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.

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 6^th 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.

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:   That’s all we’ve got now. Take care.

[End of Audio]

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 #386 here.

Episode #386

John:    It’s Episode 386 and I’ve got plugins for WP Forms, Controlling Updates, Temporary Logins, Plugin Notes and Classic Press Options. It’s 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:    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 greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews on those channels. They really help the show out.

And subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and extra shows on our YouTube channel, and you can subscribe to the show so that you get notification on every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time. I go live for the WP Plugins A to Z podcast. For those that listen to it later, check out the live show from time to time if you’ve got a chance on Thursdays at noon.

Also, follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join me on Facebook – I do respond there. Check out the links in the show notes. And finally, subscribe to the newsletter that goes out weekly every Friday with news, tips, information, and other things that I don’t cover in the show, and that newsletter has gotten fantastic now. Some really great, pertinent articles and other information is in that, so go check it out.

And also, remember this is the holiday season. Time to think about not just yourself, but think about others: those in need, think about our vets out there, make sure you say hi to them, thank them for their service, etc. That goes for the Americans as well as the Canadians, so do something nice for a vet. I know quite a few vets and if anyone has listened to my stuff in the last few months, there was a lot I learned about my father who was a vet, so it brought it closer home for me.

Another thing that’s happening with the show is you’ll find a new segment at the end of the show that I’m going to be doing for quite a while. It’ll probably last a while and this is due to the Gutenberg fiasco that occurred and ClassicPress which is the fork of WordPress, and I personally believe there’s gonna be a chunk of the WordPress community that’s gonna be moving to ClassicPress. It’s already happening, so I’m going to be covering ClassicPress plugins as I go along, mainly because I have to move a couple of my websites to ClassicPress because WordPress just won’t suit it anymore.

Okay, so that’s all the intro stuff. Let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock guitar music]

Okay, I do have four great plugins for you today and of course starting off as I changed the show up a couple of episodes back, I now have right out front a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but you might want to know about to know that they exist. These are plugins that are submitted to me by developers. I get a lot of developer submissions and I can’t check every one of them. I usually use the ones that are pertinent to whatever projects I’m working on or if I have time to throw it into a dev site to see how it works.

Sometimes I don’t get to them and I ended up accumulating a whole bunch of them, which they’re really great sounding plugins and I think you listeners will find them useful. I just haven’t had time to test them. So I give a rating on them based upon the reading of the information, their dev site or their demo site if they have it available, to give you my viewpoint and opinion on that plugin.

So with that, let’s start with the first one. This one was sent in by Malay Ladu. It is a premium plugin from Store Apps and it’s called Temporary Login Without Password, and this is a nice plugin. I’ve used a couple of plugins from Store Apps in the past, so they make pretty nice plugins. I’ve used some of their plugins for managing data in WooCommerce for a couple of my clients in the past. This one here though, a little different.

What it does for you is it creates a self-expiring automatic login link for a WordPress website. So if you need to give somebody instant access to your WordPress website, you can go create this link, send it out to them, they click it, it takes them to your site, automatically logs them in, and then the link expires after a period of time and they won’t have access. It’s a temporary fix so you don’t have to go create a set of credentials to a website.

It looks to be pretty good. It’s a nice little plugin. I didn’t catch the price on it; I imagine it’s about $39 (that’s what their lower end plugins tend to be), so you might want to check this out if you have that problem regularly recurring on your website where you have to produce this information. Go check it out. It’s a pretty nice looking plugin. I give it a 4-Dragon rating and it’s the Store Apps Temporary Login Without Password.

The next one I’ve got here for you was sent in by Sanjeev Aryal and it’s called Entries for WPForms, and this is a form plugin – WPForms. I’ve never used this form plugin, so I don’t know a lot about it. But if you use the WPForms form plugin, this might be a plugin for you. What it does for you is it unlocks the entry panels of WPForms Lite plugin. So basically they wrote a plugin so you wouldn’t have to pay for the premium version of it so you could use that section. Kinda nice of them – the hazards I guess of having open source code. If you get it out there, somebody can just write a loop around your lock.

