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

Transcript of Episode 406 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 #309 here.


It’s Episode 406 and I’ve got plugins for Time Tracking, Stock Tracking, Gamifying Your Website, and Auto Linking for Classic Press, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #406

John:    It’s Episode 406 and I’ve got plugins for Time Tracking, Stock Tracking, Gamifying Your Website, and Auto Linking for Classic Press, 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 couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving me reviews. They eventually do make it into the show.

Remember though, you can also watch live every Thursday at noon here on YouTube, where you can subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and the extra shows that do appear, and we do have a few coming up in the following month. Please follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can also join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, drop in to the website, subscribe to the newsletter. You get a whole lot of additional information there and my marketing manager, she’s such a sweetheart. She puts so much additional information into there that you will really enjoy the newsletter, so be sure to subscribe for that.

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

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

Okay, well first up I have for you a great plugin today. For a while there, I have been doing a couple of plugins at this part here, where people – developers and others – have been sending plugins in to me, submissions, to be reviewed, and that pot is finally working it down to where I’m going to drop it back to just one a week for a while until it gets too big.

So this week here, the one I have for you, it was sent in by Craig Schmidt from jumpstartdev.net and it’s called GraviTsheets, and this is an interesting plugin. It’s new and it’s just getting launched out there to the world, so I’m going to tell you a bit about it. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to use it myself, because what it does for you is it connects up Gravity Forms and Tsheets. Tsheets is a time tracking software, a third-party software system, and I already have my own time tracking.

But for many people, Tsheets is something that they use for setting up their shifts, employee shifts, or if they’ve got multiple employees that go to different places for clients, to book in client jobs, etc. And some people use Gravity Forms in their website as a way for people to book these spots, and what happened is they had to go through and they had to transfer the data from Gravity Forms into Tsheets and things will get lost or misplaced or put into the wrong times and other items like that, and then follow-up became a problem. You know, following up to make sure the client was happy, the work was done, etc.

What these guys have done is they’ve created a connector between Gravity Forms and Tsheets so that you take your Gravity Forms items, you fill out the info, it’s automatically submitted to Tsheets, it creates the shift for you. It also creates follow-up items in your Tsheets for you to follow up with your client. This looks like it’s gonna be quite the fantastic plugin and it looks like it’s going to really help those out there that use these two different items, and they’ve been partnering with some other folks. They’ve given me a call and talked to me on a few things, and I’m sure more information will come out about this as it gets moving forward.

There’s a good writeup in the show notes of what they submitted to me, so you might want to go check that out. But all in all, this is looking like quite an interesting and fantastic plugin. And currently, based on everything I know about it, I’m gonna give GraviTsheets a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Okay, and this show currently brought to you by…

Are you tired of the same old web hosting? Not having the resources you need to run your website properly? Having a lack of control? Then you need JohnOverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, JohnOverall.com provides high-quality, fast server performance. Visit JohnOverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.

            All right. Yes, hosting that won’t slow you down – come visit JohnOverall.com. Yeah, finally. A new commercial! Can you believe it? After – I don’t even know how many episodes.    Okay, and if you’d like to replace that commercial with yours, please feel free to get a hold of me.

Contests – we currently do not have a contest. We are still reaching out to developers to see if one wants to get a contest up and running. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, which is a fantastic plugin. So make sure you stay tuned to the show, the newsletter, and the website for information on contests. As we get them, we will get them announced up again. And you can check that out by going to wppluginsatoz.com/contests.

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Stock Market Ticker, and this one here is a plugin that allows you to get in there and track stocks. Tracking stocks can be an interesting and sometimes even profitable pastime. You can sign up in a myriad of places to keep track of all your stocks and other stuff. But if you want simplicity, if you want to you can simply add this plugin to your website and choose your favorite stocks to track.

Kind of a nice plugin. It’s very simple to set up. It can be used as a widget or a shortcode on the page. You do need to create an account over at financestockdio.com and get an API key, but it is a free account and it sets up really quickly and easily. It allows you to go in and just set up a ticker tracking stocks and they have a multitude of ways to set it up in there, numerous backgrounds and adjustments you can have. You can have charts and all kinds of interesting stuff.

This is something that I’ve been looking for for a while, based upon a hobby – not even a hobby – nice investment stuff I started a few years ago and I’ve been wanting to do something with it, so this will start to appear on one of my pet project sites that never gets to see the light of day. At any rate, it’s a really cool plugin, Stock Market Ticker, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Okay, and this show here, we do like – I do like listener feedback, audio clips, anything like that. So if you would like to be featured in the show, make sure you drop in at the website there, lower right-hand corner, use the SpeakPipe to leave me an audio message. I’ll play it on the show, answer your questions to the best of my ability, even do a lot of research for you. It’s a great way to get free research from an expert.

You can also hit me up on my Contact page or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter, and I will do the best I can to answer it. And if you’ve got suggestions for plugins, feel free to make those, too. I’m always looking for interesting plugins to review and talk about on the show.

This show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And for those of you out there, all the producers that help make this show happen, please – you know, if you get any value out of it, if it’s worth five bucks of your time, please donate $5 back to it – something to help out. Any donations $50 or more, they get a note read out in the show and anything below $50 remains anonymous, so thank you very much to those that have donated. The Patreon donors, thank you very much. Your Patreon donations have come through this month, I really appreciate them, and for all the other small, weekly donations that help out, so thank you very much for that.

The donations never make it to my pocket – not yet, anyway. They basically help cover the costs of the server, the transcripts, and other miscellaneous things that happen here on this show. And if you would like to donate, please just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Put the amount you’d like to donate into the form and simply go straight to PayPal and donate to the show.

There’s other ways you can donate and support the show too, and some time this week I expect to complete it, maybe early next week actually, because I keep forgetting this week’s almost over. And that is if you want to contribute artwork to the show – you know, the artwork that shows up in the podcast feed, the podcast apps that play this show, the artwork that shows up on the website. If you’ve noticed, the artwork has started to change and has started to take on something a little more dynamic, look a little better than it used to, and this is something that I’m trying to improve dramatically.

But I’m not an artist, so I can only do so much. But if you want to submit artwork to me, I’m more than happy to take it, and there will be a way on the website to submit the artwork, so something you might want to consider. All right, so thank you very much to all those that support the show.

All right, the final – not the final – the next plugin I’ve got up here, because we’ve got one more after this. The next plugin I’ve got up here is called GamiPress, and this is an interesting plugin. This is something that I’ve been looking into more and more and seeing how I can use that for the WP Plugins site, and it’s gamifying your website. This is a big step from what I hear in many marketers and other podcasts such as No Agenda and a couple of others I listen to that have gamified their show.

What they mean by that is while you get your audience involved in the show by offering up rewards for when they donate. They’ve got donation level rewards; they get badges or titles or other things. It’s basically just acknowledging them in the community for their contributions and how they support the show. And as that happens, you get more and more people that are willing to donate. It’s an interesting thing, and this is a plugin that helps you build out that gamification of your website.

It allows you to create a points/achievements/ranks format in here, so when people contribute with comments or posts or donations, they get recognized points. And one of the things they’ve got in here is they’ve integrated this plugin with multiple other WordPress plugins such as LearnDash, LifterLMS, WPEP, WP Courseware, Gravity Forms, Caldera Forms, WP Forms, Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce – so all of these other major plugins, when someone does an action in one of those, their points are collected in this plugin and it puts them forward in it.

All in all, this is a very interesting plugin. It also has third-party addons. They’ve also got additional addons for it to make it work and expand it, so it’s one that I’m starting to slowly work with. At the moment, a fantastic plugin. You know, being a freemium version of a plugin, we give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out: GamiPress, a way to gamify your WordPress website.

All right, and finally we have ClassicPress Options. This is eventually going to expand out, I’m sure. Since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention. This is a hard fork of WordPress, and it’s focused on the business website world and it’s been looking pretty good. We’re into May and they’ve started to gain a lot of attention. They’re starting to grow a little bit. They’ve released their official Version 1.0 of the plugin, which is quite stable. I’ve used it to build out a couple of websites. I’m currently building out another new website on it, which I’m trying as hard as I can to stick with pure ClassicPress plugins to see how I can deal with it.

Currently, unfortunately, there’s a limit on the number of ClassicPress-specific plugins, and I am looking forward to when the ClassicPress world, with the expansion of the number of ClassicPress-specific plugins and their own repository. Currently, there aren’t a whole lot of ClassicPress-specific plugins, but I do know it’s going to grow, and I will eventually have to expand this segment. Who knows? It could even take over the whole show.

At any rate, this week’s ClassicPress plugin that I’ve checked out – it comes from AzureCurve and it’s called Conditional Links. This one here is kind of interesting to me as I was reading it, and I’m building out a new website. The reason it captured my interest is I’m rebuilding, I should say, up a website from scratch. Something from – I should give the years – many years past when I published an Arts and Entertainment magazine, I had a columnist who did a dream analysis and advice column in there. I’m rebuilding the website up in ClassicPress and I’m looking to keep it as much in ClassicPress as possible.

What this plugin does for you is it can help with my internal linking as I’m bring in older content and new content in that with a simple shortcode, this will allow you to automatically add links. It will automatically add links based upon a slug or a title, and if the slug or title doesn’t exist, it just returns plain text. So it’s a really interesting way, because I know that there’s words that are used that relate to other columns or items that’ll be similar and it will allow for internal link building, and this is something you could do after you’ve got a website. You can just go back and add things. But I’m trying to do things going forward so I won’t have to double-back on it.

All in all, it’s looking to be a fantastic plugin and it’s something you might want to check out if you’re looking at ClassicPress and you’re working in the ClassicPress world, go check this plugin out from AzureCurve, and it’s called Conditional Links. Currently, I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, and as a side note, if you want to find a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins, there’s a link in the show notes which takes you to their current list of the plugins.

All right, well that wraps up the show for today. I covered up in this episode GraviTsheets, which I gave a 4 to; Stock Market Ticker, which I gave a 4 to; GamiPress, which I gave a 4 to; and Conditional Links, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of reminders, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be May 21st and will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. And for location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. Initially, I was gonna be presenting but I’ve managed to find someone to take over presenting for me. The topic is going to be the same; we’re going to have Shawn DeWolfe. He is going to be presenting and he’s going to be talking about WordPress maintenance and management and the best things you can do for maintaining and managing your WordPress website, so make sure you tune in for that, check it out. Or if you’re in Victoria, please come down to the Meetup. It’s only $5. It helps cover the cost of the room. I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit on those, either, but that’s my thing as I’ve tried to give back to the community wherever I can.

And be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for more information, little bits and pieces. And if you have suggestions on a plugin you would like to have reviewed, please submit them on the website at wppluginatoz.com/submit and I’ll get them into the show as soon as I can.

And a final note to developers out there who have premium plugins and if you would like to support the show, please donate a premium plugin license we can use in a future contest. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to submit all of the information and I will create a contest around there. Your only cost is that license, which, well pretty much is a minimal cost to you, because it’s just you giving away the one license and maybe some support for that license for a year. So go check it out. It’s a great way to get a lot of promotion from the show.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you today, so I’m going to let my girl take us on 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 405 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 #405 here.


It’s Episode 405 and I’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Shipping, Restaurant Reservations, WooCommerce Discounts, Crossword Puzzles, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #405

John:    It’s Episode 405 and I’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Shipping, Restaurant Reservations, WooCommerce Discounts, Crossword Puzzles, 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, 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 there. They really do help the show out. And also, watch me live every Thursday here on YouTube, where you can also subscribe to and check out our training videos, screencasts, and all the extra shows that do show up from time to time.

You could also follow the show over at Twitter, @wppluginsatoz, and you can join me on my Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook and connect with me there. Take a couple of minutes also and subscribe to the newsletter where you can get additional information. The newsletter is sent out every Friday afternoon.

So with all that being said, it is time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

And I have a great set of plugins today and to start off, I am still going through my list here, although it’s starting to thin out and I’ll probably have to start dropping it down to one for a little while, or maybe even have to eliminate this until I get another backlog of plugins from developers.

The first couple are plugins that have been sent in to me by developers and listeners over the last while and they accumulated, mainly because I couldn’t get to them, I had no use for them in any projects, and no time to just test out plugins. I still thought it might be useful for you to know that these plugins exist.

So first off here, I’ve got one that was sent in by Kuldip Patel and it’s called Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce. And what this plugin here is for, it’s a free plugin – freemium plugin, I think. But what it does is it allows you to set up some advanced shipping tracking notifications in your WooCommerce store. It provides your customers with an easy way to track their orders, shop managers can add shipment provider tracking number and date of orders, the customer will receive the info and when their order is completed and shipped, the plugin provides more than shipping providers and you can add your own custom providers to it.

It looks like a pretty decent plugin. If you’re running a WooCommerce store and you’re shipping out, this might be something for you to look into to make it easier and more transparent for your shipping processes to your clients and users, so go check this plugin out. It’s got a free version right off the WordPress.org site and it’s called Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

The next one I have for you was sent in by Ivan Zambouka and it’s called Table Reservation, and this is a freemium plugin – they do have a premium version – and this looks like a really great plugin. If you’re running a website or you’re building a website for a small restaurant/café and you offer up table reservations in the restaurant, instead of going with one of those premium services and they already have their own website, they can set it up on their website here where people can book and reserve seats right on their website.

