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 #403 here.
It’s Episode 403 and I’ve got plugins for Product Catalog, Emailing Users, Welcoming New Commentators, Reducing Bounce Rate, Advanced WYSIWYG for Classic Press, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #403
John: It’s Episode 403 and I’ve got plugins for Product Catalog, Emailing Users, Welcoming New Commentators, Reducing Bounce Rate, Advanced WYSIWYG for Classic Press, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from 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 of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.
And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over in Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving me reviews. They really do help the show out.
And if you’re new to the channel, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. You can catch me every Thursday at noon here live or, you know, catch some of the training videos and other bits and pieces that I upload to the channel, so make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell to get notifications of when that occurs.
Now one brief thing before I get started here. I wanted to give a brief note due to some things I’ve heard and read this last week about the show and I’ll cover those later in the show. But a brief note reiterating what the rating system is that I use and why I use it here at WP Plugins A to Z. This show is over seven and a half years old and I’ve been using the Dragon rating system since about Episode 20 after it was suggested to me by one of my listeners, and that was due to a song that I overused – a dragon-related song that I overused a lot, and they sort of suggested the rating system. So I took it and ran with it.
The rating system goes from 1 to 5, kind of like a 5-star rating, and you know, getting a 5 out of me is usually a pretty hard task. I don’t hand out 5 Dragons willy-nilly; they usually have to hit it right out of the park. Most of the plugins I get, they get a 3, which is pretty decent – a common plugin. You know, it means it’s a good plugin. Four, it’s a great plugin. But 5, of course is the outstanding. It means they just knocked it right out of the park.
Ones and twos, I do give them out, and if you’ve listened to me any length of time, you’ll know I hand them out and it’s usually because I tried this plugin for something I was working on – any number of factors – and if it’s a 1 or a 2, it’s probably not the best plugin and you might want to do well to just avoid that plugin if I hand out that rating.
But anyway, that’s just what I wanted to cover up and let folks know about it. With all of that out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
[Plugin lead-in rock music]
All right, first up I have a couple of plugins that I have not used yet. These are plugins that have been submitted to me over time by developers through the website, where if you’re a developer or just know a plugin that should be suggested for review, please go do that. Suggest plugins for review over at wppluginsatoz.com. These plugins here, I haven’t had a chance to use them. I couldn’t get them into any projects I was working on or I just didn’t have time to do anything, but they seemed interesting enough that I thought I should just start bringing them forward and letting folks know they exist. I’ve had a pretty long list of these for some time, so I just sort of started including them.
First off here, I have a plugin that was sent in by Stephanie Hruby and this is a freemium plugin. It’s called Ultimate Product Catalog Plugin and what this one here does for you is it allows you to create a catalog of your products on your website, and it does have a bit of an e-store component and it does combine with WooCommerce. I think I’ve used this or something similar way back when I was working on a project that got killed partway through, so I’m kind of sketchy on that thought in my head. It’s been over a year and a half, two years since I was doing a project like that and they just pulled the plug on the project partway through.
At any rate, it’s a nice, responsive catalog. It allows you to create different catalogs, multiple catalogs of separate products, all within one plugin. You can display these projects in grid formats or other formats on here. They’ve got custom CSS that’s available. The premium version offers up the full WooCommerce integration to allow you to sync all your products between the product catalog and WooCommerce.
It also has setups for such as if you run an affiliate store or affiliate linking to products, you can use this to build out the products with the way it sets up. All in all, a pretty interesting plugin if you’re running that kind of thing, it might be something for you to go check out. It is called Ultimate Product Catalog and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
Next up, I have for you a plugin that was sent in to me by Siddharth B., and this one here is called WP Email Users. It does look rather interesting, something I might consider getting a real good look at later down the road. No use for it at the moment, but it allows you to sent emails off to various groups of users in a different format such as Image, Rich Text. It has a WYSIWYG editor available for creating the emails. It’s basically an email program system that allows you to get all kinds of emails out there to your users, and you can group them out by your users. I believe they mentioned something about roles or other bits and pieces in here.
All in all, it looks like an interesting emailing program. I don’t know how it would be for newsletters, but it does sort of kinda remind me of a newsletter plugin – something you may want to go check out if you’re looking for a plugin to deal with emailing users or large groups of users or subgroups of users. This may be something that helps you solve that, so go check it out. It’s called WP Email Users and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
Okay, this show 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.
Absolutely, and if you’re looking for quality WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down, come visit me, JohnOverall.com and I provide excellent WordPress hosting.
Okay, and contests. Currently, we don’t have a contest running yet, but I would like to congratulate the winner of our last contest for the Graph Comment plugin, and that was Randolph P., so congratulations out there to Randolph for winning the contest. The next contest should be up by next week. We’re in the middle of getting it all situation and set out. And remember, the Graph Comment plugin, a great plugin to allow you to organize up the comments of your website, so go check it out.
And our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provided us with the premium version for all of our contests, so thanks a lot out to them – much appreciated – a really great plugin. They’ve been keeping it up-to-date and have been improving it dramatically. I’ve been using the plugin for about two years now and they just keep improving it, so go check it out.
