorial in my tutorials on the channel. Just do a search in my channel for Yoast and it should appear. I’m pretty sure I did one not too long ago actually, because I did a presentation on Yoast back in the fall – September/October I did a presentation on Yoast, so go check that out.

All right, well that wraps it up. What else have we got? That’s all we got. 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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.

 [Outro and competing sound effects]

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 there we go. That was a rough close. I kept hitting the wrong buttons.

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 390 WP Plugins A to Z

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

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #390 here.


It’s Episode 390 and I’ve got plugins for Site Performance, Classified Ads, Gutenberg Blocks, Site Security and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #390

John:    It’s Episode 390 and I’ve got plugins for Site Performance, Classified Ads, Gutenberg Blocks, Site Security and Classic Press Options, 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And of course I have the same great show for you this week, as every other week. But right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’ve got a few minutes, greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews there. It really helps the show out when you do that. Also, take a few minutes if you’re not already subscribed to the channel, subscribe, hit that bell, and that way you get notifications every time I go live. The show is broadcast live every Thursday at noon and additional live show has been added for Saturday evenings at 8:00, and that is strictly a live show. It does not go out to the podcast feed.

And if you want, you can follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz, join me on my Facebook page, or subscribe to the newsletter. Just go to the website and right there underneath the sliding images, enter your name, email address, and away you go and you’re all set and ready to go.

All right, with all that being said, it’s time to jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first up as I have – start off with a couple of plugins I have yet to use but I thought you might want to know they exist. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers that I don’t have time to test. I don’t have a project in the works currently that I can use them in, etc. But they looked interesting enough and I’ve had a very big collection of these for a long time that it’s time to get them out there and let you folks know about them.

Now keep in mind, the ratings on them are based upon what I think about the way their descriptions are, their demo sites if they have one, etc.

So first off here I have one that was sent in to me by Ante Laca, and this one here is called WP Performance. It looks to be another caching plugin to help improve the speed of your website. And when you set it up, it sets up – it’s got a lot of checkboxes in it. They can go in there, it’s got – it creates of course cached HTML pages much like every other caching plugin out there. It does look kind of interesting. It looks along the lines of all the rest of them. It doesn’t look like it has anything special or unique to it from all the other plugins that I’ve checked out.

But if you’re looking for something different than the standard caching plugins that are available, go check this one out. This one here might be just what you’re looking for, so go check it out. It is called WP Performance plugin and I give it a 3-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

The next one I’ve got for you, sent in by Blazej Krzymowski. I’m working on the names. Really, I am. This is called TerraClassifieds, and it is another classifieds plugin. It’s a free classifieds plugin from their website at https://www.pixelemu.com/wordpress-plugins/i/245-terraclassifieds, and again, it is a classified plugin that allows you to go through, create up classified ads, user registration, edit/add user profiles, etc. It’s a standard WordPress classified plugin that does look kind of interesting. Their demo of it, not too bad. It’s a good layout from what I can see. I don’t know if it requires a theme to get this layout. (Some do, some don’t.) It might just be the standard way it sets up. I’m willing to bet it’s a theme because they also sell themes off their website.

So this is one that you may want to check out if you’re looking for a classifieds plugin. I’ve used several over the years. I think WP Classifieds, another WP Classifieds plugin is the one that I use. I bought a premium one years ago that gave me a great license on, so I still use that one when I do build a classified site. They’re not nearly as popular as they used to be, but every once in a while you’ll run across the need to build one up. So anyway, go check this one out. It’s a pretty decent little plugin from what I can tell and I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: TerraClassifieds Free Classifieds WordPress plugin.

Okay, and 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.

Come visit me for all your WordPress hosting needs and anything else you need for WordPress.

Okay and contests – I don’t have the new contests set up. I do have a couple of keys in the works and it does take a little bit sometimes to get these things fully organized and set up and working. But we do have a couple of them that are coming your way and our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. If you’re looking to do a giveaway on your website, go checkout the plugin, Simple Giveaways, an excellent plugin. You can get it free – a free version off of WordPress.org or the premium version, which is really nice for managing all the little details of a contest off of your website. Excellent plugin.

All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is of course a Gutenberg plugin. Well, not of course, but – all right, well you’ve gotta get used to it. I’m slowly wrapping my head around Gutenberg and starting to work with it and deal with it through a couple of small projects at the moment. And I have started playing with Gutenberg and there’s some things I like and many things I still don’t like about it. It is confusing at first after being so used to the standard theme – or the standard editor. But once you start wrapping your head around it, you can work with it. But the blocks are actually kind of a nice feature and basically what it is is boiling down to me is it’s just another theme builder or another page builder system, or a page builder plugin, which is what it should’ve been.

But anyway, one of the nice things about Gutenberg is all of the blocks that are coming up, and this plugin here is called Premium Blocks for Gutenberg, and this is similar to the one from last week except it’s a different set of blocks. More and more plugins are bringing these in and they’re bringing their own uniqueness to the blocks that they’re creating.

Now, I’ve only used this one here for the maps block, and the maps block on this one is really kind of nice in that it allows you to get in there and do some customizations to the map. You can create a custom image marker, it lays out the map in a really good custom stylizing, so it’s something you can check out and use. And they do have several blocks for this plugin. You’ve got – they’ve got the banner blocks, they’ve got button blocks, icons, pricing tables, sections, and more. There’s a whole bunch that this plugin can do for you as far as adding blocks to your Gutenberg website.

