Transcript of Episode 279
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 Episode #279
It’s Episode 279 and we’ve got plugins for Calendar Registrations, Zodiac and Moon Forecasts, Sequential Post Editing, Dummy Payment Gateways and a great new plugin for Writing a Novel. . It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #279
John: Okay, the first plugin I’ve got this week is called Registrations for The Events Calendar. This plugin here, and as I’m having to face the problem of changing out the events calendar across several websites, because what I was using for the last few years, the company has just so many loops, turns, backwards, and forwards.t they’ve just changed it to the point where it’s no longer the same plugin. But in the process, I’ve been watching this Event Calendar from Modern Tribe rise up. I tried it a few times and never had quite right.
But I had a client come to me several months back using this plugin and I found out that Modern Tribe has come a long way. More and more, such as in the last show when we did a review of a plugin from Modern Tribe, I found another plugin from them. People are building plugins for this plugin, which is a beautiful thing, which means that plugin is going to be super expandable.
This one here, Registrations for The Events Calendar, allows you to take an event and turn it into a registerable event, where people can register, you can collect their email, registration information, everything you need for it, and then you can send out emails to them and track their registrations. The only one thing that I found lacking in the plugin was the ability to charge for the registrations. Other than that, it’s looking pretty good. So who knows? That may be something they add to this plugin – and it’s a relatively new plugin to begin with, so what the heck. Anyway, I gave it a 3-Dragon rating. Check it out: Registrations for The Events Calendar.
Marcus: I use the Events Calendar on a number of different client sites —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — and it’s really handy. In fact, early on in this year, I did a two-day marathon where I added events throughout the entire year. I had literally preloaded a year’s worth of content in it and it’s pretty nice. The only thing is I always have somewhat of an issue in terms of styling.
John: That was the only one thing.
Marcus: Yeah, they did improve that just a little bit, but that’s the only caveat to it that I would say. So if you’re into CSS and you can do, you know, layouts and modifications and things, then you shouldn’t have any problems. But it’s a great plugin.
John: Yep.
Marcus: All right, so the first one that I’ve got today is very interesting. It’s called Edit Next Post, and what it does is if you are in the post editor and you’re going to edit a lot of posts, just like what Glen sort of had in terms of a question with his audio comment. What it does is it puts a meta box in the top right of the edit screen and it allows you to go to a different post or page (or custom post type or whatever you want), within that specific post type. So if you’re editing a post, it actually lists all of the rest of the post. John, let’s say we had Episode 279, 278, 276, and we wanted to go through and edit that.
John: Mm-hmm?
Marcus: Well, instead of having to go back into the main pages listing, we can edit one page, update it, and then go to that little box in the upper right and then select the next one to edit, and then it just automatically takes you right to the edit screen of that post.
John: Oh, sweet!
Marcus: Yeah.
John: It saves you a couple of steps.
Marcus: Really easy, saves a ton of times, and it’s one of those lazy plugins we love, and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Beautiful. Okay – yeah, I like that idea. That’s nice. All right, the next one I’ve got here is called ZodiacPress. Now, this is a great plugin. If you run a metaphysical website or anything of the Wiccan variety or you like zodiacs, horoscopes, and things of that nature – you want to know your charts or you want to offer those up to people, this is a great plugin for you. What it does is it requires a GeoNames account.
Once you get that account set up, you set up the plugin, you go through and tweak all of the settings. People can enter in their birthdate and place and then what it will do is it will generate their birth chart for them. It will generate it on their website, so they can go through the information and you can give specialized readings and interpretations of all the information depending on your knowledge of this field. A really interesting plugin if you’re into the zodiac and into the metaphysical, but it seems like a pretty decent plugin and fairly well built, so check it out: ZodiacPress. I gave it a 3-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Great. All right, the next one is something for you WooCommerce people out there. This is called Dummy Gateway for WooCommerce, and what it is it’s a dummy payment gateway plugin that you can use for the testing of the checkout process. It’s really easy to set up and it basically is a payment gateway simulator and the entire checkout process and processing procedures can be done, so you could put in a fake credit card and all that and the dummy gateway automatically approves it and everything else. It puts you through the entire process.
