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Transcript of Episode 367 WP Plugins A to Z

July 30, 2018/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #309 here.

It’s Episode 367 and we’ve got plugins for Site Search, Admin Login PINs, Popup Boxes, Site Speed, Overriding the Customizer and Addictive Word Count Rewards. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #367

Marcus: It’s Episode 367 and we’ve got plugins for Site Search, Admin Login PINs, Popup Boxes, Site Speed, Overriding the Customizer, and Addictive Word Count Rewards system. 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.

Marcus: And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John: And we have the usual great show for you today with wonderful plugins coming your way. But of course right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have 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: Yeah, that helps out a great deal. It helps to bring audience to the show and more listeners, so we’d greatly appreciate that. Everybody out there who has helped, hey, if you’re on YouTube – which who isn’t these days —

John: [chuckling]

Marcus: The first Monday of every month at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time, we record this show live so you can actually watch the screencast of us. If you’d like to get a reminder of that, it’s really easy to do. Just go to our Facebook group and you will get notifications of all the events that are there.

Also on YouTube, check out our training videos and some of the other screencasts and things that we’ve done there. On Twitter, follow us @wppluginsatoz and our newsletter is where we keep all the good stuff, all the contests, all the giveaways, the freebies, the tips, the tricks – all that stuff. You gotta go to wppluginsatoz.com and subscribe to that newsletter to get all the cool things that you won’t hear on this show. Why? Because this show is all about the plugins.

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

[Plugins lead-in music]

The first plugin I’ve got for you today was sent in to us by Brian Mutende and it is a WordPress search plugin called PicoSearch, and this is a lightweight search plugin that you can add into your WordPress website and it helps to rank results by relevance for your users. It also does things such as saves the user’s searches for future reference that they can use. It highlights search terms, suggests search keywords, and the user types.

It’s really a great lightweight plugin. I’m just kind of testing it out to see how well it works and if it works really well, it might be the new search I use. And if you’ve been listening to the show long enough, you know I’ve gone through numerous search plugins, add-ons, to the WordPress – wppluginsatoz site – and eventually, they all seem to fail. It could be just the amount of content we have. I don’t know what it is, but this one here, maybe it will survive the test of time and make searching WP Plugins easier.

At any rate, check it out: WordPress Search Plugin called PicoSearch, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Yeah, that’s something that WordPress has always had a hard time with.

John: It has. It’s second only to the media library in problems. [chuckle]

Marcus: It’s just getting better by some of the plugins that we’ve brought in the last couple of weeks, you know.

John: Absolutely. Well, that helps the media library but it still doesn’t help the organization of the media library. It’s still got a ways to go.

Marcus: [chuckling] Okay, so I’ve got something that is called Protect Login Page, and this is very interesting, John. This I bet will defeat a lot of the people that are trying to gain access to your site nefariously. What it does is it allows you to put a PIN number in your WP-login.php or WP-admin when you’re logging in. So it’s like this – it’s like your website.com/wp-login? PIN equals whatever your PIN is. And remember, you can have it up to eight digits or a password or anything like that.

So without the PIN, you don’t even get the login screen.

John: Nice!

Marcus: So if it’s just your regular kind of spammer/scammer/whatever, just scanning your thing for the WP login or WP admin, you don’t get it because they didn’t put the PIN in.

John: Nice!

Marcus: Yeah.

John: Another way to help avoid that headache.

Marcus: Oh my gosh, can you image how much traffic this is gonna cut down for people?

John: Oh…probably a hell of a lot.

Marcus: [chuckling]

John: I know —

Marcus: Yes?

John: — answer constantly hit.

Marcus: Yep. So that’s all well and good and I was all in. I’m like, “I’m putting this on my personal site,” except there’s one little caveat to it. If you require login access other than the main WordPress login page, like the WordPress mobile app, which is something I’m starting to use —

John: Yeah?

Marcus: — it won’t work.

John: Oh, bummer!