It’s a pretty nice-looking plugin. They’ve got an essential version which comes with the free version, where you’ve got some scheduling settings, opening hours, closing hours, custom email notifications, you can put a picture on, using mapping, you select which tables are available for reservations, then they click on that table, set their reservation times that are available in your store hours. They can add and edit bookings from the admin panel. You can check the correctness of user input data. Supposedly, it’s GDPR-compliant, which is really great for those of you in the EU.

So it looks like a pretty nice, simple, straightforward plugin if you have a small restaurant business that allows for table reservations and you don’t want to pay a fee off to one of those table booking services like OpenTable or whatever all those other services are. Go check this one out, recommend it to your client. They could save themselves a little bit of money over time. Most small businesses need to save as much money as they can, and it runs right off their WordPress website which you’ve already built. So go check this one out. It’s called Table Reservation and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, 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, and if you’re looking for WordPress web hosting that won’t slow you down, go check out JohnOverall.com, with a strict limit on the number of clients I put per server, they are fast, secure servers.

All right, and currently we don’t have any contests running, so we’re still in the process of negotiating with some developers for licenses to give away. But all our contests are powered by Simple Giveaways plugin who kindly provided us with the premium version for our contests. Go check them out; there’s a link in the show notes for it. For more information on our contests, just go check out wppluginsatoz.com/contests, where the next contest will be announced. Of course it’ll be announced on the show, but chances are it’ll start before the show version happens.

All right, next up I’ve got for you another WooCommerce plugin. This one here is called WooCommerce All Discounts and it is a freemium plugin, but the free version is pretty decent if you’re setting up a simple, basic WooCommerce website. I recently had to use this on a WooCommerce site I was setting up for a small client and what he wanted to do was offer discounts on bulk purchases and, of course – surprise, surprise – that’s not built into WooCommerce. You’d think that would be a built-in thing, but no. You’ve got to add something for it.

This one here is pretty straightforward and simple. It allows you to get in there and set up multiple types of bulk purchases. You may be looking for bulk purchases where they’re gonna have multiple purchases of the same products, they get a discount. The total order of the thing, they get a discount. If they’re ordering from specific categories, they get a discount. If they’re ordering specific variations, a discount. Well, that’s what this plugin does for you in its base setup.

It does have some advance setups in it that allow you to setup even more items, such as they can buy a product from one category and get a 15% discount. They can buy two products, buy one/get one free – there’s a whole lot more in the premium version, but of course I didn’t need that for the particular site I was setting up.

All in all, a pretty decent plugin to add into WooCommerce to set up and allow for discounts on your products in there. Go check it out. It’s called WooCommerce All Discounts, premium plugin, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Listener feedback! I do love listener feedback and I greatly appreciate those that take the time out to go make reviews in iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play store – Stitcher Radio, Google Play, it takes me a little longer to find those ones. But iTunes, I have a monitor which comes in for me, so I might get them a little late, but I always get them.

This week here, I would like to thank Bryce Giesler who gave us 5-star rating from the US, and his rating goes:

Title: Plenty o’ Plugins

And what he had to say: I’ve been following this podcast for several months. Though I only support one website I have found several plugins that added features or helped me process things better. Good Job!

Well, thank you very much, Bryce. I really appreciate you taking the time out to add that review. And I’d really appreciate anyone else who hasn’t added a review to the iTunes Store, please go do that. That really helps the show increase in its rankings in iTunes – at least that’s what they tell me. I can’t – nobody can verify, but it seems to be shows that get lots of ratings rank well in iTunes.

All right, and this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it at all – I mean any value – if it saves you five bucks, please donate $5. The money doesn’t make it to my pocket. I just don’t have that many people donating yet. All it ever does is help offset the costs that I put out to pay for transcripts, the server bandwidth space, me taking the time out of my working schedule to produce the show, etc. It never actually makes it into my pocket, but it is much appreciated and it’s really great that people can show their appreciation by donating something to the show.

All you’ve got to do to do that is go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Choose the amount you want to donate, it takes you to PayPal, donate that amount, and away we go. Also, another way you can help support the show is aside from monetary donations, I am working through the process of figuring out a decent way for people to submit artwork. I’m looking for additional artwork. I’m looking for – what is iTunes now? – a 2400 x 2400 image. I want to have a different artwork.

I’ve started several episodes back and I started changing the artwork for every show to just make it that much more interesting for the show, and it takes me time to create those. While I’m kind of limited, I’m not overly artsy – I’m okay at it, but really, if someone out there wants to create me something, I’ll be happy to supply you with a copy of the logo in a .png format that you can use. All you gotta do is place that on there somewhere and I’ll give you credit and shout-outs here on the show, so lots of kudos for it.

All right, next up I have here a plugin called WHA Crossword. Now, if you are running a newspaper type of website, this is a perfect little item for you. You know, I’ve had it asked me many years ago when I was helping someone with a newspaper website, they wanted a crossword plugin for their website. Well, they didn’t really exist and there were crossword websites out there that you could put crossword puzzles up there, but there was no real way to create something that was dynamic and interactive onto your WordPress website.

Well, I’ve discovered one. This is a relatively new plugin. As far as I can tell, it’s only a few months old and this popped up when I was searching for something else in the WordPress Repository. It’s amazing; you type in one keyword and you get some random plugins sometimes. At any rate, it looked kind of cool, so I thought I’d check it out, and it is actually rather cool. It’s completely blank when you start. You go in, you set it up. You pick the words you want and you start with your first word and then you make words and make sure that your additional words use at least one letter from the other words that you’ve got in there, and you create a clue for the word – a clue for the word and then you set up the colors you want on it.

They do have a premium version which allows you to modify it even further. But once it’s set up, you just pop a shortcode onto your page and poof, it creates an instant crossword onto your website for you. Really nice – it sets up, people fill out the crossword online. It tells them if they got the word right instantly; it tells them if they got it wrong instantly, so it highlights it in either green or red or any color you choose.

It’s just kind of a fun way to help keep people more interactive on your website, so come check this one out: WHA Crossword Puzzle. Even though it has a bit of a freemium version and I usually don’t give freemium plugins a 5, this was just so cool and set up so easily and actually works so well. I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

WHA Crossword.

All right, ClassicPress Options – and of course since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPraise – Classic Praise? We’ll call it ClassicPraise – I love my tripping. ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention, and it is moving along quite nicely, and I have just started on to my first buildout of a pure ClassicPress website. So I’ve started it from the beginning, bring it down, and installing ClassicPress.

And of course this week’s plugin that I’m using for it is once I’ve started moving forward is I’m starting from the first few plugins I use and see how they work. This week’s plugin is Elementor for ClassicPress, and of course Elementor is a plugin but it’s also a theme. It’s a page builder but I wanted to see how it would work on a pure ClassicPress site, not something I converted but something I started from scratch.

Well, it installs excellently, and it sets up with no problem. So far, I’ve started building out just the front page of this site and it’s functioning just the way it should. And of course, Elementor – a fantastic plugin. I’ve started building websites from it. What I’m using for the theme for the Elementor plugin I’m using is one that was supplied to me by Jezweb at Jezweb.com.au, and I’m sure you’ve heard that name many times. He’s a great supporter of the show and he took the Hello theme and has customized it up for a much cleaner look.

I’ve left links to his Github repository for the theme if you want to go check it out, and it’s a really nice theme. I like the way it’s cleaned up the dashboard area and made it a little more usable. It’s a little confusing at first but once you get used to it, it’s fantastic. At any rate, Elementor, a fantastic plugin, and of course I’m using the pro version myself because I’m building out multiple sites on it. Go check it out. It works excellent in ClassicPress and of course it gets a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, and a little side note about that. I did mention that I was building out my first ClassicPress website and one of the things I noticed on the install of the ClassicPress site is that it is much cleaner on its install. It has a minimal amount of junk on its install and I realized a couple of things that in there are kind of needed for new users, such as the default post, the default page, a couple of other little, miscellaneous things. But I’ve been using a plugin called Tasks After Install for a long time when I install a WordPress site from scratch. You go in and install this plugin. It removes all the junk plugins, all the junk themes – everything from the site that is all junk and leaves you just a pure, bare bones installation.

Well, what this plugin does to a ClassicPress site is it removes all the themes – the ones even specifically set for ClassicPress. It’s probably because it doesn’t recognize them as ClassicPress and they belong with the site, so it removes it all down and all you have left after you install using this Tasks After Install is the base necessity for running your dashboard area. You have nothing for frontend, so you have to go in and instantly install a theme if you want a frontend. I found it kind of interesting; it’s actually kind of a little cleaner to me for a fresh start, but all set up and well, so go check that one out.

Well, that wraps up everything here and a quick note. If you’re looking for a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins, there’s a link in the show notes that’ll take you to the ClassicPress forum where they have a really nice listing of plugins. Right now, the list is kind of short but I’m sure it will grow more over time.

And that wraps it up for this show here, where I covered up Advanced Shipment for WooCommerce, which I gave a 3 to; Table Reservations, which I gave a 3 to; WooCommerce All Discounts, which I gave a 4 to; the WHA Crossword, which I gave a 5 to; and Elementor for ClassicPress, which I gave a 5 to.

And a couple of quick reminders… the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on May 21st and it will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel, so make sure you go check it out. It’s at 6:30 p.m. For location and more information, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. It’ll take you directly to the Meetup here and the next presentation is going to be done by me and I’m going to be talking about maintenance and monitoring of your WordPress website to prevent issues.

You know, all the things you’ll want to do, plugins you’ll want to set up onto your site for monitoring your site, and this is especially useful if you’re like me and not into your websites every single day because you’ve got client work and other things interfere. You’ll want notifications if something is going wrong. So this is the stuff I’m going to be talking about. It’s going to be an interesting presentation. If you live in the Victoria area, please come down to the presentation and the Meetup, say hi to me, tell me you listen to the show. I’d be greatly appreciative. If not, well, watch us live on YouTube.

Don’t forget, subscribe to the YouTube channel for notifications of when the weekly show happens and notifications when I put up new videos. And if you have suggestions about plugins you would like to have reviewed, please submit them to the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit and it’ll take you to the page where you can submit a plugin. You don’t have to be the developer to suggest a plugin to me. I’m always open to plugins for reviews.

And a final note to developers, if you would like to support the show and you have a premium plugin and you would like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to set up all the information and donate to the show. I greatly appreciate it.

And before I head out, don’t forget after all the rolling credits I do stick around for a couple of minutes to chat with people if they want to. All right, so 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 404 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 #404 here.


It’s Episode 404 and I’ve got plugins for Buddy Press Messaging, Comment Tagging, Cleaning up WordPress, WordPress Honey Pot, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #404

John:    It’s Episode 404 and I’ve got plugins for Buddy Press Messaging, Comment Tagging, Cleaning up WordPress, WordPress Honey Pot, 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 right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And make sure you subscribe and review the show over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. Those subscriptions and reviews really help the show out.

You can also watch live every Thursday at noon. Subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and extra shows here on the YouTube channel. If you watch it on YouTube, make sure you get down below there, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you don’t miss anything new that pops up.

Follow the show over at wppluginsatoz.com. Join us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz, wppluginsatoz.com/facebook, and take a moment out and subscribe to the newsletter. It would be greatly appreciated. You get lots of additional information that doesn’t show up in the show.

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

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, and I have the usual great set of plugins for you today. But starting off, I have a couple of plugins I have yet to use. You might want to know about they exist. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers – have been – I’ve collected this list for quite some time now, so I’ve got a pretty big backlog to go through. New ones will get put into the queue and shown too, but they’re sent in, they’re asking me to review them, and I have yet to find a way to either take the time to review the plugin or to incorporate it in a project I’m working on. But they seem interesting enough that I thought you might want to know about them.

The first one I’ve got here was sent in by Andrij Tkachenko and it’s called – it’s a freemium plugin and it’s called Better WP Management. Oops, wrong one. BP Better Messaging – sorry. I’m reading the wrong line here. This is called BP Better Messaging. This is a freemium plugin. It has a WebSocket version which it plays better I understand than the regular version. What it is is if you use BuddyPress, this is a plugin you might want to look at. It helps your BuddyPress community be able to communicate with each other via the BuddyPress Messenger. It’s a very interesting plugin. It uses AJAX or WebSocket powered real-time conversations. It’s got an email notification, full concept, files uploading, embedding links, messaging sound notification – a whole lot more. You could have private conversations, multiple user conversations. This is a way to have messaging work in your BuddyPress setup if you have it. I myself haven’t used BuddyPress for several years now. I built one website on it and I just couldn’t make it work very well, so I abandoned it and moved on to something else.

Anyway, it does look kind of interesting. Go check it out. It’s called BP Better Messaging and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, and next up I’ve got for you here another plugin sent in by Ankur Vishwakarma – I’m getting better at names, I swear to God, folks. It’s called WP Tag You. This plugin allows logged-in users to tag other registered users of a blog while commenting on a post and contains the following features. It detects post comments, bots, autosuggest users while typing, you can tag more than one user in a single post. Each tagged in user will get email notifications, the email body contains a comment link where they can go check it out.

