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Episode 453 WP Plugins A to Z

Our Changing World It's Episode 453 with plugins for Membership Photo Galleries, Forcing Logouts, Inactivity, and ClassicPress Options. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-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 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 #453 here.


Our Changing World It’s Episode 453 with plugins for Membership Photo Galleries, Forcing Logouts, Inactivity, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #453

Okay, what have I got this week? We’ve got ClassicPress Options. Well, the ClassicPress Options are a little light this week and that is because I hadn’t seen anything pop up new. I’ve been actually a little bit busier than usual the last week and a half, and so I hadn’t had a time to do a lot of research on ClassicPress. Everything I worked on in the last week was all pertaining to WordPress, so that’s where the majority of it comes. So I don’t have any real information to bring out or any new stuff to push forward this week.

Of course, other people have been tied up in many other ways but of course let’s bring up and remind everyone that there are some really great ClassicPress resources for you to use. ClassicPress, fantastic system. It is what is running WP Plugins A-Z – that whole site runs on ClassicPress. I’ve had to make some modifications and changes to the plugins I use, but it works really well.

If you want some other information from ClassicPress aside from going to their forums, go check out the ClassicPress Club where there’s more information here aside from what you can find at the forums. A really great resource – I’ve actually managed to pick a couple of articles out of there from time to time, which have been useful. If you are working with ClassicPress and you’re looking for the must-have plugins that you’ll want for your site, which ones are recommended, go check out the must-have plugins list on the forum. These are plugins that people have tested and worked with and some are actually ClassicPress-specific. They’ll tell you what plugins to look for for different things, such as Migration Plugin, Custom Fields, Events Calendar – all those different things. This is a really good list and it’s fairly comprehensive for building out a ClassicPress website.

Okay, to find a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins, this is a listing that is maintained by CodePotent and it has a listing – currently I believe it’s got 50 plugins in it that are ClassicPress-specific, and most of them I have gone through and reviewed already. I think there’s one or two I haven’t done a review on, so you can check out my past shows to see if you can find those. They’re really great plugins. Every one I’ve tested has been fantastic and worked very, very well, so go check out that list there.

And of course another place you can go is CodePotent’s directory. He’s got a directory of the plugins that he is producing for ClassicPress, and his directory is growing up and getting out there. So he’s got utility plugins, member plugins, content plugins, so it is coming along quite nicely. That is a nice, new directory he’s creating. So there’s a lot that’s happening there and just this week I didn’t have time to dig up any news and information about what’s up.

Okay, well let’s dive into – what have I got for WordPress this week? Well, WordPress itself, first thing I’ve got for you is a plugin for dealing with inactivity on your membership website. If you manage a membership website or you’ve built one for someone or you know someone that has one and they’ve got lots of members, one of the biggest things they need to deal with on it is ensuring that those people that log in as members don’t log in from the library computer, their neighbor’s brother’s son’s computer, or something that’s not their own personal phone or their own personal computer and staying logged in. The reason for that is, you know, if they go into a library, it’d be kind of like if you log in to check your Gmail at a library and you don’t log out. Someone walks along behind the computer and sits down, oh, here’s the logged in Gmail. Cool! What can I do in here? Same problem with a WordPress website and a membership site. You need them to be logged out if they don’t remember to do it. Many people don’t remember to do that, or they forget or maybe they have a habit and they’ve just forgotten.

Well, that’s where this plugin comes in really useful. What it does is after a period of inactivity, you set the time from a couple of minutes to an hour or whatever. You can set it up and set up rules that either work sitewide for everybody who’s logged in or you can set up rules that only work to certain member permission levels and tell it when they have to log out of the site. What has to happen, how long they can stay on, even pop up a message to remind them. Maybe they just zoned out, went to another window or something, and they get a pop up. It’s like, okay, I need to say yes, okay. It’s kind of like being logged into your bank. After a period of time it pops up a window, “Do you still want to stay logged in?” If not, you’ll want to deal with that as soon as possible.