All right, next up I have for you a plugin called Comment Redirect. This is an interesting plugin. I have yet to use it, but it’s something that I’m going to be implementing onto a couple of sites – possibly even my own site, although I don’t get many comments there. But this is a site – if you get comments, regular comments, or new commenters on your website, this would be an interesting plugin to give yourself that little extra pizazz for people.
What it does for you is when a new user, a new commentator, comes to your site and makes a comment – as soon as they make the comment, it redirects them to another page. And on this page here, you could say, “Thank you for your comment,” offer them specials, give them other options to say, “Hey, subscribe to our stuff. Check in here. We do this. We also do that,” so it’s ways to further interact with your new commentators to sort of encourage them to keep coming back and make them feel special and thank them very much for showing up and taking a look at your website and taking their time to make a comment for you.
So it’s a really cool kind of plugin; something that looks really interesting, and I do have a couple of sites I think it could be useful for that do receive comments. So if you’ve got a site that receives comments regularly or you get new comments, check this one out. Maybe you might want to look at implementing it. It’s called Comment Redirect and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, listener feedback. I do love listener feedback or feedback I find on the internet, and this week here was a really good week for me. I’ve got a couple of pieces of feedback about the show that are fantastic. The WP Plugins show has been featured in a couple of articles this week and the first one we have here is we were featured as one of the Top 20 podcasts in Tech Funnel. It’s a really great article of Top 20 WordPress Plugins to go check out.
We landed at Number 6, so I’m really quite thrilled about that. Go check it out. I really thank the guys over at Tech Funnel. They did send me a note saying that I was going to be featured. They didn’t say where I was going to be in the list, but they asked for some quotes, so I gave them some quotes to go with their article, so thank you very much to the folks at Tech Funnel for that. I much appreciate it.
The second mention I got this week was by Code Poet, and it’s been on my coverage of the ClassicPress system – the ClassicPress CMS system and the ClassicPress plugins. I’ve been featuring ClassicPress plugins since about January of this year and I really liked it. I’ve used ClassicPress on one website here; I’ve got a couple of others that it’s going to be.
As I’ve mentioned many times in my show, I’m sort of straddling between worlds. But I think there’s room for ClassicPress and WordPress out there in the world and I’m pretty sure ClassicPress is going to take their chunk of the websites out there on the internet, because they’re moving along quite nicely. They’ve been moving forward. He made some really good comments here about us. You know, I really liked this one paragraph here I’ll just read out, and it was:
John Overall, producer of a popular WordPress podcast, had an added short segment highlighting his Registration Honeypot plugin on the WP Plugins A to Z show. He said it was a good find, expressed a need for it – oh, absolutely. And really, thank you very much. I appreciate it, John. That’s the guy who runs Code Poet and I really hope to get in touch with him and hopefully get him for an interview on one of my interview shows.
So thank you very much to all of the community out there that has been following me. I really appreciate it.
Okay, and that brings me up here next – so yeah, thanks a lot. I didn’t even know you were on this stream. Thanks, Code Poet. I really appreciate it and I really appreciate your article.
All right, show donors – this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, I like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past. All donations $50 and over get their note read out and published here. For those that come in below $50, the remain anonymous and we thank you very much.
This week here, I would like to thank Jezweb Pty. Ltd. for his donation of $50 – much appreciated, Jez. I really appreciate your support for the show over the last couple of years. His note is:
This donation is on behalf of RBR Moving Removalists Newcastle at https://www.rbrmoving.com.au for people moving home in Newcastle Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor and J Theme Jello.
So thanks a lot, Jez. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your support of the show and yeah, I’m really liking since I’ve started switching to Elementor. I’m about three projects in with Elementor and I’ve been using the theme Jez was kind enough to provide me a link to his repository for this theme, the Jello theme. It’s really a nice, sweet, super clean theme to use with Elementor, so you might want to reach out to Jez if you’d like to and find out more about his theme. I really appreciate it.
And a big thank you to our donors who came in below $50. Those small donations really help and thank you to all of our Patreon donors that provide small donations. Those amounts really help cover the costs of the show, such as the transcripts we have produced, the bandwidth, the server space, etc., so thank you very much to everyone who supports the show.
Code Potent – why do I keep reading ‘poet’? I am so sorry! I will have to get that one corrected in my brain. For some reason I kept seeing ‘poet’. Sorry about that.
But – comments, folks. For those listening that are not here on the stream and listening to the show later, that’s me reading the comments off of the livestream. Potent – Code Potent. Stick that one in my head.
All right, dyslexia. Blame it on dyslexia. (I am, actually.)
All right, next up – the next plugin I have here is called Reduce Bounce Rate, and Reduce Bounce Rate, this is a plugin that helps you get the real time of onsite bounce rate from your Google Analytics. Google Analytics calculates the time onsite based on the length of time between the user entering your site and their last page view. This won’t give you the real time onsite and bounce rate stats.