It looks to be interesting. It looks like it can be useful. It kind of reminds me of what comes built into GravityForms in that every time somebody submits a GravityForm, I get it kept in the database of my site, so this does that for you. It allows you to export the information. It looks to be a useful plugin if you use WPForms. Go check it out: Entries for WPForms and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

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.

Absolutely. Call me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’re in need of some really good hosting. And the new commercials are coming in the new year – I promise you.

And contests – we do have contests right now, and our contests are powered by Simple Giveaways Plugin, who kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contests on. Go check them out; it’s a fantastic plugin if you’re running contests on your website. Our contests we have right now, we are giving away a copy of WooHoo, the plugin for customizing up your WooCommerce website. We also are giving away a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map, and it’s a really nice plugin. This mapping plugin from WP Maps Plugins, they’ve got maps around the world, not just U.S. but they’ve got Canada, Europe, Asia – everywhere – and these maps can be detailed down and you get clickable bits and pieces throughout the maps – a very nice mapping plugin.

And WP PDF Embedder – this PDF embedder here – the pro version is really nice and I think we’ve given away the pro version. I use the secure version of it myself to secure PDFs on my website and it displays PDFs beautifully, gives them the ability to download it if it’s a secured one, and you can lock them down to other ways. A very nice plugin – works excellent. Go check it out, go register for the contest – and a free year of Kanban WP, and this is to use their Kanban windows for dealing with your work progress. It is a project management kind of tool. I did an interview with the developer of Kanban a while back. You can go look that up and we’re going to get to the point where I’ll eventually have that stuff showing up in the windows or popping in as cards so people can see it. We’re slowly working out this system.

So anyway, go check them out and for all our contests, they are now available at wppluginsatoz.com/contests. Just simply go up there, click on it, register for the contests. The contests are running through until 11:59 on December 31^st, so through to the end of this year. As soon as it hits 2019, contests are over and the winners will be announced in the first show of the new year.

That brings us to our next plugin. This one here is one that I’ve been using off and on. I’ve been meaning to bring it into the show and I may have done in the past but just in case, here it is again. This is called Plugin Notes Plus, and I used to use another notes plugin. I thought it was a bit better than this, but the guy abandoned it. I didn’t have time to get it rewritten and so I found this one and switched to this one.

What this plugin does for you is it creates a second column in your plugins list and that column is where you can start adding all the notes for what those plugins are for. And if you’re like me using lots and lots of plugins on your website or you’ve got multiple clients who use different plugins for different sites for different reasons, you come back to a client’s site after a few weeks or so and you look and say, “Why did I put that plugin in there for again?” This is the thing that will help you out, because you’ll put notes in there.

The other one that’s great is I have one client that always wants to know what all their plugins are in there for. So anytime I add something new, I have to put these notes in there so that they look at it and they know what the plugin is there and what it’s doing for their website. So this is a really great plugin, Plugin Notes Plus, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Go check it out.

Listener feedback – I like listener feedback. And if you would like to give us some, please drop into the website, hit the Contact page, leave us a note from there, click the SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner of the website, leave us a SpeakPipe message, or you can email directly. Contact information is at the end of the show notes for that.

This week I do have a SpeakPipe from Louis, so take it away, Louis:

Hello, Mr. Overall. How are you doing today? I have a question – well, I have two plugins that I need help with. One, I’m building a website for a school that has an automated service for let’s say snow days and things like that. Do you know of a plugin – paid or free – that once the school sends out an email or an SMS message through the system, it would activate a popup or a bar on the website detailing snow day/school closed for whatever reason? I’ve looked around, I’m having a real hard time coming up with one.

The second thing is I need to be able to log out idle users. I’ve seen a bunch of them. The one that I’ve used in the past, it now hasn’t been updated over two years, so I’m trying to find something new. I’m not sure what – if you use that or something that I could use that would do that.

