All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of  John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #380 here.

It’s Episode 380 and I’ve got Scheduled Tweets, MailChimp Manager, Exporting Plugin Details and Increasing speed by Reducing HTTP Requests. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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Episode #380

John:    It’s Episode 380 and I’ve got Scheduled Tweets, MailChimp Manager, Exporting Plugin Details and Increasing speed by Reducing HTTP Requests. 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. And unfortunately Marcus can’t join me yet, but hopefully he’ll be back with us next week. It’s been a bit confusing with me moving around the show schedule and everything else to be able to get him here due to the way his work schedule works out. And well, it’s just unfortunate. But we have landed on the new day for the show. It will be live every week going forward after this. The time might change from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m., but we’re gonna see how it goes. If Marcus is more amenable to 2:00, it will become 2:00. I kind of like the 12:00 noon time slot myself.

At any rate though, that being said there, a couple of other quick things right off the top. You can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. If you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio and up in the YouTube – up on the iTunes and Google Play, subscribing to the show, and basically – well, subscribing to the show and – get my buttons all working correctly here – subscribing to the show and leaving us reviews. The reviews really help out the show quite a bit there.

Also, check out our training videos up on YouTube and if you’re listening to us on YouTube, it’s greatly appreciated. You can catch us here live on a weekly basis now. And also go check out the screencasts and training videos, and there will be more training videos coming as I prep for more of my WordPress Meetup groups that I’m doing here in Victoria, and the meetups are coming. You could also follow the show over at Twitter @wppluginsatoz and on our Facebook page. All the links for those are in the show notes.

With that being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, and first off the plugin I’ve got for you this week here is one that I got from an interview I did with a developer that hasn’t quite hit yet. The interview is coming. And – buttons, buttons everywhere. I gotta get used to a whole bunch of new stuff here. I’ve got new software, new everything. At any rate, Scheduled Tweets is the name of the plugin. This is a great little plugin I have just recently got it set up on my website and getting my SEO person to start doing some work with it. But it allows you to schedule Twitter tweets directly from your WordPress dashboard.

You know, Twitter is a useful tool. It’s great for marketing, helping get your message out there in front of people. The hard part I’ve always found with Twitter is you’ve gotta manually send out the tweets. This tool here will allow you to go in, schedule tweets. You can set up a whole month’s worth of tweets or more. You can create campaigns – tweet campaigns – group them all together, set them out to go out in groups, all from within your WordPress dashboard.

This is looking to be quite an excellent plugin, completely free, which of course is a major bonus for it. They haven’t gone yet to a premium version of course; it’s a really new plugin. They just released it not too long ago and not enough people are using it yet. I suggest you get out there and give this one a try if you’re using Twitter in any way, shape, and form, and you want something to help you with the marketing of all of your Twitter stuff, go check this one out. This is a fantastic looking plugin. So far, setup and functionality on my site have been great, so I give this plugin a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

All right, starting the show off with a bang today. All right, and currently this show is brought to you by…

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely. Go visit JohnOverall.com for all of your WordPress needs. I can help you out with pretty much everything you need. And that’s me, moving things around on my screen. I’ve gotta be able to get to everything I need. I need to see the new recording software to see how well it’s playing the sounds.

Okay, and so that brings us up to – what else do we got going here? Oh, X² Marketing is your full-service digital marketing and brand development agency. Whether you are a solopreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X². From WordPress to click funnels, landing pages to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, InfusionSoft management and more. Visit X² Marketing and get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs, and Marcus is really quite great at all that stuff, so go check him out at x2marketing.com.

And currently we do have a contest running for WP Plugins A to Z. We started it in the middle of October. It was a rough month getting things back in shape and it’s for the Interactive U.S. Maps donated by Botrous, which we reviewed in Episode 368. Go check it out. The contest is running until the middle of November. We would give it a little extra time this time and eventually we’ll get the contests rotated around to where they’re on a weekly or biweekly basis since it’s taken some time to work everything out.

Anyway, this is a great plugin and get yourself a free copy of this plugin. All you do is go over to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and enter the contest for all the info you need. Very simple – all we need is your email address and your name. Well, not even your name; just your email address. So go check it out. It’s a great contest. Win yourself a plugin. And we have in the queue three additional licenses coming up that more developers have been giving to us.