Go check this one out. It’s called Premium Blocks for Gutenberg and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, listener feedback – audio clips. We don’t have any this week but I really would love to have some to showcase. If you would like to give us some feedback, you can email us direct off of our website from the Contact page, hit the SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner of the page, or you can send an email direct to john@wppro.ca, or contact us via Twitter and Facebook. I do get back to you as soon as I possibly can and then I do bring your comments to the show to showcase with everyone else.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, I’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show over the past week. Anything $50 and over gets their note read out and published here. This week, I would like to acknowledge and say thank you for all the Patreon donations that have come through this month. They’re small donations but they really do help the show. The money doesn’t go into my pocket. It helps pay for things such as the fantastic transcripts that go up every week. Also, it helps cover the basic costs such as servers, etc.

Oh, and as far as value goes, if you can’t give money, hey, give some other help. We’ve had a couple of other people help out. One of our listeners out there really helped out me getting the sound a little better. Hopefully, the sound even comes across better this week. So anything you can do or you think I could do to help improve the show, please send me the information. I do listen, even if sometimes critiques are hard to take. I still take it to heart and listen.

And if you’d like to support the show, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to hit the donation page where you can go in, name, email, choose the amount you want to donate, and just click ‘enter’ and off it goes to PayPal, so help me out that way.

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got this week for you…this is a security plugin. It’s called WP Hide & Security Enhancer. And you may have a need to maximize your site security to the extent that this plugin can do for you. Now, most of the time your site security boils down to installing Wordfence or something else – Cloudflare, prevent the spammers from getting in. But sometimes you may want to just hide everything from everyone. Even if they hit and look at the code on the page, they get there and they won’t even be able to determine that it’s an actual WordPress website.

This plugin hides everything from prying eyes. It will not only hide your login URL, but the locations of your plugins, your uploads, your themes, it blocks XML RPC, API, it blocks direct access to all folders. In fact, it will do such a good job of hiding everything that the online detectors that many people use – they go, “Is this a WordPress website?” and they put in your URL, it comes back and says, “Oh, yeah. It’s a WordPress website.” What is this theme? It’s telling you what the theme is, what plugins are installed, etc.

This actually hides that information to the point they’ll look at it and say, “Nope, WordPress isn’t running there,” so this is a very, very interesting plugin. I’m actually going to be doing a tutorial video on this one, so I’ll be putting that up and showcasing how it works for you. It is such a great plugin that of course I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Go check it out: the WP Hide & Security Enhancer to maximize your site’s security and to hide everything that exists.

Okay, ClassicPress options…I do have a ClassicPress option this week. I do have some little information thought to feedback from last week. I talked about the Wordfence plugin working well in ClassicPress – and it does work – it works very well, but there is a caveat to it. And one of the things that Wordfence does is Wordfence goes in and it looks at your site, continuously looking for changes in the files, and it monitors it partly by monitoring the file name changes.

So what happened to me was a couple of days after I installed and activated this, I got a notification from Wordfence – actually, it wasn’t even a couple of days; it was within 24 hours. I got a notification that I had a whole pile of file changes in this ClassicPress site that I was testing it on, that they’d all been changed and possibly infected. And when I went in and looked, what it had done is it picked up all the file name changes that were done by ClassicPress. So if you switch to ClassicPress, all your WP files are changed to CP files; they’re defining it as ClassicPress.

So Wordfence is not programmed yet to ignore the CP files. Hopefully, Wordfence is going to come onboard for ClassicPress; we don’t know. But if they don’t and you see that, you’ll know it’s not — that’s not an actual problem. But it still works well for dealing with the other issues on your site. So you can still use it but that’s a nice notification there about the issue that Wordfence is having with ClassicPress.

This week, the plugin I have for you though that does work in ClassicPress, as far as my testing so far goes – something I use continuously and have been using for over eight years, it’s the PowerPress plugin for podcasting by Blubrry. This is an excellent plugin. I’ve been using it since way back when I first started the show eight years ago and I’ve watched this plugin grow up, enhancements, improvements, speed, better tweaks. It still has all of that and my tests on ClassicPress show that it does seem to work effectively with no problem, so you can use it and go check it out: PowerPress Podcasting by Blubrry. You can use it in ClassicPress and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

So that’s our ClassicPress options for this week.

All right, closing out this episode…I covered up the WP Performance plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the TerraClassifieds, which I gave a 3 to; the Premium Blocks for Gutenberg, which I gave a 4 to; the WP Hide & Security Enhancer, which I gave a 5 to; and PowerPress, which I give a 5 to.

And a couple of final quick notes: Don’t forget, it’s coming up quick: WordPress Meetup here coming to Victoria. This is the monthly meetup that I do here. It will be broadcast live. It’s on January 22; it’ll be at 6:30 p.m. and for those that can’t make it, check into our YouTube channel where it will be broadcast live. I’m giving a presentation on Gutenberg and what I think its future in WordPress is, and how it’s going to impact the community and how it impacts people using it.

And then we’ve got another fellow here who is giving us a presentation on what it’s like to be a WordPress freelancer and five years of being a freelancer and what he wished he had known, so going to be talking about the things he had learned along the way, so it’ll be a very interesting evening of information, so make sure you check that out.

Also, be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And for a final note to developers who would like to support the show, please, if you would like to offer up a premium license to give away, head on over to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Give us all the details and information about your plugin and submit it to the show for a contest.