Thank you very much, keep up the great work. Thank you.

Thanks, Louis. I appreciate the questions. And yeah, it’s going great today. So I’ll get you an email after this, but I thought I’d answer it in the show first and I’ll take your second one first to log out idle users. I currently use a plugin and I realized listing to your thing again that you might be using the same plugin, because you said one hasn’t been updated in a while. It’s called Idle User Lockout. It still works very well. I haven’t been able to find a better replacement than this one myself. I have looked from time to time. What I’m actually gonna end up doing is paying someone to recode this one for me to bring it up-to-date. But that’s all I can suggest on that. It is a great plugin; it still works well and it still works at least up to Version 4.99, which came out today of course, and so there’s all we’ve got with that one.

The first question though, the popup that would occur when you send out an SMS message, I’ve been unable to locate anything like that but I did have some ideas for you that might work. One of them is you might have to get some custom coding done. You could use someone like Zapier that would receive your SMS message then send the signal to your website to cause the popup to occur. I don’t know exactly how that one’s gonna work, but to me that just seems like something that’s gonna require custom coding, so you might have to ask your client to spend a little money on that one. That’s all I can suggest on that. I will keep that one in my head though if I ever run across anything like that. I’ll be sure to bring it to the show. So thanks a lot, Louis. I appreciate your questions.

And I also do have a couple of written questions that came in via email this past week, and the first one here is:

Hey John

Is there a plugin or something where if I have 20 WP sites and I want to see what needs updating on each site, I am able to do this from all in one spot?

Thanks,

Steve

And Steve, yeah, absolutely and I suggest CMS Commander. I’ve actually been using CMS Commander for about five or six years now and ever since they came out when they were brand new and a fantastic company. You can purchase whatever plan you need for it. Their plans start as few as five sites for $8 a month and you can go on up to 200 sites for $75 a month, and it is fantastic; it works very, very well. It not only does and shows you what updates are need, it gives you some stats, it has a cloning feature, it has a backup feature, it has an auto-generated content feature.

It does a lot more than just manage your website and do things for you. There’s a lot into this. I’ve never really used it to its maximum and I’m just now starting to actually try to use it to its maximum to help enhance my business even further. So go check this one out, Steve. It’s a fantastic plugin, CMS Commander. Use the link in the show notes please if you do. It is an affiliate link, so I get a couple of extra bucks out of it – not a lot but, you know, every dollar helps, so go check that out.

Then we’ve got another question. This one came from Steve also a little later in the day and it’s:

John

Got a question for you.

Say I have some image files in one of my folders on my computer.

I go into those files and go into the details and in the comments I add the NAP of the website. I also add the keyword in the details for the title.

When I now add this image into the media of the WP site and add it as a featured image on the site, does WP strip out this information from the image?

I would have thought you would know this answer, so I thought I would ask you.

I am sure you know what I am talking about when I say the details of the image, thru right clicking on the image and going to properties and finding details.

Thanks john

Steve

Okay yeah, I do have the answer for this and the rest of it is just explaining to me how to get to it. I know what you’re talking about there, Steve. That is the metadata for an image and that metadata for an image, that’s a big maybe as to whether or not WordPress is stripping it out. On all my WordPress sites, WordPress is stripping out that metadata because I don’t want that metadata embedded in the image because I’m trying to lighten that image up, even by a couple hundred K, you know, or 50K or 10K or whatever the content of the text is. Strip that out, it makes the image smaller so it loads faster. Images are not what I’m overly concerned about with the metadata and keywords. If you’re gonna do that, you’re gonna want to put that information into the ALT tag in the description of the image, etc., and that’s what I use for that.

Not all websites do it, but the plugin that I use for smooshing images as they’re uploaded automatically strips out all the metadata, so there’s your answer there. That’s a big maybe; it depends on how your website is configured. So thanks a lot, Steve, and thanks a lot, Louis. I appreciate the questions. You know, that really adds to the show a bit. I think it gives people a few things to think about.

