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 #359 here.
It’s Episode 359 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Fees, Embedding Tables, Team Showcase, Sharing Drafts, EU Cookies and Pricing per User Role. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #359
Marcus: It’s Episode 359 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Fees, Embedding Tables, Team Showcase, Sharing Drafts, EU Cookies and Pricing per User Role. 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 smoky shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And we have the usual great show for you today, but don’t forget right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over in the iTunes Store, Stitcher Radio, and Google Play, reviewing the show and subscribing to the show in those places.
Marcus: Yes, absolutely. Also remember that you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. And also, hey, our newsletter that’s like one of the most important aspects of the show. You can go to wppluginsatoz.com, subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where you find all the news, because we keep the news there, because we keep all the plugins here.
John: Absolutely, and we’ve got a usual great line of plugins for you today, so with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes.
[Plugins lead-in music]
All right, well first up here I have today a plugin called Share a Draft. Now this plugin here – and it may happen to you from time to time – but it recently occurred with me with a client where she was doing – she writes articles, a travel blog website, and she was working with a new client that wanted to see the post before she published it to make sure it properly represented them. Well, getting that done with someone who’s not registered on a website is kind of difficult. This plugin here saves all of that grief and time for you.
What it allows you to do is you can go create your draft post and then you go to a little subsection under your post that say, share a draft. You go in there and you set it. You create a specialized link that you can set to expire for hours or weeks, depending on how long you want that link to be alive and active, and then you email that link to the person you want to review the post. And when they see it, they see the post as if it’s published on the website; they don’t see it in the backend, which we all know are two different ways of looking at everything. So this is a really great plugin. It worked like a dream, it was really easy. I was able to set it up for my client and she found it a piece of cake to use, and of course plugins like this, you know, simple, easy, and make your life a breeze have to get a top 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Marcus: Yeah, that’s an awesome one.
John: Oh, it’s sweet.
Marcus: I like them a lot.
John: I was – when she asked me about doing this, I’m like, “I don’t know. Gotta be something.”
Marcus: Well, the thing that differentiates that from any other plugin like it that we’ve used before – and we have reviewed plugins that do things with drafts. However, this one that has the expiration —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — of when the draft is, that’s something new.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: That’s something —
John: The link expires, so that way —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — if they don’t see it or it gets wandered around the web, you know, a lot of – it can’t be shared if it’s something you’re trying to keep on the lowdown, so…
Marcus: Right. Wow, that’s pretty cool. So I had a listener just send me a quick message on Twitter and said, “Hey, I’m trying to add something to WooCommerce where I can put in additional feed in there for…” The way that they described it was a rush fee, so to speak. But this plugin that I’m reviewing is called WooCommerce Additional Fee. It actually allows you to add that additional fee to your checkout pages, like the handling charge or the rush charge, or whatever. Very easy to set up – it just takes a couple of minutes – very simple and effective.
So if you’re looking for that extra thing to add, whether that be a packaging fee, a handling fee, a rush charge, anything like that, this is the thing to do it. It doesn’t add an extra product, which is what a lot of people do is add a product that says ‘rush charge’ on it but it doesn’t work out that way. So check this out: WooCommerce Additional Fee and I rated this one a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s very nice. That can be quite useful if you’re running an e-commerce store.
Marcus: Yes.
John: Okay, well what we’ve got here – this show here is currently 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.
There you go – absolutely. Give me a call. I can help you with all your needs. And of course the contest we’ve been running for the last couple of months, well, we have a winner, winner, chicken dinner! And the premium license from bracketspace.com, the bundle pack of extensions for the Notification plugin has gone to Louis Hermenegildo, who we’ve notified by email about his winning. Congratulations to all of those who entered the contest. A new one is coming very soon.
And if you’d like to get a savings – you didn’t win and you’d still like to get the plugin, get yourself a discount of 25% off coupon and you can use ILOVEWPAZ at their website, so go check ‘em out.