And if you would like to suggest a plugin for review and you’re a developer, please go to the usual form for plugin submissions and I will get them appeared on the show. If I can use them, I will give a better review. If I can’t, I will put them into the first two for the beginning of the show.

Okay, that’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you this week. This has been a quiet, easy week as far as things go and I didn’t get any responses back last week to my request that if someone wanted to have discussions after the show was over. But if anyone would like to see that if they’re coming into the live show, I will hold open a small segment at the end of the show as soon as I get people who are talking to me.

That’s all I’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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 389 WP Plugins A to Z

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

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #389 here.


It’s Episode 389 and I’ve got plugins for Gutenberg Blocks, Rebranding WordPress, WooCommerce Thank You Page, Live Streaming Videos and Classic Press Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #389

John:    It’s Episode 389 and I’ve got plugins for Gutenberg Blocks, Rebranding WordPress, WooCommerce Thank You Page, Live Streaming Videos and Classic Press Options, 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d definitely appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving reviews and subscribing to the show in those places.

Also, please subscribe to the show here on the YouTube channel if you’re not already subscribed. I’d greatly appreciate that, too. You can watch the show live every Thursday at noon and also on Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. I do a strict YouTube livestream of a weekly roundup of WordPress, so go check out the YouTube channel for that information alone. It will not be in the podcast stream.

Also, you can follow us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join us on our Facebook page or subscribe to the newsletter off of the website in the lower – well, anywhere. Just scroll down the page; you can subscribe to the newsletter or other bits and pieces.

And the holiday seasons are over. We are in a brand new year now. It is 2019 – kind of hard to believe we’re at 2019. It seemed like it was just a simple 20 years ago that it was 1999 and we were partying it up. I guess it was really 20 years ago. Wow!

All right, so also stay tuned for the segment at the end of the show for ClassicPress plugins, and with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first up as I’ve started off for the last few shows is a permanent segment now where I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use, but I thought you might want to know about and know that they exist. And keep in mind, the ratings are based off the descriptions in their site and using their demo if it’s available. And these plugins were sent to me by plugin developers. The reason I’m starting to bring them out is because I’ve collected quite a few, thinking I would get around to testing them. Many of them I have no opportunity to test; I don’t have a project to use them in, but they still look like good plugins. And there’s some I would like to use but I just haven’t made the time to use them.

Such as this one coming up here. This is called White Label CMS. It was sent in to us by Ray Milidoni and it’s for rebranding WordPress. So you can use it to rebrand the administration area of WordPress with your company name and keep your name in front of your clients whenever they’re inside there. And if they leave you, well, unless you take it out, it’ll still have your branding in there until they finally figure out how to remove it.

It allows you to go in there and customize the dashboard, control which menus appear for your client. You can set up a customized dashboard it. You can use it to customize the login page. You can use it to control the menus, as I mentioned. You can use it to set up the site with a wizard. It’s a really interesting looking one. They do have a premium version of this – at least I thought I saw a premium version – must be another plugin I was thinking of. Nope, this one doesn’t have the premium version. This is a free version of the plugin.

So it looks rather interesting. It’s one that’ll help you brand up that dashboard so that your clients always know who did the work, so go check this one out. By everything I checked out on it, it looks like a pretty decent plugin and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: the White Label CMS.

Next up I have here, this one was sent in by Szabolcs Kisded. Yeah, I’m working on the names – I really am. This is a premium plugin. It’s $36. What it’s called is YouLive – Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress. It’s available over at CodeCanyon and what this plugin does for you is if you have old videos that you’ve not used or uploaded to YouTube or short snippets and pieces you want to, you could load this up, connect it up to your YouTube channel, and it will automatically livestream those from your website to your YouTube channel.

It’s kind of a way to add additional content to your website. A very useful little plugin if you’ve got lots of – a backlog of videos or you just want to redo some old content or repurpose some additional content. It’s another way to add additional features and items to your YouTube stream from your website itself.

Now there are a couple of caveats. You’ve gotta be on a webhosting provider that uses FFMPEG, which not all hosting providers provide that. You’ll need to have some bandwidth because you’ll be streaming it from your website to YouTube, etc., so there may be some limitations on whether or not you can use this depending on your hosting provider, so you might want to make sure you’ve checked out a good hosting provider such as JohnOverall.com, which would allow you to do this to an extent. You know, bandwidth is a limited resource for the most part but you’ve got to be aware of what you’re doing.

It does look rather interesting and it’s something that kind of interests me, but not sure I have the time to deal with that. But anyway, go check it out: YouLive – Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, and currently this show 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. Visit JohnOverall.com for all your WordPress needs, especially for hosting – good, quality hosting.

Okay, and our contests for the last month are done and we have winners! Winners, winners, winners! We do have winners. They’ve all been notified as soon I get verifications back that I hit them, they’ll get all of their keys, etc. And so who do we got? The copy of WooHoo went to Craig. The copy of Interactive U.S. Maps went to Martin. The WP PDF Embedder went to Larry. And the free year of Kanban went to Martin. Lucky you, Martin. You won two! That’s what you get for entering all four, you know. You have a better chance of winning.

So congratulations to all our contest winners. I don’t have the new one up yet but we do have more contests coming in next week’s show. They will be all prepared and set up and announced, and then you can start entering to win the next set of licenses that we are giving away.