All in all, it looks like an interesting kind of plugin. It does seem to have the limitation of logged-in users on a site, so this seems like it would be something useful in a community website where people have to log in to get to the comments and other stuff. If it’s just an open forum, I don’t know how well it would work, but it does sound kind of an interesting thing to go look at. Anyway, go check it out. It might be for you. It’s called WP Tag You and I give it a 3-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, and especially if you’re looking for good quality WordPress hosting that doesn’t slow you down. Come visit JohnOverall.com for that.

Also, contests. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, a very excellent plugin. They were kind enough to provide us with the premium version for all our contests. Currently, we do not have a contest, but we are working on getting one set up, and as soon as it is ready, it will be notified out either via the newsletter, the website, or at – well, definitely here on the show. But we will get it out there as soon as we have it set up. Sometimes we get a lull between contests. We’ve had several running for the last six months and we’re just kind of stuck. All right, so make sure you go check it out at the website at wppluginsatoz.com/contests, where you can find out all the information about the contests.

All right, next up the plugin I’ve got here for you is called Remove Norefer from Post Links on the Frontend, and this is a bit of a cleanup plugin for WordPress. Now recently, WordPress has implemented a change in the links – the embedded links in your website in that if you have a link and you’re like me, I set a lot of links to open up in a new page. They added in two items to it. They added in relative noopener and relative norefer, and while relative noopener is a really great thing to have in your site, what it does is it helps create some security because of the noopener. When it opens up in a new window, a new website could take over the previous one, thereby creating problems, creating a security hole, or a breach of some sort. So it sort of stops that issue.

But they added also norefer, and the problem with norefer is that – and this is something you may want to put on a link if you’re going to put links into your website – is that when it has norefer on it, when that link is counted by say the Google Analytics on the other website, it’ll be counted as a direct link, as if somebody typed in their domain, not counted as if it came from your website, which you may or may not want to occur. Having it automatic and not having a choice in the matter is something that you might want to take control of.

This plugin is very simple. It goes in there once you activate it, it removes the norefer item from the WordPress code so that it’s not automatically applied to your links. That way, if you’re giving links out to somebody and you want their website to know that the link came from you, you’ll want to have the norefer in there. Now, this doesn’t occur if you open links in the same window. It only occurs if you set links to open in a new window, which is something I do quite regularly because – I don’t know – something I learned years ago, I hear it’s not so good, but it’s mixed on what people say about it. I’m gonna keep doing it because I like it. I prefer that websites open links in a new window.

Anyway, go check this plugin out. It’s called Remove Norefer from Post Links in the Frontend, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. And also, one quick note on this, there’s a really great article in the show notes. There’s a link in the show notes to give a full description about what it does and how important that is to your analytics or to the site you’re referring to their analytics, so go check that out.

Okay, and listener feedback and questions and etc. We do like – I do like listener feedback. I love when the show gets attention. We had a lot last week. Nothing this week but hey, it comes and goes. If you do have questions or feedback for me, feel free to contact me on the Contact page at WP Plugins A to Z. You can also hit the SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner, record a voice message that I will then play on the show – anything also that line. You can also send an email direct to john@wppro.ca. That will also get to me. So feel free to get a hold of me in any way you can.

This show is also a value-for-value model, meaning it is supported by you, the listeners, and I really appreciate your support, folks. It really helps me out. All the donations $50 and over, you can get a note read out in the show with links back to whatever you put into the note, provided it’s within the realms of legitimacy. And for those below $50, I thank you very much. We had a few donations last week. I’d like to thank you very much for the donations that came in. They really help support the show by helping pay for things such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. So a big thank you to all those who came below $50.

Now, you can also give value back in other ways. WP Plugins needs other things besides cash. One of the things folks may have noticed is the artwork has been changing. I’ve been working on upgrading and doing the artwork myself. I don’t always do a great job, but it’s definitely different than it used to be, and it’s a lot cleaner. But if anyone wants to start donating artwork for me, I need a 2500 x 2500 image that I can then size down, because I use it in multiple places, and you can email it to me. I will be setting something up on the website so people can just donate the artwork there if they’d like. So if it’s something that you’re interested in, I’m always interested in that.

Now, the cover art that’ll be displayed on each show in the headers, it’s also displayed in the iTunes Store. And if you get my show through apps, you’ll notice the artwork has been changing in there on a regular basis lately. So it’s something I’ve recently started and finally figured out how to do. So you can support the show there.

And I do have a couple of comments here. So giftedones1981, oh, it sounded like the beginning of Do Not Forsake Me, My Darling. Yeah, it might’ve been. It was a cool little ditty that’s at the beginning of the show. And Hemdian, “Good show again, thanks.” Thanks for your comment. I greatly appreciate it.

Okay, and you can support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show.

Okay, and next up I have here a plugin that I had mentioned briefly when about two episodes back. It looks like someone finally took to heart my hopes that there was a WordPress version of the Honeypot plugin for ClassicPress that I covered in Episode 402. This is a new plugin and it’s called Honeypot WooCommerce WordPress Anti-spam – a little bit of a mouthful. It doesn’t quite cover everything it does, but it does cover its main points. It looks to be similar to the Honey Pot plugin that was covered in Episode 402 for ClassicPress.

All you do is turn it on and activate it. It activates a honey pot antibot in the following sections of your site: WooCommerce login, WooCommerce registration, comments box, WordPress registration, and the WordPress login form, and this may stop you getting all of those random registrations. Like I’ve had websites that have gotten, you know, 50 or 100 spam registrations in a day and we had to shut off the registration for the site for a while. So it’s something that I’m looking forward to seeing how well it keeps stuff out.

A really great plugin, very simple and easy to use. Just install it and activate it and away you go, and I love little freebies like this – and it is brand-new. It’s got less than 10 installs as of this show, so make sure you go check this plugin out, folks. And I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Honeypot WooCommerce WordPress Antispam.

And ClassicPress Options, and of course everyone knows since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention and they’re gaining even more attention. I see them getting more and more attention and who knows? I may have to segue off into an extra show just for ClassicPress, because I think it’s going to grow up to be quite big. I really do. And more and more people pick it up, more and more plugins start to join them, more developers start to join them, especially with some of the WordPress drama I’ve seen this week of people making it hard for plugin developers to create plugins. WordPress seems to be never-ending going down a bad path right now.

At any rate, this week’s ClassicPress plugin is called Add Twitter Cards by Azurecurve… and I lost the link for it. Huh, bad me. I’ll have to get the link into the show notes. Anyway, Add Twitter Cards by Azurecurve, this is is a plugin you will want on your ClassicPress site so that when your visitors are sharing your posts on Twitter, it adds the proper Twitter card. Add Twitter cards to attach rich photos to tweets, helping to drive traffic to your website.

The options it has set up for it is card types of summary or summary with images, excerpt or first 200 characters about posts added to the card, thumbnail or first post image will be added to the card, integrate with the Floating Featured Image plugin that they have. This is another plugin that they have for ClassicPress and all in all, it looks to be a really great plugin for integrating Twitter cards into your ClassicPress website and not having to depend on something that is WordPress-related and may or may not work down the road.

So go check it out. It’s called Add Twitter Cards by Azurecurve and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

And of course a little side note about ClassicPress. If you’re using it and you do a search in the plugin repository behind backend where they’re still using the WordPress Repository, just add in the tag ClassicPress and you’ll find lots of plugins that are supposed to be tagged to be actually working in ClassicPress, and they do have two great lists going right now at the ClassicPress forum, where they have a listing of plugins that are written specific for ClassicPress.

They have a pretty big list of WordPress plugins that have been tested to be working well with ClassicPress. So this is going to be something, folks. So if you’re unhappy in WordPress, you may want to consider heading on over to ClassicPress and joining them.

Okay, at any rate – closing out this episode, I covered up BP Better Messages for 3 Dragons and WP Tag You, which I gave a 3 to; the Remove Norefer, which I gave a 4 to; the Honeypot WooCommerce WordPress Antispam, which I gave a 5 to; and the Add Twitter Card, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders. The next WordPress Meetup is going to be here in Victoria on May 21, 2019 and will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. Location and information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup where all the details will be there. I’m not certain whether I’m presenting yet, or I have another presenter. The presenter said he’d do it, but he hasn’t confirmed yet, so if not, I’m not entirely certain, but I think my presentation if it’s me is going to be on performing maintenance on your WordPress website and doing all the maintenance stuff that’s required to keep it up-to-date and not overdoing it.

Also, be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A-Z, where you’ll find training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show every Thursday at noon.

And if you have suggestions on plugins you would like to have reviewed, please submit them on the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit and you can submit your plugin to appear on a show. Even if it’s not your plugin and you just have a suggestion and you say, “Hey, this is a cool plugin I’ve used. Why don’t you check it out and review it? I think others would like to know about it.” I’m more than happy to take that information and share it with the world.

And a final note to developers who would like to support the show. If you would like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. I will create a contest around your plugin, and you can get a whole lot of promotions and advertising for your plugin. And I hear it works from some of the people that have provided their licenses for contests, so make sure you check it out.

Okay, and that’s about it. 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]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 403 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 #403 here.


It’s Episode 403 and I’ve got plugins for Product Catalog, Emailing Users, Welcoming New Commentators, Reducing Bounce Rate, Advanced WYSIWYG for Classic Press, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

Episode #403

John:    It’s Episode 403 and I’ve got plugins for Product Catalog, Emailing Users, Welcoming New Commentators, Reducing Bounce Rate, Advanced WYSIWYG for Classic Press, and Classic Press 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 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 couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over in Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving me reviews. They really do help the show out.

And if you’re new to the channel, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. You can catch me every Thursday at noon here live or, you know, catch some of the training videos and other bits and pieces that I upload to the channel, so make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell to get notifications of when that occurs.

Now one brief thing before I get started here. I wanted to give a brief note due to some things I’ve heard and read this last week about the show and I’ll cover those later in the show. But a brief note reiterating what the rating system is that I use and why I use it here at WP Plugins A to Z. This show is over seven and a half years old and I’ve been using the Dragon rating system since about Episode 20 after it was suggested to me by one of my listeners, and that was due to a song that I overused – a dragon-related song that I overused a lot, and they sort of suggested the rating system. So I took it and ran with it.

The rating system goes from 1 to 5, kind of like a 5-star rating, and you know, getting a 5 out of me is usually a pretty hard task. I don’t hand out 5 Dragons willy-nilly; they usually have to hit it right out of the park. Most of the plugins I get, they get a 3, which is pretty decent – a common plugin. You know, it means it’s a good plugin. Four, it’s a great plugin. But 5, of course is the outstanding. It means they just knocked it right out of the park.

Ones and twos, I do give them out, and if you’ve listened to me any length of time, you’ll know I hand them out and it’s usually because I tried this plugin for something I was working on – any number of factors – and if it’s a 1 or a 2, it’s probably not the best plugin and you might want to do well to just avoid that plugin if I hand out that rating.

But anyway, that’s just what I wanted to cover up and let folks know about it. With all of that out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugin lead-in rock music]

All right, first up I have a couple of plugins that I have not used yet. These are plugins that have been submitted to me over time by developers through the website, where if you’re a developer or just know a plugin that should be suggested for review, please go do that. Suggest plugins for review over at wppluginsatoz.com. These plugins here, I haven’t had a chance to use them. I couldn’t get them into any projects I was working on or I just didn’t have time to do anything, but they seemed interesting enough that I thought I should just start bringing them forward and letting folks know they exist. I’ve had a pretty long list of these for some time, so I just sort of started including them.

First off here, I have a plugin that was sent in by Stephanie Hruby and this is a freemium plugin. It’s called Ultimate Product Catalog Plugin and what this one here does for you is it allows you to create a catalog of your products on your website, and it does have a bit of an e-store component and it does combine with WooCommerce. I think I’ve used this or something similar way back when I was working on a project that got killed partway through, so I’m kind of sketchy on that thought in my head. It’s been over a year and a half, two years since I was doing a project like that and they just pulled the plug on the project partway through.

At any rate, it’s a nice, responsive catalog. It allows you to create different catalogs, multiple catalogs of separate products, all within one plugin. You can display these projects in grid formats or other formats on here. They’ve got custom CSS that’s available. The premium version offers up the full WooCommerce integration to allow you to sync all your products between the product catalog and WooCommerce.

It also has setups for such as if you run an affiliate store or affiliate linking to products, you can use this to build out the products with the way it sets up. All in all, a pretty interesting plugin if you’re running that kind of thing, it might be something for you to go check out. It is called Ultimate Product Catalog and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Next up, I have for you a plugin that was sent in to me by Siddharth B., and this one here is called WP Email Users. It does look rather interesting, something I might consider getting a real good look at later down the road. No use for it at the moment, but it allows you to sent emails off to various groups of users in a different format such as Image, Rich Text. It has a WYSIWYG editor available for creating the emails. It’s basically an email program system that allows you to get all kinds of emails out there to your users, and you can group them out by your users. I believe they mentioned something about roles or other bits and pieces in here.

All in all, it looks like an interesting emailing program. I don’t know how it would be for newsletters, but it does sort of kinda remind me of a newsletter plugin – something you may want to go check out if you’re looking for a plugin to deal with emailing users or large groups of users or subgroups of users. This may be something that helps you solve that, so go check it out. It’s called WP Email Users and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Okay, 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, and if you’re looking for quality WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down, come visit me, JohnOverall.com and I provide excellent WordPress hosting.

