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 #355 here.
It’s Episode 355 and we’ve got plugins for Responsive Tables, GDPR, WooCommerce Bulk Editing, Document Sharing and Bulk Menu Creation. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #355
Marcus: It’s Episode 355 and we’ve got plugins for Responsive Tables, GDPR, WooCommerce Bulk Editing, Document Sharing, and Bulk Menu Creation. 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 Technical Depths of Hell, I’m John Overall.
Marcus: [laughing] And from the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: Yes, I’ve had some serious technical issues with my computer over the last couple of days and we’re just getting the show on. Yesterday, ten minutes before the show, power supply failed.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: Poof!
Marcus: So we’re trying it again the next day. Hopefully this one works for us, but we’re going through a lot of effort here to bring you the show this week.
John: Yeah, I’m still having some computer difficulties, but we’re getting the show out for you, our listeners out there who we know just love it. But enough of all that random stuff. 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, subscribing to us on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store.
Marcus: That’s right. You can also check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live – generally – every first Monday of the month on YouTube at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time. Also remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and subscribe to our newsletter, where we put a lot of different news that’s out there. And to the show, we’d like to keep this show all about plugins, so we don’t bore you with all that WordPress news and drama here.
John: Absolutely. All right, well, with that all being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Marcus: All right.
[Plugins lead-in music]
John: All right, we have the usual allotment of six great plugins for you today – three from me, three from Marcus, and first up I have one that I’ve been meaning to test for a long time and I finally got around to getting it checked out. It’s for the GoDaddy Reseller Store. Now, if you’re a GoDaddy reseller or what used to be known as the Wild West Reseller Program from GoDaddy, it was always problematic to get that stuff into your own website, and they have finally made it easy with the GoDaddy Reseller Store Plugin.
This plugin is very simple to use. You set it up, then you connect it to your GoDaddy Reseller program, and then you go through and it automatically creates several pages for you, so you can have a basic store instantly ready to go. It brings in products – whatever products you’re gonna sell. In my particular instance, I focus on just the domain reselling, not all the hosting of the stuff, because I do a much better job than they do of hosting.
So at any rate, the domain reseller, you can set it up with the widgets, shortcodes, and then you can set into the pages you want so that people can search for their domains. They find a domain they want, the click buy, it takes them into your GoDaddy reseller store, they buy the domain, real simple and easy, and the domains are managed through the exact same GoDaddy interface that you are familiar with.
Very fantastic. I found this plugin very easy to set up, very useful, and it finally allowed me to integrate the reseller program into my website, so go check it out: the GoDaddy Reseller Store Plugin, and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.
[Dragon roar]
Marcus: Awesome! Very awesome. Okay, the next plugin I’ve got here – the first plugin for the show for me – is called WP Responsive Table, and we all know about HTML tables. I mean for me, it’s one of the lost arts in creating and developing websites is the use of that actual table. I rarely see them anymore, mostly because there’s really no good way to display a pure, unresponsive, old-school HTML table, and especially with multiple devices. I’m talking about tablet, mobile, desktop – those kinds of resolutions – until now, that is, because this plugin actually makes HTML tables within your WordPress posts and keeps them in a mobile-responsive format.
It makes the table horizontally scrollable in its own container and it also scales itself to fit any screened format, so any size screen. It works out of the box with no further settings, there’s no shortcodes as it uses the actual native HTML table that’s already within the TinyMCE editor. So if you want a better way to make those tables that already function within your TinyMCE editor to be more responsive, this is the plugin for you. It’s one of those lazy plugins. There’s not a single thing to set; you just activate it and all of your tables become responsive out of the box.
It’s called WP Responsive Table and I give it a 4 out of 5.
John: Well, that’s very nice, and that can actually be fairly useful for those that are still using tables in some areas, and sometimes you actually have to use tables, so hey.
Marcus: Like I said, it’s one of the lost arts of web development —
John: Yeah!
Marcus: — is using the table.
John: I remember building websites with tables, within tables, within tables. [chuckling]
Marcus: Yes.
John: [chuckling] The challenges of it. All right, well this show here, currently brought to you by…
Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20-plus 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. Come see me for all your WordPress needs.
