Transcript of Episode 375 WP Plugins A to Z
All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of 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 #375 here.
It’s Episode 375 and we’ve got plugins for Enabling the Classic Editor, WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, YouTube Auto Posting, Payment Method Discounts, Jetpack Without Promotions and Tables from CSV. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #375
Marcus: It’s Episode 375 and we’ve got plugins for Enabling the Classic Editor, WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, YouTube Auto Posting, Payment Method Discounts, Jetpack Without Promotions and Tables from CSV. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
[Intro]
WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins A to Z.
John: Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.
Marcus: And from the sunny but sweltering shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: Yeah, you guys are getting nice, warm weather down there and up here in the North, it’s dropping down into the 10 to 12-degree area, or somewhere around 60 I think for you. I can’t remember; I’ve forgotten how to tell temperature in Fahrenheit. At any rate, we have the usual great show for you today. But right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show.
Marcus: That’s right, and if you check out YouTube, you can check out our training videos, screencasts, watch us live the first Monday of every month. Pretty fun – we’ve always had good times interacting with our listeners on that. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and remember to visit our website, wppluginsatoz.com. That’s where you’re gonna find our newsletter signup. Please sign up. That’s where we keep all the WordPress-related news and security briefings because on this show we only talk about the plugins.
John: Absolutely. And of course with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
[Plugins lead-in music]
And we have our usual allotment of six great plugins for you and the first one I have for you is called The Classic Editor Addon. Now by now, all of you have seen WordPress 4.8 – or is it 9? I can’t remember – 4.8. And they’ve got these things when you update, it gives you an option: enable Guttenberg or enable the Classic Editor. And hopefully, most of you are enabling the Classic Editor to prevent the site from being updated to Guttenberg when it goes into the core with Version 5.
Well, what this plugin does is it doesn’t enable the Classic Editor; it’s an add-on for the Classic Editor, which with the Classic Editor that you’re enabling, what it does is it adds an option on the settings page with a checkbox to where you can uncheck the Classic Editor and have Guttenberg instantly reactivate for you. What this plugin does is it removes that checkbox so that there’s no accidental activation of Guttenberg. You have to manually remove the plugin and then manually activate Guttenberg.
So this is a way to help prevent maybe your client who goes in messing around with settings from accidentally activating it, because Guttenberg messes up a lot of themes at the moment. It’s something unless you want to go experimenting, you want to avoid. I’m going to be coming along pretty soon with a lot of information about Guttenberg as I write up one of the presentations I’ll be doing this year at the WordPress Meetup. At any rate, because this plugin does something does something very simple, sweet, and it does something I thoroughly enjoy such as preventing Guttenberg from being accidentally activated, I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Marcus: Yeah, it shouldn’t even be intentionally activated. Guttenberg stinks.
John: [laughing]
Marcus: In comparison to Elementor, Beaver Builder, and all the rest —
John: All the other builders? Yeah, Guttenberg does suck.
Marcus: Terrible – terrible. It’s the worst decision. This is going to go down, just like distraction-free editing: no one uses it.
John: They’ll call it “When WordPress Jumped the Shark.” [chuckling]
Marcus: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And by the way, I know I’m getting on a side tangent here, but did you know that Drupal people are going to be implementing Guttenberg, too?
John: Really?
Marcus: Yes.
John: I didn’t know they built Guttenberg for Drupal. That’s interesting.
Marcus: Yes, it works!
John: Hm.
Marcus: It works for Drupal.
John: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Marcus: Yeah, so you Drupal users, now you can be twice as dumb when you install it.
John: [chuckling]
Marcus: But though it might be good for Drupal people, who knows?
John: Who knows? Good – you never know.
Marcus: All right, so here’s one I’ve got – another one from Envato Elements. This is – and Envato Elements, by the way, is a cool feature. If you haven’t heard about it, just go to elements.envato.com. I’m not getting paid to say that. In fact, I pay for the service myself out of my own pocket and it’s pretty cool. So you can pay on a monthly or an annual and you get everything that they’ve got, which is hundreds of thousands of different things, including hundreds of WordPress plugins like this one.
It’s called WooCommerce PDF Vouchers. Now, last week I talked about something that gave invoices and packing slips and things like that. This does vouchers. So what it does is it allows you to sell voucher codes or kind of a printed PDF that can then be redeemed at a physical location. So this is even tickets or gift certificates or gift card type of things. It’s perfect for those kinds of stores that want to do that for onsite pickup even, class admission tickets, presentations – anything like that. You can give your customers the ability to set a recipient name, email, and a message to purchase these vouchers as a gift or for themselves.
