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Transcript of Episode 259

It's Episode 259 and we've got plugins for Detecting Virus Activity, Advanced Login Limits, Menu Duplication, WooCommerce, Buddypress and more. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

It's Episode 259 and we've got plugins for Detecting Virus Activity, Advanced Login Limits, Menu Duplication, WooCommerce, Buddypress and more. 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 Marcus and John’s discussion of the weekly plugins we have reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for Episode #259


It’s Episode 259 and we’ve got plugins for Detecting Virus Activity, Advanced Login Limits, Menu Duplication, WooCommerce, Buddypress and more. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #259

John:                All righty then. The first plugin I’ve got this week is called Kaimbo Search. Initially, I was kind of excited about it when I was first looking at it and setting it up. But unfortunately, it sort of disappointed me in the end. It is a freemium plugin at the moment. They are in beta and that might be the bit of a disappointment with it. While they’re in beta, it’s all free. But once they come out of beta, they are going to have two to three tiers going from 10 Euros to – they don’t have a cost on their high end yet.

So anyway, it’s a very nice plugin. It sets up very well and it does an okay job of improving your search results. It’s supposed to be more thorough in the search results by indexing your pages and searching properly through all of the pages in your WordPress site. It took a while for it to index the site. I set it up on the WP Plugins site, because I wanted to try and improve there. Once it got up, initially I was getting some decent results but by the time it finished indexing, somehow it flipped to an error that caused the front page to lock to the search page, no matter what browser or computer I went on. It was really kind of bizarre.

And then it didn’t start returning very good results, so I had to pull it off. But it looked like it does have promise. Who knows? It may actually work out in the end once they figure out their bugs. But you can check it out; it’s downloadable from their website. It doesn’t seem to be in the Repository at the moment. It’s at Kaimbo.com and I gave it a 3-Dragon rating. Check it out.

Marcus:           Interesting. That’s pretty cool.

John:                Yeah, I was really hoping for more but I’ll come back to that one after they get it fixed.

Marcus:           Okay, well this next plugin is actually something that’s kind of a lazy plugin, no-brainer plugin – whatever you want to call it. What it does is it puts a little section of functionality within the tools section of your WordPress dashboard. It’s called Menu Duplicator and what it allows you to do is just duplicate any WordPress menu and you just duplicate it to another name and now you’ve got a second menu, so that’s all it really does. It just duplicates the menu.

I was doing a couple of different menus based on access level and I wanted to change it around just a little bit. Rather than making individual little items – okay, you can view this, you can view this, you can’t view this, you can view this. I said, “Forget that. I just want to make one menu that’s my member menu and one that’s my regular viewer menu.” If you’re logged in, you get to see this menu; if you’re not logged in, you get to see this other menu.

This allowed me to exactly duplicate my old menu into a second menu, in which I hacked that up and made that a cool member menu. So, I hope that’s understandable. Really, all it does is just copy the menu over, but it works very, very well and saves you a ton of time. It’s called Menu Duplicator and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice. I’ve actually wanted something like that for a while, because there’s many times where I’ve got to use the same menu twice or create a member’s menu that’s only going to have a few things different from the regular menu.

Marcus:           I’m sure that you’re in sync with probably 50 to 100 different listeners that as I mentioned what it did, they went, “Oh my God, finally!”

John:                Oh my – yes, that’s exactly what —

Marcus:           Yeah, so there you go, people. A little something to go for in terms of duplicating your menus, it is called Menu Duplicator.

John:                All right, the next plugin I’ve got here is called Virus Activity. When I first read it, I thought it was going to be talking about the viruses and malware that hit websites, but not so much. It’s a plugin that shows a widget onto your website and it lists up to ten of the biggest threats on an internet. It updates the list on a daily basis from the master virus list – I forget the name of the website that lists them out – and it includes links to the articles that discuss the issues.

Now, what I discovered when I installed it, was testing it was that the top ten viruses, eight of them seem to be ones that infect computers. What it does is it tells you how you can go in when you click the article, it shows you how you can go in and remove the viruses from your computers or how to prevent your computer from being infected, more or less.

