All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of Marcus and John’s discussion of the weekly plugins we have reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #452 here.
Tapping the Flowers of Life and Finding the Nectar It’s Episode 452 with plugins for Page builders, Class Registration Management, Google Analytic for WooCommerce, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #452
Okay, everyone. What do we got for you this week? And we’ll start right off with some ClassicPress stuff. Everyone knows about ClassicPress by now. It’s gained lots of ground over the last year and it’s still gaining ground and momentum. We’ll see how it goes over the next several months.
First off, I have a little bit of news from the ClassicPress world today. What do we have? I think I covered this before, but it was brought to my attention again so I thought I would bring it back up. If you use Elementor and you’re thinking of moving to ClassicPress, it looks like we have a beta fork of Elementor with ClassicPress support, and this is for those of you that are using ClassicPress and you want to continue using Elementor. Since Elementor dropped support for WordPress 4.9 (which is what ClassicPress is based on), this is what you’ll want to check out. So make sure you check this one out.
It’s a really good thing. I haven’t yet thoroughly tested it and they recommend don’t put it on a live site unless you’ve thoroughly vetted it to make sure. Give it a good test, let them know what you think, and once they get through it, I’m sure they will make it an actual release as long as someone picks it up and keeps it going. There is more information on it from a first update, a couple of things in the forums on it, so there’s a lot in the ClassicPress forums about it. Go check it out. It’s something that I am really happy to see happening.
Now we do have a new plugin for ClassicPress. This is another one from CodePotent and this one is Timeless Text.
And Timeless Text is for if you have sayings, such as “I have 20 years of X experience,” 35, or two years – you know, phrases like that – you can use this Timeless Text with some placeholders to automatically change those years and dates as times moves forward and goes by. Pretty useful plugin; something you’ll want to check out if you’re using ClassicPress. The plugin is built specifically for ClassicPress, so go check it out. If you use these phrases, dump it into your website and save yourself some grief down the road when you’ve gone three or four years down the road and your text has gotten out of date and you go, “Oops, I need to update it.” Something to help keep you automatically up to date.
And that’s all I really have. There’s not a lot in ClassicPress this week. I haven’t had a lot of time to research.
Surprisingly, I’ve had more work this week added to my schedule than I expected to, which is not a bad thing in and of itself. I like that, but it did surprise me. But I’m going to keep it and keep moving on.
Okay, what do we got for WordPress plugins? Okay, the first one I’ve got for you here was sent in by Angel Lemus and this is called Brizy Page Builder. Now, this is a page builder plugin that is similar in style to Elementor. It is a premium plugin and currently they are offering up lifetime licenses. I guess they have 760 left to give out. So if you test out this plugin and you really, really like it, I would suggest you buy the lifetime license. Hopefully they’ll honor it; that’s the big thing to me. I mean, I’ve seen lifetime licenses since the beginning of this. I’ve bought my share of lifetime licenses. I’ve also had my share of the developers who refuse to honor my lifetime license and the share of developers that continue to honor the lifetime license I still have, so you’re at a risk there. You know, they will get to a point to where a lifetime license is no longer a viable method for them to make money on, and they’ll have to go to an annual or semi-annual fee. So it’s just something to be aware of but it does look like a really cool page builder, something that could help you set things up and get it all functioning, so go check this one out. It does look like it’d be kind of interesting. At the moment, based upon what I see with it and what I checked out on it, I give it a 3-Dragon rating. So go check it out: the Brizy Page Builder.
Okay, the next one I’ve got here for you… this one was sent in to me by Zbynek Nedoma and it’s called Easy School Registration System. And this one here is a plugin for setting up a schooling system. If you offer classes – say you’re a personal trainer or music classes or anything like that – it’s a registration system so people can sign up on your website for your classes. You know, it’s a pretty decent plugin looking for the most part of what I’ve seen. I watched a little bit of their video showing me about all the different pieces on it and what it can do. (Having some internet loading issues right now, which is not overly surprising.) But all in all, it’s a nice little plugin for setting up your courses, your registrations, taking payments, etc. to help get you some money.
And I notice with lots of other businesses right now in this current time, personal trainers are moving online to give classes and music instructors moving online to give classes. Many, many people are going to be moving into the online world. Now, not my favorite thing – I mean, the online world is great but there’s nothing like in-person working with somebody. I know a personal trainer – I’d never be able to do a personal trainer online; I need him right there hollering at me eight inches from my face, telling me to, you know, “You can do it.” So there’s a big difference.
There are some things that are going to work, and many people can do that. I’m just not one of them. Yeah, that’s one of the problems. I couldn’t go to the gym this week. Okay, so that one there, nice-looking plugin. Again, it looks to be about an average plugin for me and being a premium system, I’m going to give this one a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out, the Easy School Registration System.
Okay, next up I have for you – this is another one that was sent in to me. This was sent in to me by Dhyey Chandani and this one is called the Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce. And this one here, I really couldn’t do much testing or look into it too deeply because I’m not doing any real WooCommerce stuff these days. But just by skipping around and looking things over, it does look like it’d be a pretty decent plugin.