And if you are a plugin developer and you would like to support the show, hey, donate a license key of a plugin for a year or whatever and you can submit that stuff off of the website itself, so thank you very much to all of those who participated in the contest. We greatly appreciate your support of the show. And the contests are powered by Simple Giveaways Plugin, who kindly provides us with the premium version of their plugin for our contests. Make sure if you’re gonna run contests, check out that plugin. It works very, very nicely, allows you to collect all the information, and then in the end all you do is click a button and poof, it automatically selects the winner from everyone who’ve entered, so it is truly as random as the computer can be. So thank you again for all of that support and joining us on that.

Okay, the next plugin we’ve got for you here – this one here is the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer. This plugin here is one that will help you to increase your sales on your WooCommerce website. This one here, if you are running a WooCommerce site, this may be a good plugin for you. What it does for you – this is the one that’s got the premium version; that’s how I got confused. It’s a freemium model. Their premium version is only $10, so it’s a great plugin for you if you’re running your own WooCommerce site. It allows you to customize up the thank you page, the page they land on after they’ve paid their bill and they get their notification. It’s usually just kind of bland, gives their name, information, what they bought, and they’re done.

This one here allows you to customize up that thank you page where you can add additional coupons to say, “Hey, thank you. You bought this. Here’s a coupon to buy some other stuff.” If you have a local store, you can add maps to it so that people can find your maps. If you have – [chuckling] you can make the information easier to read. Let’s go check out their demo page here and this shows you everything that it needs.

It allows you to – there we go – taking its sweet time loading. There you go, check out their demo page. So it allows you to set a custom coupon, their order confirmation is a lot larger, you can add customer information and billing, where it’s going to be going to them, their order details of what they got, and then add cross-sales and up-sales to this. So it’s a really nice, useful plugin. The premium version has a few additional features to it that you might want to look at.

Some of the premium version features are – here we go. Wrong one. That’s why…we’re bouncing around here, having a really good go of it. Happy New Year’s, Larry.

So the premium features here for this is that it adds related products, recent products, sale products, recently viewed products form, featured products, top rated, bestselling, related up-sales, cross-sales. You can add multiple coupon settings with rules, so for instance, you know, they buy three of something, you can give them additional coupon. Lots of good ways to use it with their premium and at $10 for the premium, that’s a pretty affordable premium plugin.

So this is something if you’re running a WooCommerce store, selling products, you might want to give this one a checkout. It is the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay…feedback. I do like listener feedback on this show, and if you would like to provide some, please go to the website and hit the SpeakPipe down on the lower right-hand corner. Leave me a message there. Voice messages are great; I get to play it out on the show. If you don’t want to leave your voice, just go to the Contact page and leave an email for me. Send an email and/or send feedback via iTunes and…my brain has just lost it today. Maybe it’s the New Year?

Stitcher, Google Play – that’s it – all the areas where we’re listed or you can also hit us up on Facebook and Twitter and on the YouTube channel. Leave comments there – that always works well, too – comments on the YouTube channel. So leave feedback. I will get back to you as quickly as I can and ask your questions. I will answer them to the best of my ability and get you – look, you get free advice out of it when that happens.

And this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get some value out of it, please give some value back to the show. And that value can be anything: by donating cash, helping out with the show by volunteering to do little things like improving my sound. I have a volunteer listener who is willing to take a look at the sound and see if he can help me fix the little errors that I am not able to correct in the sound, so we’re going to get that fixed – so anything that you can do.

In that vein, I do like to acknowledge those that donate $50 or more by reading out their note here, so if you do that, you get your note read out. For those under $50 it remains anonymous and I would like to thank all the anonymous donors who – the small donations and the Patreon donors. Those little amounts really do help the show out. They help pay for the things such as the transcripts that I have done, the bandwidth, the server hosting space, etc. All of that does cost money, so none of that actually gets into my pocket.

When I ran the numbers last year, the donations didn’t even cover the transcripts, so we’ll leave it at that. So thank you very much and please support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where all you gotta do, fill out the form and enter the amount of donation you would like to leave, and it gets donated directly via PayPal, so I appreciate all the help and support we get there.

Okay, the last plugin I’ve got for you today is Easy Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks Collection. And yeah, you knew it had to be coming. It’s Gutenberg time; I’m going to be starting to talk about Gutenberg and I’m starting out this week on a Gutenberg website – a newer project I’m doing, so I’m gonna build it from Gutenberg up to see how Gutenberg pulls together with everything that I’ve been doing over the last eight years and see how it is for putting in the content and everything else I’ve gotta deal with.

So at any rate, this one here is a blocks plugin. It creates a whole bunch of premade blocks for you. Currently, they have nine blocks and they have – it looks like they’ve slated to have 26 blocks in this plugin, so I imagine as they update it, it’s going to have even more blocks in it. Currently, it has a testimonial block, an alert notification block, a call to action, card image and text, heading and subheading, block quotes – hm…get that tongue twisted around – block quotes, testimonial slider, and a click-to-tweet block. Now, the click-to-tweet one might be interesting for me. I currently use a plugin called Click to Tweet, so we’ll see how that works. Click to Tweet is kind of a useful tool.

At any rate, lots of different blocks in it and it’s a pretty good start for blocks. There are a lot of blocks being built, and blocks looks like it’s going to be the new theme for WordPress Gutenberg – Gutenberg, because the themes themselves are gonna become redundant eventually, I believe, just because of the way Gutenberg is going. But the blocks won’t, so there will be customized blocks for doing customized content, and they’re starting to appear. They’ve been appearing for a while.

