Todays show

New Plugin review, News tips, plugin extras and more all coming up on Plugin Pulse: WP Plugins A to Z Unplugged.

Talking about unpopular idea in WordPress today. New tips and more all coming up on Plugin Pulse: WP Plugins A to Z Unplugged.

Welcome to ‘Plugin Pulse: WP Plugins A to Z Unplugged!’ I’m your host, John Overall, bringing you the latest beat on all things WordPress. Where we dive into the plugin world to spill the beans on the latest the WordPress world, all unplugged and unfiltered, showcasing the freshest WordPress news, digging into a killer plugin demo, or exploring tips to level up your site. Today, I’ve got the mic to myself, and we’re pulsing through what’s hot, what’s new, and what you need to know. So, grab your coffee, fire up your dashboard, and let’s get into it!”

Rant about the plugins for WordPress and what it means to the system I believe the days are numbered for themes have been for a long time and accelerating now but plugins they are not going anywhere. Ever since they where introduced to the system I saw that was going to change  everything and it did. Even to this day people are still creating new ways and improving on current ways that plugins are are created to solve problems and only plugin can do this.

Lets start this out with some continuation of the Cool Kids have left, time to bring them back https://iconick.io/wordpress-evangelist/

if you have been listening to this show over the year or just recently I have been talking about the issues with the WordPress repo for a long time ever since they removed the “New Plugs Tab”

Some good chaos in the plugin world https://iconick.io/good-chaos/ and more from DaveVerse https://daveverse.org/2025/10/01/evangelism-is-good-chaos/

Why Shopify wont kill WordPress https://x.com/rayhanarif07/status/1974853041255055534

More from Nick:

Thought on the new Shopify plugin for WordPress https://x.com/iamkrisrisner/status/1974834729410019642

Guidline 18 for plugins

People to follow on x:

