September 11, 2012

Discussing WordPress Plugins for Dropbox, Gravity Forms & Sharing Bars

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It’s Episode #86 and we’ve got plugins for Dropbox integration, Gravity forms PDFs, Popups, Sharing Bars and a great new site manager plugin. All that and more coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z.

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John’s & Marcus Rant:

I’m excited I have been asked to be a guest blogger on two great websites one for the Social Media camp site here in Victoria https://socialmediacamp.ca/ My first poste goes up there on the 21st or thera bouts and the second is to be at DIY WP Blog at https://diywpblog.com/ my first post there will be in a few days.. Plus I will be having a few guest bloggers coming to my website soon and if you would like to be one in the future simply drop me a line.

I really need to find a way to simply eliminate sleep from my schedule so I can get more done, you know with family life and work and hobbies it seems sleep just gets in the way. ( I am really feeling the need this past week to kill virtual monsters and demons in either WarCraft or Diablo3)

On the fun side of life I went to the Great Canadian Beer fest this past weekend one of the premier beer festivals in the west. We had some great microbreweries here from all over including some for the down south The best beer I tasted there was from Dead Frog Brewery called Pepper Lime Beer.. (now this was probably the last hot weekend of the year here but I am glad cause now my computer won’t need ice to keep running)

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

With 60 Million Websites, WordPress Rules The Web. So Where’s The Money? — a write up about the early days of WordPress

WordPress 3.4.2 Maintenance and Security Release — so what is worse than updating a bunch of WordPress websites —-?? having to do it again 30 min later when a new security update drops, yes the new update is out and dropped 30 min after I had just updated a bunch of sites for their plugins.

Sociable WordPress Plugin Security Warning — seems there may be an issue with the plugin downloading an image from a compromised site which could affect you check the article.

WordPress Plugins Reviewed by John

WordPress PopUp 4.3.2

Version: 4.3.2
Author: Barry (Incsub)
Last Updated: 81 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.1 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Downloaded: 21,077 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
This is by far the best popup plugin I have used so far, it is easy to get setup and uses custom posts types for its content so you get to add anything you want the same as any other post, this includes their use of shortcodes. It has several rules you can apply like specific pages only, if they arrive from someplace special, how many times have they seen it and more.
Rating 4 Dragons

Worpit WordPress Site manager

This is a site manager software reasonably priced but since I was only testing I thought i would try for the 3 site trial by sending out the tweet. tweet went out but i did not get the additional 2 sites added to my account automatically..(well I was wrong here it took about 8 min for the additional sites to show up after the tweet) I did run into a couple of conflicting statements. If I had installed the plugin fist and signed up I should have been eligible for 3 websites according to the info in the plugin this from the plugin.
Worpit is completely free when you want to admin up to 3 WordPress websites on a 30 day test after that it drops back to one site – Sign Up for a Worpit WordPress admin account here.

Worpit Features

3 Free Sites For Life
Manage all your WordPress sites in 1 place
One-click Updates for WordPress.org Plugins, Themes and WordPress Core
One-Click login to admin each WordPress website
Price Lock – the price you pay now, you always pay.

Fully Automated WordPress Installer Tool!
Complete Worpit Dashboard Access – no standard/pro/business tiers
Quality Premium WordPress addons only available inside Worpit (coming soon!)
Access to all future Worpit Dashboard updates!
Smooth scaling based on your needs

It seems though that since I went to their site first I am only allowed on site.. This should be consistent I think choose one or the other. I think it goes like this, if I sign up thought the plugin Woohoo I get a deal but if I sign up from the website then see the plugin I feel thats a rip. (again the authors corrected this oversight it seems that they had missed this when they made a switch in how they were making their offer)

I do like the update all plugins but did find it a bit confusing when it showed the main page and listed all plugins and the ones needing updating with an orange button labeled focus..( again they are reconsidering this labeling to find something more usable) This label did not make any sense to me so I pushed it and it switched to where it would allow to to update all plugins at once… I think it would be better labeled update all or manage all.. One thing I found here though was when I went into “focus” (should be manage all) I saw two boxes one where you can manage them by plugin name and one where you can manage them bit site name.. Only on the manage by site name can you select all. They may want to consider a select all button on the manage by plugin name. It did do a nice job of updating the plugins and since this site required 9 to be updated it was a pretty good test. they all updated and site did not break.