Marcus: So this is a deal breaker for my personal site. But for other sites – all the other sites that aren’t my personal site, yeah, this is the way to go. It’s called Protect Login Page. It’s more of a PIN-requiring device and I gave this a 4 out of 5.

John: Nice – it’s still kind of useful and very useful —

Marcus: Very useful.

John: — nice if you’re working from the computers, which the vast majority of developers are.

Okay, well this show here currently brought to you by…

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Absolutely. Give me a call. I can help you out with all your WordPress needs. And currently are running a contest. It runs through to the end of the month. This is the last week of the contest. We are giving away a premium licensed version of WP Nearby Places, generously supplied by Albert Harlow from WP Nearby Places and it’s a really fantastic plugin. We’ve discussed it many times here on the show. In fact, he’s been sponsoring the show for the entire month and you can check out an interview I did with Albert. The link is in the show notes and we go in depth and discuss that plugin, so go check that out.

And to enter the contest, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests. And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, use the discount code FLASH to get 25% off WP Nearby Places. And all contests for WP Plugins are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin and they were generous enough to supply us with a pro version of the plugin to bring these contests to you, so thank you very much to them.

And that brings us up to our next set of plugins and next I’ve got for you here, this is another plugin that was sent in to us by a developer out there. It came in from Sabrina Zeidan and it’s called SpeedGuard. This is a plugin that is a bunch of free tools that helps the webmaster get some clear, simple answers on what their website is doing, whether it’s the website that’s slow or whether it’s something else that’s happening.

It measures load times, the important pages, it gives you a good report. One of the caveats with it is it does use the webpage test site to run the tests and then it collates and then brings them back to you in the dashboard of your WordPress website. Very easy to use though. They give you a link to take you over to webpagetest.com and get a free API key. Just fill out the form, get your API key, enter it into the plugin, and then run your tests and see what’s running down your website. It’s a really simple way to do it and a quick way to use webpage tests for checking out your website.

Anyway, give it a checkout. It’s called SpeedGuard and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Very nice. I like stuff like that.

John: Yeah, it’s really nice. It helps people figure out what’s going on with their websites and why it’s loading problems are.

Marcus: Yeah. All right, I want to talk about popups. I recently had some experience with creating some forms within popups and I used a different plugin that – what was it called? Jellyfish Counter thing?

John: Jellyfish —

Marcus: Okay, so I wanted that plus a contact form to be put in there for people to actually subscribe to a newsletter.

John: Mm-hm.

Marcus: But I couldn’t get it working. I couldn’t do it in a popup until I found this thing called Popup Box – pretty cool. It’s really easy and here’s the tagline: if you want to show your favorite plugin in a popup box but it doesn’t allow you to show the popup, this is the solution. This plugin is developed just for that, putting shortcodes and other plugins within this popup box. You can change the popup box title, the description, the width and the height of the popup box. It has a shortcode that you can use and put it in any page and it’ll automatically insert that within the content.

What’s cool is you can set it so that that popup can only be seen by a user once in 24 hours, so it’s not just like popping up and up and up and up and up. Pretty cool – this did exactly what I wanted it to do. It’s called Popup Box and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John: Very cool! I like the fact that you can put shortcodes of plugins inside it and bring it up.

Marcus: Yes.

John: Definitely not very many allow that in a popup box.

Marcus: Mm-hm, no. And most of them are all preformatted.

John: Yes – yes, they are. I don’t think it would even work in the popup box I use regularly. It was Layered Popups, which is —

Marcus: Yeah, that one we – gosh, do you know how old that one is?

John: Yeah, and I’ve been – I’m still using it and they’re still keeping it up-to-date, so it’s really a cool plugin.

Marcus: [chuckling]

John: And it is a premium plugin from CodeCanyon —

Marcus: Yeah.

John: So…

Marcus: Mm-hm.