And of course, this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get some value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein there, I like to acknowledge those who come in $50 or more. We read out their note, give them links in the show notes for that and below $50 they remain anonymous. This week here, we’ve got no major donations, so thank you to the small donations from Patreon and other small places that we get donations. I thank you very much. Every few bucks helps and it doesn’t come to me. The money, it barely covers my expenses. It helps pay for the fantastic transcriptions we get which are currently up-to-date, so thank you very much to our transcription artist who is actually listening today, so much appreciated. And yeah, it doesn’t get to me. Eventually I imagine I might have enough support where I can make a little money on this and I could put even more time to the show than I do.

Also, I will be changing out my Patreon. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Patreon seems to be pulling shenanigans again, so I’m going to be going with SubscribeStar and hopefully the few patrons I have at Patreon might move over to SubscribeStar, so that information will be coming in by next episode.

If you’d like to support the show, please just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where you can just simply fill out the form, add your donation amount, and donate directly via PayPal to the show. So any amount is helpful; we thank you very much for it. So if you get any value out of it, it saves you some time, hey, send me a couple of bucks. You know, say thank you for helping me save some time.

Okay, and that brings me to my last plugin for today. The last one I’ve got for you here is Easy Updates Manager and this one here is one I may have covered in the past, but of course it’s become more prominent after this last week of Gutenberg, etc. – all of the fun with that. And I started using this more prominently in the last couple of weeks as I was going through my client sites, doing updates, tweaking things. I was sticking this in there and the main reason I was putting this plugin in there was to stop core updates without having to go add the code manually to every site, because this was much quicker than FTP, etc. This only took a minutes whereas FTP takes a few minutes.

So you can go in and you can turn off all types of updates on your site, manage your updates so that they happen on your schedule, not on WordPress’s schedule. Now, I turned off all updates even for point updates because there were rumors going around that even point updates were causing major updates to slip through. So I turned them all off to prevent the updates also to prevent my clients from accidentally (or a person who thinks they’re doing well) to accidentally upgrade to Gutenberg before the site is ready to do that. Because if you haven’t already done it, you should prepare your site or at least test your site in a dev environment to ensure that Gutenberg will work with your site before you go there.

So anyway, a fantastic plugin, easy to use, easily manages all of your site updates. Lots of great tools in there. Go check this out. It is the Easy Updates Manager and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

And here we are at the ClassicPress options. This is a segment that is going to start to fill out as the show moves forward and as I become more proficient using the ClassicPress. Now ClassicPress is the fork of WordPress as it stood at Version 4.9.8, so this one here is going to be a major deal as going forward, I feel. There’s been so much information about this pushed out this last week ever since Gutenberg was dropped as quickly as it was for people or people weren’t expecting it, and just the way it was handled. And the fact that Gutenberg as an editor, while it looks to be really nice for basic users, for enterprise-level, bigger businesses, and stuff, I can’t see how it’s going to be of use.

In particular, I mentioned — not last show – I think I talked about it on the weekend. I’ve got one client that if we put Gutenberg in there, it will damage the mass amount of customizations we’ve done to their website because we built an intranet on top of WordPress, so there’s a lot going on there, and these are the people that need to be able to stay away from Gutenberg. Now, you can say, “Well, they’ve got the Classic Editor. You won’t have to use Gutenberg.” Well yes, but you’ve only got the Classic Editor for a guaranteed three years. After that, they’re gonna drop support on it, and that is adamant. If you watch State of the Word, Matt is 100% sold on this, adamant that Gutenberg is going to rule the roost.

So that being said there, let’s talk about Classic Press. The biggest question that people come up with with ClassicPress is, “Will my plugins work in ClassicPress?” And from what I’m finding out, they’ve got a forum that you can check out and they’ve got a segment dedicated to plugins that people have been testing in ClassicPress, listing up all the ones that are currently working. So it looks like almost everything is going to work there – and probably will for a while. This is the big “for a while” thing to me, because as Gutenberg develops and as ClassicPress develops, they’re gonna be on two different paths. It’s like coming to a fork in the road and for a little while you’re parallel and then all of a sudden you’re in two different directions. This is what’s going to happen over the course of the next year to two years, so you’re gonna have to – for some things – you’re gonna have to choose. For me, I’ve got a follow both paths, which is gonna be quite the spread for me. I’m gonna be doubling back and forth here and there I can see.