It only had a couple of minor ones there about what impacts websites, so this is not so much a great tool for web developers. But if you work in the computer industry and you promote a business that people come to you for computer repairs, this is a perfect one to put on your website so your visitors can see what the prominent viruses that are impacting computers out there. A pretty nice plugin; it works well, sets up easy, and I had to give it a 4-Dragon rating. It’s called Virus Activity.

Marcus:           Okay John, I’ve been doing a lot of WooCommerce stuff lately and, you know, it just seems ever since Automatic acquired them, they just kind of had an onslaught of new add-ins and functionalities.

John:                Yeah, they have.

Marcus:           I was playing around with a theme that wasn’t necessarily WooCommerce enabled out of the gate and I started playing around the location of the cart – the actual indication of the cart and how many items are in the cart, and I found this plugin. It’s called WooCommerce Cart Count Shortcode. So we’re all typically used to seeing the cart up in the upper right corner, right? A little shopping basket with a number in it as far as how many items are in there.

But what if you could put that anywhere you wanted? What if you could put it in the widget area?

John:                That can be useful.

Marcus:           What if you can put it where your posts are?

John:                There’s another useful spot for it.

Marcus:           Well, this plugin allows you to do it. It’s called WooCommerce Cart Count Shortcode and essentially what it does is enable you to put that shortcode anywhere you want and it will generate a link right back into the WooCommerce cart. So I thought it was pretty cool, lazy kind of a shortcode plugin: WooCommerce Cart Count Shortcode.

John:                Very nice. Okay, the final one I’ve got here is one that helps solve a problem for many people running membership sites, and this might be something you might even consider looking at, Marcus.

Marcus:           Hmm.

John:                You know, one of the biggest problems with membership sites is people buy a membership – well, not a big problem – but it is a bit of a problem. One person will buy a membership and then they’ll hand out their credentials for all their friends and buddies and everybody else to log in. They could all end up being logged in at the same time, accessing the information at the same time.

Well, what this plugin does is this prevents that from happening. It sets it up so that you can limit the number of concurrent logins per user. In other words, you can say, “Hey, a user can only log in once per user, no matter where they’re logging in from.” If they log in from another computer, it logs them out of a previous session, so you can’t have two or three people using the same credentials to log in at the same time.

That’s what this plugin does for you and it allows you to set the number to anything you want from one to however many you want to allow. It’s very useful. I did give it a test and it does work. What happens if you try to log in from a different session or another browser, it pops up and says, “I’m sorry, only one concurrent login is allowed with this username,” and then it logs out the other one to log you in.

So it’s a pretty nice plugin. It seems to work fairly well. It’s called Advanced Concurrent Login Limit and I gave it a rating of 4 Dragons.

Marcus:           Very nice, very nice. Okay, finally I want to talk about something that’s an okay thing. I’m incorporating BuddyPress into something infused into some forum software with some – well, it’s complicated. But I wanted the ability to, much like Facebook where you hover over somebody’s avatar, it would provide some information, and this plugin does that – somewhat.

It’s called BuddyPress Avatar Hover and it lets you add a pop box whenever hovering over a group or a member (above their avatar), and it gives you a little bit more information at a glance. Now, I thought it was neat the way that it did it, but the output of the actual information was very hard to format. In fact, I gave up on it.

It’s nice if you know a lot more CSS than me, which is not hard to do. I’m sure you could figure this one out, but in the meantime I rated it a 3 out of 5.

John:                Very nice. Yeah, I have yet to really get digging into BuddyPress. So that’s all we’ve got. This week I covered up the Kaimbo Search, which I gave a 3 to; Virus Activity, which I gave a 4 to; and Advanced Concurrent Login Limit, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about Menu Duplicator, which I gave a 4 out of 5; WooCommerce Cart Count Shortcode – say that three times fast – gave that one a 4 out of 5; and BuddyPress Avatar Hover, gave that one a 3 out of 5.

 

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