John: Okay, well that brings up to the next part here, listener feedback and donor support. This segment of the show sponsored by WP Nearby Places. Customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your search engine rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with your specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what’s around your specified location like no other mapping plugin. Using the power of Google Maps, WP nearby places also uniquely breaks down the neighborhood locations by categories such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending on which version you purchase, provides the location’s name, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in miles or kilometers from the central location.

There are three versions available: the basic, which is available through wordpress.org, the pro and premium version, which you can get off of their website. For details all about their licensed versions, check out their website at wpnearbyplaces.com. Show off your neighbors by categories, also. This is an excellent feature with it. You can feature the neighbors in and around your business by showcasing them. You can choose them and place them up and around the map that is displayed on your website, and the best part about those is since you get to choose those, you can sell those as premium ad spaces in and around the map on your website, thereby finding an extra stream of revenue for your site.

A really excellent plugin. I’ve used it myself and Marcus will be checking it out real soon, so go check it out: WP Nearby Places.

Marcus: Yes, can’t – go ahead.

John: No, I was about to say “listener feedback here.” We don’t have any this week but we would really love to get some from you. Go to our Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com or hit us up via SpeakPipe down at the bottom right-hand corner of the website, or you can send us emails direct off the web page, so contact us Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, any of our social media channels, man. We really do like feedback and we do give you great answers.

Marcus: Absolutely. And hey, a reminder this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back to us. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those that have supported us for the show this past week. All donations $50 and over are read out over the show. But sometimes for anonymous reasons or otherwise, people that come in below the $50, they want to contribute but maybe don’t want to be mentioned and that’s okay.

A big thank you to everybody out there who’s done that and if you want to help us out, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. We are a completely listener supported show and we use the money to help grow the show. It doesn’t go into our gas tanks or me going out and grabbing a steak and barbecuing and all that. Noooo, nooo, no!

John: No, no.

Marcus: [chuckle] It goes to actually helping to propagate the formula of the show. And don’t worry, if you can’t donate, if you’re not in that position, hey, I totally understand that. Just, you know, let your friends know, let other developers know, chime in on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter how much you like WordPress Plugins A to Z and we’d appreciate that as well.

John: Absolutely. And that brings us up to our final set of plugins here, and the last one I’ve got for you here is called Customizer Plus Lite. This here is a customizer plugin that customizes the WordPress customizer. It allows you to go in and individually override the WordPress customizer settings on an individual page or post basis. It allows you to create per page and per post customization settings the same way as you’re creating in the customizer itself.

It allows you to change things like the header image, colors, custom CSS – all of the settings in the customizer and makes it a whole lot easier. Maybe you do have one or two pages which occurs a lot when you’re building out and developing a site to where you just want to customize one page. This allows you to get in there and do that. A great little plugin, seems to work fairly well. Go check it out: Customizer Plus Lite and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Yeah, I don’t even use the customizer —

John: I do.

Marcus: — unless I have to.

John: I’ve been doing it a lot lately, especially for the CSS.

Marcus: Really?

John: I’ve been doing a lot of customized CSS and the best place to dump it is into the customizer, because it comes in higher than the CSS you dump into the custom CSS file that is in your theme folder. And the other thing is if you change the theme, the CSS still sticks around in case you need it for something that’s not theme-reliant —

Marcus: Right.

John: — which I do a lot of.

Marcus: All right, hm. All right, I’m going to end it off here. This will be the last plugin of the month of July, so hopefully everybody had a great July and a great summer so far.

John: Oh, yeah.

Marcus: And this one is more of a celebratory plugin. This happens to revolve around word count, and that’s kind of one our biggest pet peeves when it comes to making content, right? You’ve gotta grind out that word count. Google’s gotta like it, you gotta make some good content and make stuff for your viewer. This is called Confetti WordCount and what it does is you can actually get a weekly word count and see what your progress is in terms of how much you’ve written, and you can set a word count goal for your posts and get a sense of how far you’ve written with this kind of meter that cruises across.