If you’ve got a good WooCommerce store you want to do some tracking on, this might be something you’ll add in there to enhance your tracking, know what’s happening, and find out what your clients and customers are up to when they’re visiting your website. Why they’re not buying, where they’re dropping out of the process, etc. so you can help refine it. And it’s going to become more important than ever to figure out those statistics than it ever has been, because you’re going to need to find ways to – okay, they come to my site. I see they load their cart. They disappear and never come back. What happens? Did they suddenly find an expense they didn’t like? Did they read something they didn’t want to read? Did something happen? Is the page not loading? You’ll need to start getting this stuff sorted out if you’re going to make money and continue to make money online, because it’s going to become even more crowded now that people are moving online these days.
And of course we are in that problem now. I noticed my internet which is normally blisteringly fast during the week when everybody in my apartment building is all gone to work, it’s slowed down a little bit as everybody is home right now and there’s many people that are probably streaming Netflix or some other major streaming service, or gaming, or something else that’s sucking through the bandwidth. So keep that in mind. That’s going to be a problem.
All right, so that’s all I’ve got for the plugins this week. And real quickly, this show… oh, I didn’t give a rating on this one. Pop that back for a moment. This one here, I give this one a rating of 3 Dragons. Go check it out. It’s Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce.
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Absolutely. CMS Commander, a very excellent plugin. As I’ve said many times, I’ve been using it for about seven or eight years now and I am thoroughly happy with it. If you do use it, please use the links in the Show Notes as that is my affiliate link. They don’t pay me for the ad; it’s an affiliate link. But if you’d like to replace that ad with yours, reach out to me. We’ll be happy to do that for you.
Okay, and listener feedback. Well, I don’t have any direct listener feedback and I’m really looking forward to seeing some emails, contact forms. You know, notes on the YouTube videos. Any place, you know? Please reach out to me.
Let me know what’s happening whether you’re liking the show, disliking the show, you want things to change, I should cover something more in-depth. You know, all these different things. I have no idea. I’m taking the show where I take it and if people are listening, they are.
So at any rate, I have been getting some feedback that I’ve seen occasionally. Lots of people are retweeting the tweets out there. They’re liking them. You know, that much I’m getting feedback on. Little bits of social media. The occasional reposts on Facebook – that sort of information – so it does tell me that people have seen the stuff. I’m just not hearing directly back from them. So if you can reach out and hit me back up, I would really enjoy that.
All right, and contests. We do have a contest, but it is not fully set up. The new contest will be starting this week and we’ll be giving away a license for Event Espresso. Now, this is either a one or another license. They have a complete license with all of their plugins or a developer’s license. That’s what your choice is going to be. You’ll get the link, you’ll be able to go sign up, it’ll all be paid for. You’ll just choose which one you want when you sign up with them.
And Event Espresso is a fantastic plugin now. I had the joy of actually using it last year sometime in the middle of the summer when I had to help a garden conference get their website up and running and they were using Event Espresso, and I hadn’t used it in years. I also did an interview with Seth from Event Espresso, which is online somewhere. I’ll have to dig that up and get it into the Show Notes, but a very excellent plugin. They’ve improved it so dramatically over the years. Like I used it way back when they first started, and it’s come a long way in the several years it’s been around.
So it’s going to be an excellent contest and it will start. You want to know when it starts? Pay attention to our Facebook feed and our Twitter feed, because we’ll be announcing it there before it’s fully announced in next week’s episode. So we do have a contest for you – just not up yet. If you want to check it out and follow it, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for information on when the contests are live.
Okay, so what have I got for you? That closes everything out this week. I covered up the following plugins: the Brizy Page Builder, which I gave a 3 to; the Easy School Registration, which I gave a 3 to; the Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce – that’s a mouthful – which I gave a 3 to; and the Beta fork of Elementor, which I gave a 4 to. I didn’t give a score to the Timeless Text one – I didn’t give a score to that one this week because I want to actually kind of test that one out.
Okay, a couple of quick reminders. The WordPress Meetup for March 26th has been cancelled. Well, I may – nah, I’m gonna cancel it, because I won’t be of mind to just do a live one out of my living room. I could, but we’ll see.
Maybe we’ll just do some sort of other episode on that instead of the topic, because I really hadn’t got the topic together for it when the virus broke and everything else broke loose. So that has been cancelled. The next Meetup is still scheduled for the end of April, provided that the world has come back from its insanity. So we shall see what happens. That’s on a week-by-week basis at the moment.
Again, if you want to be interviewed, please reach out to wppluginsatoz.com/interview or you can reach out to me direct at john@wppro.ca.
Okay – you can also find out a little bit more about me. I’ve posted up some new stuff up at theroguestavern.com, up on my Rogue’s Tavern YouTube channel. I posted up a great video on how to make beef jerky, so go check that out at theroguestavern.com. The link is direct to the YouTube channel. You can find out a little bit more about me there.
That’s pretty much all I have for you, so I appreciate everyone who stopped in to the show today and if you’ve got any questions, pop them up while the credits are playing and if not, I’ll end it shortly thereafter. So thank you very much and you all have yourself a great day. I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at 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.