The plugin helps intercede, add some activity when a user is on your site so that the real bounce rate can be calculated. They give a couple of examples where they quote out what happens here – this is interesting.
A visitor is very interested in one of your pages, takes 2:13 to read the article. After this, he bookmarks the page and leaves. The visitor stayed 2:13 on your site but never interacted with it. To Google, that’s a bounce, and bounced visits are marked “0” on the site. Well, not fair.
They give another scenario. A visitor goes to your website, stays 1:11 on the first page, then goes to the second page where he stays another minute without any interaction on the second page, then he leaves. Since Google doesn’t know how long your visitor stayed on the second page, Google will add only the time the visitor spent on the first page. So this helps clean that up and maybe get you some real stats and change your bounce rate a little bit.
You might want to check this one out if you’re really big into Google stats. I know I’m gonna be giving it a checkout even further and see how it goes. At the moment, we give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress options. Who knows? This may extend out further as ClassicPress builds the things a lot. They’ve garnered a lot of attention since the Gutenberg fiasco. And of course, ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress and it’s focused in the business websites communities and it’s definitely looking pretty good. In the last few months, ClassicPress seems to be coming into its own. And with some plugins now being created specifically for ClassicPress, I do believe it definitely has a future, and I do believe it’s going to be growing.
Now, if you want to see the ones that are specifically for ClassicPress – oops, wrong link. There we go – go check it out. There is a link in the show notes that takes you to the ClassicPress forums where there is a list of the plugins that are built specifically for ClassicPress. Currently, I believe there’s 37 in there, and I think I found the list when there was only half a dozen. I remember WordPress back when it had very few.
So before I go much further with that, let me jump into this week’s ClassicPress plugin. This one here is Advanced WYSIWYG Editor for ClassicPress. This is kind of a cool plugin. It’s a great step forward for ClassicPress, I believe. And if you are like me and use the Tiny MCE plugin in WordPress and you’re looking for a replacement for your ClassicPress install, this would be it.
The WYSIWYG Advance plugin adds lots of additional options to the ClassicPress visual editor. The plugin is a fork of the Tiny MCE Advanced that was usable in Version 4.8 of WordPress and contains no Gutenberg code. This looks to be a really great plugin. I haven’t installed it yet in my ClassicPress website, but I will be doing that so that I can take advantage of that, because these are some very important tools for a lot of developers. They add a lot of buttons and stuff that you need when you’re doing your editing. These are the editing tools that are on those buttons up above the windows for those of you that don’t know what they are.
Anyway, go check this one out. It’s a really great looking plugin and I like that it’s a fork out of the Tiny MCE and I look forward to seeing how this one evolves as it develops with ClassicPress. The name though – well, I don’t know. WYSIWYG Advance? You need a better name, really. It does.
Excellent. Good to hear, Ray. According to Ray, the Advance WYSIWYG is first-rate.
All right, so that’s what I’ve got here, and I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check out the Advance WYSIWYG Editor for ClassicPress.
Okay, and a side note. I think I skipped ahead here. I jumped around in my notes a little bit, but I talked a little bit about it. If you’re doing research using the Repository for ClassicPress, you can find WordPress-compatible plugins by typing in ‘ClassicPress’ or you can search with the tag #ClassicPress to find who have tagged their plugins for usable in ClassicPress. I’ve used that tool a couple of times when hunting down plugins for the show, so make sure you go check that out.
And of course, I mentioned the listing of the ClassicPress plugins, and this one here I’m looking forward to this list growing, and I’m looking forward to the day when ClassicPress has their own repository of plugins. As I said, I can still recall when the WordPress plugins had a very small repository. When this show started, there were less than 9,000 plugins in the WordPress Repository. I think I’ve actually got screenshots of it way back when.
So at any rate, that closes out everything on this show. Thank you very much for showing up here, everyone who showed up to the show today. I really appreciate your time and coming in to listen to me. Much appreciated and I’ve been enjoying that the show has been gaining some attention lately.
Good to hear, Code Potent, is that ClassicPress is headed toward a plugin directory. That’ll really help out that software quite a bit, I believe, and it’ll make it easier for people to use over time.
All right, so we’ve got some final reminders. The next WordPress Victoria Meetup here is on May 21st and will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. For location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be giving the presentation, but I don’t know what the subject is going to be about in this next presentation.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins, where you can find training videos, screencasts, and more. I’ve put up as much as I can, when I can. And if you have suggestions on plugins you would like to have reviewed, please feel free to go submit them on the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit, and you will be able to submit your plugin even if you’re not the developer. Feel free to submit it to me. I will take it in there and take a look at the plugin.
Developers, I look forward to you submitting them. And if you’re a developer with a premium plugin and you would like to support the show and be featured in our contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Submit all your details and we will create a contest for you. All it costs you is the plugin license and you get a ton of free advertising and promotion from me.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for the show here today, so make sure you take any time, go subscribe to the newsletter, and I’ll let my girl take us out of here. So thank you very much for showing up.
[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.
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 and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
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]
