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 and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #551 here.
It’s Episode 551 and we have plugins for Embedding Google, Sticky Contents, Customizing Gravity, Sliding Simply, Wall of News, Failing Logins… and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #551
John: Alright, we do have a ClassicPress section because, you know, I felt like ClassicPress is going to do something and unfortunately I bet on the wrong horse there. But I’m willing to bet over the years, they will become better and better and actually get quite good. I look forward to seeing them, and we’re going to keep them here and talk about stuff when it comes to us. If you happen to be a ClassicPress listener, come on in, you all send us some content. Let us know what’s happening in the ClassicPress world and we’ll try to bring it as we find it.
With that though, we’re going to get right into now into WordPress plugins. And the first one I have for you out the gate here is called WP VR-360 Panorama and Virtual Tour Builder for WordPress.
Amber: That’s a long name.
John: Yeah well the reason I’ve got these plugins here is I have someone asking me about 3D display plugins. And so I went and looked and I was looking at a few of them and I found this one. I thought, you know, if you want a 3D picture and this is for 3D pictures only and using images only for a virtual tour. You see them a lot on real estate websites and other places. But if you’ve got something that you can, a camera and I think you can get 3D type pictures, the 360 pictures with your iPhone or something, you could put this plugin, upload the pictures and then it turns it into a 3D tour for you, which is pretty nice.
Amber: That’s cool.
John: Not 3D, 360 is a great tour. That’s all the way around, up and down for whatever the image covers. And this is a really cool display plugin for displaying that. And they do have a premium version of it which allows you to expand it out a bit further. I thought it was an interesting one to bring to folks for anyone that’s doing that or considering doing that. You might want to go check this one out. It’s the WP VR-360 Panorama and Virtual Tour builder for WordPress. And I give it a four dragon rating.
Amber: The first one I have up. Sorry I actually didn’t press the button. The (inaudible 00:19:03) he ran across my keyboard. There we go. First what I have up is Cubecolour New Plugins. I know we’ve covered this before but I wanted to bring it back. They haven’t really changed much but they are keeping it up very nicely and I really love this plugin. It’s a plugin that’s designed to, if I recall, this is how plugins were set up originally where they have New, Shared, Popular, Recommended, Favorites, and then Beta Testing all on tabs.
John: Yeah.
Amber: This is Plug and Play. You plug it in and then you can go to your plugins. And as soon as you hit your Active button you will get this (inaudible 00:19:43) and you can look through all the new plugins. Or you can go to any other tab and have them little separated. It’s really awesome. Honestly this is part of the way that we imagined keeping up the newest plugins because we actually get the newest one.
John: No, I don’t use that.
Amber: Oh you don’t? I sure do. I love it.
John: I just go to Plugins Browse New for WordPress. That would work.
Amber: Okay that works too.
John: Now this used to be the way. I used to log into my website and go to the new ones there because it listed them a little more efficiently. But yeah, this is, I don’t recall if you ever covered this plugin. I don’t recall it. But yeah it’s kind of a useful one if you are building out a new website and you just want to experiment with some things or find some stuff that’s interesting. Yeah they used to do that. They used to go New, Feature, Popular, Recommended, Favorites. As the beta testing, I don’t remember that ever being in there. But I didn’t even know plugins were listed as beta testing in WordPress.
Amber: They have beta testing plugins which I really love the fact that you can just go straight to beta testing with this plugin.
John: Yeah that’s kind of useful. I kind of like that part. That will be something to experiment with. If you’re a plugin aficionado and you like to dig into plugins, this could be a fun tool for you on your (inaudible 00:21:01) testing site. Don’t put it on your live site. As I say, don’t put it on your live site.
Amber: No. I rate this a five dragons.
John: Alrighty then.
(Dragon roar)
John: Cool. Alright, next one I have up for you is another 3D image and viewer plugin. It’s the Panorama Viewer – 360, I keep want to call it 3D, 360 Degree Image and Video Viewer. The difference in this one is that this one here is for 360 degree videos also. It’s a player.
Amber: Oh, cool.
John: It’s a player for the 360 degree videos. Let’s pop to the live demo real quick because this one here we just got to look at how it works with an actual video. Because the video itself, it plays, you’ve got a video playing in a loop. And this one here allows you to scroll in and out on the videos which is kind of a useful feature. And then, upwards, downwards and then all around. And it’s really kind of sensitive. But you have to of course have a 3D or a 360 degree camera to take the videos to begin with.
