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Transcript of Episode 409 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 409 and we've got plugins for WooCommerce Shipping, Managing Events, Data Tables, and ClassicPress information. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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 #409 here.


It’s Episode 409 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Shipping, Managing Events, Data Tables, and ClassicPress information. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #409

John:    It’s Episode 409 and I’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Shipping, Managing Events, Data Tables, and ClassicPress information, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!

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 of course, I have the usual great show for you today, but right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews.

You can also catch me live every Thursday at noon here on the YouTube channel, where you can subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and the extra shows as they show up. You can follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can also join me on my Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And if you’ve got a minute, please subscribe to the newsletter. Just go to the webpage, front page, enter your name and email address, and you’re all set where you can get additional information that’s not covered in the show.

With all that being done, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

All right, first up I have a plugin that I have yet to use but I thought you might like to know about it. And I’ve got a fair number of these in the queue now and I’ll just keep bringing them out one by one until I’m overly stocked again, then I may double up.

At any rate, the one I’ve got here for you today was sent in by Sanjay Negi, and it is called Shiprocket, and this is a plugin to set up for shipping in WooCommerce. Now, I don’t know how many listeners I may have in India, but since this plugin seems to be focused on India, well, I thought I’d bring it out anyway because they brought it up to me and I said, “That looks interesting.”

Shiprocket is India’s leading e-commerce shipping solution and they have various features in this plugin that help you get shipping across, you know, 26,000+ pin codes in India, 220 countries across the globe. Shiprocket WooCommerce plugin easily handles your order fulfillment processes. It’s a free shipping plugin but they do have a freemium option or a premium option for shipping. They have different levels of packages, etc. that I discovered after looking at their website, so it looks like it’s something that will help you do your shipping. I’m not exactly sure what it does; I don’t run a website that uses a lot of shipping. But for those that do and if you’re looking for a shipping solution, this might be something to look into, maybe examine it, dig a little deeper, see if it can help you out.

Go check it out. It’s called Shiprocket and I currently give it a 3-Dragon rating based on everything I can read and understand about it, so something that might be useful and interesting.

I’ve got a little bit of WordPress news this week, and of course the little bit this week here, really not a lot in WordPress World, aside from 5.2.1 was released this week. It had 33 bug fixes in it. It’s a short cycle maintenance release and updates for the plugin. There were some security fixes and bugs that were done in it, so you’ll want to make sure you get it updated if you’re not already doing automatic updates on your website.

Another little piece of information is if you are using Elementor (which I am now using for all of my builds), Elementor, they released their Hello theme. It’s now available at the WordPress repository. You don’t have to go to them to download it. Although I don’t use that one; I use the Jello theme from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. Jezweb, we’ll talk a bit about him later, but he did a really great job of forking off the Hello theme and making it even cleaner than the Hello theme. So if you’re using it, go check that out.

So that’s all I’ve really got in WordPress news. Not a whole lot this week, but that’s how it goes. Some weeks a lot, some weeks not so much.

This show currently brought to you by…

Are you tired of the same old web hosting? Not having the resources you need to run your website properly? Having a lack of control? Then you need JohnOverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, JohnOverall.com provides high-quality, fast server performance. Visit JohnOverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.

There you go. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs also – anything else you need related to WordPress.

And currently we do have a contest this week. All our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, a very nice, fast plugin which allows you to set up and produce contests on your website, giveaways of all sorts. It collects all the needed information, it integrates very nicely with MailChimp and other mail providers. It allows you to automatically select the winner at the end, let it be autogenerated, notifications – everything – sent out automatically. Once you set it up, it just makes the contests run a lot smoother.

So currently we are giving away a single site license for WooCommerce All Discounts. This is a plugin I reviewed back in Episode 405, the last discount plugin you will ever need for WooCommerce. It’s set up bulk discounts by applying a percentage or fixed discounts off the quantity of an item ordered for your customer. It’s selling strategy, it works for product sellers that want to move unsold products faster. Check it out at discountsuiteforWP.com. A very nice plugin. I reviewed it, checked it out, and it worked really excellent for the specific purpose I needed it for, and I used the free version at that time. But they do have the premium version and we are giving away a premium license, so make sure you go sign up for our contest and get what you need.

All right, next up I have for you – now this is a plugin that I haven’t used for a few years. A very interesting plugin. I interviewed one of the founders of the plugin, had another founder as a guest on my host. This plugin is called Event Espresso, and I’m going to show up here real quick the Event Espresso Decaf, which is the lite, free version you can get from WordPress.org. It’s very useful for taking care of lite stuff as far as events go.

But what I ended up doing was I hadn’t touched this plugin in quite some time, and the reason for that was of course that I just hadn’t had a need for it, and I’ve been using another plugin waaay back – now we’re talking it’s been a few years since I’ve used this plugin. And, well, Garth from Event Espresso, he was a guest on Episode 161 (the link is in the show notes). I also interviewed Seth Schultz back in Episode 39, and I reviewed this plugin all the way back in Episode 37. That’s quite a few years back now, and I did give it a 4-Dragon rating way back then.