Pascal Claro – WP Roads https://wproads.com/

@wproads https://x.com/wproads/status/1975177761091154302

00:33 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still.
00:42 [Music]
00:48 A quarter after midnight and I’m watching the wall.
00:55 Sometimes I feel so uptight. I just can’t sleep at all.
01:02 Every day doing the same old thing. We’re losing time.
01:08 The weekend comes, we got to have some fun and rewind.
01:16 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still. We
01:23 got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the
01:28 thrill.
01:36 I feel the rope tightening, choking off our air.
01:43 We need to grab some lightning. Friday’s almost here.
01:50 Caught in a web. We need to cut this thread. We’re hanging by.
01:56 Where is it? Said you have to be half dead to survive.
02:04 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still. We
02:11 got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the
02:16 thrill. [Music]
02:31 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still. We
02:38 got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill. These are
02:45 the days of thunder. But we’re going to make time stand
02:50 still. We got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just a taste of
03:04 the These are the days of Thunder.
03:18 There we go. Look at that. I managed to get a couple of things right off the bat. Well, welcome to the show, everyone. Well, the beginnings of this
03:25 show as we finish the countdown and make sure that everything is working.
03:32 This should be just a hoot and a holler. Well, let’s get started.
03:39 Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for WordPress plugins A to Zed, not Z.
03:48 Talking about unpopular ideas in a WordPress today. news tips or coming to
03:54 you from Plug-in Pulse. WordPress plugins A to Zed Unplugged.
04:02 WordPress, the king of content management systems, powering the web with over 80,000 plugins to choose from.
04:09 How do you sort the junk from the gems? Welcome to WP Plugins A to Zed, where
04:15 we’ve been keeping the pulse of WordPress alive for over 16 incredible years. Join us every week for
04:22 unrehearsed real talk breakdowns of the latest and greatest plugins, developer, and community member interviews. Some
04:29 weeks, Amber and I team up to dig in. Others, I’m flying solo, unpacking WordPress news, demoing a standout
04:36 plugin or sharing tips to power up your site. No scripts, no fluff, just the
04:42 good stuff from A to Z. So, plug in and let’s get rolling.
04:48 Oh, 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 brewery
04:54 overlooking beautiful southern Vancouver Island. This is a coffeefueled ADHD trip into
05:01 WordPress land. And no subject is really off topic. Well, maybe. It all depends
05:07 on how how touchy they might be. But I’m flying solo and I’m about to explore something I haven’t done in a long time.
05:14 And that is unpopular ideas in WordPress or they’re popular in some circles but
05:19 not others. It’s very interesting. We got all kinds of little tips and tidbits that I’ve gathered up to see if I can
05:25 get this into a decent halfway decent show as I try to figure out how to do a
05:31 show on my own, which I haven’t done for god knows how long. At any rate, let’s
05:37 just uh dive right into it. First thing I’ve got is a bit of a rant about the um
05:46 WordPress plug-in system and the theming ecosystem. Not just the system, the
05:52 theming ecosystem and the WordPress EOS or the plug-in ecosystem. Now, I’ve had
05:57 to say I’ve said this a few times before in the past, and that is I feel like the themes are on their way out the door.
06:03 I’ve said it before for a few years and they managed to hang on a lot longer than I thought they would. They’re
06:09 starting to disappear now. The all-in-one encompassing themes that
06:15 everyone used to use, including myself. I used to use them continuously for a very long time until I realized the
06:22 flaws in that logic and that you need a barebones theme. You got to have a theme, but you
06:29 need something that’s stripped of everything and you put it all in there. That is why I started using Elementor
06:34 with just the hello theme which has nothing. If you use the free version, it’s got a header and a footer built
06:40 into it. But if you use the pro version, it’s got nothing. Not even headers and footers. You build all that with
06:45 Elementor and throw it all in there. But the plug-in system is a whole another
06:50 animal. That one there is what this show has been built on for over 16 years, of
06:55 course, and that is the fact that plugins are what drive WordPress.
07:01 Without plugins, we wouldn’t have the e-commerce stores. We wouldn’t have the
07:07 massive systems of people that have big membership sites. We wouldn’t have the
07:13 uh selling of pretty much anything. We wouldn’t have the organization of all of
07:20 the different uh different types of uh categories and
07:26 posts and pages. basically everything about WordPress’s plugins. Even the SEO system, the base SEO for WordPress,
07:33 it’ll get you there. But if you really want to extend it, you’ve got to go into a plugin. Yeah, you can go into some of
07:39 the more bloated SEO plugins or you could just write your own. Or as Amber reviewed a couple of weeks ago on the
07:46 show, she reviewed a very simple base SEO plugin that was just the bare bones basic that was really good to go. So,
07:53 it’s like plugins are what is needed for this. it to extend the code. That is the
07:58 whole joy of WordPress is you can extend it out to do anything you want.
08:05 So, what we’ve got on this now that I’ve gone through that rant, I’ll come back
08:10 around to that in a couple of minutes. And what I’m looking at first here is
08:17 WordPress and the evangelists. Now, there’s been some talk in the last couple of weeks
08:23 about the cool kids have left WordPress. that was started by Icono Nick here. Um,
08:29 he’s managed to start several discussions in the last two or three weeks with his blog posts. Stuff that
08:35 people have been thinking about, but nobody’s been voicing. He’s been sticking voices to that stuff. Again,
08:40 many of what he’s putting a voice to is stuff that I’ve been thinking about or I’ve only minorly voiced. So, I brought
