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 #315 here.

It’s Episode 315 and we’ve got plugins for Emails per Product, Geo-Mapping, WooCommerce Disclaimers, Quote of the Day, Plugins in the Customizer and In Post Advertising. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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Episode #315

John:                First up this week I have a premium plugin that was sent in to us by Roman Stepanov. It is a premium plugin called MapSVG, starts at $35 for the plugin, and this is an excellent plugin if you have data you need to map to countries or even within one of their example sites here is the States. They are showing you how you can map specific data to specific states. People click on the states and they get a list next to it of what’s in there.

The interesting thing about this plugin here is they already have the SVG maps for most every country on the globe already. So you just choose the map, load up the map, then you go in and you create your customized fields, whatever data you want to do, whatever fields you want to do, and you assign them to the map and then you assign them to the section in the map so that the information can be done. I think they might even have this allowed to go down a little further than that with it.

But this one here is very excellent and how I see this plugin being used in particular, there were many months back one of the listeners out there contacted us about a suggestion for a plugin that they could use to map data across different states for a media outlet who had different jobs available for media people in different states. There was nothing that really did a really good job, but I think this is exactly what they need; they can assign all the information they need, assign it to the state, the person they send to look for the information, you click on their state and see what’s available, and then do all the contacts. This has got tons and tons of uses on how it could be used. It’s really easy to use, it was pretty straightforward, and I found very few problems at all, so it turns out to be a fantastic plugin. It is premium but it’s MapSVG. Check it out. I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! A good plugin. All right, the first one I’ve got – we are all used to now the live preview within the customizer and it lets you see kind of an instant feedback of what’s going on with your site. Well this plugin is called Customize Plugin Manager and this is an experimental plugin, which means do not use this on a live site. (Use it on a stage site and experiment with it; that’s what it’s meant for.) But it gives you the ability to activate and deactivate plugins from within the customizer and then you can instantly see what these plugins are doing, which is pretty cool.

Now, what happens is just like the regular customizer, until you hit save and publish, it won’t actually do these things. Now the author of this does warn you that broken plugins activated through this method could break your site, so that’s a good enough reason to never use it on a live site. But if you do check out this plugin and interact, please interact with the developer and help to make this a better plugin. Maybe this is something that, you know, down the road is one of your staples.

I don’t use the customizer too much but – and I don’t think I’d really use this plugin all the time – but it’s very cool the way that they’ve got it to work and the fact that you can get a live preview of what’s going on. So I rated this one a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s very useful and that could definitely help out when you’re developing out.

Marcus:           Yeah, exactly.

John:                Okay, next up I have another premium plugin. This one was sent in by Yoav Shalev and I’m actually going to be interviewing this author later today on a different plugin. It’s a premium plugin and it’s called WP Quote of the Day. What this plugin is for is if you want to set up something on your site to be like Forbes Magazine – if you’ve ever been there, you get that big, cool looking quote that it throws over the screen for you and you might read it and you might just cause it to go away. Well, that’s what this plugin does for you.

Now, it is a bit of a third-party system. All the quotes come from their database through their API, which is why it’s a premium, but they do have over 125 different categories and over 55,000 different quotes to numerous authors. So it’s kind of a cute plugin, kind of useful, can add and enhance to your site if that’s the type of audience that’s coming to your site that you can do that for. Not every website could use it. But it does seem to work okay and it’s a pretty decent little plugin, and I gave it a good 3-Dragon rating, so it’s a good solid, steady plugin. Check it out: WP Quote of the Day.

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s a good one. And, you know, I wish that you could actually add your own quotes. That would be a lot better.

John:                It would be.

Marcus:           — if they did that, so maybe that’s something that the author can take to heart.

John:                Well, maybe I’ll ask him about it when I interview him later today.

Marcus:           Yeah. Okay, so the last two plugins that I’ve got are sort of interrelated in terms of what you can do with individual products in WooCommerce. So the first of these is called Woo Custom Emails Per Product. Now, what this allows you to do is add custom content for each product in the WooCommerce receipt emails. So you enter in the product description itself where you go through the different boxes, images, and all that stuff, you’re actually adding a block of text that is specific to that product. Then when somebody orders that product, the receipt that they get contains that block text that you’ve initiated.