The next test was the cleanup which is why this was brought to my attention. This site required some pretty good clean up lots of spam comments unapproved junk and a database that needed optimized. I ran the optimize checker before running the cleanup just to see and it did show expected issues there. So I ran the clean up with the optimizer and then started this paragraph. Turns out it had it all done before I finished this paragraph very nice

It has a great future feature that will allow complete site backups but unfortunately the one site I choose to test this on was on a server without everything needed for this system. This looks to be one great feature and will love to test it when it arrives. Although it seems I won’t be able to since all my servers are missing SVN and one does not allow sql dump

Well when my additional sites arrived I decided to test two other wordpress sites on two different servers. I was able to see how it shows you overlaps in required updates and it started to make a bit more sense in its use as I worked through each item. It was nice to be able to update more than one site with just a couple of clicks but as I am fully aware make sure you visit the sites briefly after updates to make sure all went well. Because it does happen that plugins break sites.

Aside from the minor issues when I started using it and the misunderstanding about the extra site all is pretty nice on this site manager. I do think that they should make notice that if you send out the tweet that it will be a few minutes before the additional domains become available. and they should fix the conflicting info. ( Note the authors did solve this from the time I tested it and the time of this release)

Rating 4 dragons

Service-Authors get a 4 for responsiveness on issues.

Sharebar 1.2.4

Version: 1.2.4
Author: Monjurul Dolon
Last Updated: 7 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 2.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.0.5
Downloaded: 116,310 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The LowDown:
This plugin turns out to be a pretty nice way of encouraging folks to share your content. Since the bar floats down the page as they scroll it is always there just to the left ready for when they want to share.

Rating 4 Dragons

WordPress Plugins Reviewed by Marcus

Pressbox

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pressbox/

Integrates DropBox with your blog allowing you to post images and files directly from your DropBox. Requires PHP 5.2 and cURL.

The Pressbox plugin adds a new tab to the Media Upload screen that allows you to insert images and files from Dropbox into your posts. Additionally, the plugin provides a new shortcode that lets you add links or display images anywhere you want on your blog.

Plugin Author: Les Harris

Marcus’ Take: This solved a TON of time-wasting during uploads of multiple sites. It works directly in the Media Center, allowing you to access the latest of your images across all of your websites.

Rating: 4 Dragons

Gravity Forms PDF Extended

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gravity-forms-pdf-extended/

Gravity Forms PDF Extended allows you to save/view/download a PDF from the front- and back-end, and automate PDF creation on form submission.

Features

Save PDF File on user submission of a Gravity Form so it can be attached to a notification
Customise the PDF template without affecting the core Gravity Form Plugin
Create multiple PDF templates
View and download a PDF via the administrator interface
Simple function to output PDF via template / plugin

Marcus’ Take: I used this for a restaurant client that wanted to have the ability to take orders via their web site. By utilizing the “send pdf upon form completion” it let me email the form results as a PDF to the network enabled printer in the restaurant’s kitchen. The printer was already being used as a fax, and because it was network enabled, it had it’s own email address and printed out the PDF attachment on receipt. This solved many things, as I was able to transform the mobile order page to be nothing but a Gravity form. The PDF sent was identical to their “fax in” form, with the exception of all the fields being typewritten. Great solution to a problem that integrated seamlessly to the client’s needs.

Rating: 5 Dragons

Arty Popup

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/arty-popup/

Use Arty Popup to create a designer popup with optional form integration. Upload any background image for the popup, so as a designer you have complete creative control. Optional forms can be integrated and styled using Contact Form 7. This popup plugin has been created for designers and users who want to implement an attractive popup design of their own, rather than using css to style a text based popup like many other popup plugins.

Key Features

Ability to darken background behind the popup
Select which areas of the site to show the popup (eg front page, posts, pages)
Select cookie lifetime
Works in all major browsers – IE7, IE8, IE9, Safari, Firefox, Chrome
Free popup templates available for download

Marcus’ Take: I needed something to use for a site that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. This let me Get the word out that things were still under construction while still being able to get them on the “launch” email list. Good solution that has a lot of possibilities.

Rating: 4 Dragons