But at the moment, very nice list of plugins all in one: WP Full Stripe, Contact Form 7, CAPTCHAs, Super Cache, WP Bakery. Other people that have made a list is WordFence, All in One, Divvy Booster, Really Simple SSL, Smoosh, Updraft – people are listing what their plugins are that are working in here, and it just keeps going. You just scroll down through the list.

What I’m going to be doing is because I have to make a change on one of my client’s site this next week is I’m going to be covering off my conversion to ClassicPress and then I’ve also got to update a couple of my sites and rebuild a site. I’m going to be covering off the rebuild of a site from scratch using Pure Gutenberg and I’m going to be covering off the conversion of my main site, JohnOverall.com, to Gutenberg to see how it goes, because this is going to be an interesting time for everyone. And while it’s going to be growing pains and, you know, the community of WordPress isn’t going to die. There’s a lot of people that have dedicated their fortunes and their futures to WordPress, so they’re not gonna abandon them overnight. It’s just people that just can’t use the platform are going to have to abandon it, and that’s the way it’s simply gonna be, and personally I think that’s gonna be upwards of 30% of the current WordPress community. So that’s what we’ve got there and that’s the component that’s coming to the show, so make sure you check it out.

Closing out this episode, I covered up the StoreApp’s Temporary Log On Without Password, which I gave a 4 to; the Entries for WP Forms, which I gave a 3 to; the Plugins Notes Plus, which I gave a 5 to; and the Easy Updates Manager, which I gave a 5 to.

A couple of reminders: if you like my thoughts on Gutenberg as it came about, go back and look to my two live shows I did over the weekend. They’re of good length. I actually watched State of the Word and did a critique on it while watching it – had some really great interactions with I believe it was Greg in there, so it was really quite nice and fun to do. And I also did another episode previous to that, talking about where I thought the community was going, so go check those out.

And the WordPress Meetup in Victoria is still happening in January. We don’t have one in December of this year, but January 22 it’ll be broadcast live on YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit the bell so you get notification of when it happens. And I just made a change on what I was going to do. I was going to do a talk on disaster planning for WordPress. This talk is going to be on Gutenberg and what it means – the implementation of Gutenberg on the editor, so what it means for the community and how people can prepare their sites, etc. I know it’s gonna be a long way off from now, but it’s still going to be quite relevant, so make sure you go check that out and be sure to subscribe to our channel. Just, you know, hit the button – there we go. Hit the button down below, subscribe, hit the bell. And if you don’t want to do that, subscribe to the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio and Google Play.

And that’s all I’ve got for you, so – oh, one last note. For developers out there who’d like to submit a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugincontest where you can submit all that information.

And that’s all I’ve got for you now, so take care. Bye-bye. I’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]

John:    And that’s all we got. There’s something I might be consider doing if I actually get some feedback from people. I may consider doing a brief after-show that would go out to the world – or to go out just on YouTube. It wouldn’t be on the podcast feed.

Take care, bye-bye.

[End of Audio]

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 #384 here.

Episode #384

John:    It’s Episode 384 and I’ve got plugins for Custom Site Registration, Custom Admin panels, Migrating Websites and Mobile Contacts. 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 I have the usual great show for you today, but of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all of the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, please take some time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to and reviewing the show. Those reviews are really great to get back. We love feedback. I do enjoy it and it’s really good for the show, especially if you leave reviews over in the iTunes store. It helps the rankings there. I’m working on other ways to improve that, but review the show if you haven’t already.

