Transcript of Episode 395 WP Plugins A to Z

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

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

Episode #395

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And currently, this show is brought to you by…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.