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Episode 454 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 454 with plugins for Membership, File Management, Log-out Management, 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 #454 here.


It’s Episode 454 with plugins for Membership, File Management, Log-out Management, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #454

All right, so what do we got first? ClassicPress Options right off the bat. All right, ClassicPress – everyone knows it’s a decently fast-growing fork of WordPress and I haven’t heard a lot out of the ClassicPress community in the last few weeks. I’m hoping to see some stuff coming out real soon. I’ve been looking; I don’t always have time to research it as I haven’t been working in ClassicPress lately. I’ve been working in WordPress, so I go where the work is. What can I say?

At any rate, I do have one thing this week. It’s an article here from AzureCurve and it’s a really good article discussing replacing the ClassicPress chron system, which is the exact same chron system in WordPress currently, although that’s probably going to change when Version 2.0 of ClassicPress comes out. Maybe they’ll get rid of it and introduce a real chron or at least instructions for people how to set up a real chron. A good article – it tells you how to go in there and turn off the chron job in your ClassicPress and then how to create the chron job in your hosting environment. A good article, go check it out. It could help you out a bit.

Now, I do want to cover up something that is of interest to me, and this is because I know that eventually we’re looking at the eventual demise of the Classic Editor in WordPress. And this eventual demise of the Classic Editor in WordPress is going to in my opinion lead to a mass exodus from WordPress. Right now, people are living through WordPress because it’s familiar, it works, and they’ve got Gutenberg turned off and they’re using the Classic Editor, okay? And of course you only hear, “Oh, they’ve only got five million using it through the Classic Editor plugin.”

Well, that’s not all of them.

This is a bit of information that came out here and this is a WordPress superstar, Jeff Star. He’s got a whole bunch of free WordPress plugins – quite a few actually – some really nice ones. And a big shoutout to him for his plugins surpassing one million users. That’s one million active downloads of his plugins. Most notably though of that, his one plugin, the Disable Gutenberg, has over 500,000 active users. And that got me to thinking, how many plugins out there are there for disabling Gutenberg and what is the grand tally of how many sites have Gutenberg turned off?
So I did a quick look. I probably didn’t get all the Gutenberg-disabling plugins, but I got quite a few. I think I found like seven or eight of them and between those seven or eight of them, there was almost eight million websites that had Gutenberg turned off. That’s pretty telling, I think, about the state of WordPress and the state of Gutenberg when there’s that many people that have it turned off. So when they quit supporting the Classic Editor entirely, I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a mass exodus.

All right, so what else do we got ClassicPress-wise? Oh, not a whole lot. And ClassicPress-wise, the usual weekly shoutouts to the ClassicPress Club, the must-have plugin list, the plugin list specifically for ClassicPress. A lot of that stuff can be found at the classicpress.net forums or at classicpress.club. So those are things you’ll want to go check out. There’s a lot of stuff available for ClassicPress and if you’re just coming into developing, maybe you might start with ClassicPress. It’s as easy to use as WordPress is and there is more and more development happening there. It’s just not full-time yet. It’s kind of like WordPress in the beginning; nobody really noticed it or paid attention to it until they hit a certain peak, and that’s where ClassicPress is at.

Okay, so let’s dive into the WordPress plugins. What do we have for WordPress plugins? Well, as usual, the story of my life is to overcomplicate things and recently on a project it was no different. I was working on a new membership site that was going to allow file uploads and then protect the files from prying eyes. I mean, even if they came in through direct links, they’re not allowed to get to those files. And I also wanted to make it simple but of course I started making it overly complicated, which is a bad habit from way back. I overly complicate it and I have to undo multiple things.

And I discovered some great plugins along the way to help you create a membership site that will allow people to upload files and images in such a way that you can protect them from the outside world and from all direct access, and this is what I’ve got for you – a couple of them.

First off, we’ve got Ultimate Member. Now, this membership plugin I may or may not have covered sometime in the past. I use it on a couple of sites and I just used it on this additional project I just finished. It is a really great membership plugin for free. It allows you to set up pretty much everything you need, including adjusting profiles, creating unique user levels, and then what access those user levels have to both the frontend, the backend, to pages, to sections of the site – a lot of configuration available in the free version. You don’t have to pop straight to the pro version. And in the pro version, is actually just a bunch of addons to enhance the free version.

Now, I only used the free version here. I didn’t pop to the pro version, so it worked. Everything I needed to help protect the entire site, help protect the individual pages, helped secure the site down to a certain extent. I had to add additional stuff to secure the files, but that’s something for a later date. At any rate, a really excellent plugin.

Ultimate Member, really great for protecting your site. Now, you can also use it; I use it on another site that has not only the protected member files, but also the public files to attract the members to the site. So this is a really great plugin that will help you deal with all of that.

Go check this one out. It’s called Ultimate Member User Profile and Membership Plugin, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, so you’ve built yourself a membership site and what do you want to do with it? You need to make sure that when your members log into the site that they log out. And we all know everyone logs out every time they’re done, right? Yeah, sure they do. The worst part about it is those people that log in on publicly accessible machines, maybe at the library or maybe their friend’s house or somewhere else. They log in; they forget to log out. They leave it logged in. The next person comes along, they sit down at the computer screen. “Oh hey, look at this. I can check out this website without having to log into the membership area,” and they could mess it up. Other things of that nature.

Well, this plugin here is called Inactive Logout and what it does for you is it allows you set up a time delay of when the screen is inactive, it will automatically log people out – very useful. And this is one for also when they just walked away from the computer or anything like that, it logs them out. Very useful for that. The next best thing about this though, but you’ve got to go to the pro version – which I did do – so this is a review for both the free and the pro version.

