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.
See complete show notes for Episode #210 here.
It’s episode 210 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Offers, Login Security, Easy Site Importing, Eliminating User Registrations, Link Libraries and a plugin that serves up ads in the Admin area! It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #210
John: All right, well the first plugin I’ve got this week here is one to help eliminate those scammy registrations on your website. So if you run a WordPress website, you have absolutely no need for registrations. In other words, your website is just content that you put out and you allow comments and other miscellaneous and contact back but you don’t need people to register on the site, this is a great plugin for you. If you need registrations, not so good.
So what it does is you install it, turn it on, there are no settings for it. And what it does is it deactivates the registration page completely and redirects people to the login page if they try to register, thereby just eliminating that problem entirely from your site, so it’s pretty simple. It’s pretty straightforward; seems to work pretty well, so I gave it a straight 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Cool. Yes, I would say 99.9% of my sites don’t need registration; it’s just me. So this doesn’t interfere with just creating a user though, does it?
John: No, it doesn’t interfere with creating the user, because that’s done in the back end in the administration area. This eliminates that front-facing registration page that spammers always find. And you end up with registrations, even though you can tick the box that says ‘no registrations,’ I’ve done it on sites and for some reason I get people trying to register. I like, “Wait a minute. I have it shut off.” I’m not sure they get through it, but this eliminates it entirely.
Marcus: Cool. Well John, I saw this plugin in the repository and I went, “No way. No way. This is just — no way. Uh-uh.” It’s called Easy Site Importer and by no way, I meant no way did somebody really make something really this cool. It makes the process of migrating a site much, much easier. And by when I say a site, I’m not talking about a WordPress sight, John. I’m talking about any website — any content management system. I don’t care if it’s HTML.
What this does, you enter the URL of the site. It loads up kind of this little page. It scans the target site and finds different sections of the site that have content, and this plugin actually scrapes that content and makes posts and things out of it.
John: That’s pretty cool!
Marcus: So this is really awesome if you’re going to migrate client sites, even if they’re not WordPress, and scrapes some of their posts and contents off of it. It’s probably really great for affiliates and duplicate content people that just want to embed their links in it. It’s pretty unbelievable. It didn’t do things like yanking out YouTube clips and stuff like that. But it grabbed the text for sure.
So while not fully complete, I think this is a pretty cool plugin and definitely something worth trying if you have a website that’s really tough to migrate. It may not be WordPress or some other site that you think that you can just grab some content and make some content of your own out of it, that’s great, too. I noticed it kept it in draft when I pulled everything in, so that was nice that it didn’t automatically just flood my entire website with somebody else’s stuff. But I did it on a stage site anyway, so it really didn’t matter.
So overall, I thought that this is a pretty good plugin. Pretty good outside the box thinking here, and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s pretty useful. I could see it as being quite useful. I mean, I know it’s hard to believe in this day and age, but even I have to migrate an old HTML website to WordPress. And this could save a lot of cut and pasting.
Marcus: Well, 75% of the Internet is not WordPress, right?
John: I know but it just doesn’t seem that way some days. But yeah, there’s a lot to this thing to make it very useful and a very timesaving device. All right.
Marcus: Yeah, if it had scraped everything verbatim, including some of the Java script and iFrame codes and stuff like that that I tried to pull off of this other site, it would’ve been a 5 easily.
John: Oh yeah.
Marcus: But it just went under the mark, so I had to give it a 4.
John: All right, well the next one I’ve got up here is called Login Security Solution. And what this one’s for is this is a useful utility to help you secure your website and it does several things to help keep it secure. One of the biggest things that happens to WordPress website is the constant dictionary attacks on the login of your site. And what this one does is it monitors login attempts from IP addresses and then usernames and accounts. What happens is every time a dictionary attack is thrown at a particular username, each successful attack is slowed down until it hits a point where it’s just locked — where the IP is locked.
The other thing that happens with it is that if an account happens to get breached and it suspects a breach due to several attacks and attempts to login and suddenly getting in, it causes that account to be forcefully logged out and forces a password reset so the person has to use the password reset tool to reset their password for the account.