I remember back in the spring of last year when it was announced, I did a few block things, but I never really got into Gutenberg. I just set it aside because it was too much to deal with at the time. Now it’s here, we gotta deal with it and those of us that are definitely – we’re going to be staying in the WordPress community, well this is what we gotta deal with.

At any rate, a very nice plugin, the Easy Blocks plugin is, and I give this a 4-Dragon rating. Full Gutenberg, although I’ve used any custom-built blocks. I don’t quite understand the thing there – oh, okay. Well yeah, I’ll be finding out the difference in customized, built blocks and the full Gutenberg blocks and seeing all the different pieces. Like there may be redundant blocks being built all over the place, much like the – I haven’t [chuckling]. Haven’t used any Gutenberg custom-built blocks, okay. That makes more sense, Larry – makes much more sense.

Okay, yeah, it’s gonna be a tough go and I’ve seen lots of interesting blocks here and there. You know, I’ve seen entire block sets being produced, because there’ll be more than just what’s needed in Gutenberg itself, I imagine. So it just may create a whole new niche market for WordPress is building custom blocks.

All right, finally, I do have the ClassicPress Options because as I said, I still got to maintain the track down ClassicPress simply because of a corporate client I have that has two sites we will not be able to move off of – move into Gutenberg, just because of what we’re doing, so I’m testing things out.

At any rate, this week here I have tested out for security purposes on the site, I’ve decided to test the plugin that I use a lot, and I know a lot of people have things against it but I personally find it works quite well, and that is Wordfence Security. A very nice plugin – I have found Wordfence to be very decent. They used to have a major issue with using up resources on a site, but somewhere around a year and a half or so ago, they seemed to have cured that error for the most part and they have settings in there that can help you tweak it. I’ve even managed to get this plugin to work over at Bluehost and – I’m trying to think of – GoDaddy. You know, places where they have severe restrictions on resource usage on the servers.

So this plugin still does work. I find it quite nice, so I decided let’s check it out on my ClassicPress testing site, and it does work. It installs, it activates, it doesn’t seem to slow down, it seems to function well at the time being, so I would say yes, Wordfence is something that is good to go with ClassicPress, so go check it out. As I said, it’s been a staple in my website building for several years now and I’ve tried other security plugins but they just didn’t always do as well as what I found Wordfence to do, especially when a site actually does get hacked. I’ve always found it to be a whole lot easier for me.

Tutorials for Wordfence – I do, and it’s probably out-of-date, so I will actually create a new tutorial for it. That’s a good idea. I’ve needed a plugin to create a new tutorial for. I’ll create a new one for Wordfence. Yeah, it’s quite a nice plugin and they changed the interface about eight months ago, and when they changed that interface, it just – they made it harder to use as everyone does. So let’s improve your customer experience by changing the interface. Yeah, you improved it by hiding everything that used to be in plain sight, so it’s quite irritating in that aspect, but they’re still a great plugin.

So anyway, go check it out: Wordfence for ClassicPress. I give that one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, so closing out this show here, I covered up YouLive – Livestream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress, the White Labels CMS, the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer, the Easy Blocks Gutenberg Blocks Collection, and the Wordfence Security for ClassicPress.

And end-the-show thoughts, I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of ‘em here today. It’s been a relatively quiet week; the New Year rolled in nice and smooth and quite for me, although I did stay up a little too late playing video games, so maybe that’s why I’m still out of sorts. I still haven’t recovered from staying up all night playing videogames. I know better than to do that. But every once in a while, we just gotta do things we know we shouldn’t do to see if our body can still take it. And as the body gets older, it gets harder and harder to take that kind of abuse.

Oh, I do have reminders. The WordPress Meetups – I have the WordPress Meetup coming up this month at the end of January on January 22. This one here, I am gonna be talking about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress, how it impacts websites and businesses. And I have another speaker, Jacob Buurma, who is gonna be presenting “What I Wish I’d Known – A-ha Moments from Five Years of WordPress Freelancing.” So he’s gonna talk about his last five years of WordPress freelancing and the things he wished he’d had known sooner. He’s a really great guy, a great speaker, and this is going to be streamed live to the YouTube channel. If you can’t make it, but we’d really appreciate you if you’re here on the island – anywhere within Victoria – come on down to it. All of the information is available on our Meetup website. The link is in the show notes to go sign up for it if you’re not already signed up for it, so I look forward to seeing everyone there that comes out for it.

And also finally, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Well, you can’t hit that button up – hit that one down below. Down below, there’s a button, so subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the bell for notifications. That way, you get notified when we’re going live and when the new videos are uploaded of any sort.

And just spread the word! Tell folks about it. One of the things I’d like to do is I’d like to accumulate over 1,000 subscribers this year for the YouTube channel, then I can actually turn it on and use it for other promotions. There’s other features that get turned on at 1,000 subscribers that I’d like to access – including monetization. Monetization might be nice; it wouldn’t give me much, but I imagine a few extra pennies a month would actually be useful.

And a final note to developers who would like to support the show…you want to offer up a premium license? Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter all your information, and submit your license to the show for a contest. I’ll work up the contest; all you gotta do is provide the information.