Now, as a celebratory reward if you’ve met your goal, confetti just keeps falling from the admin dashboard to celebrate your victory of getting enough content out there. It’s really fun and the bottom line is despite the confetti, it really does serve a higher purpose of getting you to write and create more content. It’s called Confetti WordCount and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John: Cool! Yeah, getting that word count up there is important. All right, well that wraps us up here and I covered up in this episode the WordPress Search plugin called PicoSearch, which I gave a 4 to. Then I covered up the….

Marcus: You sure?

John: Yeah, I covered up the SpeedGuard plugin, which I gave a 4 to. And then the final one I wrapped it up with, I covered up the Customizer Plus Lite, which I gave a 3 to.

Marcus: And I talked about Protect Login Page, which is that thing that lets you do PINs. I gave that one a 4 out of 5. Popup Box gets a 4 out of 5 and Confetti WordCount gets a 5 out of 5.

John: And that’s all we’ve got here. Once quick reminder: go check out our YouTube channel for screencasts, training videos, and more. And a note to developers: if you’d like to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and enter all the details.

And 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]

[End of Audio]

WordPress Plugins A to Z Episode 367 Site Search, Admin Login PINs

July 30, 2018/in Newsletter, Podcast, WordPress Plugins Podcast /by John Overall

Episode #367 Site Search, Admin Login PINs #WordPress #Plugins #Podcast Click To Tweet

It’s Episode 367 and we’ve got plugins for Site Search, Admin Login PINs, Popup Boxes, Site Speed, Overriding the Customizer and Addictive Word Count Rewards. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe to WPPlugins A to Z on Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | RSS

WordPress Plugins A to Z Episode 332 Content Paywalls, Site Search, WooCommerce Fulfillment

November 13, 2017/in Podcast, WordPress Plugins Podcast /by John Overall

Episode #332 Content Paywalls, Site Search #Wordpress #Plugins #Podcast Click To Tweet

It’s Episode 332 and we’ve got plugins for Content Paywalls, Site Search, WooCommerce Fulfillment, Importing and Exporting Customers and Cloning Widgets. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe to WPPlugins A to Z on Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | RSS

Transcript of Episode 332 WP Plugins A to Z

November 13, 2017/in WP Plugins A to Z Transcripts /by John Overall

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 #332 here.

It’s Episode 332 and we’ve got plugins for Content Paywalls, Site Search, WooCommerce Fulfillment, Importing and Exporting Customers and Cloning Widgets. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

Episode #332

Marcus: It’s Episode 332 and we’ve got plugins for Content Paywalls, Site Search, WooCommerce Fulfillment, Importing and Exporting Customers, and Cloning Widgets. 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 direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.

Marcus: And from the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John: And we have the usual great roundup of stuff for you here today and of course as usual, right off the top, don’t forget 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, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving us a review. And if you have a few minutes, please stop into the YouTube channel where you can catch us live every Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. or you can check out there for screencasts, training videos, and more as it’s slowly added to the channel.

Marcus: That’s right. Got a lot going on there. Also remember, you can follow this show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and we’ve got a great newsletter that we feature all the latest WordPress news. Make sure you go to our website, wppluginsatoz.com, and subscribe to that newsletter.

John: Absolutely. The newsletter helps – we’re starting to put more and more news and tidbit information in there, so make sure you do subscribe to that. Well, with that all being said, it’s time for us to dive right into the meat and potatoes time and the rest of the show. Off we go.

[Plugins lead-in music]

All right, today we have our usual allotment of six great plugins and first up I have one here called WordPress Users WooCommerce and Customers Import & Export, and this plugin here is one that I pulled together for a client who was looking to clean up their user database. They had outdated users and miscellaneous in there and for them, one of the easiest was to do it was get it all into a CSV file so they can do a better search and delete. This downloads a great CSV file of everything that you need, so you can get in there, manually edit it, change it around, and you can then re-upload the CSV file.