08:47 a few of his things here today to talk about and it helps go into this morning I was watching WP Builds podcast and
08:54 they were talking about all these exact things and of course that’s because that is the news at the moment. So, at any
09:02 rate one his post the first one I wanted to talk about is becoming a WordPress evangelist.
09:08 Well, you want to be the evangelist. And as I read through the article, I was like, you know, I actually was that
09:15 evangelist back in the beginning of WordPress. I helped mix the Kool-Aid. It seems people are mixing a new batch of
09:21 Kool-Aid for WordPress again. There seems to be more and more people jumping into the WordPress space. People that
09:28 have built themselves a career, now they want to reinvigorate WordPress, and new
09:34 people who are just figuring it out. Now, some of the discussion that they
09:39 had, and you can go catch it at um let’s see here. Let’s bring this one up
09:45 real quick.
09:53 There we go. I’ll bring this up right right in here. Today’s I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes. Right
09:59 around the 55 m 55 minute mark.
10:04 right about right about here
10:09 you are I’m sure right that there’s probably people who’ve had a similar idea in the so they they started discussing all of
10:16 the different things around this and this is the part where they started discussing about plugins which we’ll be
10:21 going into those in a few minutes and talking about plugins the WordPress repo
10:26 system my opinions and viewpoints about the WordPress repo system
10:32 but back to the evangelist part of This what we’re looking at here is if you
10:38 want to have other people excited about something, you have to talk about it to anyone and everyone who will listen.
10:44 Even those who want to listen, those are the people people that like, you know, I’ve heard it all the time. I’m tired of listening to it. Next thing you know,
10:50 they call you up. I’ve last couple of months I’ve actually had people that uh
10:56 started having to deal with WordPress and they’re going, “Oh, who do I know?” And they contact me up and it’s like, I haven’t heard from them in 5, 10, 15
11:02 years. and they say, “You do WordPress, right?” So, yeah. Well, I need your help now. So, it’s like I I planted some very
11:10 long-term seeds. They took a long time to grow, but they came to fruition. So, that’s the one thing you can always keep
11:15 in mind is that does happen is people that you’ve talked to and evangelized to about something, they’ll come back to
11:21 you when it’s like, “Oh, it’s time for me to actually do something with this.”
11:29 And the hard part about this now is I don’t have someone else to keep talking while I sip my coffee. So now I got to
11:34 stop and take a sip of coffee. All right. Well, let’s wander over and
11:40 have a little look see. That’s what I should do. I know what I could do. Here we go. Time for coffee.
11:48 [Music] [Applause] Reconnect back to the world.
11:54 All right. Welcome to the show. For those that are here, new batch of Kool-Aid is strong. Yes, it is. World’s
12:01 WordPress worst WordPress. That’s an interesting name. Okay. Yes, the new
12:06 batch of Kool-Aid is strong and I’m helping to remix this batch of Kool-Aid. You know, reinvigorate WordPress.
12:13 There’s been a lot of invigoration in the last couple of weeks. Uh in this last year, this last year, there’s been
12:19 a lot of invigoration. Um so anyway, back to talking about the WordPress plugins. And this is another
12:27 article that um Nick put out and that was the WordPress discovery experiment.
12:34 I don’t have a link to he didn’t no I forgot to get the link to his um
12:42 he created a search engine for searching out WordPress plugins and finding them.
12:49 It’s a very good search engine. But the big thing was on his articles he’s talking about the discovery experiment. And this is something I’ve complained
12:55 about ever since they removed from the WordPress back end. When you went to add
13:02 a new plugin in WordPress, you used to get a couple of tabs back there. The couple of tabs were the featured plugins
13:11 which have always been there and they used to be more varied than they are now. I mean, now they are so piss poorly
13:18 varied. Let’s bring up something here. Let’s uh let’s go bring up something just so we can showcase what this looks
13:25 like. Let’s pop this in here. There we go.
13:34 They when you go to add new plugin in the back end of WordPress, they give you
13:40 featured, popular, recommended, and direct install. And Elementor adds its own tab in here where if you’re using
13:46 Elementor, it adds this tab in here. So, you can find plugins that are specifically for Elementor. I kind of like that little feature. I only
13:53 recently realized that was even there. Um, direct install. This is where you can go download a plugin ID to get to
14:02 get it and download it. Oh, I seems I still have Okay, it seems
14:08 I still have the uh fair plugin activated on this website. Let’s go deactivate the fair plugin here because
14:16 I forgot I had it on here. This is my test site. So, I was playing with the fair plugin
14:22 and go find it in the 4200 plugins I have installed on this site. There it is. Because the fair plugin actually
14:29 gives you a more realistic view of what’s in the WordPress repo versus what WordPress default does.
14:37 And this one here has annoyed me for a long time. Here it is. featured, popular, recommended, featured, always
14:43 the same featured plugins. It never ever changes. The Kismmet always number one. We know, well, my viewpoint on a Kismmet
14:51 is useless. Jetack, another useless plugin in my personal viewpoint.
14:57 Gutenberg, well, that could be useful if you were using as a plugin and it wasn’t crammed into the core. The Health Truck
15:02 and Troubleshooter, that one’s always useful. Performance Lab, yes, but these are always the same. They never change
15:08 no matter what I do. brand new website, fresh out the box. I just installed it and I go to in activate a plug or
15:14 install a new plugin. Boom. These are the ones they get. The popular ones again always the same plugins.