One other subs $4,000 – oh, 1,000 subs; 4,000 – I almost hit 4,000 hours of watch time. I get a lot of watch time on my training videos. My training videos, I’ve got – one of my training videos has got 4,000 hours of its own; it just keeps getting used over and over again. I had a training video for a brief time that the developer had used in their notes, and that one there got tons of usage for a while until the video became obsolete, which happens when you do a training video. They’re good for about six months to a year, I noticed, and then they gotta be redone because developers change everything.

But yeah, thanks a lot, Larry. I appreciate you coming in on the show. Thank you to the other people who showed up – much appreciated. That is what we’ve got, so I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here and you all have a good day. 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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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 388 WP Plugins A to Z

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

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #388 here.


It’s Episode 388 and we’ve got plugins for Social Sharing, Top 10 Posts and a Thumbs Up/Down button. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #388

John:    It’s Episode 388 and I’ve got plugins for Anti-spam, WordPress Backups, File Uploaders, WooCommerce products feeds and Classic Press Options, 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from A to Z.

John:    Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving reviews and subscribing to the show there.

And also, take some time out there if you’re not already, subscribe to the YouTube channel and make sure you hit the notification bell so you know when I go live, because I go live once a week on Thursday at noon and it looks like I’m gonna be doing just a live show on Saturday evenings about 8:00 going forward here. It’s something I have started doing and it’s kind of fun, I enjoy it, and then periodically if I get the urge, I may just go live again. So make sure you check it out and there’s other little tidbits going up to YouTube as I complete them.

Also, you can subscribe to the show over at wppluginsatoz.com – or on Twitter – @wppluginsatoz on Twitter and follow us on our Facebook page and subscribe to the newsletter over on the wppluginsatoz.com website.

And the holiday season, partly behind us. I hope everyone had themselves a fantastic Christmas. I had a great one. Santa was nice to me this year and to my boys, so it’s really kind of a nice year. Well what we have left is the New Year. Let me tell you a little secret: don’t tell your personal trainer you suffered from a hangover the day after Christmas, because he seems to put you through 10 times the amount of…

All right, that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, first up here, I have the segment I started a few weeks ago with the show where I now bring you a couple of plugins right off the top that I have yet to actually use myself. They’re plugins that have been submitted to me by developers and I have big backlog of ‘em, so I thought it would be important to bring them out here, talk about them a little bit that I can figure out with them. The reviews I’m giving on them – the ratings I’m giving – are based upon their website and if they have a demo that I can test it out and see how it works. Other than that, I have not actually used them but they do sound interesting.

So the first one up here was sent in to us by C. Shakhawat Sultan and it’s a freemium plugin, and it’s called WooCommerce Product Feed Manager, and this one here is a plugin that helps you manage product feeds going into your WooCommerce Store. And in particular, if you use product feeds from multiple sites such as Amazon or let’s say – they’ve got a list of them. I’m trying to think where they all come from. They filter all of the information, intuitive interfaces for it, and they’ve got a whole lot of popups on their site. But – oh, there it is: Amazon, Google, eBay, NexTag, Facebook – you know, bringing in your product feeds from all these different places or feeding out from your WooCommerce site to all these different places.

And what it does for you is it helps you manage those feeds to keep control of your products for you. You can increase your WooCommerce store sales, etc., etc. with it. It looks to be a pretty decent plugin. It’s a freemium plugin; they do have a free version which will allow you to go check out a little bit about the site. Oh, here – I had the comparison up earlier. Ah, I’ve lost the comparison for it.

Anyway, the free version lets you set up one feed. If you go to their premium version which is $89 a year, you can set up multiple feeds on your site. If you’re running a decent sized WooCommerce site, this would be something worth checking out if you’re feeding out to multiple places. So go give it a check-out. It’s called the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager and based on everything I can see with it, it looks like it should be worth about a 4-Dragon rating. Give it a check-out.

And the next one I’ve got for you was one that was sent in to me by Akshat Choudhary – I’m really gonna have to work on my enunciations. Sorry if I butcher you names, guys, but I’m learning. This is a premium plugin. It’s called Blog Vault Backup Service. This is another backup service for WordPress that you can use. It is a premium service from $7 to $99 a month, depending on which level you’re at with it.

It does multiple backups or backups of your website, it can help you do some transfers of your site, it’ll do daily automatic backups, a variety of other features, like taking on-demand backups whenever you need, scheduling the backups on your convenience, large websites. Blog Vault offers incremental backup facility to ensure nothing is missed and it offers you quite a bit with what it does, and the pricing on it, as I said, it’s – you know – as I said, it’s, you know, $7 for a personal site for one website, all the way up to an agency with 100 websites, so if you manage multiple sites and you want a backup system, this might be something to consider if they’re on a shared hosting platform or multiple platforms – like many hosts don’t even provide proper backups these days, which is kind of strange to me, considering how cheap storage is for the most part.

So at any rate, this is one you’ll want to check out if you’re looking for a backup service. It looks to be a good one. I’ve heard about it from time to time and I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Meat and potatoes – oh, absolutely. Absolutely, Larry. I seem to be losing that from time to time. All right, so those are the two plugins I’ve got so far that I haven’t checked out, so let’s jump into 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. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’re looking for better WordPress hosting – something I’m gonna be putting a little bit more focus on in the new year as my hosting business, mainly because I offer fantastic hosting, a reasonable price, you don’t have to fight for all of your services, and I make sure there’s always backups available.