But I did find one caveat to this: it doesn’t delete something that’s on the site, so you have to manually delete stuff when you re-upload, so that’s one of the things about it. It’s a pretty decent plugin; it’s great for bringing down that data and it gives you some limitations. Like a lot of these plugins where it brings down everything that is associated with the user, this one helps you determine which columns you want to export such as names, login names, user ID, email, password. You can include them or exclude them during the export, thereby getting just exactly what you need to do all of your editing to this file. Anyway, a great plugin: WordPress Users and WooCommerce Customer Import – and it’s the basic – they do have a pro version, so go check it out. I give this a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Very nice! Very good to do that, especially if you’ve got a WooCommerce site that’s been around a long time and you’re going to engage in something like MailChimp or something like that for maybe a newsletter – whatever you want to do — that’s a very vital feature.

John: Yeah, there’s another great use for it.

Marcus: Yep. All right, I’m going to stick with WooCommerce here in terms of the subject matter for the moment, and this one is called WooCommerce Customer Care. Now, it’s great to have WooCommerce on board to take different orders, but you know, what’s out there that actually helps you fulfill the order once it comes in? That’s a different story because shipping the product out is the most important part and often also what’s the worst part of dealing with WooCommerce. So this plugin is called WooCommerce Customer Care.

It is billed as a complete customer care system for WooCommerce. You can actually assign users (or assign yourself or other people) within your website that when an order comes in, it actually auto-assigns to a specific person: one manager or say you’re a department head or something like that that you have specific products that you take care of. John, let’s just say you and I had an e-commerce shop together.

It could assign all of the high-end products let’s say to you, all the medium end products to me, and all the low-end products to somebody else. Whoever makes an order, it then goes to say that customer service manager to see it through and make sure that it goes all the way through. So it does both auto-assign and self-assign and it also prevents access. Say John, if you had one that you picked up, it would prevent me from also picking that up because it knows that you picked it up —

John: Nice!

Marcus: — which is pretty cool. It also has a running log that tracks all of the changes and everything that happens in between. It’s called WooCommerce Customer Care and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John: Very nice! That’s excellent to be able to track the stuff from start to finish so that it’s always looking the way it needs to be.

Marcus: Isn’t it something that WooCommerce does so much in relation to the e-commerce end but it forgets to take care of the fulfillment end?

John: Yeah, well, so fulfillment is very important. It’s one thing to collect the money but it’s another is you better deliver on the product.

Marcus: Yeah. I’ve even had to do it with actual live clients. I’ve had to actually use Zapier and make it go to a Google Sheet online so that people could see orders, rather than having people have to log into WordPress, go in the backend – all that other stuff.

John: Wow.

Marcus: It just seemed too hard for them in the past and we had to kind of make a different means for them to display what the order were.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Marcus: A thing like this actually prevents all of that, so —

John: That’s pretty nice.

Marcus: — if that’s a common mistake happening within your e-commerce site or the ones that you develop for clients, this is probably a good solution for you.

John: That it is. All right, well that brings us up to the point here we wanted to let everyone know is currently sponsored by the following people and/or businesses. It’s currently sponsored by JohnOverall.com WordPress and Web Services. Finding quality WordPress hosting and support can be a challenge. Well, you can drop that stress by contacting JohnOverall.com Web Services. We can help you eliminate your WordPress stresses, solving your WordPress emergency issues, or doing the more day-to-day items such as finding that perfect plugin, helping you move to a new hosting provider, or even providing quality WordPress hosting.

With 20-plus years’ experience online, over eight years dedicated to WordPress, JohnOverall.com provides all your web service needs from hosting to WordPress development, repairs, and emergency malware removal on your website. Visit JohnOverall.com or call me at (818) 850-7729 or send an email to john@wppro.ca.