So this is a really great plugin. It works very, very well for doing exactly that, logging people out of the website. Excellent plugin, Inactive Logout. I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, now along that line is a similar plugin that works well, too. Now, I had to work on a membership website recently and actually I’m still just finishing it up. But what this one had to do is it had to allow someone to log in, check out something specific, and then get them logged out without showing that they were actually logged in as a member. We were using the WordPress site to run the membership system and then allowing them to look at different sets of files that were loaded up to the site for another purpose.

So what I needed to do was I needed something that logged them out. I had initially set up to use the Inactive Logout plugin, but it wouldn’t work because they weren’t tied to a WordPress page that had the session key active for the page. What I needed was to have them log out the moment the browser was closed, no matter where they were, whether they were in the WordPress files or in a subset of files that are just slightly outside of WordPress, and that’s where the WP Force Logout plugin comes into play.

Very simple plugin. You set it up and what it does is the moment they close their browser window it forcefully logs them out of the WordPress account, and this is something that happens sitewide for everyone who logs in, be it the admins or anyone. It could be a pain in the neck if you’re an administrator and you like to leave yourself logged in or any other reason. Other than that, fantastic plugin. I found it worked very well, set up very quickly, and of course plugins like that end up with a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, and the final one I’ve got for you here today is one for creating a user post gallery. Now, I ended up getting the premium version of this plugin because I tested out the free version and found yep, this is what I want – almost. Lacking exactly what they have in the premium version. Well, the premium version is only $19, so it’s well worth it.

Building it up for a client, it was a small fee, so I went ahead and bought it.

But the great thing about this plugin here is it works with Ultimate Member. It actually has a segment where it connects with Ultimate Member, so you can set up to allow the members of this site – and this is a friendship club site that’s being set up, so the members were all friends with each other and they want to share their images with each other but they don’t want them on Facebook or other social media. They want them in their own private environment so that only the members in their group can see these photos of the meetups basically that they go to, the events that they go to. They want them to be protected.

So we needed them to be protected inside the membership system and make it easy for all the members, and some of the members were kind of older, in that 60-70+ range and they just know how to use computers and they know how to move files and upload, so this was a very simple plugin to get that set up. The premium version was needed to allow multiple images uploads. Everything else you need is pretty much in the free version but if you want to allow multiple images and easy drag- ‘n-drop for the images versus hit the button and open up and all of that.

Drag-‘n-drop, which many people understand, that’s where I went to the premium version on this and set it up and then using the Ultimate Member plugin, you protect the pages that are used for uploading, you protect the pages that display the galleries, it splits out the galleries, they end up with their own personal gallery inside their member account, so they can go look at it and if they find images in there that, “Oh, I don’t want those in,” they can delete them from their own member gallery but they can’t impact anyone else’s member gallery, and then it doesn’t impact the whole. They can look at just their own gallery or they can look at all the members’ galleries. You can set it up so it shows galleries via tags on it or descriptors, so a really great plugin.

It did a fantastic job on it. Go check this one out if you’re looking for a way to set up a user post gallery. I believe this is something that because it can also be used outside of a membership, this is probably what I’m going to be using to revamp the Art Generator for WP Plugins because currently it’s basically only a Gravity Forms where the art is submitted. I’ve been looking for a way to easily display all those images that have been submitted to me and I hadn’t gotten to it yet. So anyway, this is something to go check out, the User Post Gallery. And because I did check out the premium version and ended up buying it, it gets a full 5-Dragon rating.

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Alrighty, yes – absolutely. CMS Commander, fantastic plugin. It works great. Like I’ve been saying many times, I’ve been using it for years. And if you do sign up for it, please use the link in my Show Notes. It is an affiliate link; they don’t actually pay me for that ad. I just make money off the affiliate commissions I make on it, the only thing I have an affiliate program with these days because I’ve had them for so long and it does pay me a few bucks about every three or four months. I get a few bucks out of it. I don’t get a whole lot of money, but every little bit does help and it’s always a nice surprise when it arrives in the PayPal account.

Okay, listener feedback. As I’ve been asking folks, please send some listener feedback. I haven’t heard anything from anybody in ages it seems. You know, I see the occasional retweets, the occasional likes on Facebook or other, but no actual concrete feedback. As far as I know, this show is fantastic, everyone loves it, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s perfect to the nth degree. But hey, I don’t know unless somebody actually tells me, so I’m just going to assume the best because that’s my attitude.

