Transcript of Episode 356 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 #356 here.
It’s Episode 356 and we’ve got plugins for Site Audits, Reinventing User Profiles, WooCommerce Product Addons, Deleting Old Products, Saving Abandoned Carts and more. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #356
Marcus: It’s Episode 356 and we’ve got plugins for Site Audits, Reinventing User Profiles, WooCommerce Product Add-ons, Deleting Old Products, Saving Abandoned Carts, and more. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A to 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 Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And it’s gorgeous up here in the Great White North, which has turned beautifully green for the springtime, so welcome to the show. And of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few 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. Also, you can check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live every first Monday of the month in the morning at 10:00 Pacific Time. Make sure you subscribe and follow us actually on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we’ve got a lot of the news that’s going on within WordPress and some of the important stuff we like to cover – only plugins on this show, and that’s what we specialize in. So all the news stuff goes to the newsletter; make sure you go to wppluginsatoz.com and subscribe.
John: Absolutely, and with that being said, let’s dive right in to the meat and potatoes of the show.
[Plugins lead-in music]
And we have our usual allotment of six great plugins for you today and first up, the one I have for you is called WP Audit. Now, this is a plugin that allows you to start tracking what’s going on inside your website. It’s a very useful plugin. I’ve been using this for a while on several different sites – actually, a different version of this plugin. This one’s relatively new.
But the nice thing about it is it allows you to track in and around your website and see what’s happening with it, and they’re a fantastic tool for keeping track of what’s going on within your website. So at any rate, it’s a great plugin. Go check it out. I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: I am gonna check that out. That’s pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as this plugin, John. It’s called Profile Pro, and it is a full-featured frontend profile login and registration plugin for WordPress. Totally user friendly, totally customizable. With this plugin, you can stop sending your users like this ugly backend profile registration login page crap, and instead give them a real seamless frontend experience, and here’s what I’m talking about.
It does custom form fields, you can set privacy on specific fields (like maybe a phone number or something like that), it has a drag-n-drop form builder, you can take file uploads from it – so if somebody wants to upload a profile picture and all that instead of Gravatar, which Gravatar has got so much to be desired in terms of the profile stuff. And then you can do things like dynamic lists, you can make maximum lengths and minimum lengths for fields, email notification checkboxes – all that kind of stuff – change the admin approval, you know, you’re waiting admin approval to get in the thing, a verification email, auto-generating different pages for logins, all that kind of stuff.
There is a pro version of this as well that does a lot more. It does sidebar stuff, customization, redirection emails, those kinds of things. Very nice – I would give it a perfect 5 out of 5, but again, there is a pro version involved in this as well, so I gave it a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s very nice. I like that for a possibility of a website I’m working on that’s gonna need user profiles in a more in-depth manner than usual.
Marcus: Yeah, and one thing I forgot is that you can actually import users from a CSV file.
John: Oh.
Marcus: So – now, that’s very important for one reason alone. It’s because a lot of times, maybe you are dealing with a client that has a company or customers or something like that that they want to bring in people to log into a backend system – something where your customers can log in and you can bring them over. Maybe you’re doing a Shopify thing and you want existing customers to be in your new system in WordPress. This is the way to do it.
John: Very nice!
Marcus: So check it out.
John: Yeah, that’s kind of cool. I like that. All right, well this show here, currently brought to you by:
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Absolutely – give me a call. Okay, and we do have a contest currently running for the website and that contest is being a premium license from Bracketspace.com where we are giving away a bundle pack of extensions for their notification plugin. And this is a bundle pack of all the different extensions that they offer up for allowing for instant notifications from your website.
The plugin itself, there’s a link in the website where you can go down the basic plugin for free to check it out. But go sign up for the contest and see if you can win the bundle pack. And if you’re in a great big hurry, you can also get a discount off of that bundle pack right now – 25% off with a called I LOVE WPAZ until the end of May, and you can go check out all that information. The links are in the show notes for it.
Marcus: Very nice!
John: And the contests are currently sponsored by – or powered by – Simple Giveaways Plugin.
Marcus: Cool.
John: All right, that takes us into our second set of plugins here and the next one I’ve got up for you here is a WooCommerce plugin, and I’ve got quite a few of those coming up, because I’m just getting started on a WooCommerce website, so I’ll be pulling up all kinds of plugins along the way. This one here is called WooCommerce Product Addons and they do have a pro version for it but the free version is actually quite nice.
It allows for personalized product option manager. It adds input fields on the product page to personalize your product. The client could provide information about his order on the product page, they can add additional information you need, or you can add additional field types and text types to it, checkboxes. There’s a whole lot that the free version does and of course, it has a pro version that goes with it. So this plugin here is one you might want to check out for your WooCommerce store if it’s one that I’m looking at for the site I’m just getting started on. Go check it out. This plugin, I give it a 4-Dragon rating and it’s called WooCommerce Product Addons.
Marcus: Yeah, that’s very important – very important. Boy, talk about Yin and Yang here.
John: [chuckle]
Marcus: I’ve got a WooCommerce plugin but it has nothing to do with adding; it has everything to do with deleting.
John: Cool!
Marcus: And it’s called WooCommerce Delete Product Images. Now, one of the things that really sucks about WooCommerce is if you delete a product, you could still go into the media library —
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: — and that image of that product is still there.
John: Hm…that could be problematic after a while.
Marcus: So this is a lazy backend plugin that all you have to do is install it and every time you delete a WooCommerce product, this will also make sure that all of those product images are also deleted from the backend.
John: Nice.
Marcus: I rated this one a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s a nice way to help keep your website clean as you remove products from the website.