15:23 Elementor, Yoast, Contact Form 7, Classic Editor, WooCommerce, Lightseed, they’re always they’re they’re the most
15:30 installed plugins. It never varies. So, nobody ever gets a chance to be in the
15:36 uh popular recommended. Let’s see what they got there. Again, recommended, same thing as
15:43 the featured pretty much. Let’s actually recommended and featured. Let’s take a look at this. Let’s put them side by
15:49 side. That’s one I never looked at. Oh, wait a sec. There’s the featured.
15:54 There’s the recommended. Same exact plugins. Look at that.
16:01 That’s just pointless. Oh, and here they are. Secure custom fields. Huh. Wonder why that one’s there instead of maybe
16:09 AFC. Okay, there’s enough there. Let’s see what else I got here. Preach. Yes,
16:14 that’s that. I’ve got a pulpit today, man. I’m all by myself here. Give me a pulpit where I can just ramble. We’ll
16:21 see how many people come and stick and listen to it or how many I chase away. I’m hoping not to chase people away. I’m
16:27 just trying to point out some of the topics that very few people want to
16:35 approach and deal with. Here we are live on X today. I noticed it
16:43 went live. I don’t know what’s happening there. Edit and live cut. No, let’s see. Yeah,
16:49 it’s it’s maybe streaming. I really don’t know. I have no idea. I’m hoping that it’s
16:55 streaming. I X is very limited with what I can and can’t do when I stream live to X because I can’t do spaces. I would
17:02 love to do it as a space, but to do X spaces, you got to run it through a phone, which is a bizarre one to me. And
17:09 I just don’t know how to track the conversation in X and see if it’s there.
17:14 Anyway, so there’s untapped potential. One of the things he says here with the WordPress discovery experiment is to go
17:20 in here and start changing up the um
17:26 front page, the featured ones, feature eight different plugins for a week. You
17:31 know, just randomly feature eight different plugins. See what happens to their install numbers. I guarantee their
17:37 install numbers would go up. You know, some of the discussion around on WP Builds this morning was, “Well, maybe it
17:43 might change it.” Well, maybe there’s a reason why there’s less than a thousand plugins. Well, the biggest reason why there’s less than a thousand plugins,
17:49 thousand installs of a plugin is because nobody knows it exists. People forget how this system started.
17:57 I’ve been doing this podcast since WordPress 2.7
18:04 2.8. And when I started it, there was less than 9,000 plugins in the WordPress
18:11 repo. That was it. 9,000. At one point, we approached 90,000 plugins. Then they did
18:18 a massive clean and purge of all the junk. It brought it down to about 40,000. It’s now around 60,000. And
18:25 that’s just the WordPress repo. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands that are not in the WordPress repo. I’ve
18:32 got five plugins myself now that are not in a WordPress repo. One, because I’m not allowed in a WordPress repo. I was
18:38 banned from WordPress uh.org uh nine years ago. So, at any rate,
18:45 there’s a lot going on with it. And
18:52 if you give them a chance, if the if the plugin can be viewed, people will give
18:57 it a chance. If they see it, you know, if you go search for security plugins, well, you generally get just the top
19:03 security ones. You don’t get anything else. You don’t get other unknown ones. Maybe
19:09 somebody has figured out a way to do it, but they just can’t get it out there to market. That’s the hardest thing when
19:15 you’re in a crowded market is getting yourself seen. If you happen to write something new and unique, well, you’re
19:21 going to pop to the top, but there’s not much left that’s new and unique in WordPress. All that’s left now is to
19:27 improve upon what other people are doing unless you happen to luck into a
19:32 undertapped niche of WordPress. The other thing is is um you can go into
19:40 the recommended stuff here and have the recommended
19:47 be something besides the exact same as the featured plugins.
19:53 maybe swap it around to say this week are recommendations for security plugins and have the have 10 or 15 security
20:01 plugins including some of the ones that don’t have tens of thousands of installs. Let’s go. While we’re playing
20:08 with this and goofing with it, we’re going to go wander back and reactivate the fair plugin just so you can see what
20:16 we’ve got going here.
20:25 Now, let’s go pocket the All right.
20:31 Hey, see, even the recommended for fair
20:37 gets you Oh, it gets you the same stuff. Okay, they’re pulling it. Oh, no. They they had light speed cache and uh Kismet’s
20:44 further down the list. Oh, they gave you more than just a couple. Which ones do I got here? Yeah. Oh, this is the
20:51 recommended one. So, they’ve only got they’ve only got two, four, six, eight,
20:57 10. Two, four, six, eight. Oh, they only got eight. Whereas the fair plugin gives
21:04 you not sure 15, 20, 25. Keep going down. It just keeps Oh, okay. Yeah.
21:14 Gives you about 20 25 or so. and they give you some that are more useful.
21:20 The part I like the most though is what they have as featured.
21:26 And this is a whole new set of plugins that might not be found.
21:34 Better categories, images, security checker for I for themes references.
21:40 These are even different than the ones I did my uh video on a couple weeks ago or a week and a half or so ago. Manage IPOS
21:48 automotive feed importer. Nope, that one was there, but it was in a different spot. Fetchify.
21:55 Oh, so they give you something different to look at. So, at any rate, this is one spot here.
22:04 And the other thing that um Nick did
22:11 Oh, here’s the Oh, so he c this is the tool. Do we got a link here to the tool? Yeah, here it is. He built a dream
22:17 creation tool, a search tool for WordPress plugins. So, his is a little
22:24 different than most. He does the search at the WordPress uh repo, but he created
22:29 it tapping into their API keys, and you can type in anything you want.
22:37 We’ll pop in security and just have it pop up security plugins. Oh, search. There we go.
22:46 Those aren’t search plug or security plugins. Did I spell it right? S C U R I T Y. Yeah, there we go. Most popular all
22:52 categories any. and he’s got them set up so that it only