Okay, and contests. Currently, we don’t have a contest running yet, but I would like to congratulate the winner of our last contest for the Graph Comment plugin, and that was Randolph P., so congratulations out there to Randolph for winning the contest. The next contest should be up by next week. We’re in the middle of getting it all situation and set out. And remember, the Graph Comment plugin, a great plugin to allow you to organize up the comments of your website, so go check it out.

And our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provided us with the premium version for all of our contests, so thanks a lot out to them – much appreciated – a really great plugin. They’ve been keeping it up-to-date and have been improving it dramatically. I’ve been using the plugin for about two years now and they just keep improving it, so go check it out.

All right, next up I have for you a plugin called Comment Redirect. This is an interesting plugin. I have yet to use it, but it’s something that I’m going to be implementing onto a couple of sites – possibly even my own site, although I don’t get many comments there. But this is a site – if you get comments, regular comments, or new commenters on your website, this would be an interesting plugin to give yourself that little extra pizazz for people.

What it does for you is when a new user, a new commentator, comes to your site and makes a comment – as soon as they make the comment, it redirects them to another page. And on this page here, you could say, “Thank you for your comment,” offer them specials, give them other options to say, “Hey, subscribe to our stuff. Check in here. We do this. We also do that,” so it’s ways to further interact with your new commentators to sort of encourage them to keep coming back and make them feel special and thank them very much for showing up and taking a look at your website and taking their time to make a comment for you.

So it’s a really cool kind of plugin; something that looks really interesting, and I do have a couple of sites I think it could be useful for that do receive comments. So if you’ve got a site that receives comments regularly or you get new comments, check this one out. Maybe you might want to look at implementing it. It’s called Comment Redirect and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, listener feedback. I do love listener feedback or feedback I find on the internet, and this week here was a really good week for me. I’ve got a couple of pieces of feedback about the show that are fantastic. The WP Plugins show has been featured in a couple of articles this week and the first one we have here is we were featured as one of the Top 20 podcasts in Tech Funnel. It’s a really great article of Top 20 WordPress Plugins to go check out.

We landed at Number 6, so I’m really quite thrilled about that. Go check it out. I really thank the guys over at Tech Funnel. They did send me a note saying that I was going to be featured. They didn’t say where I was going to be in the list, but they asked for some quotes, so I gave them some quotes to go with their article, so thank you very much to the folks at Tech Funnel for that. I much appreciate it.

The second mention I got this week was by Code Poet, and it’s been on my coverage of the ClassicPress system – the ClassicPress CMS system and the ClassicPress plugins. I’ve been featuring ClassicPress plugins since about January of this year and I really liked it. I’ve used ClassicPress on one website here; I’ve got a couple of others that it’s going to be.

As I’ve mentioned many times in my show, I’m sort of straddling between worlds. But I think there’s room for ClassicPress and WordPress out there in the world and I’m pretty sure ClassicPress is going to take their chunk of the websites out there on the internet, because they’re moving along quite nicely. They’ve been moving forward. He made some really good comments here about us. You know, I really liked this one paragraph here I’ll just read out, and it was:

John Overall, producer of a popular WordPress podcast, had an added short segment highlighting his Registration Honeypot plugin on the WP Plugins A to Z show. He said it was a good find, expressed a need for it – oh, absolutely. And really, thank you very much. I appreciate it, John. That’s the guy who runs Code Poet and I really hope to get in touch with him and hopefully get him for an interview on one of my interview shows.

So thank you very much to all of the community out there that has been following me. I really appreciate it.

Okay, and that brings me up here next – so yeah, thanks a lot. I didn’t even know you were on this stream. Thanks, Code Poet. I really appreciate it and I really appreciate your article.

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

This week here, I would like to thank Jezweb Pty. Ltd. for his donation of $50 – much appreciated, Jez. I really appreciate your support for the show over the last couple of years. His note is:

This donation is on behalf of RBR Moving Removalists Newcastle at https://www.rbrmoving.com.au for people moving home in Newcastle Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor and J Theme Jello. 

So thanks a lot, Jez. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your support of the show and yeah, I’m really liking since I’ve started switching to Elementor. I’m about three projects in with Elementor and I’ve been using the theme Jez was kind enough to provide me a link to his repository for this theme, the Jello theme. It’s really a nice, sweet, super clean theme to use with Elementor, so you might want to reach out to Jez if you’d like to and find out more about his theme. I really appreciate it.

And a big thank you to our donors who came in below $50. Those small donations really help and thank you to all of our Patreon donors that provide small donations. Those amounts really help cover the costs of the show, such as the transcripts we have produced, the bandwidth, the server space, etc., so thank you very much to everyone who supports the show.

Code Potent – why do I keep reading ‘poet’? I am so sorry! I will have to get that one corrected in my brain. For some reason I kept seeing ‘poet’. Sorry about that.

But – comments, folks. For those listening that are not here on the stream and listening to the show later, that’s me reading the comments off of the livestream. Potent – Code Potent. Stick that one in my head.

All right, dyslexia. Blame it on dyslexia. (I am, actually.)

All right, next up – the next plugin I have here is called Reduce Bounce Rate, and Reduce Bounce Rate, this is a plugin that helps you get the real time of onsite bounce rate from your Google Analytics. Google Analytics calculates the time onsite based on the length of time between the user entering your site and their last page view. This won’t give you the real time onsite and bounce rate stats.

The plugin helps intercede, add some activity when a user is on your site so that the real bounce rate can be calculated. They give a couple of examples where they quote out what happens here – this is interesting.

A visitor is very interested in one of your pages, takes 2:13 to read the article. After this, he bookmarks the page and leaves. The visitor stayed 2:13 on your site but never interacted with it. To Google, that’s a bounce, and bounced visits are marked “0” on the site. Well, not fair.

They give another scenario. A visitor goes to your website, stays 1:11 on the first page, then goes to the second page where he stays another minute without any interaction on the second page, then he leaves. Since Google doesn’t know how long your visitor stayed on the second page, Google will add only the time the visitor spent on the first page. So this helps clean that up and maybe get you some real stats and change your bounce rate a little bit.

You might want to check this one out if you’re really big into Google stats. I know I’m gonna be giving it a checkout even further and see how it goes. At the moment, we give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, ClassicPress options. Who knows? This may extend out further as ClassicPress builds the things a lot. They’ve garnered a lot of attention since the Gutenberg fiasco. And of course, ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress and it’s focused in the business websites communities and it’s definitely looking pretty good. In the last few months, ClassicPress seems to be coming into its own. And with some plugins now being created specifically for ClassicPress, I do believe it definitely has a future, and I do believe it’s going to be growing.

Now, if you want to see the ones that are specifically for ClassicPress – oops, wrong link. There we go – go check it out. There is a link in the show notes that takes you to the ClassicPress forums where there is a list of the plugins that are built specifically for ClassicPress. Currently, I believe there’s 37 in there, and I think I found the list when there was only half a dozen. I remember WordPress back when it had very few.

So before I go much further with that, let me jump into this week’s ClassicPress plugin. This one here is Advanced WYSIWYG Editor for ClassicPress. This is kind of a cool plugin. It’s a great step forward for ClassicPress, I believe. And if you are like me and use the Tiny MCE plugin in WordPress and you’re looking for a replacement for your ClassicPress install, this would be it.

The WYSIWYG Advance plugin adds lots of additional options to the ClassicPress visual editor. The plugin is a fork of the Tiny MCE Advanced that was usable in Version 4.8 of WordPress and contains no Gutenberg code. This looks to be a really great plugin. I haven’t installed it yet in my ClassicPress website, but I will be doing that so that I can take advantage of that, because these are some very important tools for a lot of developers. They add a lot of buttons and stuff that you need when you’re doing your editing. These are the editing tools that are on those buttons up above the windows for those of you that don’t know what they are.

Anyway, go check this one out. It’s a really great looking plugin and I like that it’s a fork out of the Tiny MCE and I look forward to seeing how this one evolves as it develops with ClassicPress. The name though – well, I don’t know. WYSIWYG Advance? You need a better name, really. It does.

Excellent. Good to hear, Ray. According to Ray, the Advance WYSIWYG is first-rate.

All right, so that’s what I’ve got here, and I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check out the Advance WYSIWYG Editor for ClassicPress.

Okay, and a side note. I think I skipped ahead here. I jumped around in my notes a little bit, but I talked a little bit about it. If you’re doing research using the Repository for ClassicPress, you can find WordPress-compatible plugins by typing in ‘ClassicPress’ or you can search with the tag #ClassicPress to find who have tagged their plugins for usable in ClassicPress. I’ve used that tool a couple of times when hunting down plugins for the show, so make sure you go check that out.

And of course, I mentioned the listing of the ClassicPress plugins, and this one here I’m looking forward to this list growing, and I’m looking forward to the day when ClassicPress has their own repository of plugins. As I said, I can still recall when the WordPress plugins had a very small repository. When this show started, there were less than 9,000 plugins in the WordPress Repository. I think I’ve actually got screenshots of it way back when.

So at any rate, that closes out everything on this show. Thank you very much for showing up here, everyone who showed up to the show today. I really appreciate your time and coming in to listen to me. Much appreciated and I’ve been enjoying that the show has been gaining some attention lately.

Good to hear, Code Potent, is that ClassicPress is headed toward a plugin directory. That’ll really help out that software quite a bit, I believe, and it’ll make it easier for people to use over time.

All right, so we’ve got some final reminders. The next WordPress Victoria Meetup here is on May 21st and will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. For location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be giving the presentation, but I don’t know what the subject is going to be about in this next presentation.

Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins, where you can find training videos, screencasts, and more. I’ve put up as much as I can, when I can. And if you have suggestions on plugins you would like to have reviewed, please feel free to go submit them on the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit, and you will be able to submit your plugin even if you’re not the developer. Feel free to submit it to me. I will take it in there and take a look at the plugin.

Developers, I look forward to you submitting them. And if you’re a developer with a premium plugin and you would like to support the show and be featured in our contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Submit all your details and we will create a contest for you. All it costs you is the plugin license and you get a ton of free advertising and promotion from me.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for the show here today, so make sure you take any time, go subscribe to the newsletter, and I’ll let my girl take us out of here. So thank you very much for showing up.

[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 402 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 #402 here.


It’s Episode 402 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chatting, Members Directory, World Time, Content Creation, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #402

John:    It’s Episode 402 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chatting, Members Directory, World Time, Content Creation, and ClassicPress 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 usual great show for you today.

But right off the top, I want to put out a public service announcement, and what it is is I am the chair of a local charity organization here, and the sister organization that I work with needs a webmaster for their website – someone to manage it. We’re looking for a pro bono person who would like to manage a WordPress website. If you’re interested in this, please send me an email to john@wppro.ca and I will get all the information and communicate back and forth with you if you want to pick it up, so looking forward to it.

And 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 at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews. You can also catch the show every Thursday at noon live on YouTube and that’s where you can also subscribe to all the videos and other items that we have there, so please check it out.

You could also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join me on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook or take a couple of minutes and sign up to the newsletter on our website where there’s even more information that goes out on a weekly basis there – stuff that’s not covered in the show.

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

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, and I have the usual great set of plugins for today and to start off, I have a couple of plugins that I have not tested but were sent to me by developers, so I thought you might like to know they exist. I never get a chance to test them, I don’t have projects for them, but they look to be of use and value to those of you in the community who may be doing work like this that these plugins apply to.

The first one I have for you was sent in by Bianca Allery and it’s called Live Chat & Talk. This is a plugin that will connect your WordPress site through a 3CX live chat phone system. You need to have the 3CX phone system installed. 3CX is a piece of software that allows for VOIP setup of phone systems and you can integrate that then into this plugin and integrate it into your website so that people could do live chatting and talking. Maybe you’re chatting and you need to raise it up to a phone call, get them to call. They don’t have to call you; you can call them. There’s lots of connectivity in this, but you do have to have this phone system installed for the plugin to work.

It does look like an interesting tool and if you’re running a big enough website where you have these kinds of questions and other stuff and you’re communicating with visitors on a regular basis, this could be an additional tool for you to add that extra level of customer appreciation and customer connectedness for your website. So it’s something that may allow you to connect with your customers better, so make sure you check this plugin out. It’s called Live Chat & Talk and currently I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out.

The next item I’ve got for you here was sent in by Richard Taylor and this is Membership Software. It’s a third-party plugin access to your WordPress website. This is a third-party service; it ranges from free if you have less than 50 members to $239/month if you have 10,000 members, and the prices are varied in between. The costs vary of course depending on the number of members you have, and it offers up a lot of the services you would need for running a membership site.

Now, I have my reservations about using third-party services. I’ve never been a fan of sticking my content into somebody else’s system. I’ve seen it too many times over the years where a great third-party service appears, you get content you build up with them, they become successful, they get bought out by a competitor or something where a competitor kills them, your information gets rolled into a new system. All of a sudden, what you’re used to isn’t there. Or, they may – there’s a possibility the could just go away. The problem of handing your data over to a third-party system – you’ve got to make sure that you can retrieve that data in a usable fashion that you can then take elsewhere, so that’s something to check out with something like this, especially something as important as a membership site, because you could have some really important data there.

So anyway, it looks to be a great service. It does offer up everything you need such as an events calendar, online payment systems, member directories – all of the little bits and pieces for running a membership site. Now again, the content is not on your site; it’s contained on their site. Your website just interfaces with that website, so you’ve got to think about how that’s going to work for you.