But what happened was for a couple of years after that, something occurred. They took the wrong choices, directions, they made the plugin difficult to use, better competitors popped up, and I ended up switching to their competitor’s software and using it for quite a while. Recently, I came in contact with this plugin when I took on a project for the North American Garden Tourism Conference, which I just launched that website, and when using Event Espresso to build out this website for their registration system for their conference, I found Event Espresso had dramatically improved.

It’s easier to use than it ever was. It integrates much better with the payment processors. The way they have split out their addons and other pieces made much more sense than it used to do. All in all, I found it to be quite fantastic and more usable than I had thought it would be. It’s just been so long since I had used it, but because the client wanted it – and I also did make sure of one thing with it, and that is if you’re looking at Event Espresso, make sure you go purchase the entire package – everything for it. It costs a bit more, but if you only get the addons you need, it can end up costing you as much as the premium license anyway, and that’s what you’ll want to do. You’ll want to have everything you need for it for your single site license, and this way you can add the pieces as you need them.

By the time we were done adding the pieces we needed from all their different addons, it went over the cost of buying the individual addons over their $299 license fee, but well worth the cost – well worth it. The plugin sets up nice. It’s got really good layouts in it now. It makes more sense when you’re setting it up. It’s more intuitive than it used to be.

All in all, I can’t say enough about it right now. I really enjoy it, and as a special treat, I’m going to have Seth Schultz on for an interview again next week, and so that’ll be coming up soon. At any rate, go check it out. If you haven’t looked at it (which I hadn’t in a long time), check out Event Espresso. Check out the Event Espresso Decaf if you’re looking for something lite. But because I got to play with the premium version, I know what it’s fully like. I had to go and give this one a full 5-Dragon rating.

Event Espresso, a very nice plugin. Very, very excellently improved over the years.

All right, listener feedback. I do love listener feedback and I look forward to it when I can get it, where I can get it – anywhere I can find it. Please feel free to reach out to me on our Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com/contact. Go to the website, click the SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner, leave me a voicemail message, or you can email me directly at john@wppro.ca.

I do have a little feedback this week – something kind of cool:

Wppluginsatoz has made the Top 20 podcasts that you need to hear in 2019. Not just WordPress, but the Top 20 podcasts from Tech Funnel, and I fell in at Number 6. I’m really quite happy about that. So there’s a link in the show notes that takes you to their article of their Top 20 plugins, but this is a really great little piece of feedback for me. I was really quite thrilled to be there.

When I talked to them back and forth, they found out that it was one of their writers had recommended us, so that’s what I thoroughly enjoy. Thank you everyone for listening out there. Go check out Tech Funnel. They’ve got a lot of really great articles there of information technology and, of course, this fantastic article about WP Plugins A-Z as a Top 20 need to hear plugins of 2019.

This show is also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, I like to acknowledge those who have supported the show. All donations $50 and over get their note read out and published here. For those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.

This week here, I would like to acknowledge and thank Jezweb Pty. Ltd., who donated $50 here. And his donation will note:

This donation is on behalf of Summit Roof and Exterior Painting at https://www.summitroofpainting.com/ who paint houses in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor and J Theme Jello.

Thanks, Jez! I really appreciate you donating to the show – I always appreciate it. So yeah, and as I mentioned a little earlier, I was talking about the Elementor theme, the Jello theme. Jez was kind enough to give me a link to his repository, which of course I promptly shared out with the world a few shows back. Just go do some searching in the WP Plugins A-Z. There will be a link back there where you can download his copy of the Jello theme, which is really quite nice for working with Elementor. It’s a very clean theme. So a big thank you out there for Jez and a big thank you to those who came in under $50 and for those who have set up the little, small weekly subscriptions – all those small subscriptions really help this show out. And a big thank you to those who have hired be because you’ve been listening to the podcast. That is as good as donating to the show. I really appreciate that.

If you’d like to give some value back, you can do so by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, create the donation amount that fits you, and just donate it. And I’m also setting up a page I’ve been researching. I haven’t found the right result, but I am looking for artwork that I can start using in my iTunes art, and anyone who would like to donate art, you can just email it to me directly at the moment. But pretty soon, as soon as I find the right solution, I will have a page set up where people can just upload it to the site, and it’ll also eventually get showcased on the site – all different artwork. So thank you very much! Much appreciated.

All right, next up the plugin I’ve got for you here is called Data Tables Generator. Now, this one here I ended up using because of a project I was working on where I needed to display an Excel table, and normally not much of a problem. You can get something where you can convert the Excel table to CSV file and then import the CSV file, and most table plugins do that. But every time I went to CSV, I would lose critical data from this table that was created in Excel.

This plugin here, their free version didn’t import the Excel file, and I did try the CSV first; it didn’t work. But I saw they had an Excel version and I thought, “Okay, we’ll take a chance on it.” I bought the premium version of their plugin and the premium version being $39, well worth the money. If you want to import and export tables, you can import the tables. All the data that is contained in the Excel file in its proper formatting is imported into your site and it makes it really easy.