All right, and we also currently have a contest running. It’s been running for the last month. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the confirmation before we did all the prerecorded shows last month. But the – we are giving away a premium license from bracketspace.com, where they’re giving away a bundle pack of extensions for their Notification plugins. And this bundle pack helps extend out their Notification plugin and it’s really a nice plugin.
I’ve started to experiment with it and I’ll have a review for it coming up. For more information, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin and not win it, you can get a discount off of the plugins with a 25% off coupon code for all Notification extensions. Use the code ILOVEWPAZ until the end of May —
Marcus: Great.
John: — and get the core plugin. You get the core plugin free; it’s available at WordPress. It’s a free – it’s a free Notification plugin from WordPress and there’s a link in the show notes to that. And also, just to let everyone know, the contests on our site are powered by the Simple Giveaways Plugin, and it’s very nice of them to have given us – and they originally gave us a preview version. I’ve been using it for a year and the author contacted me about two weeks ago and said, “Hey, here’s a brand new version, a whole lot of new updates, a pro version,” so hey, so now our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways Plugins. So —
Marcus: Ah yeah, and we thank them for that, too. Thank you very much.
John: Very much. And the contest currently is running until the end of May and the winner will be announced at our live show in June, provided – well, it’ll be a live show one way or another.
All right, I guess that takes us up to our second set of plugins. And the next one I’ve got up here is called ScoutDocs. Now, this is an interesting new service that has just come out. It’s a brand new plugin and what it allows you to do, it’s a third-party service. It allows you to use the cloud for securely sharing your documents from WordPress. You can set it up to allow secure sharing of all documents through the cloud service. You set up the links you need; you give them to your clients. It’s according to them; it’s a great way to share things such as lawyer documents or private documentation.
They have a free service where you can get up to 20MB files and up to 500MB of storage space. And if you go to their premium service, you can upload up to 50MB files and have up to 5G of storage space. It looks to be a pretty good service. I’m not sure about the storage and file sizes yet as to how effective it’ll be, but I’m sure because it’s so new, they’ll evolve as they figure out what their clients need.
At any rate, it looks like a great service. You might want to check it out if you’re looking for a secure way to share documents through your WordPress website. Check it out: ScoutDocs, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Yeah, that’s nice even though there’s a lot of restrictions there, but —
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: — a pretty cool looking plugin. I’m looking at the specs right now for it. ScoutDocs.
John: It looks like it might be fairly useful if you’re sharing documents. I know like one of the group – interesting things it could be is I have clients that run newspapers and they’ve got to share back and forth sample ads.
Marcus: Mm-hm?
John: And this might be a great service for them.
Marcus: Oh, that’s true.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Proofs, yeah. Good for designers too that are actually showing different layouts of things that you want to share to a client.
John: Yeah, because it’s getting – it’s getting hard to mail any file over two – over 2 —
Marcus: Oh, geez.
John: — MB in size.
Marcus: Or a video —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — or anything like that.
John: So this could be a good way to deal with that.
Marcus: Okay. So the next plugin, the second one I’ve got for today, is called WooCommerce Bulk Editor, and this is very nice. It’s kind of one of those lazy plugins that does a lot of things – maybe it’s a lazy Swiss Army knife. Maybe that’s we’ll combine two terms together. But this is actually for managing and changing WooCommerce product data and it does it in a bulk way that you can – here’s some of the features. Check it out.
Bulk editing of all WooCommerce fields, attributes, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, meta fields, bulk product variation editing from the variable product stuff, sizing, colors – all that kind of stuff, filtering by all WooCommerce product fields for further bulk editings. You can save a filter and go back next time and edit it. You can do a product export of all the WooCommerce data and then import it back using the native WooCommerce importer.
It does a full history of both bulk and solo operations with rollbacks, so if you mess something up, you can roll it back. You can take care of all the meta fields, do a calculator for all the decimal fields, all kinds of variable product stuff, binded editing, where you can edit several products at once. You can change all the products relatively. Say [electronic sound glitch – 11:33] prices by 10% or increase every price by 35 cents. That’s what does it.