Marcus: Nice! Yeah, we got a couple of other plugins that we’re talking to some people about doing contests for. We like doing every single month, giving away a new plugin. That seems to kind of bring – bring some attention to not only this show but to the listeners themselves and, you know, how we like to treat you and maybe let you win stuff, so stay tuned.
John: Absolutely.
Marcus: We’ve got a lot more coming up.
John: No, I’ve got some things to do. I forgot to mention here also the contests are powered by Simple Giveaways plugin, since they provided us a premium version. Thank you guys very much and I’ll be updating all of that stuff there in the coming next week or two as I prep up for the next contest.
Marcus: Awesome.
John: I got a whole bunch of tweaks to do there since they’ve got an advanced version of the plugin that came out a couple of months ago that I haven’t implemented yet.
All right, well that brings us up to our next set of plugins here, and the next one – I know this one’s been in our reviews before. In fact, I think you reviewed it once, Marcus. It’s Ninja Tables and this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to play with it.
Now as anyone knows who hasn’t been hiding under a rock, the GDPR just pounded everybody to death for the last couple of weeks, and I was caught up in that mess, too. One of the requirements in the GDPR was having to list up all of the cookies that your website uses, and there’s multiple ways to do this. And I was thinking, “Well, let me get a table, something to create a nice, little table. I can display the table nice and cleanly inside the privacy policy where the cookies are supposed to be listed.”
And I looked at a couple of different methods and I went, “Oh yeah, Ninja Tables.” The great thing about it was you can get all your cookies you need, put them into a CSV file, so you have them all nice and organized, then you import that CSV file directly into Ninja Tables, and then with a shortcode, you stick it wherever you want it to be. It displays beautifully, from your desktop all the way down to the mobile version, which is what I was looking for, and I needed it not just for myself, for the WP Plugins site, JohnOverall.com, plus several other clients.
So all in all, fantastic plugin. I love the way it worked. I loved the smoothness of the functionality. I liked the display of it. Anyway, if you haven’t tried it yet, go check out Ninja Tables and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Marcus: All right, I hate to pop the 5 Dragons —
John: Really? Why?
Marcus: — but does this thing import Google Spreadsheets?
John: I didn’t try to import spreadsheets. I just —
Marcus: That’s the only thing to me that wouldn’t.
John: It imported a CSV file like a dream.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: So if Google Spreadsheets can be CSV’d, then it —
Marcus: Oh yeah, of course they can.
John: Then it should import them fine.
Marcus: Yeah, the only reason I was asking is maybe because the Google Spreadsheet could be updated live on the backend and then —
John: Yeah. I don’t think this has a live version to import. You would have to update your Google Spreadsheet and then go reimport it.
Marcus: Hmm.
John: That was the one thing I did find that – but that didn’t impact the way I needed it to work.
Marcus: Okay. Well that’s just a different set of scrutiny, I guess —
John: Yep.
Marcus: — from my end.
John: That’s all it is, a different set of scrutiny.
Marcus: Okay, so I’ve been working on a business site for actually for my wife, and one of the things that I wanted to include was a nice display of all the great ladies that work there. And so I decided with a plugin called Team Showcase, and it is actually called Team Ultimate. It is a plugin that allows you to create and manage a nice team page very nicely. It gives you a TON of different options that you can do.
You can create unlimited team members categories, fonts, you know, the sizing, the spacing, all the options. You can put social stuff in there, you can put feeds, you can put just all kinds of slider stuff. It’s just one of the most amazing kind of a team things that I’ve seen. It’s got kind of this cool little sliding grid underneath that talks about what their specialties are and stuff like that. Very cool – probably one of the coolest kind of staff or about us or team plugins that I’ve seen and it gets a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s a very cool plugin. I was just looking it over.
Marcus: Mm-hm.
John: I do like the displays for it.
Marcus: Yes, the display is awesome. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen.