Amber: That is so cool.
John: I thought this was a good one for people because the player is going to be a very important part of what you’re going to do. Once you get the videos, you need something to display them and play them correctly. And then, this allows you to insert it in your site with a Shortcode. So all in all it’s really good. It supposably plays files such as png, jpeg, mp4s and so on. You can embed it anywhere on your site and even into your WooCommerce product pages. So could be something interesting depending on what you’re doing and what you’ve got going on. At any rate, something to go check out is the Panorama Viewer 360 Degree Image and Video Player and I give it a four dragon rating.
Amber: Next one I have up is CodeArt Units Converter. This is a really easy-peasy plugin. It’s designed for those out there who need this kind of convertor on their site. You use a Shortcode which is offered in the settings on left hand side once you activate the plugin. You can present calculators or converters for weight, speed, and area. The converter charts are very simple but they are very good. I can see this as being very useful on site that offers plans for building or something like that. It’s a totally free plugin and I rate it at five dragons.
John: Cool.
(Dragon roar)
John: Lots of uses for that one. Alright, the final one I have for you today is your Daily Bible Verse. This one is kind of interesting one, you know, if you want to display Bible verses on your website. And one of the cool features I found with it was once you get it setup, it’s just a widget you insert on your site and then you choose whether to display text or text and images or images only with the Bible verse that it chooses for the day for you. And it’s just random. They’ve got 31,000 Bible verses in their database that they use for you. And they have curated them all up. And you just install it, activate it, and boom you start inserting Bible verses on to your site. I thought it was a pretty cool little tool. It can show you all kinds of really interesting stuff. At any rate, I give it five dragons.
(Dragon roar)
John: It is the Daily Bible Verse. This show has been going 100% today.
Amber: You don’t know, at least we are talking (inaudible 00:25:07). So the last one I have is Automatic Tooltips. This is an awesome little plugin. It’s designed to have little tool tips throughout your poster pages. You can use these tool tips to create definitions of words, explain various things on the go so to speak so you don’t have to add the definition in the article itself. Like if you have a “how to” page on how to do something, every time that you put something down like go to the Menu on the left, you can actually put a little tool tip and have it point to the menu on the left that you’re talking about. It’s pretty cool.
Once activated, you go into the settings on the left hand side and you can add your tool tips one by one. You have the option to make it that your tool tips are only able to affect particular categories, only poster pages, or all of them. This way if you have a category that is “how to” you can make it so that only that category will get this tool tip thus saving the rest of your site from the little popup. It’s very useful and I really liked the design.
John: Cool.
Amber: I rate it at as five dragons.
(Dragon roar)
John: Sounds like something to check out and set up for you anyway.
Amber: Yep.
John: Alright, well, let’s go talk about–
(Jingle)
John: Absolutely our contests. Our contests are powered by the simple giveaway plugin, go check them out. Link is in the Show Notes. Current contest we have for you is a single lifetime domain license with interactive Geo Maps. This is a $49 value, $50 value plugin. It’s a really cool plugin. We reviewed this a few episodes back. I did an interview with Carlos. It was really kind of a great interview. You want to go check out those two shows for more details on this plugin. But on the whole, it’s a really good plugin for helping you set up unique, simple maps.
You can’t use them for a high definition maps or for other things. But it’s a really great mapping system say you are a world hiker and you want to hike certain trails and whatnots. You just want to put, I started here, I went here, I went here, and I went here and here, you know, things like that across the maps or locations. If you’ve got locations in major cities, you can set up pops on there that can link then to say Google Maps for more detailed information. There is a lot of things you can do with these maps. It is a really cool plugin and I really do recommend you check it out. Contest runs from now till April 6th. The winner will be announced on the April 7th show. So go enter the contest and get yourself the license for this. Contest is open for everybody.
Amber: I really, really like this plugin. It’s so much fun.
John: Yeah a lot you can do with it.
Amber: The more you play with it, the more you realize there is so much you can do with that.
John: Yeah there is a lot you can do with it. I only played with it for about half an hour or so. Since I don’t need actually need it for anything right now, I just got the good gist of how it worked.
Alright, gonna cover up a few things before we go into the Q&A segment. First off, plugins I covered in this show here were the WP VR-360 Panorama and Virtual Tour Builder for WordPress which I gave a four to, the Panorama Viewer 360 Degree Image and Video Viewer, which I gave a four to, and the Daily Bible Verse which I gave a five to.