22:58 shows.
23:06 No, for some reason it’s not uh changing. Okay, maybe it’s having a glitch in it.
23:13 Oh, well, there’s a WordPress security. Load more. Let’s see what we got.
23:19 Jetack some security. Okay, it’s not really doing much. All right. So, well, PS4 on that one. Sorry, Nick. I tried to
23:26 demo it live and it uh failed. That’s what happens with me. I always
23:32 find theuh edge cases on things that aren’t that won’t work. I’m good for that. Any rate, go check this one out
23:39 and uh if it’s working for you, then you’ll be able to find some plugins. Now, back to the uniqueness of it. what
23:45 his what he does is he has them only showing uh just the
23:51 uh images first. You can click through to it to end up back in the WordPress
23:56 repo to see it. But he shows the title of it and then he shows any screenshots
24:02 that they have, which is a very useful tool because even when I’m searching for a plugin, one of the first things I’ll
24:08 do is like, oh, that looks interesting. Then I’ll go see, well, what do they what does it do for me for settings? Where’s it going to put stuff? what’s it
24:14 going to do? So, this is a very useful one. So, go check that one out and see
24:20 what we got. Where else can we wander on into? Now, I’ve still got a couple other quick things here while I’m talking
24:26 about Nick. He has created a very cool tool. If you’re writing WordPress
24:31 plugins and in your first of your plugins and you don’t have a default setup for your readme file, he has
24:39 created an README a WordPress readme file generator.
24:45 You can import your existing gener uh readme, have it rewritten, but it takes in your basic information, your
24:51 contributors, your tags, your version info, your description, your installation instructions, your
24:56 frequently asked questions, your change log, all of that. And then you can download that readme text file and have
25:03 it nicely formatted for WordPress, which is very nice, especially in your first
25:09 couple of plugins when you’re creating them. Could even be useful further down the road when you’re creating a new one.
25:14 So, I thought that’s very nice. He’s actually been building and putting out some really cool tools lately. So, go
25:22 check out his stuff. You can find him on X and other places. And you’ll find in the show notes there will be links to
25:29 this. So, that’s enough about the WordPress
25:34 plug-in repo and my viewpoint that they are manipulating the search function
25:40 back here. I had to search for a plugin today and again I put the exact name of
25:45 the plugin. It didn’t even show on the first three pages. I had to put the exact name of the plugin with the
25:52 author’s name to get the plugin. So this is how badly the search function for
25:58 WordPress is broken or my p personal viewpoint is
26:04 manipulated. But I have no way of knowing that for sure. That’s just my viewpoint on it.
26:10 All right, let’s go talk about a couple of other quick things here.
26:17 Now, this is one that people seem to think it’s been big news on X for the
26:25 last couple of days. For some strange reason, Shopify released a plugin for
26:30 WordPress. Oh my god, it’s going to kill Woo Commerce. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Just
26:37 get that out of your head, folks. It’s not going to kill Woo Commerce. Nothing’s going to happen to Woo
26:42 Commerce. You know, they like here’s one here from X. Don’t, you know,
26:49 start selling on WordPress with Shopify. And the guy’s like, “Didn’t have this in my bingo card, but WooCommerce should be
26:55 shaking in their boots.” No. All it’s going to do is make it easier
27:01 for those that have been using Shopify to want to have themselves a decent SEO
27:06 blog that they can draw people in with articles and not have to mess with the
27:12 Shopify interface, which is a minor pain in the neck for creating posts and other
27:20 miscellaneous stuff. Um, I’m working through pulling a client off Shopify right now. So, at any rate,
27:29 no, that’s all it does. It’s just another embed Shopify store into your
27:34 WooCommerce website or to your WordPress website and couple of other notations on
27:41 it. Let’s see. Come on, get the red. Thanks. There we go.
27:49 Rudolfph Meloy. Meli Mallei. I can’t. Sorry, Brew
27:55 Al. I butchered your last name. I’m really good at that. If it’s if it’s not uh practice, I butcher them really well.
28:02 Okay. He tried out the Shopify Woo Commerce plugins so you don’t have to
28:08 waste your time. And his report is as follows. Well, yeah, you can go get the plugin from Shopify’s website. I would
28:14 hope they would freely give out the plugin without a Shopify account. Adding products to your website requires you to
28:21 have a Shopify subscription. So, there’s one problem. But if you’re going to be doing this, you already have a Shopify
28:27 subscription or you’re considering it. The plugin lightweight. It embeds your Shopify store in WordPress. So, it’s
28:33 basically a fancy iframe is all it really is.
28:39 Nothing too special for for this sliding cart. It’s provided out of the
28:45 box. Bing bing bing. I forgot to turn off my notifications. Stop that again. There we
28:51 go. Go away notifications. All right. Sliding cart for the products.
28:59 Customers will do all their checkout through Shopify. So, whatever is managed
29:04 over there is managed over there. Um, product order management happens
29:09 entirely at Shopify. It’s fast and stable. I suppose it’s just a big fancy
29:19 um iframe inbed is basically what it boils down to. Uh everything is managed
29:24 over on there. If you’re already using Woo Commerce, it might feel more like a
29:32 sales channel versus an actual plugin. You know, all this big noise that
29:38 everyone’s making, I look kind of went no. And of course, it didn’t take Woo Commerce long to come up with something
29:45 to compare it. So, you can compare to see what is available through
29:52 Woo and Shopify, all their three different plans, because they have three different plans. It starts uh 105 bucks
30:00 a month for the Shopify grow. Oh, that’s pricey. That’s almost as pricey as buying Woo Commerce plugins.