In the pro version, you get an additional feature. This is a very useful feature, and that is the moment they close the browser window, it automatically logs them out of the site. The most useful feature I have found because the site I was building, I needed it to when the moment the browser window was closed for the people to log out, because they were only going to be allowed into a very specific area of the site for a very specific purpose and they couldn’t go anywhere else and they didn’t have a logout option available to them. So I needed to make sure that when they left the site, closed the browser window, that it logged them out. This plugin handled that like a dream, a really excellent tool if you’re looking for something to manage that aspect. Go check this plugin out, maybe check out the pro version. It’s not that much. I think it was like $20 or something, so it was really affordable to go ahead and get it.

At any rate, Inactive Logout, I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, well that takes me to the next item, the last item in my thing, and this is File Manager. And again, this is a plugin that I think I’ve covered before. I didn’t search to find out, but I’m pretty sure I covered it. But in this one here, I’m adding on the addition of dealing with the pro version, because previously I dealt with the free version and now, I needed the added features of the pro version.

The pro version of this one here gives you everything the free has, which are very cool tools, excellent for managing and dealing with your files in your website. Of course, it is kind of risky; you can limit who has access to it, etc. Well, the pro version adds on additional limits and integrates with the membership plugin I talked about previously. So it really can help you lock down things securely. The other bonus in the pro version is you can assign a specific directory on a per-user basis. So the moment you create the username, they get their own directory that they can upload files to if you give that level of membership permission to upload files with this plugin. So it’s very useful in that aspect there and for what I needed this website to do, I needed to create a specific user that was going to upload specific types of files and so that they could be found in a specific way.

So an excellent tool – very excellent. The price was quite affordable, right around $25 for the pro version. A great tool, worked well, did everything I needed to do even after all of the testing, it functioned exactly the way it was supposed to. So go check this out. I give the File Manager pro version a 5-Dragon rating.

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All right, so what do we got? Listener feedback. Well, I don’t really have any. I have one minor piece of listener feedback and it was a simple request, and it was – well, let’s leave his name out of it. It’s like, Hello. I’m out of beer now! Can you please send some? Thank you. Well, it’s kind of hard to send a beer through the thing. But to you know who you are that sent that out to me, beer is imagined to be going to you. If I had a drone, I would send it right out.

Okay, that’s really all I’ve got. It’d be nice to have some other listener feedback. Let me know how the show is going, etc. Anything I’m doing good, doing bad, let me know, folks. I’m more than happy to help out.

And of course, we do have a contest this week. And of course, the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin and those guys were kind enough to provide us with the premium version of their plugin which runs our contests. I’ve been using this plugin since they were brand new – a couple of years now. They’ve done nothing but improve it over time. It just keeps getting better and better with more improvements and advances to the plugin, so make sure you go check that out if you’re going to run contests on your site.

Right now, we are running a contest until April 22nd where we are giving away a license for Event Espresso, an excellent plugin for managing your events of all types. They can be virtual events or physical events and you can take payments with it and set it up in numerous ways. Event Espresso is a flexible event registration, ticketing, and calendar plugin for your website. It can handle a variety of events from organizing an annual conference for your company to holding training courses to teach CPR, hosting art or painting classes, planning an event to raise money for a nonprofit. Event Espresso can make your event registration and ticketing with WordPress enjoyable, easy, and profitable. Okay, the best events registration and ticketing – ah, I can’t read all that. I really have tried; I just can’t.

Enough said that I used to use this years ago when they were brand new and they were fantastic when they were brand new. Then they took some sideways decisions and they made it difficult and I jumped ship and left for another product.

And of course, what happened was last year I had a client come to me and they wanted to build out a conference site, and they wanted to use Event Espresso and I’m like, “Ah… I hadn’t touched them in a couple of years,” so I hadn’t even looked at it to see. I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll use it, no problem,” and then as I went through it and set it up, I was impressed. I was impressed with how much better they had made the plugin and how the functionality had actually improved and started working together. So on the whole, I can actually recommend Event Espresso as a plugin – excellent one.

What we are giving away is a license valued at $300 and you get to choose which license you need. There are two support licenses. You will be the Event Espresso Everything License or the Event Espresso Developer License, whichever one suits your needs, you will get to choose one or the other. Each one is worth $300. Sign up for the contest. You never know, you just might be the winner of this one. So make sure you go check out the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contests. And if you want to know more about it, I did do an interview with Seth Schultz from Event Espresso. The link is in the Show Notes to that interview, and that interview was a couple of months ago.

Okay, and that’s pretty much it. Closing out this episode, the plugins I covered were: File Manager, which I gave a 5 to; Inactive Logout, which I gave a 5 to; and the Ultimate Member User Profile and Membership plugin, which I gave a 5 to.

And of course, you can stick around after the show. Chat with me or – I don’t have any music to play. I haven’t clipped anything from the No Agenda Show for this week. You know, I’ve had enough fun playing all the Wuhan virus stuff.

The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on April 28th. I don’t know if it’s going to be live yet but at the current state of things and from what I hear from the BC government, it’s probably not going to be live. I’m probably going to have to cancel my venue and maybe just do something online, so we’ll see how many people I can get to show up for that.

All right, if you would like to be in an interview show, reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. If you want to find out a little bit more about me, check out theroguestavern.com. My videos are a little bit behind in getting updated there, but they will happen.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so I’m gonna let my girl take us on 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 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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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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