It’s really great. It does a lot of different things; instantly saves all the data you’ve entered because it uses AJAX. There are two versions: the one I evaluate is the lite version. There is also a pro version. I would’ve given this a perfect 5 out of 5 but because of that pro version, I’m taking off one point. Otherwise, it’s really a great plugin for editing a lot of different products and stats on your WooCommerce installation at once. This is a real timesaver. It gets a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice! That’s one that I’m gonna have to consider. I’m taking on a WooCommerce store for the first time in like nine months and it’s got a lot of stuff that’s got to be done to it, so this could be something that would help them out quite nicely.
Marcus: I would bookmark this —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — because this is something you’re gonna want to get in there if you have to do any editing of more than one product.
John: Yeah?
Marcus: This is the way to go.
John: Well, the nice thing about WP Plugins is I’m improving the search functions there and we’ve got a plugin that I’ve had in development for six months that is almost nearing completion that’ll make finding everything we reviewed much simpler.
Marcus: Oh, good!
John: So I’m looking forward to when that’s complete and it makes it easier to go, “Hey, what was that plugin that we did a review on?”
Marcus: Yeah, exactly.
John: Because we seem to review plugins that we – I often go back to and say, “Where is that?”
Marcus: Yeah, and I’ll be making something and I’ll be like, “Uh, what was the name of that thing that I talked about six —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — months ago?”
John: That’s it. So there you go, folks. If we use our reference a lot, I’d bet a lot of you out there do, too.
And with that being said, this show here supported by many people, but first we have a little bit of listener feedback. And if you would like to give feedback, you can do it via our Contact page, SpeakPipe, or simply email us. And this week we do have a SpeakPipe from Luis Hermenegildo, so take it away, Luis.
Hello guys, how are you? I just want to say that you guys – I just recently found you. Awesome job. Keep up the great work. I will be contributing soon. I do have a question. I currently picked up a new job for a DJ website, so I was wondering are there any website – are there any plugins that you think I could possibly use with a DJ website. Again, thank you for the great job you guys are doing. I’ve listened to almost all of your episodes since I found you guys two weeks ago. Thank you.
Marcus: All right!
John: Thanks a lot, Luis. We really greatly appreciate you going back though the back catalog and listening to us, so…
Marcus: Yeah.
John: As to your question, I actually did a little research on it and it turns out there’s some DJ plugins in the WordPress Repository, but not a one of them has been updated in over two years.
Marcus: Bummer.
John: And so you really probably don’t want to use those. I did find that there’s a – at least six or seven DJ themes at Envato or CodeCanyon that you might want to check out, and they included some plugins specifically tailored to DJs and the theme itself is built for doing DJ stuff. So you might want to look at Envato and see what they’ve got, so give them a checkout.
Marcus: Yeah, you’re definitely gonna need some sort of an event management plugin to see where you’re DJing or something like that. If you’re doing bookings for DJs, you want to use something like Time Trade or some kind of an appointment thing that can go along with it, and then maybe a playlist creator or something you can play some music on the site that might help. But thanks for listening. We do appreciate it.
John: And there you go – and that note from Envato recently disbanded their Envato Toolkit – that must be yours.
Marcus: Yeah. I wanted to talk about this. So this is pretty good since you brought up Envato anyway. They used to have this thing called Envato Toolkit that you used on your site and it helped with anything that was Envato-related. It could have been the Envato theme, you know, from Theme Forest on your site. This toolkit was kind of a bridge in between so that you could update it, rather than having to download it and reinstall it.
Well, this new one is a new iteration of it called Envato Market and what it does instead when you install this is it – you get a quick, simple API key that you enter into it that hooks right into your Envato account. And now it lets you download any theme or any plugin that you have at Envato that you’ve paid for right there in the dashboard of that WordPress installation.
John: Oh, nice! I’ll have to check that out.
Marcus: Yeah, and it’s a one-click install.
John: Hm.
Marcus: So it literally shows everything you’ve bought forever in your account and you can install it with just one click.
John: Nice. I’ve got quite the collection. I’ve got like four pages of stuff from Envato.
Marcus: Yeah! Yep, it’ll pick it all up.
John: Nice.
Marcus: So check that – if you’ve got an Envato Toolkit or if you use anything – if you’ve got more than three things that you’ve bought from any Envato property, you probably want to check this out.