Now, I will say this is probably one of the most overlooked things when somebody puts up a store, because they don’t want to put their own credit card in and test it out on PayPal or whatever it happens to be, or Stripe, or any of those. This is a great way to check that out and make sure that everything that needs to fire, in terms of through that payment process, does what it’s supposed to do. And by that, I’m talking about the thank you page, the options to make sure that everything goes exactly as planned, because there’s nothing worse than setting up an entire e-commerce site and then having no sales say for like a month or a week or whatever, and you don’t know why.
Maybe it’s because there was a mistake made somewhere along the line of the payment gateway or there’s very poor onboarding, if this is something like the Membership Coach site. If I didn’t have the right thank you attribution and then one of the things I have is that you get to set up an appointment call with me right away after you pay. These are things that you need to completely go through the process to make sure that all your T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted and all the rest of it. It’s called Dummy Gateway for WooCommerce, and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice. Yeah, I saw that one and I was considering reviewing it myself. But yeah, I’m glad that you did.
Marcus: Yes.
John: Okay, the final plugin I’ve got here today is another one for the metaphysical. It’s called Daily Moon Forecast and this is a simple plugin that creates a widget or a shortcode you can use on your page or in your sidebars. What it does for you as it tells you what the moon’s current position is, whether it’s a full moon, a dark moon, whether it’s in Scorpio or Cancer or whatever sign it’s currently in, it gives you the ascendency – all those bits of information for those of you that like to follow that information.
It’s a really great add-on if you’re running a metaphysical site, because it helps bring people to your site on a daily basis, so they can check to see where the moon is at. You know, these sorts of things lots of people believe in, lots of people let it think it rules their lives. So if you like this sort of thing or you run a metaphysical website or want to offer up something different to your clients, check it out. It’s called Daily Moon Forecast, and I gave it a 3-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Hmm, interesting. Well, the final plugin that I have today is something that’s very interesting. It’s called Plan My Novel and what it is it’s a tool that helps writers plan and organize all of the details that have to be handled in order to successfully create and publish a novel.
What it does is a number of things: it covers everything that you need in terms of making a novel, it helps you with outlines, doing different scenes, chapters, it’s got a custom post type for characters. So if you have characters in your novel, it allows you to kind of give the backstory of the character within a custom post type, even put their picture in there, plan it out. It has a budget that you can export to CSV and it has a lot of other things, like documents, manuscript drafts, and research stuff, and it’s all native within WordPress.
I’ve never seen anything like this from WordPress. I’ve seen plenty of desktop applications that do this kind of thing, but this is the first WordPress version that I’ve seen. It’s probably not good for a nonfiction or something that doesn’t have a lot of characters in the story. Like I don’t think I could ever do a – let’s say if I was doing a WordPress Plugins book, this wouldn’t be what I would use. I would use this for some other thing where maybe John and I are superheroes and we save the world with WordPress plugins. But it’s very cool if you are into writing fiction type novel stuff. This is an absolute must in terms of checking this out. I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Yeah, that’s very nice. When I saw there, the first thing I could think of was my wife who has taken up writing in the last six months again and is working herself up to bigger and bigger stories. She’s got characters that she would like to expand on and I can see myself having to install this on her website soon to allow her to start mapping things out.
Marcus: Right.
John: So thanks for bringing this one to my attention because yeah, I didn’t even see it. But yeah, I liked it.
Marcus: Great!
John: And I’m sure she will. All right, well I covered up in this week Registrations for The Events Calendar, which I gave a 3 to; ZodiacPress, which I gave a 3 to; and Daily Moon Forecast, which I gave a 3 to.
Marcus: And I talked about Edit Next Post – gave that one a 5; Dummy Gateway for WooCommerce gets a 4; and we just discussed Plan My Novel, which gets a 5 out of 5.
[End of Audio]