We’ve been getting more and more support from the show from all of the development community out there and as I’ve mention, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with developers. I’ve still got three more scheduled in the next coming weeks. I’ve got two in the hopper, I’ve released a couple in the last week, so you’re gonna hear more and more from all of the developers out there about the different plugins we use, so stay tuned to this channel for more of that stuff up and coming. Subscribe to the podcast to get the interviews. Those are not done live.

All right, the next couple of plugins for you – I actually have two plugins for you  in this segment. The first one is something to help you speed up your website a little bit. It’s called Reduce HTTP Requests, Disable Emojis & Disable Embeds, Speedup WooCommerce. This is a pretty long name for a plugin that basically helps you speed up your WordPress website. It helps you get rid of things by getting rid of the emojis, the gravitars, the embeds, the query strings, speed up WooCommerce. They’ve got support to disable pingbacks, disable trackbacks, close comments, etc., etc., disable WooCommerce scripts and CSS on non-WooCommerce pages. All of these things here can help speed up the performance of your website and help you obtain higher rankings in the search engines and higher speed for your users.

There’s a lot that this plugin does. I’ve just started experimenting with it to see how I can improve my websites with it and something I’m also going to do with client sites, because speed is of paramount importance. This is a really great plugin as far as I can tell. Again, it’s a free one – our favorite kind of plugins. You just set it up and go in and tweak and turn off and on all of the little things you want to turn off and on with it, and away you go. It might gain you a half a second, but hey, half a second can mean the difference between a sale and not a sale. Many people won’t even wait half a second for a page to load, so think about that.

So go check it out. It’s called Reduce HTTP Requests, Disable Emojis & Disable Embeds, Speedup WooCommerce, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, and the next one I’ve got in here is a nice, simple, and sweet plugin. Now, from time to time, you may have the need to create a list of all of the plugin details for the plugins you have on your site. [This one is called Export Plugin Details.] And in that case there, you’re gonna want something that is going to make a nice, good, clean list besides you going in there and copying and pasting from the page to see what it has.

So at any rate, what this plugin does for you is it allows you to go in, create and export a plugin details list. So this is something that can save you a fair bit of time if you’re just working up around getting all of your plugin details in order, so simple, sweet. It exports out the plugin name, the description, the author, whether it’s active or inactive on your site, the current version that’s there, an update available (yes or no) and whether it’s got a new version available. A really nice plugin to help you with the managing of your site or in migration or things you’re turning off and on. This is just a way to help manage what you’re up to and what you’re doing, go check this plugin out. It’s very simple, sweet – our favorite kind of plugin. It just kind of works, so I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.

[Dragon roar]

Okay, listener feedback, clips, etc., etc. We like listener feedback, so if you’ve got listener feedback for us, drop in to wppluginsatoz.com, go down to the lower right-hand corner, click on the Ask a Question, leave us a voicemail via SpeakPipe, contact us through our Contact page, contact us through Twitter or Facebook page. We do get back to you – sometimes not fast because, well, I’ve still got to make a living, so I’ve got to work and things like this sometimes hit the back burner. Or if it’s an email, sometimes it gets buried in the inbox, but I do eventually respond – always. So feedback is always a great thing.

This week here, we’ve got a little bit of feedback from one person here. I got an email from the guys over at hapity.com and they’ve got a new plugin – uh-oh, something’s wrong with their site. Either that or my typo-ing on it – probably my typo-ing. Hapity.com…let’s bring it up here. There it is. Hapity.com – probably my typo.

At any rate, this is a plugin that allows you to livestream to your website and to other multiple screens. But what they asked me is they’re looking for someone to help them with marketing their plugin. This plugin allows you to broadcast to multiple places. It’s a really interesting plugin. I haven’t fully checked it out yet but it is in the queue to be reviewed since they brought it to my attention. But they’re looking for someone who might help them do the marketing for this. So if you’re that kind of person, go contact them over at hapity.com and let them know John from WP Plugins A to Z sent you there and that you are willing to help take their money and help market their plugin. They do have a budget so go check them out.

And this show, a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over are read out and their note is published in the show notes. And those below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

This week here, Jezweb Pty. Ltd. sent us in a donation of $50 and he had to say:

This donation is on behalf of Hunter Valley Amazing Wine Tours https://www.huntervalleyamazingwinetours.com.au in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au . Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez

Jez, thank you very much. We really appreciate your support of the show. Your support really helps us cover the costs that we’ve got to put out on a regular basis, for the transcripts which are currently up-to-date and the new ones going up today, so we get the current transcripts for the show about four to five, sometimes six days after the show is published. But they do get up on time and on queue now. It’s amazing what happens when you’ve got an additional person to help you out with the work, so a big thank-you out to them. And a big thank you out to those who came in under $50, you know who you are and thank you for the weekly subscriptions and the small subscriptions that come in through Patreon and other donations. Thank you very much. Your support for the show is fantastic. Every little bit helps the show out.

