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 #265
It’s Episode 265 and we’ve got plugins for Security Audit Logs, Registered Users, Disabling Auto Complete, Staff Directories, Yoast to WordPress API Callouts, and a great new plug that pulls any image on any website into your media library.. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #265
John: Okay, the first plugin I’ve got here today is called Registered Users Only, and this is a plugin that allows you to lock down your website real quick and easy. It’s a plugin I’m starting to use more and more when I’m doing development versus using a landing page or the in development pages plugins that were used. This one locks it down to specifically prevent anyone from getting into the site unless they are logged in or through IP addresses if you do a little customization in the code.
It’s a plugin I inherited through a client and it can also help you build an intranet, and this is more information on what’s going to be developing from this plugin further down the line. But other than that, if you use this plugin with Gravity Forms, you can also force people to only register for your website, and with some more tweaks, you can limit it even further.
But as it stands right now as Registered Users Only, it’s a great plugin and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Outstanding! Well, what I’m going to talk about next is called Advanced Image Grabber, and this is a really cool plugin. What it does is you can point it to an external webpage URL somewhere and it will take all of the images that’s on that page and allow you to select them and import them. So it will just download them straight from that website and import them right into the media library. What do you think of that, John?
John: That’s very nice. It also sounds very dangerous.
Marcus: It does. It sounds like somebody could pirate you with just one click.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: But this is pretty cool in terms of if you’ve got, you know, an old client site and you need to pull a bunch of images over, stuff like that.
John: Yeah, I can see the benefits for it.
Marcus: Yeah, yeah – so I rated this one a 4 out of 5.
John: Yeah, very nice. Yeah, it’s got some great benefits but the use and copyright violations is just astounding for that one, too.
Okay, the next plugin I’ve got here
. This is one of the first in many plugins coming for WP Plugins A to Z. This is going to be one of our first plugins created. It’s called Staff Directory WPAZ. If you want to get a copy of it, you’ll have to go to the Contact page and send me an email. But I’ll tell you a little bit about this plugin. This is a fork of another plugin called Staff Directory. There’s a link in the show notes to the original.
What we’ve done with this plugin is it came to me through a client of mine who had a staff directory and they were using this plugin but it wasn’t adequate to the needs and there was nothing else out there. So we decided to take this plugin which had the good basics and start forking it out.
What it allows you to do is create a staff list which you can edit in the backend and display in the frontend via a short code. This is for if you’re running an intranet and you wanted to display your staff list. We added functionality to it such as Ajax Sorting for the frontend, as well as in the backend, the ability to export the CSV file, the ability to reimport the CSV file, and double-check to make sure if the entries were there, and not over-write them. It also did some cleanup of the interface.
We’ve added a whole bunch of new features to it and there’s more coming. This is a plugin that will continue to be developed over time and it’s going to be our first plugin that gets announced out to the world soon – and may even submit it to the WordPress Repository eventually, so check it out. Of course, since it’s a WordPress Plugin from A to Z, it’s going to get a 5, right?
Marcus:
John: No, just kidding. At the moment, it’s still rated at a 4, but it’s not a perfect plugin yet, but it’s getting close. So check it out; it’s called Staff Directory WPAZ.
Marcus: Excellent. I look forward to that and many more.
John: Yeah, well there’s another one in the pipeline right now, too.
Marcus: Yeah, maybe we can fork off all the 3’s and 4’s that we found and make them 5’s.
John: Well, what’s happening is when I run into a plugin that’s needed, I’m starting to fork it off since I’ve manage to find myself a really good quality developer locally who does work for me.
Marcus: Yeah, I do the same with my outsource team. I have them fork plugins that I like that gets me about 70% of the way that I need to get —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — and then have them do the rest as far as the last 30.
John: Time to bring them back here and we can offer them as an exclusive to our subscribers on the website.
Marcus: Hmm, that’s a great idea. Well, the next one I’d like to talk about is called Disable Autocomplete, and John, with so many autocomplete scripts out there and I’m talking about stuff within Chrome, Firefox – you know, those password savers.
John: Autocomplete forms.
Marcus: Last Pass is another good one. There are a lot of different ways that sensitive data could get saved within your browser, and sometimes you just don’t want that. To do your users a favor, you can use this plugin to disable autocomplete and it prevents items from being saved in your passwords or Last Pass, which can be pretty valuable if you’ve got stuff that’s relatively sensitive that you do not want somebody to just save the password, and I rated this one a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Very nice. Very nice. That could come in real handy.
Marcus: Yes.
John: Okay, and the final one I’ve got here is called WP Security Audit Log. This is a great plugin that helps you track everything on your website from user sign-ins to whatever changes they’ve made, including your own changes, whatever plugins you install, activate, deactivate, remove. It tracks failed logins and more.
It’s a great tool for helping you know what’s going on and if something goes wrong on your site. It’s got a log here you can go and check it out and see what happened just before it went wrong. It tracks pretty much everything. You can also expand its abilities by adding some pro add-ons such as email notifications, you have user monitor, and even more to it.
All in all, a pretty great plugin. Again, another one that I picked up from a client and check it out: WP Security Audit Log; I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: And that’s pretty valuable stuff.
John: It’s very —
Marcus: You want to see what’s going on.
John: — especially if you’ve got a site with multiple users.
Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. All right, I’m going to wrap it up with something that’s a little off the beaten path. It’s called WP API Yoast SEO and what this does is it returns Yoast post or page metadata in a normal post or page request and it stores the metadata in a field of returned data. Yay. Okay, so what?
But I want to bring this plugin to light not because I think a ton of people will be using it, but I want to talk about this to illustrate and highlight a point that these kinds of plugin interactions via API are coming a lot faster than you might think. So what this does is it actually takes metadata from within Yoast and you can manipulate it and do different things with — actually, even incorporate it within your post itself, so that’s pretty powerful. I only bring this up because Yoast is something that almost all of us use —
John: Yes.
Marcus: — in some respect. And this plugin is fun to just get a sense of what kind of interactions you can do with the API, and that’s why I wanted to talk about it. It’s called WP API Yoast SEO, and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice. Yes, we’ve got lots and lots of changes coming down the pipe for WordPress over the next year or two.
Marcus: Mm-hmm.
John: Okay, well that covers up. In this show, I covered up the Registered Users Only, which I gave a 4 to; the Staff Directory WPAZ, which I gave a 4 to; and the WP Security Audit Log, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I talked about Advanced Image Graver, 4 out of 5; Disable Autocomplete got a perfect 5 out of 5; and WP API Yoast SEO gets a 4 out of five.
John: Very nice.