And don’t forget, subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and you can watch live every Thursday at noon Pacific Standard Time, the WP Plugins Show as I go live with it on YouTube. And if you’re not already subscribed to the channel, please subscribe to it up above right there – for those of you that are watching.

Don’t forget, you could also follow the show over at @wppluginsatoz on Twitter or wppluginsatoz for the rest of the English speaking world. Join us on Facebook, link in the show notes, to join us on the Facebook page. I’m trying to get that moving forward. And also, subscribe to the weekly newsletter that goes out. It has been improving bit by bit.

And it is the holiday season. Time for giving thanks, and the big thanks to give is yay, Black Friday is over and for those of you that know what I’m talking about, it seems every email list that I ever signed up for suddenly has sprung to life over the Black Friday weekend. I was inundated with emails for specials, sales – on and on. At any rate – and also, remember for those in need, you know, think of other vets, fellow people that are in need, it is the holiday season where everything thinks of everyone else – the one good time of the year for the human race for the most part.

That being done, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, what I’ve got here now – to start off, I’ve a couple of plugins that I have yet to use. But I thought you might want to know about them, so this is kind of a new segment. With me doing the show by myself now, I wanted to give more value to the listeners out there. One, yes, we’ve gone live every week now. Thanks, Larry.

The other is this new segment here right in the front, I’m going to have two plugins that I have yet to review but they’ve been sent in to me or I’ve discovered through my research. But I get a lot of submissions from plugin developers and I don’t always have time to test them or they’re not relevant to any of my projects, so I don’t get a chance to properly vet them. But I thought I’d bring them forth, introduce them to you all so that you know they exist, and that you might want them or go check them out. So we will have that as an ongoing thing going forward. Now keep in mind, the ratings I’m gonna give these are based on the descriptions of the plugins off their sites and also using their demo if they have it available.

So first up I have a plugin here that was sent in by Mehreen Hussain and it’s called Pie Register. And Pie Register is a WordPress registration plugin. It is a freemium plugin; you can get a free version right off their website or you could get the premium version at $39.99. This one here is for customizing registration forms. It verifies and moderates registrations, invitation codes, membership payments, two-step verification, social login, email marketing, conditional logic, and more.

It has a drag-n-drop form builder, invitation-only registrations, you can insert the registration form on your site by using shortcodes, it’s got spam protection, two-way login, and more. So this is a pretty robust plugin. The free version might be good enough for you test it out to see how it’s going to work for you. But if you find it works, go opt for the premium version. And based upon all of that, I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out. It’s called Pie Registration.

The next plugin I’ve got here for you is called Cusmin, and it was submitted to me by Goran Radosevic. Now, this one here, Cusmin – I think is how I pronounce it – Cusmin is a complete customization of your WordPress admin panel. Now, this one here is kind of different and unique. I’ve used plugins to customize and brand the admin panel so that it’s branded under my company name for my clients, etc. This one here is a total SAAS – service as a software – so it’s a complete third-party system. It’s based upon a monthly payment with it.

It’s got a really great idea. It offers up some really fantastic customizations to your WordPress plugin. But one of the things I couldn’t figure out on their site is what happens if say, your client leaves you. Now, I know we don’t ever want to admit it but yes, sometimes our clients leave us for one reason or another and they move on. Now, they go somewhere else. How do they change that back or is it permanent or does it just automatically revert back to the WordPress default admin?

Another happens is what if you decide you no longer want to pay for this service? You’re no longer getting value out of it, you know, and you dismiss it and you put it up on several clients. Does it suddenly revert back for them? What happens? So it leaves it kind of in limbo with me and I wasn’t able to quite figure all that information out, but it is something you do want to think about. Go check it out. They do have a demo site where you can log in and check out how it all works. It seems to work okay in the demo area. At any rate, Cusmin, I give this one a 3-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

All right, what else have we got here? Well, this show currently brought to you by…

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There you go. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs, especially WordPress hosting when you’re tired of all of the hosts that give you grief and never the resources you need to get your job done. Come see JohnOverall.com hosting. Limited, exclusive hosting.