John: Absolutely. All right, well this also brings us up to this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those that have supported the show in the past month, and any donations $50 or more are acknowledged here on the show life. Anything less than $50 is left anonymous and we thank you very much for that.
This month here, we would like to thank Jezweb Pty. Ltd. who went in $50 on April 12th and they had a nice quick one here. Their donation is on behalf of Honeysuckle Executive Apartments https://www.honeysuckleapartments.com.au/ who provide serviced accommodation in Newcastle Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au. The team at Jezweb appreciate you keeping us updated with new plugins which help solve our client feature requests. A plugin we recently found that has been very useful is Anywhere Elementor which you can use to design post and archive pages with Elementor page builder very easily. Check it out at Elementor.com – or elementoraddons.com. And thank you very much.
Well thanks, Jez. We really greatly appreciate you continuing to support this show. You’ve been an ardent supporter of the show for the past year and a half and it’s been very much appreciated. It helps cover the costs of the transcripts, bandwidth, and other miscellaneous expenses that are required to just put on a show like this – plus our time. Well, none of it goes into our pockets; it goes back to the other things I mentioned.
Marcus: Right.
John: We don’t make much on that and thank you to the small donors who are still over at Patreon. I’ve left that going. If you’re really into Patreon, you can go donate to us through Patreon. I don’t believe in them in a big way, but hey, every little bit of support helps. And you can go check out and support the show over at wppluginsatoz.com/donate for multiple ways where you can donate and support the show.
Marcus: Absolutely. We appreciate all the support everybody’s getting and if you cannot contribute from a monetary standpoint, please help to promote the show. We do appreciate that as well.
John: Yeah, and promote the show or if someone has spare time, I have things on the website that need to be done. We’ve brought in a couple of people here and there who’ve done some things for us, but their life gets busy and I understand. It’s a volunteer thing and if you want to help clean up the website, fix up some of the articles and miscellaneous things in there, please contact me.
All right, well that brings us up to our final set of plugins and the last one I’ve got for you here today is one that everyone is talking about. (Well, this is one of many.) It’s for the GDPR, the Global Data Protection Racket – I mean, Regulations. And this is of course coming down from the EU and it’s forcing everyone worldwide to adopt it and it’s a bit of a pain. But of course, one of the things that’s happening is WordPress 4.9.6 is due out about the 15th of the month and they’re going to be releasing some additional tools in WordPress to help people become compliant with the GDPR.
But becoming compliant is gonna be variable depending on who you are and what your website is, and as a disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV, so don’t take anything I say here as advice. Do your own research.
That being said, the plugin I want to talk about briefly is called simply GDPR. This is one of the more popular plugins in WordPress and when I went searching, there seems to be a good couple dozen of GDPR plugins there, and this is something you’re gonna want to be aware of. What this one does for you is helps you build your privacy page, it helps you set up for one of the requirements, which is allow people to request all data you have on them so they can download it, and this also helps you to comply with the notifications for when they hit your website and it says, “Hey, we’re tracking you. Hey, we’re keeping your email address. Hey, we’re sending you emails,” or whatever your particular things are gonna be on your website.
So you might want to check this plugin out, check out a few other things. There’s lots of links and other things. I sent an article around via Twitter today and on the Facebook page from BlogAid, where she did a big, huge write-up on all the things you’re gonna face with GDPR, so you’ll want to check all of this stuff out. The date for this coming into effect is May 25th of this year and after that, who knows what the EU is going to do.
Anyway, go check this one out: the GDPR plugin, and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Yeah, I’m still not prepared for that, I guess. [chuckle]
John: I’m just starting to prepare my website, but mine’s fairly simple. I only collect emails for – well, both of our sites – WP Plugins and JohnOverall. We collect emails for the newsletter —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — and of course I have billing information for my clients, so it’s very easy for me to comply with it.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: I just got to add notifications and I’ve got to update my privacy pages, which haven’t been updated in a few years.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: [inaudible – 22:12] For someone running an e-commerce store, doing email marketing blitzes, or doing mass amount of tracking – like I do very little tracking. To me, tracking is only minorly important to me, so I don’t have lots of tracking going on. But it’s gonna vary —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — from person to person.