Marcus: And anyone listening to this show, we know that you have a passion for WordPress. Why not write about something unique within WordPress? I am now the WordPress Editor and Head Curator for Smashing Magazine, one of the biggest web design resources online, and I’m looking for folks to write great articles about different facets of WordPress. So if you’d like to do that, get a lot of exposure to yourself and your work, then visit marcuscouch.com/smashing and I will reply back with more information right away with an autoresponder, give you all the different guidelines – everything that needs to be done. It’s a great way to contribute to the WordPress community, get exposure, and get a few hundred bucks for yourself just for the effort. So check it out: marcuscouch.com/smashing.

John: Absolutely, and if you’re in need of some research or stuff to help you find your way, go check out Smashing Magazine’s resource library of WordPress articles. Really great stuff there.

Marcus: Yes.

John: All right, well this brings us up to our next couple of plugins and the next one I have for you is one that I did – or Marcus did review – last week and I made a brief mention of that I tried to review it but I was having problems with it. And initially, I’d loaded it up on a live website – my sandbox area – and I couldn’t get it to load and I assumed it was due to a conflict with all the other mess I had in there. Sure enough, it turned out that way. I managed to get it tested and loaded on a clean dev site and it’s on a local development site.

It loaded up fine but it loaded up with an error in the code. Once it activated, it worked fine – no further errors. But it was an activation error and I moved that error on to the developer so that he could take a look at it. But afterwards, I did check the plugin out. It’s a pretty nice plugin for getting in there and hiding the plugins from other users in your website, preventing them from turning them on or off or hiding the ability to them to try and do updates to them.

All in all, a really great and simple in its idea and it’s a very simple way to take care of that issue. Check it out; it’s called Hidden Plugin and hopefully the error will go away and for most live sites, you might not even see the error when it comes up. It only comes up when you’ve got it set to show you PHP debugging. So anyway, go check it out. It’s called Hidden Plugin and I gave it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Hmm…very interesting. Yeah, I did not get that error but that’s because I must have that error logging turned off.

John: Well, error logging is turned off by default, but I found —

Marcus: Right.

John: — that the local dev site I have, it’s turned on by default, so you can find all the little problems you’re having.

Marcus: Mm-hm?

John: So…

Marcus: And just to differentiate, John has his own hosting server and also local development that gave him those problems. I used a managed host setup – WordPress managed host, so…

John: Well…

Marcus: — just the differences.

John: It’s the interesting thing about WordPress and so many hosting providers out there; everyone does it differently and some things will work in one spot and won’t work in another because of whatever the configurations might be.

Marcus: Right.

John: So…

Marcus: Okay. Well, I’m going to review something next that’s pretty cool. It’s called Donate to Access Content. Now, this is a subplugin for the Give donation plugin that we all know and love. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s pretty cool. It’s called Give – it’s a full setup for taking donations. This one is actually an add-on to that, so once you install Give (and I’ve got the link to that in the show notes) and you install this plugin, it allows you to actually restrict a specific page or a piece of content on your website until somebody has made a donation.

Once the user has made the donation, it unlocks that particular page for them. So you can choose as an administrator to restrict the content of the site via a shortcode or you can restrict an entire website or, as I said before, a particular page, post, category, post type – all that stuff – all within one specific plugin. This one, Donate to Access Content, really nice plugin. It’s on the back of the Give donation plugin and I rated this a 4 out of 5.

John: Very nice. That’s quite useful and if we had enough decent content, I think I’d add it to our site to lock it down and get some donations in.

Marcus: Yeah, that’s something to look forward to. Yes. That’s why I brought this up.

John: Leading that up and this talks about our show is a value-for-value model, meaning that if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. A cup of coffee, you know, figure it any way you can. You know, weekly donations, monthly donations – anything to help support the show. After all, it does take time to produce, plus we have to pay for bandwidth, transcripts, and more. So anyway, this week here we would like to make a shout out to our donors here. All those who came in below $50 will remain anonymous and we thank you very much. This week here, that’s all we’ve got [chuckling]. Just thank you to all donors below $50.

