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 See complete show notes for Episode #342 here.
It’s Episode 342 and we’ve got plugins for Cleaning Shortcodes, Media Library FTP, Customized Logins, Featured Images in RSS, Social Sharing and Login Notifications. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #342
Marcus: It’s Episode 342 and we’ve got plugins for Cleaning Shortcodes, Media Library FTP, Customized Logins, Featured Images in RSS, Social Sharing, and Login Notifications. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A to Z.
WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins 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 and live from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.
Marcus: And from the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And we have a live show for you this week and the first one in a couple weeks, but hey, we’ll do these every few weeks as an actual live show on YouTube, so make sure you come and join us here and we’ll make sure it’s announced out on YouTube – on Twitter – and on our Facebook page, so…
Marcus: Yeah, here we are. Come see us.
John: Yeah. We’re not doing live shows as often and as consistent as we’re used to, due to the fact that well, we’re too busy making a living now.
Marcus:
John: I don’t know about you Marcus, but I’ve been really busy since the beginning of the year.
Marcus: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of new projects that I’m working on and a lot of plugins stuff going on in my world.
John: Absolutely. Well, with that all being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, and first up here we have our usual allotment of six great plugins for you today, plus a few other treats and tips.
Marcus: Wait a second, I’m calling inaudible here, John.
John: Calling an inaudible?
Marcus: Yep.
John: What’s that?
Marcus: You forgot the entire section on where we can —
John: Oh! I —
Marcus: — be found.
John: Oh, I did! Oh my God.
Marcus: Back it up! Back up the meat and potatoes.
John: Back it up! Back it up.
Marcus: Wind that meat and potatoes back.
John: All right, I forgot. For some reason, my brain just leapt ahead to the really good, fun part of the show. Don’t forget, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. If you’ve got it, we appreciate you taking a few minutes to subscribe to us over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store.
Marcus: Yes, and here’s something else you and do. Watch this. Hey, Siri?
Siri:
Marcus: Play the Word – wait, let’s do this again.
Siri: Switchboard.
Marcus: No, stop!
John:
Marcus: Hey, Siri! Play –
Siri:
Marcus: Play the WordPress Plugins A to Z podcasts.
Siri: Now playing podcast WordPress Plugins from A to Z.
“WordPress…”
John/Marcus: There you go!
John: Awesome.
Siri: “…content management and website solutions on the internet.”
Marcus: That’s all you gotta do —
Siri:
Marcus: — is just ask Siri, “Hey, play the WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast,” and you can also do the same thing by asking Siri to subscribe you to the WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast, so it’s very easy to do. All you have to do is if you have an iPhone, just ask Siri to start playing it, and it’ll play the most recent episode.
John: There you go! Excellent. I hadn’t actually thought of ever doing that, so —
Marcus: Actually, I learned that from Mr. Dave Jackson, so thank you, Dave.
John: All right, well thanks a lot, Dave. Much appreciated. And also, stop on into the YouTube channel and check out our screencasts, training videos, and the shows that get put up there.
Marcus: Yep! Remember, you can also follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and subscribe to our newsletter from our site, wppluginsatoz.com.
John: All right, wow. Well, I guess this is —
Marcus: And now…
John: Now we can jump right into it. Let’s start that segment all over again. Off to the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, well we have our usual allotment of six great plugins today, along with some other treats throughout the rest of the show. And first up I have a premium plugin that was sent in to us by Mohamed Abd ElHalim from jozooer.com, and this is a plugin that is a Shortcode Cleaner. What it will do is it’ll help you clean up all those shortcodes that might be on your site, especially if your site’s been around for a while, like mine’s been around for going on nine years now, and I’ve accumulated shortcodes, removed the plugins that use them, and occasionally I go digging for them, but most of the time not bother.
This plugin here will help you go in there and clean up all the broken shortcodes that are in your website with a few simple clicks, and real sweet. Install it, activate it, and go. It is a premium plugin, but it’s only $17, so hey, well worth the $17 to save you tons of time. So go check it out; it’s available over at CodeCanyon. Links are in the show notes for it and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. Check out Shortcode Cleaner.
Marcus: Beautiful! So I was doing some uploading of some actual video files this past week and I noticed that there was a limitation in terms of how big of a size that I could put in there. I did not like that and I had a bunch of different files that someone had actually sent me. So here’s what I did: I found a new plugin called Media from FTP, and sometimes, you know, uploading large media files directly through the WordPress interface can let you down, and this is one of those instances. And regrettably, WordPress doesn’t natively support alternate media file uploads. You just have to do it right through the browser. So while you can always upload files that way or a custom script, even through FTP, WordPress doesn’t even register those files when you give them the link.
So this plugin, Media from FTP, was created to solve this exact challenge. So whether you’re trying to upload files through the WordPress interface or through FTP, this does exactly what it says. It means you can upload media files through your FTP and then display the media within the WordPress library, give it things like ALT tags, descriptions, all that kind of stuff, and it does it automatically. So what it does is it lets you look up specific files within an FTP folder and then register those inside WordPress.