At any rate, go check it out if you’re looking for a membership solution that you don’t have to go through a lot of headache to deal with. Check out Membership Works and I currently give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Okay, this podcast is 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 see me when you’re tired of WordPress hosting that slows you down. And for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down, visit JohnOverall.com to get premium hosting with all the resources you need.

Currently also, we are running a contest, and the contest ends today at midnight. You’ll want to check it out. I’ll be announcing the winner the next show. It is for the Simple Giveaways plugin and this here – oh, no. It’s not for the Simple Giveaways plugin. What am I thinking, brain? Okay, the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provide us with the premium plugin for the website.

What we are giving away is a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free, powerful commenting system that makes for easy discussions, easy reading, and helps keep the trolls under the bridge where they belong and off your website. No more disorganized discussions piled on several pages. With Graph Comment, your audience can easily follow the discussions. One of the great things about this plugin is all the data stays on your website, so if ever you decide to leave them, you just revert back to the regular commenting system and you don’t lose any of that data, such as if you were using – I can’t remember the comment plugins that do that, the ones that take the data off your site.

So you’ll want to go check them out. For more information about this plugin, it’s over at graphcomment.com. Make sure you get in there, enter the contest today, and we’ll be drawing the winners first thing tomorrow morning. So thank you very much for all of those who have been participating in our contests and we will have another one coming up shortly hereafter.

Okay, the next plugin I have up for you is called CoolClock – a JavaScript Analog Clock. Now, I know a few episodes back I talked about a few different clock plugins and I had settled on what I thought was a really great clock plugin for a project I was working on where I needed to display multiple clocks in a widget to showcase the projects I’m working on with their multiple offices across the globe. I needed to showcase that in a very nice, clean way and I thought I’d found it. It worked well on my test site.

When I went to put it on the development site, I couldn’t get it to work and I was having problems and I didn’t find it for a little while, but it was a jQuery error and it was conflicting with the FooGallery, and a FooGallery was a must-use plugin. So I had to revert back, and I decided, “Well, let’s go back through that list of clocks I had looked at and see if one I missed.”

Well, this one I missed in the system. I needed something that was able to produce multiple clocks with shortcodes, set up multiple time zones, give a very clean look. This one here was even better than the first one I looked at. It gives you these really nice skins that you can choose from for your clocks. It can set up with a shortcode, so you can set up multiple clocks within one widget block.

You can also take this one here and it’s got another function that the other didn’t have, and that when you set up dial clocks and people see the dials, they don’t know if it’s a.m. or p.m., just off the dials of the clock. And with international time zones that I’m setting up, there’s some zones that would be in the a.m., some in the p.m. Well, this one here has another added thing that you can turn on that turns on a little digital function, which is in the middle of the clock face that tells the time in digital format and sets it for a.m./p.m.

Really nicely done, nicely laid out, an excellent plugin. It’s free, sets up well, functions, and it played well with the other plugins that are using jQuery, which was a major bonus. So go check this one out. It’s CoolClock – a JavaScript Analog Clock, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and listener feedback. I would really love some. Just hit me up on the Contact page up on wppluginsatoz.com. You can also get the SpeakPipe down in the lower right-hand corner of the website and leave me a SpeakPipe voice message. I’ll play it out for everyone to hear, answer your questions – all kinds of stuff. Think of it as a way to gain some insights from an expert and save money.

Show donors – this show here is a 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. All donations $50 and over get their note read out and for those below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much for your support of the show.

I’d like to thank this week for those from Patreon with the small donations you’re providing – much appreciated. And if you’d like to support me through Patreon, just click the link in the show notes to take you to the Patreon location. Preferably, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and donate to the show. All the donations go to support the show and the things I do, such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc., so thank you to everyone out there.

Okay, the next plugin I have up here for you is called Edit Flow. Now, this plugin here is one that would be very useful, and you might be able to use it for yourself too if you’re a single author, but this seems to be mostly usable if you have multiple authors on your site. I have a client currently – we just launched their site. They have five people in their office, all of them contributing content, all of them doing it through separate login accounts so that they know who’s creating the content. But there’s still one overall person who manages the content and makes sure it’s happy.

This is a plugin to help you do that. It allows you to set up a work flow so that you can set up on here an edit flow that will allow you to go from the point of conception to completion. It has a calendar. You can set up so when certain content is due. You can set up custom statuses for the content, if it’s in edit, if it needs a review, if it needs a rewrite, if it needs to be published, set up all these different things.

It offers up the ability to add editorial comments that get passed back and forth with the notes so that if someone says, “Hey, take a look at this and read it,” the person who reads it can leave editorial comments, making suggestions on how to change it and make it better. It’s a really nice way to gain control of all your editorial content on your website, and something you will want to have a look at and check out.

A really nice little plugin. It seems to flow quite nicely from the free version. They do have a couple of premium support pieces in it that could be of help with you, so go check this out. It’s called Edit Flow and currently I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, and finally we have ClassicPress options here for you. And of course, since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has been gaining ground, and I’ve noticed lately it’s gaining ground at even more rate. After this last week’s fiasco with WordPress (and if you haven’t heard about that, just go google “Jetpack and inserting ads.”  That’ll give you exactly what you need.) So anyway, I imagine ClassicPress will gain a few more people.

At any rate, this week here I have a plugin specifically for ClassicPress. They now have a list of plugins on the ClassicPress forums that will allow you to search up and see plugins that are written specifically for ClassicPress, not just for WordPress and ClassicPress, but pure ClassicPress.

This week here, what I have for you here is called Registration Honeypot, and this is a plugin that allows you to go in, plug it in turn it on. It adds a hidden input into the ClassicPress registration form and if the input contains any data when the form is submitted, the account won’t be created. This is a spammer prevention tool. I’m beginning to wonder, does this exist for WordPress? Because it would be a really nice tool to have, because I have sites that the spammers just won’t leave alone.

So at any rate, this is a very nice tool, fantastic, and free plugins that just work, do a job and do it right, only one thing for them: this gets a 5-Dragon rating. Go check it out: Registration Honeypot.

[Dragon roar]

Anyway, well that wraps up the plugins for this week. I covered up the Live Chat & Talk, which I gave a 3 to; the Membership Software, which I gave a 3 to; the CoolClock, which I gave a 5 to; and then the Edit Flow, which I gave a 4 to; and then the Registration Honeypot, which I gave a 5 to.

And one more time, I’d like to give a special shout-out to Steve Schmidt at nowowl.com for his donation of the WP Plugins A to Z logo. We thank you very much.

Also, the next WordPress Meetup, which if you didn’t catch it, you can go catch last night’s WordPress Meetup which was a presentation on WordPress SEO 101. The next Meetup is going to be on May 21st and the subject has yet to be determined. In fact, I might have a different speaker for that night, which would be cool for me – I mean one less presentation for me to actually prepare for. So go check it out. The information can be found at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for all the information for that.

Be sure to subscribe and check out the YouTube channel where you’ll find training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show here every week.

And a final note to developers: if you’d like to support the show and you’d like to donate a premium license to be used for future contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Or, if you would like to have a plugin reviewed, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-review to get a plugin reviewed. Submit it; you don’t have to be a developer to submit a plugin you think should be reviewed.

And one final reminder just about the fact that I am looking for a WordPress developer would like a pro bono project, I am stacked to the gills with my pro bono projects. I can’t take on another one anymore. I’m full on that. At any rate, it is for a health cooperative and it is a really great local organization here in Victoria. If you would like to support and help them out in some way, please get a hold of me and I will get you hooked up with all the information to manage and maintain this site.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so thank you all for tuning in and listening to the show today. I greatly appreciate your time. Y’all have fun, 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 401 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 #401 here.


It’s Episode 401 and I’ve got plugins for Dynamic Maps, Android App Builder, Bulk Moving Posts, Locking WooCommerce, and ClassicPress options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

Episode #401

John:    It’s Episode 401 and I’ve got plugins for Dynamic Maps, Android App Builder, Bulk Moving Posts, Locking WooCommerce, and ClassicPress options. It’s 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 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 in Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews there. They really do help the show out and I greatly appreciate the time you take to do it.

You can subscribe and check out our training videos here on YouTube. Also catch me live every Thursday at noon where I also put out screencasts, extra training videos, and other extra shows as I have the time to get them out the door. And on Saturday nights, I’ve been touch-and-go lately. I have not been able to get the Saturday night show out, but they’ll come, and they’ll be hit and miss. Just, you know, subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell; that way you get notifications whenever I go live with the show.

You can follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join me on the Facebook at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook –there we go. You can also subscribe to our newsletter right there on the front page. Just enter your name and your email address and we’ll subscribe you to the newsletter and you get information that is not covered in the show and other tidbits of helpful advice, and there’s more things coming down the pike for that newsletter. We’ve been working at improving it and working it, putting in content that people like.

So, that’s all out of the way. It’s time to jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, and to start off I’ve got a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but thought you might want to know that they exist. Keep in mind the ratings are based off the descriptions, their site demos (if they have one), and other bits and pieces that I can find as I dig around with them. The reason I haven’t used these is one, I don’t have the time to get them into a test site to test them all out, or I can’t use them in any of my current projects (and I have a couple on the go right now). Not too many, but I do have a few on the go.

All right, so the first one I’ve got for you was sent in to us by Yancho Yanchev and this one here is called Image Map Pro, and this is an image map plugin that creates more than just country or county maps. It creates maps for just about anything – kind of a cool plugin. I really like it. I wish I had a use for it right now so I could dig into it and see what it can do. I do like their test site that showcases the human body where you can click on the different muscles, figure out what the different muscles are, get more information. That’s on their test site there.

They do also have with the plugin you get 50+ maps of countries and continents that are included. You know, custom polygon shapes – basically, you create an SVG map and then you map it with the overlays for all the clickable stuff that you want. A really cool, interesting plugin – something I thought was quite interesting to look at. This looks to be a really cool plugin to check out. You might want to go check it out.

It is a premium plugin; it’s $39 over at CodeCanyon and you can get it there. The link is in the show notes. All in all, it looks pretty great – something to check out. I would give this one a 4-Dragon rating based on everything here. Who knows? If I test it out, it could end up at a 5, so make sure you go check it out. It is called Image Map Pro for WordPress – SVG Map Builder.

And next up I’ve got for you – this one here was sent in by Nissar Mashina and it is a freemium plugin – [rotary phone ringing] – and get that one off. It’s a freemium plugin and it’s called Movipress, which [smartphone ringing] doesn’t really describe what it does. It kind of leaves you – what? Is this about movies? But no, it is an Android app builder and what it does is it allows you to create an Android app over on their website and then you can embed and use this app over on your WordPress website.

It allows you to create an app to interface with your clients if you can get them to use the app. It’s kind of something – I don’t know how good or bad it would be. I don’t really do apps myself, so if you’re into apps or building apps, this might be a really nice tool for you to turn your website into an Android app. It does not look to be anything for iPhone, but of course Android has a larger share of the market nowadays, so you might want to check this out.

And there’s a whole lot that it can do: change the appearance anytime/anywhere, use Google Fonts, you know, link articles with different templates. You can add your own logos, save articles, send new comments, support for videos, and more in it. So go check this out. It’s called Movipress and it is an Android app builder and currently I give it a 3-Dragon rating, so go check that one out.

Okay, currently this show is brought to you by …

[sad organ sound cue]

Whoops, wrong button.

Re – [outro]

Wrong – still wrong button.

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 looking for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down. See JohnOverall.com.

And currently we do have a contest running right now and the contests that we run are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. They were kind enough to provide us with a premium plugin for running all our contests, a really great plugin, so go check out that plugin. There’s a link in the show notes to it.

And our current contest is running for one more week until April 4th. We are giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful commenting plugin for great discussions. It helps you organize your discussions, makes it easy, and keeps the trolls under the bridge where they belong: away from your website. They can’t get up on top and extract their toll.

So go check this one out and I also reviewed this plugin back in Episode 394, so you can go find out what I really thought about that plugin when I gave it a good review. For more information go check out their website, graphcomment.com. All you’ve got to do to enter the contest is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information on it.

All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Bulk Move. Now, if you’re ever in the middle of redeveloping a website that’s been around for five, 10, 12 years or so – however long they’ve been running WordPress – and they’ve got maybe hundreds or thousands of posts. Well, when you’re redeveloping, sometimes you start to rethink the categories that you have assigned to all your posts or you’ve assigned to bulk amounts of posts.

Well, this is the fate that I faced in the last couple of weeks with a big project that I’m in the middle of redeveloping on. The client wanted to reevaluate their categories for their posts; in other words, move a large chunk of posts from one category to the other. Well, you can do that, you know, at 10, 20, 50, 100 pages at a time in bulk editing mode on the post listing page, but that just takes way too long.

Well this plugin here allows you to go in, choose a category of posts you want to move, and you can move them from one category to the other. Real quick, simple, easy, click and move. You can also move posts from one tag to another. Or you can move posts from a category to a tag. Or you can move custom taxonomies around. There’s a lot that this plugin does. They’re even working on some development for it to add the ability to bulk move pages to posts, bulk move users from one role to another.