Also, contest-wise, I mentioned it in the last show that the contests are a bit on hiatus right now and they will continue to be that way until probably next week as we’re sorting out what happened and occurred with last month’s contest that went nowhere. I’ve got several premium licenses to give away from several different developers. I don’t know if I’m going to do them all at once, once a week somehow, but I need to get people to respond to and enter the contests or otherwise they’re a pointless venture. So look forward to those coming up. And for information on that, you’ll be able to check out wppluginsatoz.com/contests.

Okay, next up – next plugin I have for you here today is something that I used about five or six years ago and it is a service as a software and it’s called CMS2CMS Connector. Now what this is for – this is a software system I was using about five years ago when they were relatively brand new and they hadn’t quite worked out all the bugs in their system. And what I was doing was I was migrating OS Commerce stores over to WooCommerce and we were trying to maintain and keep all of that content from an OS commerce store into a WooCommerce, because if you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember the day when OS Commerce was the ranking, leading e-commerce platform on the internet versus WooCommerce now.

So anyway, I was doing lots of transfers and it was very affordable for a reasonably sized store or small store. When you’ve got a really big store with thousands of products, it got to be a little bit costly. But if you had a store that big, you generally had the money to afford it. I had one client we had to migrate 40,000 items, and that’s when I ended up turning to these guys here because of the process.

Well, I recently had to use it again and what I used it for recently was for a site that was hosted on Google Sites. And if you’ve never used Google Sites, which of course I had never done, it is a HTML nightmare mess from what I can figure out and getting it over to WordPress is either manually copying the pages and the content one page at a time – whatever you’re going to do. It just takes way too much time. And I looked at this and I went, “Wait a minute,” tripped across this while looking for a way to migrate it and I went, “Okay, well let’s check these guys out again.”

It worked beautiful. It worked like a charm. There was a couple of glitches in the content that came over, but that was due to how the Google Sites was releasing it and not their fault. It was just one of those things but it was minor amounts of fixing versus doing all the pages over again, and it was a relatively small site so it was really quite affordable to move this site over. The process was much better than I remembered it to be and they now offer even more CMS2CMS transfers than they used to, and they go back and forth from one CMS to another, not just from something to WordPress, but they’ll go from WordPress to something else.

It’s a whole lot – these guys have really rounded out their business quite well and it works great. So anyway, a really great plugin that works. Go check it out: CMS2CMS Connector and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, listener feedback – I love listener feedback and I’ll catch it here when it shows up in the stream too for those that show up in the stream and stick around. And to get back to you Larry, yeah, it was the first Thursday in every month up until about two weeks ago when I started going live every Thursday. Yeah, new sounds, too. I had to change out a whole lot of things, so it is now live every Thursday at noon. It fit into my schedule, which is the reason why I lost Marcus from the show due to the way my life changed several months ago – a couple of months ago when my father passed away. It changed a lot of things. So yeah, thank you. Glad you like the new sounds and the new dragon. I like him too better – much better.

Also, a little bit of other feedback for the show this week. We do have an iTunes review – a really great one to counter the previous review that was read out a couple of shows ago. And it comes from EasySchoolRegistration in the Czech Republic and its title is “Just Awesome” a five-star review and it says:

Thanks for the awesome work you are doing. I love interviews with plugin developers, so thank you very much from EasySchoolRegistration. Much appreciated.

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

And this week’s donors – well, I just want to say thank you to all of those who have small, weekly subscriptions and monthly subscriptions that support the show. If you’d like to give a small subscription to support the show, you can do it via PayPal directly off of our website at wppluginsatoz.com/donate or you can do it through Patreon. So thank you very much to those who support the show. And those donations do not actually make it to my pocket; they never have, at least not so far. They actually go to cover all the base expenses of transcripts and hosting, etc. for the show.