It allows you to set up the media properties such as the date, the timestamp, and all of that, and it also lets you set a predefined schedule so that you can run the plugin at specific intervals and import things on the fly in the backend. Great plugin: Media from FTP. I rated it a 5 out of 5.
John: That’s a very sweet plugin. That solves a lot of problems for those people that are using cheap web hosting out there that limits them to 8, 16, 20 megs of upload through the browser.
Marcus: I once had to upload 9,000 images —
John: Yeah?
Marcus: — of personnel and people into a website, and sometimes it would just hang on one particular file for no reason at all.
John: Yep.
Marcus: And then I had to start all over again.
John: Mm…been down that track. But yeah —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — this is something that’ll solve a lot of problems. So yeah, go check it out, folks. It looks like a great plugin.
Marcus: Yep.
John: Okay, well that brings us up to this little bit of – oop – brain…brain…lost my notes. There we go. This show is brought to you by the following people and/or businesses:
“With all the changes in website requirements, pulled, compromised, and abandoned plugins out there, now is the time to update and upgrade your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, support, and more to keep your site up to date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time you use, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.
There you go, supported by JohnOverall.com Hosting Services.
Marcus: Beautiful! Nothing for me this week.
John: Nothing from you, all right. All right, and we also want to mention here that currently we do have a contest going on the website where you can come in and win yourself a premium license from Foliovision.com. They’re giving out a premium license for their Folio Player and this is a excellent plugin that’s worth $75. It helps you manage all of your YouTube videos, it’s got an excellent player in here that’s got some – got some excellent overlays for it for adding in your own pre-rolls, mid-rolls, after-rolls. You can customize some other bits and pieces through it. There’s a lot about this; you might want to go check out the interview I did a couple of weeks back with Grant, I think – his name just jumped out of my head – interview I did with him on the show, so we got in pretty deep into Folio Player, along with a whole lot of other stuff. So go check it out, enter the contest. All you’ve got to do is enter your name and email address and you can be a winner!
Marcus: Great. Yeah, it’s a cool plugin.
John: Okay, all right, that’s all we’ve got in that area, so time to jump into our next couple of plugins.
Marcus: Yep.
John: This week – this one here I have is another – it’s a freemium plugin with a pro version. This was another one sent in by one of our listeners out there, Faiza Yousuf, and it’s called Pie Register. Now, what Pie Register is is a plugin that helps you customize your registration page. The free version of the plugin allows you to do – ah, problems with my teeth – my mouth. I’m unable to talk!
Anyway, the free version allows you to go in and customize up one registration form, verify and moderate registrations, invitation-only registrations, create custom email template, it’s got Captcha support, shortcodes, has a PayPal standard payment gateway built into it for membership fees.
The professional version allows you to add social login, email marketing, two-way login, profile search, and more. It is a pretty intensive little plugin for customizing up your registration and login window. So go check it out; it’s a pretty decent plugin available from pieregister.com and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Cool. All right, next one here – this is called WPPM Login Security Notifications. So what this does, it’s very simple and it’s not necessarily security as it is kind of a security camera, I guess you could say. This plugin actually sends an email to the administrator each time a user logs in successfully or fails to connect. So the intent behind this plugin is to improve the security of your WordPress website with a doorman type of interaction, so it lets you see who is coming in and who doesn’t get in.
It’s not a full security solution, but it does at least provide a good indication as to who is logging in. So this is also great for designers and developers out there who have clients and it allows you to monitor your clients’ site usage if you’re maintaining these sites professionally. So if you want to see actually how often your client actually uses the site, this will be a great indicator that you can see exactly when they’re logging in. It’s called WPPM Login Security Notification and I give it a 4 out of 5.
John: Oh, that’s a nice little add-on to monitoring your website or monitoring for clients if you do that sort of thing.
Marcus: Yeah, it’s real simple and easy to use.
John: Excellent. Okay, well this brings us to the point here where we want to talk a little bit of listener feedback. If you would like to participate in this show and provide us listener feedback, just head over to wppluginsatoz.com, lower right-hand corner. You can click on the SpeakPipe box and leave us a audio message or go to our Contact page where you can leave us an email and get back to us directly.
Marcus: Yeah, so we’ve got one question today from listener Steve who asked this question via Twitter – interesting question: “I am trying to make a night mode switch for my WordPress website, but since I don’t know how to code, I’m limited in my ability to make one. Can you suggest anything that will provide my site users with a night mode switch?”
So for all you out there that may be unfamiliar with the term, night mode is simple a way to automatically or manually change from blue to yellow light when it’s time. A lot of you see this on your phone. I did find a plugin for you, Steve, that does exactly that. It’s called Night Mode for WordPress, which you can find at CodeCanyon. I have put a link in the show notes. It is $17, which is certainly a much better option than having to go through the frustrations of coding it yourself, so a good suggestion there and question for Night Mode for WordPress. Keep those questions coming.
John: Absolutely, and feel free to send them on Twitter, Facebook, go visit our Facebook page, Twitter – we do get back to you.
Marcus: Yes.