Now, you can use either a HTML code or just plain text, but this is things like installation instructions, pick-up instructions, you know, any kind of thing like that as far as 1:1 individual products get sold and then here’s what to expect, or here’s how it comes, or here’s how to unfold it, or here’s how to do whatever with it. This is a very cool thing that individually tailors each one of your different products with the custom message.

John:                Nice!

Marcus:           And I thought the functionality of it was great. It’s very easy to set up, very easy to use, and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Excellent. I always do when a plugin hits that.

Marcus:           Yeah, that’s a really nice touch to add to an e-commerce site.

John:                Absolutely and help enhance it. All right, the final plugin I have here today is another premium plugin. It was sent in to us by Scott DeLuzio and it’s called WP In-Post Ads. Now, it is another plugin that allows you to put advertisements into your site. Now this one is kind of more along the lines for someone who’s doing blogging on their website. What it does is it makes it easy to add the ads into the body content and it will add up to three ads in there.

You simply add the ad code, tell it what paragraphs the ad is to appear at. You can add multiple styles of ads in there. He has multiple blocks for putting the ads in, too, tell it where to appear, and then they just start to appear in your text. It’s very simple, very straightforward plugin, a good solid advertising plugin for your basic ad insertion into a website. Check it out: it’s called WP In-Post Ads and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           How does it determine where in the post it goes? Do you put a shortcode in or does it have sort of a – I don’t know.

John:                It’s automatic in the plugin.

Marcus:           Mm-hmm?

John:                The plugin probably calls into the hooks and when you set up the plugin, you tell it “appear the first ad after paragraph three, the second one after paragraph five, the third one after paragraph seven.”

Marcus:           Got it, perfect.

John:                And that’s what it does. It just puts them after those paragraphs, whatever they might be.

Marcus:           Nice.

John:                So the other nice thing about it – and I did forget to mention – is these are the things that at first I was going to give it a three, but then I realized it had some other things. It’s when you’re doing each individual post, you can customize it on a per post basis for where the paragraphs will be. Maybe you wrote an article that only has four paragraphs, so you want the ad to appear a little sooner, or maybe you have lots of paragraphs and you can do it there. Plus, if you have a multi-author blog and you want to allow it, you can allow the additional authors to have one of their own single ads inserted on their post.

Marcus:           Oh, nice!

John:                So that’s one useful feature about it that brought it up to a four.

Marcus:           But then that post editor, do you also have the ability to turn it off for a post?

John:                Yes, you do. You have the ability to turn it off for a post, too, if it’s a post that you think should not be monetized.

Marcus:           Great! That sounds like a great plugin.

John:                Yep, there you go.

Marcus:           All right, let’s wrap it up here. The final one is also WooCommerce-related and to individual products. This is called WooCommerce Product Disclaimer and it’s a plugin where you get to set up some terms and conditions before the customer is allowed to add the product to their cart. They have to agree to the terms and conditions. So when you click Add to Cart, a disclaimer pops up, asking the customer to review and agree to the terms and conditions, and that is before they are allowed to add it to the cart.

So if somebody buys it and they say, “I didn’t know,” look…you can’t even add it to the cart without knowing.

John:                That’s right.

Marcus:           So this gives you complete coverage. And if they decline the terms and conditions, it does not add the product to the cart. Very cool, very nice in order to kind of cover your bases when it comes to specific products that have special details or instructions, and it marries nicely with that Emails Per Product plugin I used. This one is called WooCommerce Product Disclaimer and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                That’s actually quite useful for folks using WooCommerce to ensure that they get that disclaimer checked off.

Marcus:           That’s right. You cannot purchase without it.

John:                Yeah. Okay, well that wraps it up. This week here I covered up MapSVG, which I gave a 5 to; WP Quote of the Day, which I gave a 3 to; and then WP In-Post Ads, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about Customize Plugin Manager, which gets a 4 out of 5; Woo Custom Emails Per Product gets a 5 out of 5, and WooCommerce Product Disclaimer, another 5 out of 5.

 

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