And we are currently still giving away the plugins. We have four contests here, and the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways Plugin, who kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contests on. I liked it when I was using the free version, but the premium version is so much better. Make sure you go check that out.

Current contests we have: A copy of WooHoo, which is a plugin for going in and editing up your WooCommerce sites. You can do a lot of customizations with WooHoo. If you’d like that, go enter the contest for it. A copy of the Interactive U.S. Map, which is a really cool plugin. I’ve examined this plugin a couple of times over the years and not only do they have U.S. maps, but they have maps for countries all over the world, and these maps can be seriously integrated, so go check them out. WP PDF Embedder – this is a fantastic plugin for embedding PDFs into your website. I use it across about four or five of my websites, so get a license for this one. It’ll save you a lot of grief when putting PDFs into your website – a very nice plugin.

And a free year of Kanban, from Kanban WP, and this one here is a projects manager tool to help you manage your projects if you’ve got multiple people working on your projects on your website, so check this one out. It’s a really nice one and you can enter to win a copy or a free year worth of all of these services. All you need to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and we have one week left for the contests, and I’m really happy to see that people have been entering the contests this last month. I’m excited to see that, you know, people are starting to dig into them again.

Okay, next up I have for you the next plugin here is AJAX Upload for Gravity Forms. I couldn’t remember if I’d done this one before, but if I had, well it’s back again. This is a tool that you can use. If you’re using Gravity Forms and you have it set to upload files or images or anything like that – and I have a couple on different websites that we do this. Normally what happens is they enter their file and nothing occurs until they submit the form, and it takes a little bit longer to submit the form because now it’s got to upload the form.

Well, what this plugin can do is it can shorten that for you. They can choose their files, pick them, set them in place, they can click the Upload button, and they upload while they finish filling out the form. It’ll save a few moments. You know, every – like I say, every 10 seconds saved adds up to minutes by the end of the year – sometimes even hours, so this is something that just saves time for everyone and it’s a very simple plugin to use. It’s free and so that just makes it a fantastic plugin. Free works and its good. What else happens there? That gives it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

There we go.  Go check it out: the AJAX Upload for Gravity Forms.

All right, what do we got now? Oh, feedback – listener feedback. Well, we like listener feedback and questions. This week I have none but if you would like to leave some, please go to the Contact page on the website, hit the SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner of WP Plugins A to Z, or you can email me directly at john@wppro.ca. Any of those places there, I will answer your questions to the best I can, so you’ll want to check it out and just contact me with your questions.

This show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, I like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over, their note is read out and published here. Those that come below $50, thank you very much; they remain anonymous.

This week here, no big donors but I’d like to give a big thank you to those who have hired me in the last few months because of this podcast. That’s as good as a donation to the show because you’re hiring me because you’ve heard me through the show, so I’d like to thank you very much for supporting me in that manner. Aside from listening to the show you go, “Hey, maybe he knows what he’s doing,” so you hire me to do some work and a few of you have become extremely long-term clients just because of this podcast, so thank you very much in that area there.

I would also like to thank those who came in under $50 and have set up the small Patreon donations and the small PayPal donations. Those little bits really help the show. Now, the money that’s donated to the show does not end up in my pocket. That money there actually covers the costs of the show. It covers the transcripts, it covers the bandwidth, the server space – all of the incidentals that are just simple required to run a podcast. And if you’ve never run a podcast, go do it. You’ll find out real quick that even though it doesn’t seem like it costs anything, there’s money involved in it, even if it seems like it’s small amounts. It adds up by the end of the year.

Well, thank you very much to all of those who support the show. And if you would like to support the show, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. A simple form: name, email, decide whether you want to subscribe to the newsletter, leave a message if you like, choose your donation amount. It takes you directly to PayPal and it donates it, so it’s the simplest thing you can do. Thank you very much for all those that support the show.

All right, and before we jump off to that, I just want to – comments. I really like comments. I had some really good comments in the livestream I did last Saturday night. You might want to check it out and read the comments there. We got into a good discussion as I was discussing my WordPress drama, which I’ll come back to at the end of the show. And so far here – thanks, Larry. The PDF Embedder, fantastic. I’ve used it a few times. Yeah, I use it a lot, so it is a great plugin. Thank you very much.

Okay, the last plugin for WordPress here that I have – this one here is kind of a simpler plugin – kind of cool. If you have a menu and you want to put some of those fancy menu icons and your theme doesn’t have it built-in, and many themes have it built-in now. But this is the Menu Icons plugin by ThemeIsle, a really nice, nifty plugin that all you’ve gotta do is go in, install it, activate it, and then you go to your menus and you can just choose from multiple icons that are produced by Font Awesome, Geneticons, Elusive, etc., and determine what size you want them to be, where you want them: left, right, how you want them placed in the menu, insert them, and then set them, and then all of a sudden you’ll have those fancy menu icons without a whole lot of extra effort if your theme doesn’t provide it.

This is a really simple plugin. Nothing super stupendous or fancy but hey, it’s still kind of cool, so go check it out: the Menu Icons by ThemeIsle, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, ClassicPress. Yes, I’m going to keep talking about ClassicPress because it’s not going away. I don’t know how many people have followed ClassicPress ever since the release of Gutenberg, but ClassicPress has made some massive inroads into the WordPress community. And as I said when it first occurred, I’m pretty sure by the end of it 30% of what was the WordPress community on December 6th will be using ClassicPress probably by the end of January to the middle of February. There has been more and more people moving over there.