It tracks IPs, usernames, passwords, and much more. It has several other features in it that I didn’t quite get into. But all in all, it looks like a pretty decent login security solution for your website to at the very minimum slow down those hack attempts on your website. So check it out. It’s called Login Security, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Cool. See, I use Clef, and that completely takes out all passwords. You have to login with your phone —
John: Yes.
Marcus: — which is pretty cool.
John: Which is great when it’s a single person logging in, but —
Marcus: No, actually it does multiple accounts so that —
John: Does it?
Marcus: — every — yeah, so that everybody has to use their app. What’s cool is if you’re logging into my site and I look on Clef and it says that you just logged into the site and I go, “Hey, I only want John to be on for an hour,” I can set the time limit that you’re allowed to be on the site.
John: That’s useful.
Marcus: Yeah, and then it just locks you out. You’re just done. After that’s expired, it just — the next thing you try and do if you try to go anywhere, even on the back end or anything, you’re logged out. Pretty cool.
Okay, let’s get to the next one here. This one I had a hard time wrapping my head around this, John, but I think I figured this out. It’s called Admin Ads, and it’s a pretty easy plugin that lets you show ads within the WordPress admin page.
John: Okay.
Marcus: And you’re probably thinking, “Why? Why the heck would I want to do that?”
John: That’s the first question.
Marcus: What if you’ve got a ton of authors on your site? What if you’ve got a ton of guests or customers or things like that that log into their account or things like that on the back end? There’s a million things that I could think of, but then I realized you can add any HTML code to this, so it doesn’t really have to be an ad. It could be a widget to something, like a speed pipe. It could be anything — I mean, any kind of HTML that you would want some function on the back end to be. Maybe that’s you RSS feed embedding something in the admin area so that you can take a look and get inspired about what to write about — any of those things. You can embed a channel for YouTube so you can have like the latest news or something like that on there — anything.
So now I get it. Now I understand. I don’t really need to show ads on the back end, but I can use this HTML embed to put other things in there, so I thought it was a pretty useful idea at least in the way that I figured out how to use it. So I rated this one a 4 out of 5.
John: Nice! That does sound like a very good use for it. The ad part, yeah I couldn’t quite figure that out. All right, well the final one I’ve got here today, this one kind of harkens back to the good old days of building links on your website. But there are uses. This is called Link Library, and what it’s designed to do is to help you curate link lists on your website and display on a single page.
Now the good old days of creating links to link back to other websites and other things, probably not the best thing nowadays. But there are good uses for this plugin. Say you have a website that you need to offer up resources, such as a tax preparer — they want to offer resources to all the government links to downloading additional forms. Well, this is a great plugin for creating that list of curated links.
You could use it to also create a list of your favorite resources that you want to point people to, and you can also set the links on it as no follow, so that’s a benefit to it nowadays — very important sometimes. The other great thing too you could do is you can set up a page and let people manually submit links to your website if you want. I believe it has a spot in there to determine whether or not you approve those links or not. It could be useful, maybe not, but all in all, I liked the Link Library part of it.
I have clients where we’ve been doing some convoluted methods or manual methods of building links and this will be a nice way to sort of make that process a little more centralized for maintaining link lists of resources. So check it out: Link Library. I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Cool. Yeah, the art of the link is almost dead.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: All right, finally we’re gonna wrap up the show with a pretty cool plugin. If you use WooCommerce, this one is called Offers for WooCommerce, and this plugin lets you add a ‘Make an Offer’ button to products. It gives them a form that potential buyers can enter the details and submit their offer. Email notifications go out for all new offers, accepted offers, you can counter-offer and decline an offer, and it’s all managed within WordPress and WooCoomerce, just like you would any other order. So I thought this was great. If you’ve got some things to sell that perhaps you’ll just take the best offer, then this one is for you, so I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: Could be very useful. Excellent. All right, well that covers up in this episode; I covered up Disable WP Registration Page, which I gave a 4 to, Login Security Solution, which I gave a 4 to, and then Link Library, which again I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And much of the same flavor, I gave Easy Site Importer a 4 out of 5, Admin Ads, 4 out of 5, and Offers for WooCommerce a 4 out of 5.