Transcript of Episode 294
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 #294 here.
It’s Episode 294 and we’ve got plugins for Sales Countdown Woocommerce, Sending Bad Bots to the corner, Techxplorer’s Plugin Listicle sounds like something from Epic Spell Wars. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #294
[John only this week]
Okay, this week here I have the first plugin. It is called Sales Countdown WooCommerce Addon. Now this one here can be a real enhancement to those of you who have a WooCommerce website and you offer sales for your products from time to time. One of the things that helps enhance when you have a sale is getting people to buy it is to put a time limit on it as a way to make it more important so that they feel the sense of urgency necessary to purchase it. So what this plugin does for you is it creates a timer which shows up underneath your product. It shows how many days left until the sale is over.
With that kind of thing happening, it helps put a sense of urgency to people to buy. It’s been found that this does help. While it does help minimally, hey, every additional sale because of it is more money into your pocket. So anyway, it’s a really great plugin. It allows you to enter information when you’re putting your products in and then you can display the stuff via a shortcode on your website and different places. So anyway, check it out: Sales Countdown WooCommerce Addon, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Next up here, we have a way for you to banish bad bots into the dark black hole of Never-never Land. Now, if you’ve been running your website long enough, sooner or later you’re going to run into a bot that ignores the rules of your robot text file. This is kind of important because when a bot goes bad, it will run through your website and it will suck down your bandwidth and use up your resources and create all kinds of headache and grief. It would be nice to have a way to just – when that happens, just banish them so that they can’t even bother your website again.
So what this plugin does for you is it is a little bit of work to set up, so it’s not the easiest thing for the most part, because you’ve got to go in there and set up your robot’s text file, go in there, and you set a honeypot link into the robot’s text file. Now, all good bots (the ones that obey the rules that you set forth in your robot’s text file) will see that they’re not supposed to index this file here and they won’t index it. But bad bots will index that file and as soon as they index that file, they are automatically blocked from the rest of your website and don’t bother it at all. They’re all automatically just banished and out of the way so that they can’t impact you at all.
It’s a really great plugin. It does seem to work quite well. It does have some issues if you use caching plugins with your website, so you have to beware of that. They have some instructions to work around that. And if it wasn’t for this little bit of extra work and the caching plugin issue, this would be rated a 5. But at the moment, I’m going to give it a 4-Dragon rating. So check it out: Blackhole for Bad Bots.
And finally, what I have for you here today is Techxplorer’s Plugin Listicle – it just sounds like a spell from Epic Spell Wars. If you’re a game player, it’s a card game and it’s actually a lot of fun. But as soon as I saw it, that’s why it made me giggle when I saw it and I thought ah, I’ve gotta check this one out, just because of the title. Anyway, what this plugin here is – well, sharing is what WordPress is all about, right? Well, for many anyways – at least for us. Well, one of the things is that a lot of people use a lot of different plugins and there’s a lot of people that are always asking us, “What plugin do you use? Which ones on your website?”
Well, what this plugin does for you is it creates a list of all the plugins that are running on your website and you can create a page using a shortcode and show them out. The default CSS for it is pretty nice. It’s not perfect but, you know, a little bit of work and you can change the CSS layout to more match your website, but the default is all right. It’s really great because what you can do is you can give credit where credit is due for all the plugin developers out there that have helped you build your website. (And yes, they helped you build your website by providing those plugins free, premium, or whatever.) Because of their hard work, you got to save hours and tons of time.
So this is a great way to give back to them at least in a tiny way by providing them links that link back to their product and showcase what you have on your website. You can check it out on our site here. I’ve got it listed up on the WP Plugins A-Z website where it shows what plugins that we are currently using on our website here. One of the nice features I’ve found about this, like I’ve tried plugins like this in the past to be able to showcase all of the plugins that were being used. But the biggest problem I ran into is it tried to list up even the plugins that weren’t active on the site, which is a bit of a pain because sometimes I’ll be storing numerous inactive plugins in anticipation of using them elsewhere or something else, and I didn’t want to showcase what I wasn’t using.
So this showcases just your live, active plugins, which is also very nice in an MU environment which is what WPAZ is at and because the other websites use multiple other plugins. So it’s a really great plugin. It’s a great way of sharing everything and because it’s just really kind of cool (the title is awesome), I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
So there you have it. That’s the plugins this week. I covered up Sales Countdown WooCommerce Addon, which I gave a 4 to; Blackhole for Bad Bots, which I gave a 4 to; and then Techxplorer’s Plugin Listicle, which I gave a 5 to.
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