30:07 Now, as much as I like Woo, I don’t like their plugins because of their pricing
30:12 structure. Their pricing structure is ludicrous. I think I have one or two legacy plugins, but they abandoned them.
30:20 That way, they didn’t have to keep them up to date and they they legacied out them. They legacied out. What they did
30:26 was they recreated them with a new name so they could charge
30:32 their new pricing. I’ve been I’ve been I’ve been upset with Woo Commerce ever since
30:39 Automatic Bottom because I was dealing with Woo Commerce long before Automatic Bottom.
30:47 Automatic has taken them from being they were really affordable then and Automatic bought them and within a short
30:52 period of time they were no longer affordable for their plugins. If you can’t afford the Woo plugins, there’s
30:59 lots of other options. And if all else fails, write it yourself or hire a programmer to write it for you. Anyway,
31:05 let’s go down the line here. Data ownership. The data ownership is always there with Woo. Not with actually it’s
31:12 just the only thing here that you get the same in Shopify that you get in Woo
31:19 Commerce is full theme customization. That’s really it. You get nothing else.
31:26 Um, you know, they they compared a few admins like staff accounts in Shopify,
31:34 you got to pay big-time dollars extra for five or more. You know, support, it
31:40 depends. You know, Woo’s got support. Inventory locations, you can extend as you want. Yeah, it
31:46 takes a little bit of work in Woo Commerce to extend out to multiple inventory locations, but uh they don’t.
31:52 Now, payment processing, at least they’re comparing their Woo payment pricing
31:59 um to Woo Commerce, which I wouldn’t use Woo Payments, but uh there’s lots of other options to avoid paying that extra
32:05 fee. Supported payment gateways, there’s 70 plus extensions in the WooCommerce
32:11 market, 100 extensions throughout everything else throughout uh Shopify.
32:17 Transaction fee for not using native pay payment gateway. Well, it’d be hard for
32:22 Woo Commerce to charge a transaction fee for not using the native pay payment gateway because of course it is an open-
32:29 source product. But if Shopify, you don’t use their native payment gateway, they charge you an additional transaction fee. Well, they’re already
32:36 making a transaction fee if you do use their native payment gateway.
32:41 Gift cards. Yeah, there’s a plugin from WooCommerce for that, but there’s lots of other really great plugins for it. I
32:48 reviewed a couple of them many months back when I needed one for a website. I had to go through cuz Woo Commerce
32:55 wanted way too much for their plugin. Discount codes, coupons, all of that. Okay. Pay with deposits. Allow shoppers
33:02 to place deposit on an item. Yeah, it’s possible. Takes a little bit of setup. Custom checkout. This is where
33:10 WooCommerce excels is customizing the checkout system.
33:15 Um, branded checkout page.
33:20 Yeah, you can customize it to your heart’s content. Shipping taxes. Anyway, just wandering down the line.
33:28 Digital products. You can’t sell the digital products with Shopify, which of course there’s a lot of people in the WordPress world that are selling digital
33:35 products and courses, which are digital products, etc. All of that good stuff.
33:40 So anyway, it’s a nice comparison so you can see exactly what’s going on and why.
33:47 Just ignore all the people. Woo Commerce isn’t going anywhere. They’ve lost their approximate share of the market right
33:54 now for e-commerce. But in my viewpoint, I’ve only touched on playing with the
33:60 Fluent when while it’s in beta. I was I got to play with it a little bit and it’s looking really nice. I haven’t gone
34:06 back to play with it since, but the Fluent Cart I think might actually be a
34:12 Woo Commerce. Not a killer, but it’s going to make a serious dent in their strangle hold of the e-commerce system
34:19 for WordPress. There there was several other really great e-commerce plugins, but not very
34:26 many. Shart seems like a pretty nice solution. Yeah, I haven’t tried Shart,
34:33 so that one would be nice. Um, but I think Fluent Fluent Cart, which is still, I believe,
34:40 in beta, hasn’t been fully released yet. Um, I think that’s going to be really nice. What little bit I’ve touched on is
34:47 really nice and how much comes with their free version, uh, from the
34:53 anticipations of it, I believe. Oh, I I think they’re going to make a big dent in the world for it.
35:00 All right, let’s go. Where else do I got going up here? I’ve got
35:10 Oh, here’s something. Yes, I read Reddit, folks. Believe it or not, Reddit has some entertaining conversation. Yes,
35:17 it’s a dumpster fire, and yes, there’s a ton of crap there, but every once in a while, somebody puts something up that
35:23 has some interesting viewpoints in it.
35:30 All right, it’s a guilty pleasure. What can I say? All right, this guy here, his title was
35:38 you don’t need a plugin for that. And he does have a point because as he
35:44 starts off, you see, watch somebody dump a 2meg plugin in there for adding a
35:50 contact form. You know, it comes with all kinds of things. An email marketing suite, CRM, analytics that I’m not sure
35:58 which one that would be. It could be any of them. I personally use Gravity Forms, which is lightweight and easy, but it is
36:03 a premium plugin and it works very well. I’ve been paying for it since they were brand new. I was one of their early
36:10 adopters for Gravity Forms. Um,
36:16 but during the conversation that they were having here, there was a couple of
36:22 people that popped in there and let’s see if I can find it.
36:34 Nope. I should have highlighted it to uh make sure I had it. There were some really good comments made about why
36:43 plugins are needed and how they are majorly beneficial to it. And
36:50 sometimes making a plugin is the best way. In fact, the reality is either when
36:55 you need functionality for WordPress, you are writing a plug-in. If you take
37:01 that code, you dump it into the functions file for the theme, it’s the same as taking that code and dumping it
37:08 into a plug-in file and creating a custom plugin. There’s no difference.
37:13 You’re still adding a code load to your WordPress website, whether it’s loaded