All in all, this is a pretty nice plugin and having used it, fantastic plugin. It does what it says it’s gonna do. It’s really quick and easy. It gets that stuff out of your way and it allows you to move on with more productive work, so this one here, a fantastic plugin – free – go check it out. Bulk Move for moving your post categories around gets a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and feedback. I do like listener feedback when I can get it. It’s been a while, so go hit the Contact page, send me an email, go hit me up on SpeakPipe at the lower right-hand corner of the website. Send me a SpeakPipe message. Any way – you can also send me an email direct to john@wppro.ca. Go to our Facebook page, Twitter – any number of ways to get a hold of me. Send me feedback on the show, send me comments, send me questions – anything. I’m looking for any kind of feedback, folks. Send it in. I’ll happily help it out.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. If it saves you five minutes, what’s that five minutes worth to you? Do $50, $5, whatever – donate to the show. Simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show and all donations are gratefully accepted and none of them ever make it into my pocket. They simply help support the show for its necessary needs such as transcripts – and we get fantastic transcripts sent for the show.

Also, it helps handle things such as bandwidth and time, so thank you very much to those who donate to the show and I’d like to thank all those small donations that come in on a weekly basis. Everything under $50 stays anonymous; $50 and over, leave me a note. I’ll put it in the show notes, read it out on the air, and link to any links you put in the show notes for me.

I would like to give a big thank you out to those who have hired me because of the podcast. Thank you very much. That is as good as donating to the show, because that gives me an income, so I greatly appreciate those of you who contact me because of the show to do some work for you. So just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show.

Okay, and the next plugin I’ve got here for you – this one here is called Lock My WooCommerce. This is a really nice plugin. It’s relatively new and what it does for you is if you’re running a specialized membership WooCommerce store, this could be an excellent plugin for you. And what I mean by that is maybe you’re running a wholesale club, maybe you’re running a members-only eStore – you know, something specialized where it’s not open to just the general public; it’s only open to the membership that you select to come in here.

This plugin locks down your WooCommerce website. It hides it without affecting the theme. It hides it from sidebars and official widgets. It creates a login form with a custom message for you. Its option to allow – it has an option where you can allow users to see a store, but they can’t interact with the store. It’s a way to sort of, you know, entice people. “Hey, join our club. Get all this cool stuff. You can buy all this cool stuff from us.” It’ll even hide the store from search engines for you so that you don’t get it indexed or they don’t come in through the backdoor of search engines.

All in all, it looks to be a pretty fantastic plugin for specialized use in WooCommerce by locking your WooCommerce store down. Go check this one out. It’s pretty useful if you have that particular niche market. All in all, it looks great. I think it is worth a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: Lock My WooCommerce.

And the final thing I’ve got for you here today is the ClassicPress option for this week. And of course, if you haven’t used ClassicPress – maybe you don’t need to but you many need it – is a fork of WordPress that is focused on business applications of what WordPress used to do well and with Gutenberg does not do so well (as I’ve discovered in at least one instance).

Now this plugin is called WP ADA Compliance Check, and this is one here that I’ll probably be testing out for WordPress, so I’ll bring it back again after I’ve given it a full test-out. It allows you to get in there and run the ADA compliance checks, some basic checks on your WordPress website, to see if you’re in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, this mostly applies to Americans, but it could create problems for everyone else across the globe in some areas, especially doing business in the States.

And as we know in the last year, many big, giant websites, people with big pockets, are being sued for ADA violations on their website, which if you’ve ever tried to do ADA compliance on your website, it takes a fair amount of work to do. So this is something you might want to check into, check out this plugin. If you’re using ClassicPress, this plugin does work in ClassicPress.

It seems to function just fine. I didn’t run it through all its tests, but I did run some basics on it, and it installs, activates, and allows you to start doing some checks on it, so go check it out, the WP ADA Compliance Check Basic plugin and I give it a 4-Dragon rating for ClassicPress.

Okay, well that wraps it up. In this episode here I covered up the following plugins: Image Map Pro for WordPress, which I gave a 4 to; Moviepress Android App Builder, which I gave a 3 to; the Bulk Move plugin for moving bulk categories, which I gave a 5 to; the Lock My WooCommerce, which I gave a 5 to; and the WP ADA Compliance Check Basic, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of last reminders: another thank you out to Steve Schmidt, the creator of the logo that we use on WP Plugins for his generous donation of the WP Plugins A-Z logo we currently use, and that’s from nowowl.com, so go check him out. And another reminder – the last reminder here – next week is the WordPress Meetup in Victoria on April 3rd. It’ll be broadcast live on our YouTube channel here, and this meetup here is going to be covering SEO 101. I’ll be giving the presentation, presenting it out to the people who show up and to the live YouTube audience and for those that want to come back and watch the show later.

This is a great presentation. If you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come on down, say hi, tell me you heard about it on the show. I’d be really thrilled to hear that. So go check it out at meetup.com, wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. We’ll take you to the link for all of our events that happen at the Victoria WordPress Meetup and events.

And a final reminder, please subscribe to the channel down below. Hit the subscription bell and then hit it again to get notifications since YouTube is always messing with stuff. They make it very difficult for people – you’ve got to hit this twice. Yeah, you’re subscribed. Are you sure you’re subscribed? Hit it again, so make sure you do that.

All right, and that’s pretty much – oh, one final note out to developers who would like to support the show. If you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to enter all of the information needed to support the show. Hey, it’s great free advertising for you. You get like several episodes of advertising, promoting and plugging your plugins. You know, all you gotta do is supply that license and we’ll do all the rest of it.

So thank you very much to everyone listening to the show. I appreciate your time and that’s all I’ve got for you, so 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]

 

[End of Audio]

Transcript of Episode 400 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 #400 here.


It’s Episode 400 and I’ve got plugins for Instant Site Security, Project Management, WooCommerce Orders, Admin Emails, Top Page Builder, and Elementor for ClassicPress, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

Episode #400

John:    It’s Episode 400 and I’ve got plugins for Instant Site Security, Project Management, WooCommerce Orders, Admin Emails, Top Page Builder, and Elementor for ClassicPress, 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 Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall. And this is Episode 400 of the WP Plugins A-Z show. It’s been a long time coming. Four hundred weeks, seven and a half years now of doing this show, and I’d like to thank each and every one of my listeners out there that have joined me, donated to the show, donated stuff to the show, the website – everything that is done to bring this show this far along. Getting to 400 episodes for a podcast is usually quite a feat for most people. Most shows usually die out somewhere in the first 50.

But at any rate, we’re gonna do a little couple of toss back things and just for some fun here.

Wow.

            Yeah.

            Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Woooow. Woooow.

            Wheeeeeeee!

            [eerie tone]

            There we go, and I’d like to thank the No Agenda show for those sounds. This is a quick throwback before I dig right into the show itself. This is from Episode 45 and the old, old intro to the show and how bad the sound used to be…. Okay, and not it’s not gonna play. I tested it several times.

[child laughing]

            [old WP Plugins intro plays] ♪♪ A dragon has come to our village today. We’ve asked him to leave but he won’t go away. Now it’s met with our king and they’ve worked out the deal. No homes will he burn, and no crops will he steal. ♪♪

            Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you happen to be out there on the globe this fine, fine, wonderful day…

And there you go. There’s my old intro going back several years – just for some fun. All right, with all that out of the way and little bits about hitting 400, reminders – don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. 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 there if at all possible. It really helps the show out.

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel which the show is on every Thursday at noon and I also put up training videos and screencasts as I get the time to do them. Lately, I haven’t had much time for it. And I also do a live show on Saturday nights about 8:00. It’s hit-and-miss these days because it turns out I’ve found things to do on Saturday night besides sit around and do a podcast when I do another one during the week.

And you can also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join me on the Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook and take a few moments and drop over to the website and sign up for the newsletter where there’s even more information. And we’d really appreciate any feedback on that newsletter for those of you that subscribe to it. Let us know what’s working and what’s not working. We’re really trying to get it refined down so it’s a very usable item for you, so please drop into the website and hit the Contact page and send us your information about that.

With all that out of the way, I think it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, and first up I have for you here a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but these are ones that were sent in to me via developers, and I think you might like to know about them. I don’t have time to test them. I don’t have a project I’m currently working on that I can use them in, but they do look to be usable plugins.

So the first one I’ve got for you here, it was sent in by Alan Wiat, and this is an antivirus/antimalware plugin and it’s called WebDefender. And it’s GDPR-ready. It’s got smart protection, website hide function to help prevent hackers from getting in there, antispam protection, diagnostic for vulnerabilities detection, it’s got blacklist monitoring, built-in malware removal tool if you go with the pro version, because this is a freemium plugin. It’s got GDPR tools – lots of stuff in here for this plugin.

It’s a pretty comprehensive antispam and web defender for your WordPress website. You might want to go check it out if you’re not already using something that you’re happy with or you’re looking to switch or your looking for something new. Go give this one a checkout. It looks like it’d be pretty good. If I wasn’t settled into my methods, I probably would give this one a good go, but all in all, not too bad. Check it out. It’s WebDefender security protection and GDPR and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

The next one I’ve got for you here was sent in by Cylan James and this is a freemium plugin also. It is called Zephyr Project Manager, and this is a project manager plugin, and project managers – if you do several projects – like currently I have four projects on the go. I launched two projects last week and then two new ones came in to fill the spot. So what I have to do is I have to manage these projects carefully. I already have a project management system, so I’m not about to change. But if you haven’t developed one yet, you might give this plugin a checkout.

It’s a pretty comprehensive one. It works inside your WordPress website, so it’s another way to draw your clients back to your website on a continuous basis. They get your name embedded in them. This then here manages project tasks, it’s got an Android app for it, personal dashboards, discussions and attachments, email notification, file manager, category calendar progress, teams and members, customizations, and they do have a pro edition which has got even more stuff added to it where you could put Kanban boards in there, Asana, custom fields – a whole lot of stuff to it.

It looks like a really good, comprehensive project manager that is built inside your WordPress website, so something you’ll want to go check out if you don’t already have a project management tool in action, and I know switching them is really hard, so that’s one reason why I had not bought and not tried it out, because I’m really happy with my project management tool and I’m not about to switch, because I already know where it’s all at. And once you get your systems down, changing them requires a ridiculous learning curve and slows down your process.

At any rate, go check this out: the Zephyr Project Manager, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

And this show currently 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 if you’re tired of WordPress hosting that slows you down. So for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down, see JohnOverall.com.

And thinking of anniversaries and thanks, Giftedones – “Congratulations on Episode 400.” Yeah, I’m really happy and you started about 350. Well that’s 50 episodes. That’s almost a year you’ve been listening to me. Thank you very much for following the show. I really appreciate it.

And there’s another anniversary that’ll be coming up and I’ll be putting more stuff out about it. My business, JohnOverall.com, is actually turning 20 years old this year, so in October of this year, it’ll be 20 years since I started into the web hosting/web development business as a self-employed person. So another big one coming down the pike.

And contests – we do have a contest running right [random alert notification/sound effect] now until April 4th, and of course there’s always sounds that kick out at the strangest time. April 4th, we have a contest running. We are currently giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful comment plugin for great discussions. It helps organize your discussions, get rid of the trolls, no more disorganized discussions piled on several pages. Graph Comment helps your audience easily follow the relevant discussions that are occurring.

And this plugin here, I reviewed it back in Episode 394, so go check out that review and that show if you haven’t already heard it. And all you got to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest. All we’re looking for is your name and email address. Sign up and win a one-year for the expert license of this plugin. They do have a free version, but the expert license is really nice.

Okay, next up the plugin I’ve got for you here is a really nice one. Now, this is called Autocomplete WooCommerce Orders, and this is kind of an interesting thing. WooCommerce is a fantastic e-commerce plugin. I’ve been using it for years now and it’s had a lot of really nice features in it that I just took for granted and I didn’t pay attention to it. From time to time, I’d realize, “Oh, that feature is gone,” and it turns out they seem to like yanking out what should be core features and then turning them into a plugin. And one of them was what this plugin replaces.

If you have a website that’s selling digital items, you need it to autocomplete the purchase. Once that purchase has been made through PayPal or whatever processor you’re using, it gets feedback to the website that says, “Yep, they paid their bill. You can ship them,” so they get instant download to it. Well, what happens is default for WooCommerce is to leave it as processing, which means that people might not get instant access to their stuff, they’re waiting for you to get in there, approve it. Well, this plugin here puts back the feature that was taken out of WooCommerce in that once it gets the official notification that it was paid, it automatically completes the process, sends them all their emails, so then they can download those digital products.

It’s a really excellent plugin. I really want to give a quick shout-out to Liam, the developer of this, who gave this away, thereby you don’t have to pay the $49 over at WooCommerce for the plugin to do the exact same thing (which I thought was kind of ludicrous for it). At any rate, a fantastic plugin – Autocomplete WooCommerce Orders. I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Feedback, feedback, feedback – I would love some listener feedback. I don’t care how you get it to me. You can go over to the website, drop me a line via SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner, you can drop me an email. If you want to send it direct, you can go to john@wppro.ca or you can hit the Contact page on the website and send me a contact notification. There’s also Twitter, Facebook – multiple ways. Send some feedback about how the show is going, what you guys think about it, whether or not it’s still going in the right direction, if I’m losing my mind – whatever it might be. Please give me some feedback.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, if it saves you five minutes, what’s that five minutes worth to you? Five bucks? Well please donate that five bucks back to the show. All you’ve got to do is go over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where you can fill out your donation amount – anything you want – and donate the show. The money doesn’t make it in my pocket. It goes to pay for the fantastic transcripts I get for this show, it pays for the server space, the hosting, the bandwidth – all of those things, they cost money. So anything you can do to help.