So I’m going to continue with this show, even though it’s the WP Plugins show, I’m gonna add ClassicPress plugins and I will have a – I already bought the URL, cppluginsatoz – so I will already have that pointing to this site to carry people in here from ClassicPress. Right now, it’s even. All of the plugins work in ClassicPress but I know it’s going to change over time, so this’ll be an interesting growth thing for me as I have to travel both paths.

So this week here, I do have a plugin tested out for ClassicPress, and I figure if you’re gonna start with it, you may as well start at the beginning to see the important plugins for a website. Now the most important plugin on a website, in my opinion, if you’re going to accept comments on your site is to set up an anti-spam plugin. And it annoyed me to no end that Akismet was built into WordPress, thereby defying one of WordPress’s own rules about having plugins in there, so that annoyed me to no end.

But it was the first thing I removed. There’s a fantastic plugin in WordPress that was called Tasks After Install; I still use it every time I’d set up a new WordPress site, hit it, it wipes out the Akismet, the Hello Dolly, cleans up everything, and sets it to perfectly clean like it should be when it’s new.

At any rate, I removed that and installed Antispam Bee, so I thought, well, let’s make sure that this works in ClassicPress – and it does. Antispam Bee is, in my opinion, the best antispam plugin out there as for a simple, very lightweight, does not depend on a third-party service, and it just looks – it just works really, really well. So this is one that you’ll want to check out and use. If you’re switching to ClassicPress, you have an antispam plugin that will work, so go check it out: Antispam Bee, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, so – and Larry asks here, “So ClassicPress stays at 4.9 and only gets security updates?” Eh, I don’t know if that’s exactly what they’re doing. From what I can tell, they’re actually forking it off. Right now it’s security updates. It’s not even – when you do the ClassicPress conversion (which I’ve done), it makes a lot of changes in there to all of the files, all the files in the core, changed from WP to CP. It does leave the WP content folder alone, so all the content there stays where it should be. You actually still – if you want to add plugins, remove, and update plugins in ClassicPress, it still uses the WordPress Repository to get that information and do it, so they’re kind of on a parallel path right now from what I can see.

I haven’t read their map. They have mapped out what they plan to do with ClassicPress; it’s on their website at classicpress.net, and their map – I’m pretty sure their map is going to see a complete divergence, and of course it’s actually gonna happen one way or another just simply the way Gutenberg is going, and I expect it’ll be – hm…six months, a year – maybe a bit longer before they completely diverge and in the plugins for ClassicPress don’t work as well as the plugins in WordPress. They start having conflicting errors. I expect it at about that point. Right now, any plugin that worked in Version 4.98/99 of WordPress, I’m pretty sure will work in ClassicPress. But I know about that. And yeah, Akismet is bloatware, absolutely – absolutely bloatware.

And ClassicPress – yeah, well ClassicPress was created to avoid the block editor changes. Yes it was, Larry, and that’s what’s gonna happen to happen, and they’re just going to continue down the line of where WordPress would’ve gone had they not edited Gutenberg to the core. That’s pretty much what I think is going to occur. Who knows? They could overtake WordPress at some point in time if WordPress makes enough mistakes over the next couple of years. They’ve made a load of those recently.

All right, so closing out this episode, I covered up plugins – the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager, which I gave a 4 to; the Blog Vault Backup Service, which I gave a 4 to; the AJAX Upload for Gravity forms, which I gave a 5 to; the Menu Icons by ThemeIsle, which I gave a 4 to; and the Antispam Bee plugin for ClassicPress, which I gave a 5 to, so we’re looking pretty good there.

Real briefly, just to cover up. There’s a big, long post for those that haven’t caught it over at WP Plugins. I have been officially banned from the WordPress Forums. I am no longer permitted to post in there or create a new account or anything else. If you want to read it, I’ve got the entire email thread with me and – what’s his name? – the name in my head here. Oh, Jan – Jan Dobrowski. Me and him going back and forth and him eventually just, even after I had capitulated to everything, I just didn’t say the right words, I think, and he just went, “No, I’m leaving you suspended. You can appeal to one of the other moderators if you want.”

And personally, I don’t think I’m gonna have any success with that, so I just sort of left it. I’m done, but it is an interesting read and I’ve been told I passed that and I’ve had a few people comment on it and a couple of people have commented. It’s like, “Wow,” the one person come in and said like, “I didn’t really think I’d read the whole thing but then suddenly I had read the whole thing,” and it’s like yeah, sometimes drama can just be entertaining as all.

            So at any rate, it’s official: I’m no longer allowed in the WordPress forums. Gotta love the – it means I’ve just gotta email all the developers directly when I do stuff for them and let them know that yeah, I still exist – still pretty cool. We’ve got here – not so bad, and I’ll continue doing the plugin reviews that I’ve been doing for a long time.

All right, that pretty much wraps everything up here for today. And I’ve got all my little notes carried out. That’s it. Just make sure you stop in and subscribe to the YouTube channel, subscribe to the show at iTunes, YouTube, and all the usual places, so thank you very much for listening to the show, and I’ll look forward to talking to you next week, and thanks a lot for showing up, Larry. Always appreciate having someone into the show to talk to. It makes for a good day.

All right, I’m gonna let my girl take us on out.

[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.

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John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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:   That’s all we’ve got now. Take care.

[End of Audio]