37:19 from the functions file or loaded from the plug-in folder as a plugin. There’s no difference.
37:25 The thing is is some things that need to be anything anytime you need to expand or add something here, you have to add
37:31 code somewhere. Even if you’re just going to hardcode a old-fashioned,
37:39 oh god, I can’t even remember what it’s called now. or how to put a, you know, a contact form with all the code right
37:45 there in the form, the HTML document for submitting it. God, it’s been years since I’ve done that. You’re still
37:51 adding code. So, no matter how you go about it, you’re adding code to your site. So, a plugin is always needed. You
37:58 know, you need a plugin for that. Whether it’s one you write yourself and make sure you write it as light as you
38:04 need it to be, or whether you download and install an overbloated plugin, which
38:10 is where it comes in handy to talk to a professional and see what the professionals have to
38:16 say, like, hey, okay, well, we can do it this way or we can do it this way. Which way would you prefer? Or just let the
38:21 professional handle it, and they’ll usually do it the right way, unless you get a half-ass professional.
38:28 Uh, let’s see. Oh, I know what it was. That’s where I had this uh article information.
38:34 Okay, let’s jump into something else here. Is WordPress slowly turning into a SAS
38:42 SAS platform? And what does that mean for plug-in developers? Now, this is a
38:49 very good discussion. The links for this particular Reddit thread are in the show notes because there was a really great
38:56 point made on here and I did highlight this one. This fellow here was
39:02 illustrating um that
39:08 the WordPress.org and WordPress.com have been showing automatics tightening
39:14 control to blur the lines between the two. and the October 24, 2024 ACF
39:22 takeover, which as you can see now they promote SCF, which is the ACF takeover
39:29 in their system and they forked it, you know, and they had never done one for
39:36 the reasons they claimed it was for security reasons, but the only reason they couldn’t update the security was
39:42 because they were unable to get in there and access their account to update the code
39:50 that they had already updated. So, at any rate, but one of the things he noted in here
39:56 was what was known as guideline 18. And I’d never heard of guideline 18 for
40:01 WordPress. And I thought, okay, what is this one here? You know, they have a lot of oddball guidelines that they will use
40:10 from time to time. I’m been party to them actually changing guidelines because I called their bluff on them and
40:17 they went oh and they rewrote them in live time. I actually have a lifetime
40:23 article on that. Uh you can go dig it up on uh the WP plugins website if you
40:29 search hard enough. At any rate, guideline 18 grants WordPress or
40:34 automatic the right to maintain the directory for disabling or removing plugins not covered by existing rules
40:42 and making changes to plugins in the interest of public safety even without developer consent. And what he’s talking
40:48 about here was weaponizing guideline 18 for when someone becomes obnoxious,
40:55 irritable, no longer in favor with the top elite crowd. You know, I thought
41:02 this one was a good example of how the guidelines have been weaponized in
41:09 recent times. So, at any rate, that there is what we’ve got going there.
41:16 What else have I got here? Got no questions here. I’m trying to monitor the questions here. I don’t know if
41:21 there’s any questions on Twitter because I can’t figure out how to watch that feed.
41:30 So, I don’t know if anyone’s in there. I know it’s streaming to Twitter and hopefully it’ll be reviewable there, but
41:36 we’ll see what happens. This is another one of my weeks of experimentation with multistreaming. Once I perfect and
41:42 figure out the Twitter’s multireaming, I will extend the multistreaming out to other platforms.
41:49 The nice thing about the multistreaming is it’s not costing me a monthly fee to do it because once you start learning
41:55 all the little bits and pieces of OBS, you start to realize that uh it can
42:03 work. Let’s uh pop out of that for a moment. Let’s see where else we got.
42:12 Okay, I know where we go next.
42:17 Let’s uh do this. Glitch glitch. There we go. Okay.
42:24 Going to the next item here. What I’m going to do is I’m creating a little segment for when I do the show unplugged
42:31 like this. I’m going to try to grab people that are relatively unknown in
42:37 the WordPress sphere. someone I’ve just recently discovered or people that I follow. I follow a lot of people in the
42:43 WordPress field. Some of them have very small accounts. And this guy popped up in my feed today. This is WP Roads. And
42:51 let’s go to his Twitter feed first. It’s uh Pascal Claro WP roads and he was uh
42:59 talking about redesign logo site navigation on a new website that website he’s worked on and he’s basically
43:06 promoting his stuff which is free WordPress tutorials premium courses um
43:11 plug-in reviews WordPress tools his uh website looked kind of
43:17 interesting I popped around to it you know a lot of really great stuff there creating the tools free shipping bar.
43:24 So, someone who could do it a little love, folks. You know, go check him out
43:30 and see what he’s got and share out his stuff there. I don’t have any others popped in here.
43:37 I just didn’t remember to get them all put in. And I end up bouncing around
43:42 another place. As I said at the beginning, yeah, it’s ADHD fueled. And that is my life. bouncing from one thing
43:48 to another as I work through all of my tons of projects and other miscellaneous
43:55 things that I’m doing and enjoying the coffee.
44:02 So, there’s all my rants for today. There’s some unpopular, well, maybe popular pro uh
44:10 um categories um projects. Um, she there
44:16 goes the words. [Music]
44:26 And there we fried
44:34 unpopular subjects. There we go. That’s what I was
44:40 looking for. The word subjects. Unpopular subjects in the WordPress sphere. So, those of you that are
44:45 sitting there listening to me, got any questions? Any things you’d like to see me explore? Next week’s show will be one