John: Okay, and we would also like to acknowledge our donors who have contributed to us between the live shows and over the past few weeks when the shows were prerecorded. We had a couple of donations from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., and the first one that came in was on January 17th and he gave us $50, and the note that came with it was:
“This donation is on behalf of Jesmond Executive Villas, https://www.jev.com.au which is a new WordPress site built by Jeremy and the team at Jezweb in Australia. The build process was faster and more enjoyable with a combination of OceanWP theme and elementor. If you haven’t checked out these before or recently we highly recommend you do.”
And that’s a pretty nice website, Jeremy.
Marcus: Yeah, Elementor is something that I’ve heard a lot about. I’ll have to check that out.
John: Yeah, I’ve been seeing it pop up from time to time in different areas and groups I belong to, so I may have to dig into it. And from January 23rd for Show 341 from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., he donated $50, and:
“This donation was on behalf of Argyle Pink Diamond Investments – https://www.argylepinkdiamondinvestments.com.au/a WordPress website built by Jezweb in Australia.”
And wow, that was really nice, too! Nice work, Jeremy!
Marcus: Yeah, Jeremy. You need to put together a course on how to get clients, because it seems like you’ve got a ton! Geez.
John: You do. You’re doing – you’re doing really well.
Marcus: Yeah, well I’m chalking it up to the fact that he listens to the show.
John: Absolutely.
Marcus: That’s why he’s got it.
John: Absolutely, and all those donations with all the links out and everything else that helps out, so…and also a big thank you to donors who came in under $50. You know who you are. Thank you very much. And the Patreon account is still running; I haven’t yet terminated it, so we had a couple of donations via the Patreon account, so thank you there – much appreciated. Every little bit of support helps out. It helps us cover the costs for bandwidth, for producing the show, for transcriptions, and everything else. Although transcriptions are a little behind at the moment, they will be caught up this week.
Marcus: Good!
John: Okay, all right, that brings us up – oh, one more – one last thing. You can – if you want to support the show, go over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, where we have multiple options to where you can support the show.
Marcus: Yeah, we do appreciate that. John and I do have full-time gigs that we do and it’s nice to kind of recoup the costs for the show that we provide free to you, so help us out: wppluginsatoz.com/donate.
John: Okay, and our final set of plugins for today. The last one I have for you here is called Social Shares – Social Pug. Now if you’ve been around WordPress for a while, you’re starting to notice in the last couple of years in particular that many plugins are dropping off the board. The developers have abandoned them, they are becoming old, they’re more than two years old, where there’s been no updates done to them, they’re starting to become unstable, unsecure, etc., etc. And this is happening more and more across many of the sites that I manage for my clients and some of the ones that I’m updating these days.
This is another plugin that I’m having to replace. I used to have another favorite social plugin that would add social share buttons to the bottom of a post or a page and the theme that didn’t include that sort of thing, and I had to go out and hunt for another one. This is a freemium plugin; it has a free and pro version. The free version allows you to set up the four common social media shares: Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest.
If you need more than that, you need to jump up to the pro version which gives you multiple social media networks to choose from. It gives you a pop-up social share and more. This plugin starts at $24 and goes up from there for the premium version but all in all, the free version should do more than what you need, because most people only share to Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Pinterest at the moment. So anyway, go check it out: Social Shares – Social Pug, and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very nice, very nice. I’ve yet to find the perfect solution for that, but I’m looking for it. All right, final plugin for the show. It is called RSS Featured Image. Now, this is a pretty cool plugin because it allows you to add a featured image to your RSS feed within the media content. So, what does that do? Well, nothing in itself but it does perform incredibly well when you pair it with MailChimp. That’s right! You can actually use this RSS item image tag within MailChimp and start to actually see your featured images populate your MailChimp newsletter if you happen to do it from an RSS basis.
It is lightweight, straightforward, no options, no clutter, no garbage in your WordPress dashboard. You can experiment with this on your own and tie it into your newsletter for a very good automated newsletter experience with all your new posts. It’s called RSS Featured Image and because of the fact that it works so well with MailChimp, I gave it a 5 out of 5.
John: Dragon’s sounding a little loud.
Marcus: A little.
John: That’s all right. I like that one there. I think I’m gonna add it to our newsletter that goes out weekly, because that’d be kind of cool to pull in the featured images.
Marcus: Absolutely.
John: Excellent.
Marcus: It’s still in development, so it only takes large images for now but you’ve got to scale them within MailChimp. Experiment on your own, but if you’re using a MailChimp newsletter that auto-populates from RSS, you need to check this out.
John: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely need to get that one checked out and moved in there. All right, well that wraps it up. I’m closing out this episode here. I covered up Shortcode Cleaner, which I gave a 4 to; Pie Register, which I gave a 4 to; and Social Shares – Social Pug, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I talked about Media from FTP, which gets a 5 out of 5; WPPM Login Security Notifications gets a 4 out of 5; and RSS Featured Images gets a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: All right, and a couple of – well, there’s no other reminders here. Oh, there is a couple of reminders. Please, stop in at our YouTube channel, check out the screencasts, the live show goes up there later, along with many other things. And a note to developers, if you would like to support the show and offer up premium licenses for giveaways and contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, and that’s pretty much it. That’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.
And that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.
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 by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one 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 to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter at @wppluginsatoz.
John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter at @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching 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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