Okay, and finally the last plugin I’ve got for you here today. This one is to help you with your mobile. It’s called Mobile Call Now & Map Buttons. Now, I’m in the middle of a project now and one of the most important things for this client is for their mobile. People will want to call them or they will want to have directions to their place of business – two big things. Now, there’s multiple ways you can do this. Some themes have it built-in to automatically produce these buttons. The theme I’m working with doesn’t have it and I went to search for an older plugin that I used to use for this and came across this one as a new plugin, and it turns out it’s one of my favorite types of plugins. It’s simple, easy to use.

What it does is it simply adds two buttons to the bottom of your mobile version and it adds a Call Now button where if they click that, their phone will come up and say, “Would you like to call this number?” They say “Yes” and they call it. The map button or directions button (depending on what you want to label it), click that, it automatically opens up Google Maps and gives them the directions to the place. It shows it on the map.

Really nice – you don’t have to go through the API issues with Google to set this up. All you have to do is enter the address in it and it makes a normal map call into a search engine and brings it up, so you don’t have that headache. It’s very easy to set up. The colors of the buttons are easily changed right there in the backend to match your theme or make them stand out better, depending on what you need to do. It’s easy to adjust the mobile screen sizes. They have a preset selector where you can select what size you want it to show. Do you want it to show up on tablets? Make sure it’s clicked. Or do you want it to show only on smaller smartphones? Whatever – you just choose which one you want and it’s done.

A very sweet plugin, very straightforward. I really like the way this one’s set up. Go check it out: Mobile Call Now & Directions Plugin and I give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Yeah, you’d think I’d hunt down 5-Dragons just to use the new dragon. All right, well that closes out on this episode here. The plugins I covered was Cusmin, which I gave a 3 to; Pie Register, which I gave a 4 to; the CMS2CMS Connector, which I have a 5 to; and the Mobile Call Now & Map Buttons, which I gave a 5 to.

And before I hit the reminders, I just want to reiterate to folks out there about where the show is right now and what’s happening. The show is going to continue forward. It’s going to be just me in the seat for a while. I’m still doing interviews with developers which appear as a separate show that gets downloaded. I’m looking at a way to make that go up as a livestream, because there’s a plugin I’ve discovered that you can upload stuff to your site and then hit a button and it will automatically livestream it to YouTube at a later time. Kind of an interesting thing; one that I’m going to work with and play with a bit. Other than that, they’ll just be in the iTunes or on the mp3 download area or the podcast area of the website – downloadable – and it will appear in the iTunes stream or whatever subscription you have.

And yeah, just me for a while, so thank you everyone for coming in and tuning in to the show. I really enjoy doing it and I’m enjoying the way it’s changing and moving forward. And as I’ve gotten some new equipment, this is actually a new microphone today. Hopefully the new microphone has improved the sound tremendously along with learning a little bit better how to use my mixer and the controls of all the new software, so that’s it.

A couple of quick reminders…meetups – WordPress Meetups – I do those here in Victoria about every month. There’s no meetup for December but the next one is on January 22 and you can go to meetup.com to see when it will be. If you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come out to the meetup. I’d love to see you there. If not, we do broadcast it live to YouTube, so make sure you’re subscribed to the channel and click the bell for notifications so you’ll get a notification when we’re going live. That way, you can check out the meetup. That one’s getting better too as I figure out the way to do the recordings on it for best viewing on it. The last one turned out not too bad, so next time, even better. Every time I do this, I get better.

Be sure to check out the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A to Z with other training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show every week.

And a final note to developers, if you would like to support the show, offer up premium licenses to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to donate a license that we will use in a future contest. And also if you’d like to, register and enter to book an interview. Just go to Book an Interview on WP Plugins and you can book an interview with me. I have specific time slots set up during the week that are available. You can find one that’ll fit your schedule and there we go. I allocate specific time just for that.

Finally, check out and subscribe to our newsletter, so thank you very much and thanks, Larry. I appreciate that – and better pics. Yeah, well I’m working on those. It’s little by little. That’s all we got for you now. I’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 notifications 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:    Take care now, bye.

[End of Audio]