John: Yeah, that’s – that’s quite nice.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: All right. Well, that brings us up to…we love listener feedback on this show. We haven’t had any for a little while but hey folks, send us some listener feedback. If you get it in to us in the next week, we’ll get it into all the prerecorded shows for the rest of June. You know, it’d be really great to have more stuff in there and if you’d like to contact us, you can get us on our Contact page, send us an email, or use the SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner of the website.
Marcus: Yeah, that’s a really great way to get in touch with us. It’s very easy to do and I don’t know, it seems like we’ve waned in popularity of getting audio feedback from our listeners. We used to get multiple pieces a week but it seems like everybody turned shy all of the sudden.
John: Yeah, it comes and goes. I’m not overly worried about it anymore.
Marcus: [chuckle]
John: And also this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give us some value back. And we’d like to acknowledge all those that have supported the show in the past and any donations $50 or over are read out in the show and a note is published. And we’d like to thank out this week all of those who came in under $50 and those that are still on the Patreon system for those small donations. They help quite nicely to help offset the transcripts that get done, the bandwidth, and etc. for the website. None of the money there – there’s not enough actually to even buy a beer lately, but hey, every little bit helps.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: So thank you very much.
Marcus: Yeah, either that or maybe you’d like us to start giving on GoDaddy and WP Engine promo codes that everybody can use.
John: [chuckle]
Marcus: Like every week and hammer on you for forever and email you five times a week saying, “Use our promo code so we can get money!”
John: There you go.
Marcus: Would you rather do that or just throw $5 our way? Which one?
John: Throw $5 our way.
Marcus: You decide.
John: You can do that by going to the wppluginsatoz.com/donate page where there’s multiple options there to donate to the show.
Marcus: That’s right.
John: Okay, well —
Marcus: Thank you.
John: — this is it, the final set of plugins for today! And of course, more EU stuff. EU/GDPR.
Marcus: [chuckle]
John: GDPR consumed my life for almost two weeks there.
Marcus: Now before you review this plugin, I really almost thought of putting a popup that just said, “If you’re from the EU, you have surrendered all your rights.”
John: [laughing]
Marcus: “By using my website, I don’t care about you. America first. Goodbye.”
John: [laughing]
Marcus: No.
John: [chuckling] I kind of like the idea, except some of my clients are – they have corporate headquarters in the EU, so…
Marcus: Oh, well that doesn’t work then.
John: So I have to – have to do something. If you’re located in the EU, you are definitely subject to the law.
Marcus: Yes.
John: If you’re outside the EU, well, if you’ve got clients such as I do – I have some clients in the EU, so I have to comply to some extent.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: The biggest thing is —
Marcus: Yeah, and if you’re in the US, you use the motto —
John: Yeah?
Marcus: “Ignorance is bliss.”
John: Ignorance is bliss, there you go.
Marcus: [chuckling]
John: All right, well the final one I’ve got here today is for the EU Cookie Law. It’s EU Cookie Law. Now, I’ve used this plugin in the past back when the EU passed their first law, the Cookie Law, which required a popup on your website for people to know that you were using cookies. But in particular with the GDPR, they updated that to the point where if someone’s visiting your website, they have to accept the cookies before they continue through, and what you’re supposed to do is shut down all functionality that the cookies require until they accept the cookies. It’s kind of a Catch-22; they can’t accept a cookie that they need to accept until they’ve accepted. See, it’s really a mess.
At any rate, what this plugin does for you is it makes the job of complying with the cookie version of the EU a whole lot simpler. And what it does for you is it’s got a lot of simple settings in there that allow you to go in and create a popup banner that allows people to accept the cookies and it does prevent scripts from loading on the website until they’ve accepted the cookies, and I actually ran into that myself where I couldn’t load a couple things on my own site until I accepted my own cookies. So it’s a little bit of a pain in that aspect that if they try to surf your site, it’s gonna be partly broken until they’ve accepted, so it’s a good thing there.