You can also export it again from your site in that format if you want. Once it’s in your site, they have a very nice interface for going in and managing the table or adjusting the table later. A very excellent plugin. I found this to just work very well. The premium version, well worth the money. Go check it out. It’s called Data Tables Generator and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, ClassicPress Options. I know everyone wants to hear this. Everyone comes to the show just for the ClassicPress Options. Of course – frog in the throat. Since the release of Gutenberg and the fallout, ClassicPress, a hard fork of WordPress, has garnered a lot of attention and it’s still continuing to gain attention. I’m looking forward to seeing how this community grows. I am becoming a small part of it at the moment, but I think I’ll end up taking a little bit larger role in it and showcasing more and more stuff on ClassicPress as I can find it and showcasing developers as I find them.

Right now, there’s not a lot of ClassicPress-specific plugins, and so this week I’m going to focus on some of the recent press that ClassicPress is getting, and I’m talking press in the last couple of months, not the press from back in December – November and December and early January when they made a big splash. I’m talking about what’s happening now a few months later, and that gives you an indication of what’s happening in the community and how it is actually growing.

So what I’ve got up here first is from Rough Pixels Themes. This is from May 19, 2019 and this is an article about ClassicPress as an alternative to WordPress. It’s a very nice article describing what ClassicPress is, how it is growing, a little bit about how it came about, some information a bit about, and of course them in the end saying that they’re going to be supporting ClassicPress with all of their themes. This is from Rough Pixels Themes, a theme development company that is going to be supporting both ClassicPress and WordPress, which is a really cool thing that there are developers out there that are going to be supporting this project and building for this project. I know that that’s what we’re going to be doing with Plugin Dynamics as we’re going to be supporting both.

Another article from March 4th is from Specky Boy. This is a behind-the-scenes of ClassicPress, the WordPress alternative, and this is another article talking to you about the fork and why the switch and how it came about, and a little bit more information about it and the democratic decision making of the ClassicPress community and what their future prospects are. All in all, it’s a really good, positive article about ClassicPress.

And these sorts of things are really good to know about and it’s really exciting to see that this community is starting to grow bit by bit, and it does remind me a lot of the WordPress community in its early years, where people sort of dismissed them, said they weren’t going to do anything, how are they going to compete against the stuff that was out there already. But what happens is as you get more and more developers behind it, it starts to evolve, and it starts to grow.

And another one I found, this one is kind of interesting. This is called The ClassicPress Club. This is a secondary kind of forum. They want to be an informal forum for ClassicPress, a place where the non-techie or the general user can show up to discuss information about ClassicPress, maybe ask questions if they’re a little more unnerved about going to the formal ClassicPress forums. Maybe they want to check out this. I found it to be kind of an interesting idea that somebody has put forth something like this as a place to have an alternative discussion. So go check this out if you’re a ClassicPress user. Maybe reach out to the developer of the forum; I know I’m going to see if I can get him to come talk to me.

All right, and that’s really the more this community puts out, the more it’s going to grow, and we’re going to see more and more talented people migrating over to it. You know, that’s what’s going to happen with it.

All right, well that’s all I’ve got there on ClassicPress this week and I’ll be hunting up specific plugins. I do know that I’ve caught a couple of links just before I went live with the show of some more ClassicPress stuff, so there’s more out there and it’s coming.

All right, that’s all I’ve got this week here on plugins. I covered up Shiprocket, which I gave a 3 to; Event Espresso, which I gave a 5 to; and then Data Tables Generator, which I gave a 5 to.

As I said, another new interview is going to be coming down the pike next week with Seth Schultz and I’m also going to be appearing as a guest host on another podcast, so stay tuned for that one – Be Busy podcast, that’s the one. I’ll be appearing as a guest host there, so stay tuned for information to where you’ll be able to get that information.

And the next WordPress Meetup is in June, and the meetup for June is not a seminar; it is just a social meetup here in Victoria, so it’s not going to be broadcast live. But if you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come down to the meetup. It’s going to be at the Boston Pizza here in Victoria, where we have lots of room for lots of people to show up and we can meet, greet, have a chat, and maybe help work out the plan for next year’s meetings for the Victoria WordPress Meetup group.

Take a few moments also to subscribe to the YouTube channel by clicking the Subscribe button down below if you’re watching me on YouTube or watching this on YouTube. If you’re listening to it on the podcast feed, head over to the YouTube channel and subscribe to it. I can use some more subscribers.

And a final note out there to the developers, if you would like to have your plugin featured in a plugin contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to submit all the details. And if you are a developer that has a plugin that you would like reviewed or you know of a plugin you think would be interesting to be reviewed, you don’t have to be a developer to submit it. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/submit-plugin and I will review it for the show.

So that’s all I’ve got for you this week. Yeah, pretty much it. I’m gonna let my girl take us on out of here.

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.

 

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.

 

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