And if you’d like to support the show, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where I’ve made it quite simple to donate now instead of all the complexity I had. It’s a simple form. Fill it out, choose the amount you’d like to donate, click enter. It takes you to PayPal and boom, you’re done. So that’s the way you can donate to the show as simple as I can possibly get it without standing in front of you with my hand and saying, “Just put cash here.”

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got for you today – at first when I discovered it, I was hoping it wasn’t a freemium plugin, but it is a freemium plugin. But it looks like I may go for the premium version. Who knows? Maybe they’ll send me a copy that I can test out. The freemium version though, this is called MailChimp Manager, and if you use MailChimp (which many, many people do and I use MailChimp for managing our mailing list). And if you’ve used MailChimp’s interface, you know what a chore it can be sometimes, and that chore just makes life difficult to work through and get everything functioning.

This plugin here allows you to do all of your campaign management including the templates you’re building out to send to your newsletter list from the backend of your WordPress website. You connect it up through the API key, you go in, you build out your campaign. They don’t show it in the images they have here, but as I was working through it, you can choose the template layouts that you want to do from default ones. They have more layouts available once you get into the premium version from what I’ve read. You also get the ability to have more than one campaign running from your website. You could just create a website if you have multiple campaigns, like I do for under the same account. You could have them all running through the one website, too. There’s a lot you can do with this and manage MailChimp from within WordPress.

The advantages to this – well, to me it looks like the advantages would be one, I could get to publish that email newsletter right on my website at the same time it’s pushed out to MailChimp. Yeah, you can do that the other way around, but it’s not as easy. The other is I manage the content in one spot and when you’re working on something and you have to pull together a newsletter for a particular website, you have to go back and forth between MailChimp’s thing. If you’re inside your WordPress dashboard, you have more information right at your fingertips. It could save you a minute or two, but in everything the more minutes you can save, it adds up to hours.

All in all, it looks to be a really great plugin. I would give it a 5, but of course being the freemium version, it gets knocked down one point just by default. Once I get a chance to look at the premium version, we may up the volume of it to a 5. But go check it out. It’s called MailChimp Manager, a relatively new plugin. It looks to be well-built and working well. They are working on some extensions on it to do additional stuff to it, according to their website. So this is something you’ll want to check out. So it’s MailChimp Manager and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Okay, and that wraps it up here. I covered up Scheduled Tweets, which I gave a 5 to; Reduce HTTP Requests, which I gave a 5 to; Export Plugin Details, which I gave a 5 to; and MailChimp Manager, which I gave a 4 to. So all in all, not too bad. A good roundup of plugins.

And of course the usual reminders…be sure to go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts and training videos and more live stuff coming. I’ve been working with talking to my brother who is a gaming streamer and he’s helping me to set up some proper streaming software on my computer. As everyone knows, I’ve got a new computer. It’s just been up and running for about three weeks now, so I’ve got a whole lot that I’m reincorporating in here. New audio software – hopefully if you download the show from the podcast channel, you will hear the nice, cleaner, better sounding audio. Let me know what people think.

Also, I want new streaming software so I don’t have to use Google Hangouts and I can get better, cleaner software and have more interactivity with the listeners out there. I noticed there was three or four of you up on the channel there and it’d be nice to interact with the chats on that. I want to bring a little bit of interactivity back to the show and since I’ve been able to reorganize my time to bring back the weekly live show, this is going to happen over time. And it’s simply because I truly enjoy doing the show and that’s where we’re at at the moment.

So other things – note to developers. If you’d like to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and that’s it. Subscribe to our newsletter if you’re not already subscribed. We’re starting to include better quality news and information there. We’re upping our game, basically. We’ve been running along for a while just sort of moving, but everything else is slowly improving bit by bit.

And be sure to tune in here and it’ll either be 12:00 or 2:00 p.m. as the standard time. I’ll know some time over the next few days and just tune into the YouTube channel. You’ll see it posted as the next live time, so go check it out.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you. Thanks for coming in and listening to the show, folks. It’s greatly appreciated. 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.

John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[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]

John:    And that’s all we’ve got. Take care.

[End of Audio]