So you can create unlimited – it’s totally easy to use. I tried it, it looks really nice. You can add custom logos, you can put the redemption instructions right in the PDF, you can add unlimited locations where the voucher can be redeemed. You can put anything on it, like the buyer’s name and email and any kind of identification things on that thing too so that you know that that person is actually the one that gets it, so it’s not just 50 people printing the same thing out. It is QR code-ready so that you can actually scan it in and see exactly what it’s supposed to be. You have the ability to use codes on an unlimited basis, so it’s the same kind of code over and over or you can assign them individually. It really doesn’t make a difference.
So it also will – if you happen to be selling some physical product and all of the vouchers get sold out, it can send an email to the vendor saying so: “Hey, we’re sold out. We need more.”
John: Cool.
Marcus: Very, very cool plugin. This did exactly what I needed it to do. It also works with plugins like WooCommerce Bookings, WC Vendors, Pay Your Price, the Social Deal Engine WooCommerce Extension, Multi-Vendor. It works with WooCommerce SMS Notification plugins – all kinds of stuff. It’s translation-ready, it works really nice. I put a demo link for the frontend and the backend of this plugin in the show notes, so check that out at our website. I rated this a perfect 5 out of 5.
[Dragon roar]
John: That’s a pretty cool plugin. One thing I didn’t hear you mention, you may have, but it also has the ability to check if the voucher code is valid or not for a specific vendor.
Marcus: Correct.
John: So that’s kind of important. That was the first thing that popped in my mind: how do you check to make sure, because your PDF, they could print a million of them. What would prevent them from using them? So it’s got a way to make sure they don’t misuse the code.
Marcus: That’s correct, yes.
John: So that’s an important factor.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: All right, well this show here currently brought to you by…
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John: Absolutely. And of course, we are giving away an ultimate bundle license package for WP Book List and this is the last week for you to get in there and enter the contest. Go do that at wppluginsatoz.com/contests and this is a plugin bundle valued at $83 and WP Book List is a WordPress plugin that strives to be the ultimate book management tool. Whether you’re an author, publisher, librarian, bookstore owner, or simply a lover of books. WP Book List has something for you.
Just plug in the ISBN or ASN number and let WP Book List scour Amazon and other sources for tons of information about each title, including cover images, publication date, number of pages, and more. So this plugin provides everything you need to get yourself set up with a complete book list on your site, and as we talked about in the last show, it’s a really great way to create other types of book lists that might be handy for you. So go check it out and if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, we have a great discount coupon code offer from the developer. Just enter ULTIMATE20 (all caps) and save $12 off on the plugin, so go check it out: WP Book List.
And a big thank you to Simple Giveaways Plugin for providing us with the plugin that powers all our contests.
Marcus: Yep, and you better enter because I’m gonna take it if no one enters.
John: There you go.
Marcus: It’s all mine.
John: You’ll sneak that in.
Marcus: [chuckling]
John: All right, and our next couple of plugins we’ve got for you…. the next one I have for you here was sent in by Szabolcs Istvan Kisded. Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator and YouTube Auto Poster Plugin for WordPress. This is a premium plugin from CodeCanyon and from everything I looked at, I haven’t fully tested the plugin but I did look it over real good and watched his training video on it.
It’s a fantastic YouTube plugin that will allow you, if you’re so inclined, you can upload the video to your website, put it in as a link on a post or a page. Once you publish the post or page, it then auto-uploads that video to YouTube for you. It uploads all the content from your post and everything and puts it up into your YouTube channel. Now, the other thing it does for you if you want to pull down videos from other YouTube channels out there and display them in your site, it’ll pull down the video and it will pull down the description, it’ll pull down the comments and everything, and put it into your site as a post.
So it goes on both directions for uploading and downloading YouTube videos, help you create some unique content on your site. It can be very handy if you can figure out how to make the most of it. But it looks like quite the interesting plugin as far as managing and using YouTube videos on your website. Go check this out. It’s called Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator and YouTube Auto Poster and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Be careful of that with duplicate content. Make sure you’ve got other stuff on that page, too.
John: Yeah. Well, it’s a matter of what you’re trying to do or what you’re accomplishing. But according here, it helps prevent you from doing duplicate content because it’s also got a AI spinner in here to spin the posting information for you.
Marcus: Yeah, if you want it to be completely unreadable. [chuckling]
John: [chuckling] Well…
Marcus: Yeah, okay. All right.
