Transcript of Episode 398 WP Plugins A to Z
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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 #398 here.
It’s Episode 398 and I’ve got plugins for Selling Games, Social Media, World Time, Block Management, and Shortcode Factory, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #398
John: It’s Episode 398 and I’ve got plugins for Selling Games, Social Media, World Time, Block Management, and Shortcode Factory, 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 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from 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 I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.
And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and reviewing it for us. We’d greatly appreciate that time you take.
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I do have a show that goes out on Saturday nights – not every Saturday night. I try to make it a regular, but it turns out I actually have a life on Saturday night sometimes, so it’s an intermittent show so you’ll just have to tune in for it or watch for it.
You could also follow the show up on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook – let’s get that one correct. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. It goes out every Friday and it’s got more information and tidbits in it that are not covered up in the show.
With all that out of the way, let’s dive into the meat and potatoes of the show.
[Plugins lead-in rock music]
All right, and to start off I do have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but they’re ones I thought people would like to know about. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers to be reviewed, and either I don’t have time to get them into a project, they’re not needed for a project, I can’t get them into a test site, but they’ve been accumulating. I really think people will want to know that these plugins exist, so I’m letting everyone know about them.
First up, I have one that was sent in by Paul Myerson and this is a third-party service and it’s CodesWholesale and it’s from codewholesale.com – wow, that’s a tongue twister. And here’s what they have to say about the plugin:
“This is a plugin that provides you with the free extensions to online stores using WooCommerce. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly into WooCommerce and give you unlimited access to over 2,000 digital games in the product catalogue.” This way, you don’t need to own them to resell them. It’s basically a reseller’s item that you can bring into your store. It’s powerful; it’s got lots of features, price, and stock up dates, postback, system notifications, replaces the manual price adjustment with the universal pricing rules, program your store to fulfill the orders in seconds (so I assume that they’ll do the drop shipping for you and all of the other little tidbits with it.)
It looks kind of interesting, but it is a third-party service you have to pay for or sign up for for their little test for free to see how it works. All in all, if you’re running a WooCommerce store and you’re looking to add some additional products with minimal amount of effort and no stock overhead, check this plugin out. I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It’s called Codeswholesale and it’s at codeswholesale.com. (Whew, that’s still a tough one to say.)
What I have next for you is a plugin that was sent in to us by Daniela Turcanu and it’s another third-party service, and this one here is from https://walls.io and it’s a social media feed plugin. And this being a third-party service, they do have a free account you can get to test it. It allows you to bring in feeds from all of the social media outlets out there such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, etc. and it creates a wall feed on your website for you.
From what I gather from reading everything on it, it helps keep that information up-to-date for you, maybe possibly dragging in more visitors to your site who might engage with you, buy your products or your services – whatever you’re doing on your website – so it looks kind of interesting. Again, a third-party service with a free sampler that you can sign up for for a premium account. Something to go check out if you’re looking to add more content to your website through a little bit of work. All in all, it looks like a pretty decent plugin to help with that information.
Go check it out. It’s called Walls.io and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
[clears throat] I got a frog this morning. I’m gonna chase those frogs away.
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And contests – we do have a winner from the last contest for the WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. The winner was Mike. Congratulations to Mike. He’s been notified so as soon as he gets back to me, we will get him out his information for his license. So thank you to everyone who entered the contest last month – much appreciated. It’s a way to get yourself a free license; you just never know. All you gotta do is enter your name and email address.
And we do have a new contest coming up and it starts on Friday being tomorrow on March 8, and it will run through until April 4th. We are giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful commenting plugins system that has a premium version, so we’re giving away the premium version license for it and you’ll want to check them out at graphcomment.com, and I believe we might have even reviewed this plugin, but I’ll have to get the further information about it.
Anyway, it’s something to bring in the comments to your WordPress website and hold them there and you keep them. It uses a third-party service along with your site. It’s kind of an interesting way of doing things. So anyway, it’s something you may want to check out. It’s Graph Comments and that contest will run from March 8th – yeah, we’re in March now – March 8th until April 4th, so make sure you go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest to win the one-year license for Graph Comments.
Okay, what do we got next? We have World Time Clocks. Now this one here is one that I had to search for. It turns out that if you are searching for a way to display actual clocks (not just digital time on your site), not a lot of choices out there at the moment, and a couple of them that are out there that work, they use Flash. (And well, everyone knows where Flash is going.)
This here is called jClocksGMT World Clocks and it is a plugin that will work not only as a widget – which almost all of them are pure widget – this also uses shortcodes that you can then place on a page or a post so that you can create multiple clocks for world times across the globe. So if you’re setting up a page, and in my particular instance I was working on a client’s site and they needed – they had offices all over the globe, so they needed time clocks on a particular page so everyone could look at one page and see the time zones for all the different offices they have, and seeing the digital stuff didn’t always equate if you’re a person that gets used to seeing analog clocks. I know that analog clocks are a little rough for a lot of younger folks out there, but analog is the way to go.