Marcus: So the final plugin I’ve got for today is called Bulk Menu Creator and it’s – this is something that I would keep only as a construction plugin or a development plugin installed on my site. But if you need to set up a lot of menus and submenus within your WordPress site, this plugin can help you to ease that burden. It’s a real simple way to drop in a list of text and corresponding URLs that will automatically create a menu with appropriately assigned URL structure.
Now, I used this to create a menu with over 30 different submenus that also happened and it actually had also 20 different external links in the menu as well. So I did this entire operation with this plugin in about 10 seconds. In fact, the longest time it took me was just to type out the menu names. It isn’t the kind of plugin I said as you would keep installed forever. It’s more of a kind of setup or development category, but it does the job exactly how it should when you need it. It is called Bulk Menu Creator and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.
[Dragon roar]
John: That’s nice. That could’ve saved me tons of time on a site I recently built. [chuckle]
Marcus: [chuckling]
John: I didn’t even know something like that exists, because I had to go create the single one, add the menu, move it around —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — add the menu, move it around. It’s like I hate building big menus, and yeah, this could save tons of time, so I’m gonna keep that one in my head for the next one that shows up because it happens way too often.
Marcus: Yeah, I almost feel like we need to create like a – I don’t know – an e-book: all the cool plugins that you should install while you’re creating a site. Not while it’s being run —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — while you’re creating.
John: While you’re creating and then remove them when you’re done, because the client doesn’t need ‘em.
Marcus: Yeah…hm.
John: There’s quite a few. There’s quite a few plugins that save me tons of time while developing and the last thing I do when I’m done, I go through and remove all those plugins.
Marcus: Exactly.
John: All right, well that closes out this episode where I covered up the GoDaddy Reseller Store, which I gave a 5 to; the ScoutDocs, which I gave a 4 to; and the GDPR, which I gave a 3 to.
Marcus: And I talked about WP Responsive Table, which gets a 4 out of 5; WooCommerce Bulk Editor gets a 4 out of 5, and the Bulk Menu Creator gets a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: And there we go. A nice roundup of plugins. And just a couple of quick reminders, stop into our YouTube channel where you can check out the screencasts for our live shows. And when I have time again, I will be doing training videos and other things going up there. Right now, life has just kept me way too busy and business has been really good this year. And also, go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter so you can find out what we’re talking about each and every week.
And as a little side-note, I know that there’s not a lot of listeners, but I have a couple here on the Island. On May 27th, WordPress’s birthday, we are having a meetup. I am now the organizer for the meetup group up here in Victoria and I am reviving the group and bringing it back to life, and so we’re having a social meetup on Sunday, May 27th at 1:00 in the afternoon at the Boston Pizza, where we’re going to discuss the future of this group and the things that I’m planning to do with it over the next year. So if you live in the Victoria area or you happen to be visiting, hey, stop in by on May 27th for WordPress’s birthday.
Marcus: Nice.
John: More information, you can send me an email. I’ll be happy to send you more info on it.
Marcus: You gonna have a WordPress birthday cake?
John: No, we might have a WordPress pizza because you know…
Marcus: Well, there you go.
John: We are going to Boston Pizza – a nice Sunday afternoon.
Marcus: Yeah, if they can get the W in like pepperoni – spell it out with pepperoni or something.
John: There should be a hockey game on that day. I think we’re still in the middle of playoff season.
Marcus: [laughing] There’s always a hockey game on in Canada. [laughing]
John: [giggling] Always. Yeah, I think the only time they stop playing hockey is like September 1st to the 2nd or something – you know.
Marcus: Mm-hm.
John: At any rate, don’t forget to go support the show, wppluginsatoz.com/donate and subscribe and review the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store.
Marcus: That’s right. Do it.
John: And you can follow us up on Twitter and you can contact us – well, let’s just play the extra stuff that I got here. I keep forgetting I’ve got it. 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]
John: There we have it. We got it recorded.
Marcus: Hooray!
John: Time to go off-air.
[End of Audio]
It’s Episode 355 and we’ve got plugins for Responsive Tables, WDPR, WooCommerce Bulk Editing, Document Sharing and Bulk Menu Creation. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!