Amber: And I covered Cubecolour New Plugins which I rated at five, CodeArt Units Converter which I rated at five, and Automatic Tooltips which I also rated at five.
John: Very good. A couple of quick reminders and some promos. There will be a meetup. We don’t, our Notes say no meetup planned but there will be one sometime towards the end of June. More details to follow as soon as I get that fully organized.
If you would like to be on an interview show, if you are a developer or you know a developer or you are into WordPress and you just want to talk some WordPress stuff, you can reach out to me for an interview show. Just go to wppluginsAtoZ.com/interview to book a time slot. I have specific time slots available for interviews and they are set aside specifically for that. If nobody books interviews, I do something else with that time but I want to make it as easy as possible. You just look at it and see what works with your schedule and it sets up the time in your time zone for the time zones I have set up at any rate. It’s really straightforward.
If you’ve got plugin suggestions, ideas, something you want to have reviewed or you would like to submit a plugin that you are developing, you can do that by going to wppluginsAtoZ.com/submitpluginreview.
Alright, enough of all of that. It is time for–
(Male speaker)
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: Before I get started today, I want to remind everyone out there that if anybody out there has any questions you would like to have asked here on the show, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca and we will get them up here, and we will see if we can stump my dad. First question is what is a shared host package?
John: Okay that’s straightforward. Alright, shared host package is pretty much every hosting that everyone has out there as a shared hosting package. What that means is you are not alone on a server.
Amber: Oh okay.
John: It means you are sharing that server with anywhere from if you go with JohnOverall.com hosting less than 100 other websites to if you go to someone like Bluehost you could have thousands and thousands of websites on the same server. And shared hosting is the standard out there on the internet. That’s what makes hosting affordable to people because servers are not inexpensive. They cost a fair chunk of money each month to have and manage and run a server. Because not only do you got to lease the server from a datacenter, but then you have to lease the software that runs the server. Then, you’ve got to either do it yourself and never sleep or have a support team that helps you manage your servers for issues and other things that come up with the servers. You’ve got to pay all this money out. So what the shared hosting does is it allows the cost of that to be shared across multiple websites and clients and also for small hosting companies or even large hosting companies to make a small profit out of the process of doing that and give less headaches to the people. That’s what a shared host package is and that is the standard.
If you want not a shared host, you got to go to your own server. A VPN, they claim a VPN to be not shared but a VPN is shared because a VPN is a server that’s been sliced into chunks and each person gets a specific allocation of the memory and the hard drive space on that server.
Amber: Okay when I first heard shared host package, I was thinking along the lines of like time shared vacation home kind of ideas.
John: No.
Amber: Now that I understand what a shared host package is, the second question is null and void.
John: Oh okay. How do shared host packages work and would you recommend these to anyone? Is there a specific reason for doing a shared host package? Well yeah, I guess the second question is null and void because it is the standard of the internet.
Amber: Yeah well because like I said I was thinking more along the lines of the time shared vacation home file.
John: That would be an awful crowded.
Amber: I don’t know do they have that?
John: What’s that time shared server space? Yeah somehow I don’t think that would work because everybody’s website need to be online all the time. See one of the best ways I can describe it, I can describe a shared hosting package is an apartment building. An apartment building is one server. And every apartment is each person’s website. And somebody built the apartment building and set it up, manages, and maintains the building, the hallways, the grounds on the outside etcetera, and then they rent that space inside each apartment to everyone.
Amber: That is a really good way to explain it.
John: And inside each apartment, each person is responsible for their own security to their front door of their apartment. Now someone might break into the building but they might not be able to break into all the individual apartments.
Amber: Okay.
John: You can think of a shared server as a giant apartment building. It literally translates out just that well.
Amber: What do you know, we turned my second question into (inaudible 00:34:50).
John: Yeah there you go, turn it into something useful.
Amber: Okay so my last question, I’ll read it out for you.
John: Okay.
Amber: How do you tell if it is your server site or internet acting up when you are unable to load up a site?
John: Alright, this is a fun question. So we will come back to that one after our girl takes us on out. So if you’re listening on the regular podcast, you want to hear your answer to that great question, got to tune into the YouTube channel. Alright, let’s go out of here.
(Female speaker)
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John can also be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
(Outro)
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.
(Child giggling)
(End of Audio)