John: It was an interesting one sent in by a listener and I thought hey, we’ll give it a check.
Marcus: Yes. Okay, so the next plugin I’ve got is something relatively new but I thought it was pretty cool. It’s called WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts, and this is very intriguing. It allows you to actually add a discount based on specific payment methods. So let’s say, John, you take PayPal and Square and Stripe and credit card payments and all that different stuff. Maybe you want PayPal because you want that instant access to your account and you don’t want, you know, the chargebacks or anything like that.
So what you can do is you can say, “Anybody that pays with PayPal, you get a 5% discount on the pricing,” so it automatically enters that based on the total as they check out. So when they select their payment method, it actually can do a fixed or a percentage based on the methods that you choose. So in WooCommerce you always set up your merchants and your payment methods and things, and that’s exactly where this resides. It’s called WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts and it gets a perfect 5 out of 5.
[outro starts]
John: Whoops, wrong button.
[Dragon roar]
Wrong button. Do that again.
Marcus: Drop the mic, end the show.
[Dragon roar]
John: Sometimes the buttons just are too skinny for my fingers. Yeah, it’s a fantastic idea and it – even from what I just read real quickly, if you’re taking checks, give them a discount if they’re paying in checks or cash if they’re going that route.
Marcus: Yes.
John: All right, and listener feedback…we do love listener feedback, and if you’d like to leave us some, hit us up on our Contact page on the website, SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner, or hit us up on our social media channels: YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. And we do get back to you as soon as we can. We’ll answer your questions to the best of our ability and you get a lot of free advice for it, so go check us out and send us some feedback.
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And if you’d like to support the show that way, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate.
And our final set of plugins for today and the last one I’ve got for you here is one that’s near and dear to my heart, although I usually remove this plugin if it gets accidentally installed at all costs. It’s Jetpack Without Promotions. Now, if you’ve ever installed Jetpack and there’s occasionally a reason I have to install and use it, but all of the notifications and ads and “Please buy this” or “add this” – all those things in the admin bar just annoy me to no end.
This plugin removes all that junk. It helps clean up and declutter your admin area of your website if you’re using Jetpack. This one here is like yahoo! Tops – I love it. It’s a great plugin. Go check it out: Jetpack Without Promotions, and of course it hits a top 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Marcus: I gotta find this clip when I was interviewing Matt Mullenweg when I was doing WordPress Weekly.
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: Of him talking about Jetpack and him asking me about something, and I said, “I don’t know, man. I don’t like using it.”
John: Yeah?
Marcus: And he was [chuckling] he was confused as to why I would never use it.
John: Yeah?
Marcus: And that’s a good reason why.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Right there. Okay, let’s round this one out with something that we use for tables. So a lot of times you want to have tables within your WordPress pages or posts, and here’s a really cool thing. It’s called Table Builder for CSV. It allows you to create a full HTML table by uploading a CSV file into your media library. So you can upload it then include the table in the page based on a shortcode and then insert the table right in there and it a creates a nice, responsive HTML table that you can use straight from a CSV file.
Now what’s really nice is you can actually update that CSV file and, you know, put a new CSV file in and it updates within that page too automatically, so that’s pretty cool. It also allows you to define new headers as far as the top of the column, what the names are and things like that. A really cool plugin and it worked for me right out of the gate. Rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s a pretty nice plugin. I kind of like how that works. I don’t have a need for it now but I have had a need for that in the past, so it’s one go check out.
All right, well closing out this episode, I covered up the Classic Editor Addon, which I gave a 5 to; the Youtubomatic Automatic Post Generator, which I gave a 4 to; and the Jetpack Without Promotions, which I gave a 5 to.
Marcus: And I talked about WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, which gets a 5 out of 5; WooCommerce Simple Payment Discounts, 5 out of 5; and Table Builder for CSVs gets a 4 out of 5.
John: And of course we have a couple of quick reminders and promotions for you. One, please go check out the Victoria WordPress Meetup group if you’re on the island or planning to visit the island, please come check us out on October 9th. And we have two presentations, one by a guest speaker who’s going to present all about using GravityForms and how it can enhance your website, and myself will be presenting on how to choose a theme for your website. And after the troubles I’ve had recently, well, it’s gonna be something worth watching to help you figure out how to choose a theme for a new project.
And be sure to check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And to developers out there, if you’d like to support the show and you want to give away or offer up a free premium license for our contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.
And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.
[Female speaker]
Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
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[Outro]
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.
[Child giggling]
[End of Audio]