44:53 with Amber and I. And I, Unless I get an interview coming, actually the weekend
44:59 after that. Let’s go take a look here. Let’s wander through here. Yeah, next week’s show will be Amber and
45:06 I for next week, but the following week is if I don’t get an interview, I’ll be
45:12 back with Unplugged for I’ll be continue the Unplugged show until I’ve got interviews booked. But the following
45:18 week on the 27th of October, my daughter’s on her honeymoon. So, that
45:24 will probably be an unplugged show. I will go crazy with it uh for the uh unplugged show. Then after that, we’ll
45:30 go back into whatever happens. It’s either I’ve got an interview or unplugged show. So, you could end up
45:36 hearing me ramble on. And as I do this more and more, I will prepare the show
45:41 better and better. This one here was basically, oh, late Saturday. It’s like, oh, I don’t
45:47 have an interview. Nobody booked it. I better prepare a show. I spent Sunday trying to figure out a thing for it.
45:52 Didn’t come up with an idea until late yesterday, and I spent most of today prepping for it. So,
45:59 believe it or not, folks, a podcast takes a fair amount of work to
46:05 pull together. As Ryan has found out, just putting together a newsletter takes hours to produce a decent newsletter.
46:13 Even after you get everything automated, it’s getting the content together and then making it make sense.
46:23 All right, since we don’t have much else here, I don’t have much else to showcase
46:28 on here. Let’s see. Let’s go through what little notes I’ve got here. We’ve covered up all of Nick’s stuff. We’ve uh
46:35 copied up the Shopify stuff. We’ve copied up the
46:41 um the WordPress stuff and uh
46:50 and Reddit. Uh we’ve done that.
46:57 We’ll leave that one there. Oh, we’ve got another one here.
47:05 I couldn’t find this fellow on Twitter, but uh this one here was something I
47:11 picked off off of uh Nick’s uh website, someone named Dave Verse, and uh he
47:18 continued on with the evangelism is good chaos. And that is for WordPress. And we
47:25 are working on a new batch of Kool-Aid. We’ve got a whole bunch of it. the new
47:30 kid or the cool kids, not the new kids, the new kids who are cool kids and the new and the cool kids are returning to
47:37 WordPress and are recreating themselves in WordPress. WordPress has had a revival if nothing else that Mullen WG
47:44 done last year when he went on his tirade and his rant. I think he revived
47:51 a lot of people that were sitting and had just become lethargic with what they
47:57 were doing with WordPress and they suddenly got excited. The other thing I believe that has made WordPress so much
48:03 more exciting now is the usage of AI and everything. I know it’s helped reexite
48:10 me in that now I’m able to actually produce the plugins I dream of instead
48:16 of having to pay somebody to write them because most of the time I dream of a plugin. It’s a simple little thing. It’s
48:21 not very big. Not hard to write. But my problem is is I can’t type crap. No
48:29 matter how many years I spent taking courses or uh learning to type or
48:35 whatever those typing things are, programs for your computer, even when I was going to college, I only managed to
48:41 get to 35 words a minute for typing. And then when I didn’t have to do it all the time, it quickly fell back. So it’s like
48:48 a typing is a skill that’s not everybody can master. And I’m one of those. But
48:54 with AI, it can write the code for me and then I can review and check the code and make
49:00 sure it’s working and if it gets above and beyond me, I’ve
49:06 got a programmer buddy who will happily look over code. All right.
49:13 Wow, we’ve popped at six. Welcome, folks. Welcome. I have no idea what’s
49:18 happening out there in Twitter reveal Xville. I keep wanting to call it TW. It’ll probably I’ll probably continue to
49:24 call it Twitter the same way I call some of the landmarks around here by their original name even though they’ve
49:29 changed them two decades ago. I still use their original name for many landmarks.
49:36 It’s one of those things you get you get ingrained into you. You’ll slowly adapt to the new name, but you’ll be stuck
49:41 with it. All right. Well, of all that, I think I managed to carry this for
49:47 almost an hour, and I didn’t really anticipate it taking the carrying this long. Um, yeah, I’ve recorded 45
49:54 minutes, so I think I will uh call it at that point there. Anybody got any
49:59 comments for me to carry it on up?
50:05 We’ll let the comments play for a minute and reconnect back to the internet.
50:13 [Music] [Applause] Yes, I downloaded and stole that sound
50:21 out. That was the sound of my early years on the internet continuously.
50:27 All right. Well, thank you everyone for showing up. I greatly appreciate. I’m impressed that so many people hung
50:32 around as long as they did to my continuous ramblings.
50:39 All right, thanks everyone. We’re going to play a little music. Carry us on out of here.
50:47 We’re going to make time stand still.
50:60 A quarter after midnight and I’m watching the wall.
51:06 Sometimes I feel so uptight. I just can’t sleep at all.
51:13 Every day doing the same old thing. We’re losing time.
51:20 The weekend comes. We got to have some fun and rewind.
51:27 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still. We
51:34 got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the
51:40 thrill.
51:48 I feel the rope tightening, choking off our air.
51:54 We need to grab some lightning. Friday’s almost here.
52:01 Caught in a web. We need to cut this thread. We’re hanging by.
52:08 Where is it? Said you have to be half dead to survive.
52:15 These are the days of thunder, but we’re going to make the time stand
52:21 still. We got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the
52:28 thrill. [Music]
52:42 These are the days of thunder. We’re going to make time stand still. We
52:50 got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill. These are
52:57 the days of thunder. But we’re going to make time stand
53:02 still. We got to feel the hunger hanging over the ed.
53:15 These are the days of
53:26 All righty, folks. That’s all I’ve got for you now. Take care. Bye-bye. Oh my god, that is amazing.
53:34 Oh no.