And anyone who donates $50 or more, they get a note read out here on the show at this point. And for all of those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much.

This week here I would like to thank Jeremy at Jezweb Pty. Ltd., who donated $50. And the note they’ve got on it: This donation is on behalf of Best Removalists Newcastle at https://www.bestremovalistsnewcastle.com.au/ the best moving company for moving home locally. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au and it’s built with Elementor, which is a plugin I’m just now digging into and really enjoying it. I wish I’d got to it a lot sooner, and it uses the J Theme Jello, so thank you very much, Jez. I really appreciate you supporting the show and donating on a semi-regular basis. You’re a fantastic supporter of the show. Greatly appreciated.

I’d like to give a big thank you to all those on Patreon, the small donations, those little bits help, and for all the other minor donations that come in via PayPal, so thank you very much for those. So remember, if you want to give some value back, drop on over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to leave something for the show.

The final plugin I’ve got for you today – well not the final. This is the final before I hit the ClassicPress. The next plugin here is called Multiple Admin Email Addresses. Now, from time to time when you’re working on a website (which I ran into on a project that I just recently launched), is there’s multiple administrators to the site and each of them need to get notifications for when the website sends out administrative notifications. Now, default for WordPress is you can only put one administrator notification inside the general settings, and you need to set up either some coding or use a plugin like this one here.

This plugin goes in, it creates a new field in your general settings tab, to allow you to create a comma delimited list of email addresses that will send out all the notifications from the website to all those administrators, and this can be very important depending on the project or what you’re doing. At any rate, a very fantastic plugin, simple to use, solves a major headache problem, just works, and of course being free, all plugins like that, what do they get? A 5-Dragon rating for this one here.

[Dragon roar]

That’s Multiple Admin Email Addresses.

And ClassicPress – and of course this one here, ClassicPress is growing in community size, I believe, and getting better and better. At any rate, I’m still checking out plugins that are mostly WordPress-based but seeing how they work with ClassicPress in my test and development site I’m working on, this one here is for Elementor, which I just briefly mentioned, thanks to Jezweb. They have a free version of the plugin and I also have the pro version, so this is a little discussion about both the free and the pro version and how it works with ClassicPress.

It seems to work fantastically with ClassicPress with one minor caveat I noticed. After I installed the pro version into the ClassicPress, I found that it needed an update, but it would not do the auto update in ClassicPress. It might be a glitch in there. Maybe they’ll fix it, maybe they won’t. I hope they do, because that would make it really nice to allow it to continually update.

All in all, ClassicPress is allowing me to create some really new and uniquely designed websites, stuff that I’ve been doing with other types of themes and doing it through additional work in those themes. But it’s just making the task of development a whole lot easier and I’m also finding that I’m not running into headaches with Gutenberg using Elementor, which is also kind of a nice toy.

At any rate Elementor works really well with ClassicPress. You might want to go check it out if you’re moving into the ClassicPress area. And of course, Elementor being so good as it is, I give it a 4 rating for the free version, which always is a point for free. But for the pro version it gets a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Hey, it’s a roaring kind of day.

Okay, well that closes it out I covered up in this episode here WebDefender, which I gave a 3 to; the Zephyr Project Manager, which I gave a 4 to; the Autocomplete WooCommerce Orders, which I gave a 5 to; the Multiple Admin Email Addresses, which I gave a 5 to; and then the Elementor Page Builder, which got a 4 and a 5 for free and pro.

And I’d also like to give another shout-out to Steve Schmidt of nowowl.com and his generous donation of the WP Plugins A-Z logo we currently use. A really great logo and lots of people like it, and I really appreciate his talents and his time for creating that for me. You see, there’s lots of ways to donate to the show, folks. If you really like it, there’s other things that I need besides money. Sometimes, I just need somebody to do edits on the website. I don’t always have time for it. I have a person that does it, but she’s only here four hours a week, so not always enough time.

Also, the next WordPress Meetup is in Victoria on April 3rd, so that’s just over a week from now – I believe it’s just over a week. No, let me look at my calendar real quick. Bring up the calendar. Oh, sorry. A week and a half. So it’s a week and a half from now. It’s a Wednesday. So anyway, it will be broadcast live here on YouTube and I’m pretty sure I’ll get it right this time. Every time I’ve done it, I’ve gotten better and better, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be right, so you’ll want to check this one out. I’m doing a presentation on SEO 101 for WordPress. This is basic SEO stuff, so if you’re not already dealing with SEO in your WordPress website or you’re just learning it, this is for you. This is not for someone who’s experienced in WordPress SEO. So make sure you check it out.

And if you happen to be in the Victoria area, come on down. Say hi. Tell me you listen to the show. I’d really like to hear it. I really appreciate when people tell me about it and I really appreciate you, the listeners.

Also, be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A-Z, where you find training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show every week.

And a final note out there to developers, if you want to support the show and you would like to donate a premium license, all you gotta do is head over to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter all the information, the license information, and we will create a contest giveaway where you get show after show, free advertising, promoting, and pushing out your plugin. It’s the best form of free advertising I could think. All it costs you is the cost of your license, which is pretty minimal for digital products, you know. It could be some time helping the person that wins it if they need support, but that’s all it really is.

That’s pretty much it, so thank you very much everyone for showing up and for those of you listening to this Episode 400 and may there be another 400 shows. Who knows? At any rate, I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here, so thank you very much.

 

[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 399 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 #399 here.


It’s Episode 399 and I’ve got plugins for Instagram Widget, Protecting Posts, Header Bars, Limiting Access, Vegas lighting, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!

Episode #399

John:    It’s Episode 399 and I’ve got plugins for Instagram Widget, Protecting Posts, Header Bars, Limiting Access, Vegas lighting, 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 and talking to you on my new microphone that made its epic world tour, starting in Barcelona, Spain, heading up to Leipzig, Germany, East Midlands, Great Britain, hung out in London for a couple of days, back to East Midlands where it headed across the pond to Cincinnati, Ohio, hung out there for a couple of days, and then finally arrived in Vancouver yesterday, arriving here to Victoria, British Columbia today. I hope you all enjoy this new sound, and this microphone is a world traveler.

So 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 at 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 greatly appreciate your time for doing that.

Also, subscribe and hit the notification bell if you’re listening to us on YouTube, or just do that so you can get the training videos, screencasts, and all the extra shows that eventually show up here.

You can watch live every Thursday at noon. I do this show live on YouTube and check me out. It’s a really great time. Lots of people show up from time to time; sometimes a lot, sometimes not so many. But hey, it’s always fun for me. And there’s also an occasional live show on Saturday nights at about 8:00, depending on what’s happening with my weekend. This weekend? No, I’m going away. I’m getting away out to the forest – escaping technology for 36, 38, 40 hours.

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

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right and starting us off I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but thought you might find useful. These are plugins that have been sent in to me by developers. I’ve not been able to find any use for them, I’ve not had time to get them into a test site to test them out, but I thought you might want to know a bit about them.

The first one was sent in to us by Herman Schutte and it’s a freemium third-party plugin. This one here is called SnapWidget WP Instagram Widget, and what this plugin does for you and what they have to say is it’s an Instagram widget plugin that’s easy to use and embed your SnapWidget Instagram Widget into your website or blog to display your Instagram photos. And what you need to do with them is you need to install this plugin into your site and then you have to go over to SnapWidget and get yourself an account with them. They have assorted pricings from free all the way up to a developer plan.

It looks like a really good plugin if you use Snapchat a lot – or Instagram, not Snapchat – let me get that straight in my head. If you use Instagram a lot, this is a way to embed them into your site using a third-party service. You create the SnapWidgets over there, then you import the shortcodes into your website using this plugin. I don’t know why they don’t just give you code, but this might be a little easier for people.

There’s a lot that it can do. It’s got both pro and free versions and services you can use via pro. If you do use the free service, the links that are created in your photos off your website go to the SnapWidget website, whereas if you go to the pro, the links you create with your photos go directly to your Instagram profile. So pros and cons with it, you know. Of course, anytime you get something for free, there’s generally a cost to it in some other way.

At any rate, it looks interesting enough and it might be useful for folks, so go check it out. It is called SnapWidget WP Instagram Widget, and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, next up we’ve got one here that was sent in to us by Tim Van Onckelen. This is a free plugin and it’s called Super Access Manager. This is a plugin that if you’re running a simplified membership type of site where you want to limit access to posts and pages, you can control access across posts and pages, custom post types, you can make posts available on a user role basis, you can make it available only for visitors or registered users, create personal pages, auto-hide pages and menus. You know, it uses the shortcodes to show all user pages. There’s a lot of little things you can do to this, but it is for the simplified version of a membership site and controlling posts.

I do have a couple of ideas on where it could be used. I work with one particular client that they have a simplified version of allowing special posts to different people on the site. I don’t know if it’s going to work fully, but it’s along the idea of what I’ve been looking for, so it’s something you may want to go check out. It’s called Super Access Manager, available from xeweb.be, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out, folks. Very interesting little plugin.

And currently, this show is brought to you by…

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

Absolutely – and if you’re tired of WordPress hosting that slows you down, come visit JohnOverall.com for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down.

And contest-wise, we announced the winner to the contest last week and we do have a new contest going out right now. We are giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful commenting system for great discussions. The one-year license gives you more advantages to it, so it’s a freemium model plugin. No more disorganized discussions piled on several pages. With Graph Comment, your audience can easily follow the relevant discussions.

It inserts all the comments into your WordPress database, which allows you simply if you want to revert away from their third-party system back to your default commenting, you don’t lose any of the comments like you do with some of the other third-party systems out there.

For more information, go check it out at graphcomment.com. It’s a really great plugin. I believe we reviewed this one. I’ll have to go look it up, but it’s one that I have reviewed some time in the past, and we are giving away a one-year expert license for it, so go sign up for the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contest to enter the contest. All we need is your name and email address and hey, you might even like to sign up for the email list at the same time.

The next plugin I’ve got up here for you is called MS Header Bar. This one here will allow you to create header bars – multiple styles of header bars – across your website. Now one unique thing about this, I’ve played with a lot of different header bar plugins in the past, such as HelloBar and a few others. A lot of them would just go site-wide or a little touchy on individual pages. This one here is made to create header bars for specific pages or posts throughout your site.

What you do is you go in there and you create – it uses custom post types. You create the header bar, it creates a shortcode for you where it actually creates a meta block in your post area that you then choose the header bar that you’re looking for to display on that particular page. And you can create all kinds of different header bars, from social media header bars, to countdown timers, to email forms, to popup messages, to just plain messages. You can add colors to it. There’s a lot of little miscellaneous things that goes into this plugin.

All in all, it’s pretty easy to use and set up and you activate it on a per-page basis, so create the specific headers on a specific page and use it across your site. There is even a way to, you know, bulk load it. So go check this plugin out. It’s a pretty decent plugin and it’s called MS Header Bar – Create Beautiful Header Bars to Show Notifications, Call back, Timer, Offers, Coupons and Collect leads and More. That’s their full title; that’s not me just making that up. So all in all – and I give this plugin a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Okay, listener feedback – I do like listener feedback when I can get it, so please take a few moments, drop in to wppluginsatoz.com. Go down into the lower right-hand corner, click the button, send me a voice message via SpeakPipe. Hit our Contact page up, send me an email – multiple ways to get a hold of me. You could also contact me through the Facebook at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook or on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. So there’s multiple ways and I’ll be happy to take your feedback, use it on the show. As me questions. I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. Think of it as a way to get some free advice from a very expensive professional.

This show, also value-for-value model, meaning if you’re getting any value out of it, please give some value back. If the things I talk about save you even five minutes, what’s that five minutes worth to you? A cup of coffee, maybe? Maybe the price of a beer? Hey, give that back by going to PayPal, going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, and donate that $5, $8, or whatever it is. Or sign up at Patreon and create a monthly Patreon donation that comes in.

And I’d like to thank all of the monthly Patreon donations and the other small donors that have been donating the small $5 and $10 amounts. Thank you very much. That money is greatly appreciated and helps support the show by doing the things such as transcripts, paying for the bandwidth, the server space, etc.

Any donations though that are $50 and over, they get a note read out here on the show; everyone else stays anonymous. Thank you very much for all you donors. I greatly appreciate your help.

Okay, the final plugin I’ve got for you here today… this one here is called Neon Lights. So you want to add some Vegas style to your – old Vegas – I should’ve put that in the header – old Vegas style neon text lights or old “Get your kicks on Route 66,” you know, all the old neon lighting across the world used to be – and neon lighting is making a big comeback. Well, you can go create neon text with this plugin.

It creates some pretty cool neon text effects in here. You can have the lights flash, you can make one letter burnt out so that it gives you that effect of, you know, partially lit and flashing, like it’s dying. It does all kinds of cool things. You can go in there and set up those timings, choose multiple colors for your text, what the forward color is, back colors – there’s a whole lot of really cool things it does.

I’ve been playing with it. I don’t know exactly how I’ll use it. I don’t know where I’ll be able to use it, but I just found it cool. And if you happen to have a site that is just crying for neon text, go check out this one here, Neon Lights. And just because it’s cool, simple, and free, I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Go check it out: Neon Lights.