All right, now we do have a contest. We have a brand-new contest for everyone, and the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who have kindly provided us with the premium version for all our contests. And we do have a new contest that starts today. We are giving away a license for Event Espresso, and the license we’re giving away is either the Everything License or the Developer License – take your pick. Either one is worth $300, and what’ll happen when you win the contest, you’ll get a key where you can take it directly here. You hit “Buy Now,” you enter that, you enter all your information, and boom, you get the whole package for free. Just make sure you weigh which one you need most, the Everything or the Developer. Both of them, a fantastic deal.

Excellent plugin – Event Espresso is a flexible event registration, ticketing, and calendar plugin for WordPress. The plugin can handle a variety of events from organizing an annual conference for you company, to holding training courses to teach CPR, hosting an art or painting classes, or planning an event to raise money for a non-profit. Event Espresso can make your event registration and ticketing with WordPress enjoyable, easy, and profitable. The best events registration and ticketing features come standard in the core, a WordPress events plugin, plus fantastic support.

Both support licenses are valued at $300 and the coupon is good for one redemption. You choose which version best suits your needs. Now, to carry that on a little further of course, we are at a current point in time where we’re not having get-togethers or face-to-face events. You could still use this for virtual events. Set up your virtual events, set up your ticketing, get paid for your virtual event. You could still use this for those things there; it’s still going to work for it.

I can say that it is fantastic. For a long time I remember Event Espresso when they were brand-new. Go all the way back to somewhere around Episode 25, the first time I reviewed Event Espresso, and somewhere around Episode 100, I interviewed Seth Schultz. I actually didn’t encounter it for a while. For a while I didn’t think it was doing very well and I moved on to other plugins. Last year, I had to build a website and they insisted upon using Event Espresso and I went, “Okay, fine. I’ll use it. I’ll dig into it again,” and it turned out I should’ve gone back to it long before, because it works very well.

It sets up very well. When you get the full license you need for everything with it, you get all the tools you need to set up everything you need: all the checkouts, all the courses, all the bits and pieces, even addons and registrations and check-ins and a whole bunch of stuff. Fantastic plugin. If you want to find out a bit more about this plugin, I did an interview with Seth Schultz from Event Espresso again recently. I guess it was about a few months back. The link is in the Show Notes. Go check out the interview with him on Event Espresso. And this contest is running until April 22nd, so get in there, sign it up. All you need is your email address and your name, then share it out wide and far to get this plugin.

Okay, and finally, closing out this episode I covered up the User Post Gallery plugin, which I gave a 5 to; the WP Force Logout, which I gave a 5 to; and the Inactive Logout, which I gave a 5 to.

Also, a little quick note. Be sure to stick around after the show for some really great music from the No Agenda listeners, and it will only be available on the YouTube version of the show. So if you’re listening to the podcast later, you’re gonna have to pop over to the YouTube channel to catch these songs. And I find them quite amusing although I’m sure I’ll be called all kinds of names for putting them out there, but so be it. We need some lighthearted levity and poking fun at the events that we’re currently experiencing.

Okay, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is scheduled for April 28th. I know there was one that was supposed to happen this next week, but of course that’s been cancelled. With a little luck, we’ll be able to have it on April 28th. If not, I will work very hard to put it up on YouTube live. Maybe I’ll sit here at my computer and stream it live and just use my computer to do everything and you can look at my face like you do now.

Okay, and if you want to be on an interview show, simply check out wppluginsatoz.com/interview for more information.

If you want to know more about me, check out theroguestavern.com, where I’m behind in putting up videos right now, because again, those take time. It’s amazing how everything takes time. It’s the one thing we never have enough of. But there are some pretty cool ones up there of me getting out gold panning, hiking, camping, out on the gun range – all kinds of little fun things that I do. I’ve got some really interesting ones about gardening that are coming up really soon.

Anyway, go check that out and that’s pretty much everything I’ve got here, so I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here and them I’m going to play the music. If anyone wants to toss in things, feel free.

Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A-Z 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.

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You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

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.

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