The other thing that I found in this, it has a nice little shortcode in it that will help you find all the cookies that are used on your website. You insert the shortcode somewhere and it displays all the cookies that are used on a particular page. And one of the interesting things I’ve found while going through all of this stuff with the EU and compliance is that when you go through your website, you’ll find that different pages or sections of your website, one might have five or six cookies and the other might have 10 or 15, depending on what’s being displayed and what functionality you’re doing. So you’ve got to kind of search through, because one of the requirements of the EU is you list every cookie that you do, where they come from, how you use them, etc., etc.
This helps you to become in compliance with it. It was very easy to use and it helped take care of one of my major headaches. So go check it out: the EU Cookie Law and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Yeah, I’m all aces today.
Marcus: Quite the run today. Wow!
John: Yeah, all aces.
Marcus: Very nice.
John: It’s been a while since we’ve had all aces.
Marcus: All right, I have got something that is pretty cool but it needs some work. This is called Prices by User Role Lite, and what it is is it’s designed to extend the default WooCommerce functionality by adding – or actually by hiding – the Add to Cart button and the product prices from new users or only to user roles that you specify.
So why would you want this? Well maybe I have a membership or a subscription program that I sell supplies but you have to pay me $50 a year, like Costco or one of the other ones in order to get that. Well, maybe I want a specific user role first before your allowed to purchase. That’s where this comes into play. So you can set who actually has the ability and the access level and permissions to make a purchase.
John: Hm.
Marcus: And this one works very well. Now, does it work very well as the Prices by User Role Lite version? No. It only does one thing, and that’s hide the Add to Cart. It doesn’t do any of the other customizations at all. The pro version does all that. So normally, if it would’ve included a lot more features, it probably would’ve gotten a 4 out of 5. But because of the fact they hide so much accessible programming and code in the lite version, I think it’s a little too lean, so I’m giving this one a 3 out of 5.
John: Ah, okay. I was wondering about that. That’s kind of odd. Okay, it sounds like a great plugin but if you’ve got to go all the way to the pro to get even some of the stuff that should be in the basics, well…
Marcus: Mm-hm.
John: That makes it kind of tough, but it does look like a really great thing and I never thought about running a website like that where you charge them an annual fee to access the cheaper prices.
Marcus: Yeah, it’s a good way to go.
John: Yeah, it might be something in the future for people. Okay, that —
Marcus: Now by the way, you don’t even have to – and by the way, I do want to preface you don’t have to charge them.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Maybe you’ve got a membership or meetup group or something like that or —
John: Oh, there is an idea, too.
Marcus: — and you wanted to sell some things or sell blocks of time that you wanted to do it at a cheaper rate, or you just want to make sure that you know the person before that you start doing commerce with them.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: This is a way to do that.
John: Yeah, it’s an excellent thing to do. All right, well that brings us up to the end of the show, pretty much. I covered up in this episode the Share a Draft plugin, which I gave a 5 to; the Ninja Tables, which I gave a 5 to; and the EU Cookie Law, which I have a 5 to.
Marcus: And I reviewed WooCommerce Fees, which gets a 4 out of 5; Team Showcase, which gets a 4 out of 5; and Prices by User Role Lite gets a 3 out of 5.
John: All right, and a few couple of reminders. Please stop into our YouTube channel, check it out. I know I haven’t gotten anything new up there, I will be getting some training videos up there soon as I have to produce some for a couple of clients, so I’ll be sharing with the world. That’s the beauty of actually doing some additional work, so go check it out, our YouTube channel – also where the live show gets published the first Monday of every month, we do this live show for everyone to let you know, hey, we do still exist aside from just in the ether.
And also that’s pretty much it. 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.
[Dragon roar]
John: Wrong button.
[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]
It’s Episode 359 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Fees, Embedding Tables, Team Showcase, Sharing Drafts, EU Cookies and Pricing per User Role. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!