At any rate, great plugin, works wonderful. The shortcodes have a lot of input variations to allow you to have different clock faces, different time zones, different titles – a whole bunch of little things in it. It worked great; just install it, activate it, either set it as a widget, set your shortcodes, and poof, it worked. A really nice plugin. It is an older plugin, so I do know it works with the latest version of WordPress and also works in ClassicPress, so something you might want to check out. It’s called jClocksGMT World Clocks and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Go check it out.
I’m still looking for that listener feedback. You’ve got questions you’d like answered, any thing that gets you excited, feedback about the site – anything – send it my way. You can do that by going through our Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com or you can drop a SpeakPipe just in the lower right-hand corner, hit the little “Leave a Message” button, and it’ll record your vice and send it in to me. You can get a hold of me via a direct email or off the Facebook or Twitter pages – anywhere – get a hold of me. I do get back to people (sometimes not as quick as I should), but I do get back to people and I look forward to your comments and questions and anything you’d like to give me.
This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, I’d like to acknowledge all those who have donated to the show in the past week, past month. Currently, I’d like to acknowledge and thank all the Patreon donors out there that donate small amounts. The Patreon payment came through this month, so thank you very much for that. Those that are $50 and over, they get a note read out here and everyone below $50, thank you very much for your support. It remains anonymous.
And if you would like to support the show, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. Fill out the form, submit it to PayPal, and I will get your donation. And those donations do not actually make it to my pocket. They help support the things we do on the show such as transcripts, server bandwidth – yeah, that’s pretty much where it all goes right now. Eventually it might pay for some of the time I put into it, but I’m not worried about that.
A big thank you also to those that hire me because of the podcast. That’s as good as donating to the show as far as I’m concerned, because that helps pay for my time. So thank you very much!
Okay, the final – the next – actually, I’ve got one more. I’ve got a couple. The next plugin I’ve got for you here, this one here is if you’ve started working in Gutenberg, you’ll understand this a little bit. I mean, I’ve started to work with Gutenberg in bits and pieces. I have a couple of smaller clients that are using Gutenberg and one of the things in Gutenberg is all the blocks that get installed, and many of those blocks can be confusing. Some of them might not even be useful for your customers. You might just want to get rid of them and turn them off.
This is a plugin to do that. It disables Gutenberg blocks. It is a block manager to go in and disable a whole bunch of blocks. It supports turning off core blocks, advanced Gutenberg blocks, cadence blocks, jetpack blocks, editor blocks, WooCommerce blocks, other blocks. It’s got a whole list of blocks that you can turn off with this plugin.
And according to them, they’re adding to it to help you control your blocks, because you can end up with a lot of blocks, confuse your customer. They only need to do the stuff they need to do – or even yourself if you’re working on a website. You only want the stuff you want to do. You don’t want to open it up and have a whole list to scroll through, categorize – all the other stuff.
A great little plugin, works very nice. You just turn it on, turn off the stuff you don’t want to see, and it’s not gonna be shown. A great plugin, works well, and we always love free plugins that work well which get a top 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Check it out: Disable Gutenberg Blocks – Block Manager.
And finally, we have ClassicPress Options. This one here is to talk a little bit about the ClassicPress plugins since I do have a site right now that is going ClassicPress and I need to be testing and using stuff on it and bringing stuff into it. This week’s Classic Press plugin is called Shortcode Factory, and Shortcode Factory offers a wide range of ready-to-use shortcodes for your daily WordPress operations. There are plenty of shortcodes available at hand and they try to bring the most common shortcodes to you.
It’s got shortcode templates, you know, no need to remember them for shortcodes for posts and pages, uses roles, forms, and fields, UI and utility, and I think it’s got an ability for you to go in and edit your own. All in all, it looks like a pretty good plugin to use in your website if you use shortcodes, and I use a lot of shortcodes, especially like the WP Plugins site. I’ve got an old plugin in there that manages all our shortcodes that handle a lot of stuff in there. So this is one you’ll want to go check out. It looks to be a pretty great plugin. It’s called Shortcode Factory and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
So that wraps it up. I covered up in this show here the Codeswholesale plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the Social Media Feed plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the jClocksGMT World Clocks, which I gave a 5 to; the Disable Gutenberg Blocks – Block Manager, which I gave a 5 to; and the Shortcode Factory, which I gave a 4 to, so make sure you go check these out.
A couple of quick reminders…the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be April 3rd and it will be broadcast live on YouTube. For location and more information, go check it out at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. So if you’re in the Victoria area, please come out to the meetup and join us. We’ve got a pretty big group of people that are coming out regularly now – somewhere around 20 to 30 people show up regularly and you can meet other WordPress users, get some tips and information. The next meetup presentation I’ll be giving is SEO 101, which is basic SEO setup for your WordPress website and things you want to think about and do, so make sure you join it. It will be broadcast live and the livestreams have been getting better and better, so I’m pretty sure the next one will be even better than the last one.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel where you’ll find training videos, screencasts, and more. And little by little, I’m getting more of those training videos up as I find the plugins that I need to do them for.
And a final note to developers out there, if you’d like to support the show, you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/contest to enter all of your information.
And a final note, please subscribe to the newsletter. Just go to the website, scroll down a little bit, enter your name and email and subscribe to the newsletter.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you today, so thanks everyone for listening. I really greatly appreciate your time and I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here.
[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 created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.
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John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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]
[End of Audio]