All right, and ClassicPress options. What do we have this week? And of course, ClassicPress has come into existence simply due to the misstep (I believe) that WordPress has made. While I’m still going to use WordPress and I still like it, I still believe it was a misstep to force Gutenberg into the core. At any rate, ClassicPress is out and they are on Version One Official and they are moving forward, so plugins are starting to move in that direction and I believe that more and more of it’s going to occur.

This week here, what have I got for you? (And I may have talked about this plugin before, but I don’t know if I talked about it in relation to ClassicPress), and this is the Health Check and Troubleshooting plugin. This is a plugin here that gives you a whole bunch of information about your site. It tells you everything that’s happening in your site from your PHP version, your MySQL version, what add-ins for PHP are missing from your install that you should have. It’s got a debug mode, so you can go in and debug issues. It does a lot of troubleshooting information and site info that developers need from time to time when they’re trying to figure out what’s going on.

So this is a really great plugin. I already know it works well under WordPress. I’ve used it a couple of times on there and just something to go check out. So go check this one out: Health Check and Troubleshooting, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. So go check out this plugin – really great and useful and it does work in ClassicPress to give you all of the information you need for your ClassicPress install.

That wraps up everything and, in this episode, I covered up the SnapWidget WP Instagram Widget, which I gave a 3 to; the Super Access Manager, which I gave a 4 to; and the MS Header Bar, which I gave a 4 to; the Neon Lights, which I gave a 5 to; and the Health Check and Troubleshooting, which I gave a 4 to.

Now I’d also like to put another reminder out there, a special thanks out to Steve Schmidt, who was the designer of the logo we currently use at wppluginsatoz.com. I know I’ve thanked him once before, but I just wanted to re-acknowledge him because that logo is pretty cool, and I get lots of really good complements on it and I gotta go, “Hey, I didn’t do it.” One of my listeners did, so thanks a lot, Steve, if you’re still listening to this show. And you can find him at NowOwl.com and I really appreciate the generous donation of the logo.

Okay, and the next WordPress Meetup for Victoria is on April 3rd and it will be broadcast live on YouTube. For the location information, go check it out and the next seminar is going to be on WordPress 101 information, so go check that out. I’ll be broadcasting it live and I’m pretty sure the broadcast will go out much better than the last couple. I get better every time I do it. I always find something I forget or don’t know or some little tweak. It’s really actually harder than you think to broadcast live, especially if you’re using an iPhone, and I’ve got to step up the game and get it up to an actual camera. But that costs money, so I can’t quite do that yet. So go check it out. It’ll be on April 3rd and if you happen to be in the Victoria area, come on down and join us. It’s only $5. Help me pay for the cost of the room.

Okay, and be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Hit that notification bell right down there somewhere – there you go, it’s right down there. There we go. Hit that notification bell; that way you get notifications of when we’re going live and when new videos are uploaded to the site.

And that’s all I’ve got for you, so I’ll let my girl take us on 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 398 WP Plugins A to Z

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe to WPPlugins A to Z on Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | RSS

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 #398 here.


It’s Episode 398 and I’ve got plugins for Selling Games, Social Media, World Time, Block Management, and Shortcode Factory, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #398

John:    It’s Episode 398 and I’ve got plugins for Selling Games, Social Media, World Time, Block Management, and Shortcode Factory, 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 greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and reviewing it for us. We’d greatly appreciate that time you take.

Also remember here on YouTube, if you’re watching us live or you’re coming in later to watch it, remember to subscribe to the show. Hit the little bell down there on the bottom. That way, you get notification of when new videos come up or when we’re getting ready to go live.

I do have a show that goes out on Saturday nights – not every Saturday night. I try to make it a regular, but it turns out I actually have a life on Saturday night sometimes, so it’s an intermittent show so you’ll just have to tune in for it or watch for it.

You could also follow the show up on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook – let’s get that one correct. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. It goes out every Friday and it’s got more information and tidbits in it that are not covered up in the show.

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

[Plugins lead-in rock music]

All right, and to start off I do have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but they’re ones I thought people would like to know about. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers to be reviewed, and either I don’t have time to get them into a project, they’re not needed for a project, I can’t get them into a test site, but they’ve been accumulating. I really think people will want to know that these plugins exist, so I’m letting everyone know about them.

First up, I have one that was sent in by Paul Myerson and this is a third-party service and it’s CodesWholesale and it’s from codewholesale.com – wow, that’s a tongue twister. And here’s what they have to say about the plugin:

“This is a plugin that provides you with the free extensions to online stores using WooCommerce. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly into WooCommerce and give you unlimited access to over 2,000 digital games in the product catalogue.” This way, you don’t need to own them to resell them. It’s basically a reseller’s item that you can bring into your store. It’s powerful; it’s got lots of features, price, and stock up dates, postback, system notifications, replaces the manual price adjustment with the universal pricing rules, program your store to fulfill the orders in seconds (so I assume that they’ll do the drop shipping for you and all of the other little tidbits with it.)

It looks kind of interesting, but it is a third-party service you have to pay for or sign up for for their little test for free to see how it works. All in all, if you’re running a WooCommerce store and you’re looking to add some additional products with minimal amount of effort and no stock overhead, check this plugin out. I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It’s called Codeswholesale and it’s at codeswholesale.com. (Whew, that’s still a tough one to say.)

What I have next for you is a plugin that was sent in to us by Daniela Turcanu and it’s another third-party service, and this one here is from https://walls.io and it’s a social media feed plugin. And this being a third-party service, they do have a free account you can get to test it. It allows you to bring in feeds from all of the social media outlets out there such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, etc. and it creates a wall feed on your website for you.

From what I gather from reading everything on it, it helps keep that information up-to-date for you, maybe possibly dragging in more visitors to your site who might engage with you, buy your products or your services – whatever you’re doing on your website – so it looks kind of interesting. Again, a third-party service with a free sampler that you can sign up for for a premium account. Something to go check out if you’re looking to add more content to your website through a little bit of work. All in all, it looks like a pretty decent plugin to help with that information.

Go check it out. It’s called Walls.io and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

[clears throat] I got a frog this morning. I’m gonna chase those frogs away.

All right, currently this show is brought to you buy…

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

Absolutely, and if you’re tired of web hosting that slows you down, contact JohnOverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.

And contests – we do have a winner from the last contest for the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. The winner was Mike. Congratulations to Mike. He’s been notified so as soon as he gets back to me, we will get him out his information for his license. So thank you to everyone who entered the contest last month – much appreciated. It’s a way to get yourself a free license; you just never know. All you gotta do is enter your name and email address.

And we do have a new contest coming up and it starts on Friday being tomorrow on March 8, and it will run through until April 4th. We are giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful commenting plugins system that has a premium version, so we’re giving away the premium version license for it and you’ll want to check them out at graphcomment.com, and I believe we might have even reviewed this plugin, but I’ll have to get the further information about it.

Anyway, it’s something to bring in the comments to your WordPress website and hold them there and you keep them. It uses a third-party service along with your site. It’s kind of an interesting way of doing things. So anyway, it’s something you may want to check out. It’s Graph Comments and that contest will run from March 8th – yeah, we’re in March now – March 8th until April 4th, so make sure you go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest to win the one-year license for Graph Comments.

Okay, what do we got next? We have World Time Clocks. Now this one here is one that I had to search for. It turns out that if you are searching for a way to display actual clocks (not just digital time on your site), not a lot of choices out there at the moment, and a couple of them that are out there that work, they use Flash. (And well, everyone knows where Flash is going.)

This here is called jClocksGMT World Clocks and it is a plugin that will work not only as a widget – which almost all of them are pure widget – this also uses shortcodes that you can then place on a page or a post so that you can create multiple clocks for world times across the globe. So if you’re setting up a page, and in my particular instance I was working on a client’s site and they needed – they had offices all over the globe, so they needed time clocks on a particular page so everyone could look at one page and see the time zones for all the different offices they have, and seeing the digital stuff didn’t always equate if you’re a person that gets used to seeing analog clocks. I know that analog clocks are a little rough for a lot of younger folks out there, but analog is the way to go.

At any rate, great plugin, works wonderful. The shortcodes have a lot of input variations to allow you to have different clock faces, different time zones, different titles – a whole bunch of little things in it. It worked great; just install it, activate it, either set it as a widget, set your shortcodes, and poof, it worked. A really nice plugin. It is an older plugin, so I do know it works with the latest version of WordPress and also works in ClassicPress, so something you might want to check out. It’s called jClocksGMT World Clocks and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

            Go check it out.

I’m still looking for that listener feedback. You’ve got questions you’d like answered, any thing that gets you excited, feedback about the site – anything – send it my way. You can do that by going through our Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com or you can drop a SpeakPipe just in the lower right-hand corner, hit the little “Leave a Message” button, and it’ll record your vice and send it in to me. You can get a hold of me via a direct email or off the Facebook or Twitter pages – anywhere – get a hold of me. I do get back to people (sometimes not as quick as I should), but I do get back to people and I look forward to your comments and questions and anything you’d like to give me.

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 all those who have donated to the show in the past week, past month. Currently, I’d like to acknowledge and thank all the Patreon donors out there that donate small amounts. The Patreon payment came through this month, so thank you very much for that. Those that are $50 and over, they get a note read out here and everyone below $50, thank you very much for your support. It remains anonymous.

And if you would like to support the show, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. Fill out the form, submit it to PayPal, and I will get your donation. And those donations do not actually make it to my pocket. They help support the things we do on the show such as transcripts, server bandwidth – yeah, that’s pretty much where it all goes right now. Eventually it might pay for some of the time I put into it, but I’m not worried about that.

A big thank you also to those that hire me because of the podcast. That’s as good as donating to the show as far as I’m concerned, because that helps pay for my time. So thank you very much!

Okay, the final – the next – actually, I’ve got one more. I’ve got a couple. The next plugin I’ve got for you here, this one here is if you’ve started working in Gutenberg, you’ll understand this a little bit. I mean, I’ve started to work with Gutenberg in bits and pieces. I have a couple of smaller clients that are using Gutenberg and one of the things in Gutenberg is all the blocks that get installed, and many of those blocks can be confusing. Some of them might not even be useful for your customers. You might just want to get rid of them and turn them off.

This is a plugin to do that. It disables Gutenberg blocks. It is a block manager to go in and disable a whole bunch of blocks. It supports turning off core blocks, advanced Gutenberg blocks, cadence blocks, jetpack blocks, editor blocks, WooCommerce blocks, other blocks. It’s got a whole list of blocks that you can turn off with this plugin.

And according to them, they’re adding to it to help you control your blocks, because you can end up with a lot of blocks, confuse your customer. They only need to do the stuff they need to do – or even yourself if you’re working on a website. You only want the stuff you want to do. You don’t want to open it up and have a whole list to scroll through, categorize – all the other stuff.

A great little plugin, works very nice. You just turn it on, turn off the stuff you don’t want to see, and it’s not gonna be shown. A great plugin, works well, and we always love free plugins that work well which get a top 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Check it out: Disable Gutenberg Blocks – Block Manager.

And finally, we have ClassicPress Options. This one here is to talk a little bit about the ClassicPress plugins since I do have a site right now that is going ClassicPress and I need to be testing and using stuff on it and bringing stuff into it. This week’s Classic Press plugin is called Shortcode Factory, and Shortcode Factory offers a wide range of ready-to-use shortcodes for your daily WordPress operations. There are plenty of shortcodes available at hand and they try to bring the most common shortcodes to you.

It’s got shortcode templates, you know, no need to remember them for shortcodes for posts and pages, uses roles, forms, and fields, UI and utility, and I think it’s got an ability for you to go in and edit your own. All in all, it looks like a pretty good plugin to use in your website if you use shortcodes, and I use a lot of shortcodes, especially like the WP Plugins site. I’ve got an old plugin in there that manages all our shortcodes that handle a lot of stuff in there. So this is one you’ll want to go check out. It looks to be a pretty great plugin. It’s called Shortcode Factory and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

So that wraps it up. I covered up in this show here the Codeswholesale plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the Social Media Feed plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the jClocksGMT World Clocks, which I gave a 5 to; the Disable Gutenberg Blocks – Block Manager, which I gave a 5 to; and the Shortcode Factory, which I gave a 4 to, so make sure you go check these out.

A couple of quick reminders…the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be April 3rd and it will be broadcast live on YouTube. For location and more information, go check it out at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. So if you’re in the Victoria area, please come out to the meetup and join us. We’ve got a pretty big group of people that are coming out regularly now – somewhere around 20 to 30 people show up regularly and you can meet other WordPress users, get some tips and information. The next meetup presentation I’ll be giving is SEO 101, which is basic SEO setup for your WordPress website and things you want to think about and do, so make sure you join it. It will be broadcast live and the livestreams have been getting better and better, so I’m pretty sure the next one will be even better than the last one.

Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel where you’ll find training videos, screencasts, and more. And little by little, I’m getting more of those training videos up as I find the plugins that I need to do them for.

And a final note to developers out there, if you’d like to support the show, you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/contest to enter all of your information.

And a final note, please subscribe to the newsletter. Just go to the website, scroll down a little bit, enter your name and email and subscribe to the newsletter.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you today, so thanks everyone for listening. I really greatly appreciate your time and 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]

 

[End of Audio]

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

/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…

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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]