Marcus: Yeah, those donations really help out and John and I do a lot on the backend for the site and for the show, and we do appreciate all the donations. They definitely help; they don’t go to gas money or anything like that. They go right back into promoting and improving the show.

John: Absolutely. And also just a brief reminder: next week we are hitting Episode 333. Go support the show by creating a weekly donation of $3.33.

Marcus: Yeah, that is a great idea.

John: That’s a great number, too. All right, this brings us to our final set of plugins for today and what I have for you this week is Site Search 360 as a plugin and this looks like a very interesting thing. It is another search plugin in my never-ending quest to find a better search function for WordPress because after all, their built-in search function basically sucks, for lack of a better term. Unfortunately though, this plugin isn’t gonna solve the problem on our site that I was hoping for, but it still looks like a pretty decent plugin.

It is a third-party service that you’ve got to sign up for and then it grabs all your data and indexes it for you and gives you some nice displays. Then on their control panel, you get to see some stats about people, how they’re searching your site, etc. etc. It looked to be quite useful; I didn’t realize it was a total third party.

I myself was unable to thoroughly test this site because I wasn’t gonna put it on a live site because I’m leaving my cowboy coding days behind me and I’m slowly working – I’ve been working the last couple of months to do local development and I’ve finally hit the point where almost everything is gonna be local development now. So I decided to test this; this plugin would not activate on a local development system because it needs a live active domain before it will register for you. So anyway, it looks like a great plugin. Go check it out: Site Search 360 and at the moment I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus: Very nice. All right, we’ve had kind of a weird mix of plugins today.

John: We have.

Marcus: And I’m going to leave off on a high note. This one is called Duplicate Widgets (or Duplicate Widgets, which ever one [pronunciation] you prefer). It is a very simple plugin that you install and activate that lets you duplicate your existing widgets with just one click. It’s made for easier management of widgets, especially if you’ve had a lot of widgets with similar configurations, which a lot of my websites do.

Essentially, this plugin gives you a clone link where you typically would see just close and delete, and all you have to do is clone that widget and then it makes a little copy of the widget for you, places it right under the original widget, and then you can drag-n-drop that in position wherever you need to. So this can save you tons of time that you are doing site development and helps you to develop and replicate complex widgets with just one click. It’s called Duplicate Widgets and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

[Dragon roar]

John: Very nice! We finally hit something high today. [chuckling]

Marcus: Yeah.

John: Nice work. Well, that closes this one out here. I covered up in this episode WordPress Users and WooCommerce Customers Import/Export Basic and I gave it a 4; Hidden Plugin and I gave that one a 3; and then Site Search 360, I gave that one a 3.

Marcus: And I talked about WooCommerce Customer Care; gave that one a 4 out of 5, Donate to Access Content gets a 4 out of 5; and Duplicate Widgets gets a 5 out of 5.

John: Excellent roundup of plugins today. All right, some little bit of promotions/tidbits here. I’d like to ask everyone to join me in supporting men’s health and family issues by donating through my Movember campaign page at mobro.co/johnoverall, and you can see my great beard and moustache that’s coming out here if you go look at the YouTube stream or the YouTube video. And it’s itching like an SOB but I’ll be glad when it’s done so I can shave it off.

But at any rate, I’m suffering through this to raise awareness for men’s health and family issues and I have a goal to raise $1,000, so support me in any way you can. Go over to the link on the show notes at mobro.co/johnoverall. And also we’ve got – be sure to check out our YouTube screencast that goes up later. Watch the add-on parts that I add in here doing first impressions of the plugins that Marcus reviews.

And note to developers: if you want to support this show and you’d like to offer up premium licenses to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and go check out our YouTube channel where we have training videos and more up there. And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Anything else, Marcus?

Marcus: Nope.

John: That’s it.

Marcus: Looking forward to next week.

John: All right, take care now. Bye-bye.

Reminders for the show [female speaker]:

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 at @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 at @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]

[End of Audio]

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