Marcus: Tell me about it. Now, if you yourself are lazy —
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: — that counteracts the lazy plugin, because if you’re using the same image for four products —
John: Hm…
Marcus: — and you delete one, I don’t know what happens. But it may delete the image.
John: Maybe delete the image if you’re using the same image, because the image is only linked to one of the products.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: So if you delete the product —
Marcus: So don’t do that.
John: If you delete the product it’s linked to, then you – bye-bye image. So yeah, that’s an interesting thought on that. I hadn’t thought about that.
Marcus: Me neither. I just did.
John: Yeah!
Marcus: So anyway, 4 out of 5. It’s called WooCommerce Delete Product Images.
John: All right, well check that out. Also, we like listener feedback on this show and if you’d like to leave some for us, you can go to our Contact page and leave us a message there. You can hit us up on SpeakPipe, lower right-hand corner of the webpage at wppluginsatoz.com, or you can email us directly with your questions and comments, and we do showcase them on the site.
Also, this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, we ask you to please give some value back. You can do that by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and select any of the donation options there, or you can go to our Patreon page where there’s a link in the show notes and add to the Patreon if you’d like. Or hey, just send us a direct PayPal donation. One way or another, we’ll be happy to take your money, and the money doesn’t go into our pockets. It helps support the show by supporting things such as transcripts, bandwidth, server support, etc., etc. And that’s all we’ve got there, so —
Marcus: Yeah. Yeah – I’m sorry, John. We do appreciate all of it — the transcripts, especially. That’s a huge part of what we’re doing to make sure that people that can’t hear the podcast can at least read about different plugins in terms of text reviews that we do.
John: Yep.
Marcus: And we really appreciate everybody’s help, so help us out if you can.
John: All right, and our last couple of plugins today, time for me to hit up some of the submissions I’ve had over the last couple of months. This one here was sent in to us by Nauris Kolats and it’s another WooCommerce plugin, and it’s called WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture.
This plugin here saves all activity in the WooCommerce website for you – or in the WooCommerce checkout cart – and then it allows you to recover that – or it allows your client to recover that before they hit the checkout form submission. So you’re able – one of the things you’re able to do with this is if they abandon their cart before they’re checked out, you’ll be able to see what they had in their cart and what was left, and maybe get an idea on why they’re abandoning the cart.
This could help you figure out what’s going on and why you’re not selling stuff or what point that they’re leaving your website before they fully make the purchase. This is kind of useful if you’re running an e-commerce store, so you can try to figure out what’s up. And also what it will do is it will – if you get the premium version of it, you can have an auto-notice sent out to the customer about their abandoned cart and offer them a discount or something to get them to come back and retrieve that cart.
So anyway, it’s a great little plugin. It’s one I haven’t implemented yet or fully tested, but it looks to be quite good and currently I give it a 4-Dragon rating. Check it out: WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture.
Marcus: Very nice! Very nice. Okay, I’ve got something else that I want to talk about that I was hesitant to bring this to the show because it’s a little difficult to describe. But I think I can describe it via scenario. So the plugin is called File Replace/Rename and here’s something that happens a lot. So John, if you’re faced with this issue where say you’re uploading a bunch of customer images that come from a digital camera —
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: — and they all say like, you know, “I am G001abx212.”
John: Right.
Marcus: Right?
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: But it’s really a sunset over the mountains.
John: [chuckle]
Marcus: [chuckle] And that – you know.
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: And you’ve got this kind of thing that kind of goes and goes and goes, and it’s neither SEO-friendly or isn’t easy to track or find those things. So what do you have to do is typically you’ve got to put those on your end and locally rename them all and replace them.
So what happens if you try and rename something in WordPress is other places that pull this up are trying to pull it by ID, and they’re not pulling it by image name or things like that.
John: Right.
Marcus: Sometimes it goes to a different folder in terms of uploading it. Maybe it might be, you know, March of 2015 for all you know. So when you install this plugin called File Rename/Replace, it actually does two things. It takes all of the other instances – let’s say you wanted to replace an image.
John: Right.
Marcus: It takes the original ID of that image and maintains it and uses this file instead within the ecosystem of WordPress.
John: Hm.
Marcus: It also lets you rename it, yet is associates the WordPress ID with what you renamed it to, so you can either replace it or rename it, and it has the same benefits.
John: Interesting.
Marcus: It’s a very tactical kind of thing, but if you deal with images on a regular basis, you’re like nodding your head in agreement with everything that I say right now, because it sucks when you have to rename something. Basically, the old way is you had to re-upload everything —
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: — and then retarget everything. So it’s called File Rename/Replace and I give this a 5-Dragon rating – and those of you who know what this plugin is for, you love it. Those of you who don’t, I hope you never need something like this.
John: [chuckle]
Marcus: [laughter]
John: Absolutely.
Marcus: Give me the dragon! Come on!
John: Oh, I didn’t hear you. I didn’t hear your rating.
Marcus: Let’s go! Five.
[Dragon roar]
John: There you go. I didn’t hear the rating.
Marcus: Well, now you got it.
John: Got it! Top Dragon – all right. Cool. All right, well closing out this episode, I covered up WP Audit, which I gave a 4 to; the WooCommerce Product Addons, which I gave a 4 to; and the WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture – Save Abandoned Carts, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I talked about Profile Pro, which gets a 4 out of 5; Delete WooCommerce Images gets a 4 out of 5; and File Rename/Replace gets a 5 out of 5.
John: And the usual reminders, please check out our YouTube channel, where we put up the screencasts for the live show along with training videos when I get the time to get them done, and more there. And we’d also – if you want to check out our contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests. And if you’re a developer, you’d like to support the show, you want to offer up a premium license to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to offer that information up.
And that’s pretty much all we have for you now, so 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]
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