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 #555 here.

Episode #555

(Plugins lead-in rock music)  

John:              Alright, this week here, as far as I know there’s nothing new in ClassicPress. If there is, I’m missing it.

Amber:           We don’t have any new news but we do have a tutorial. So if you’re looking to learn how to use ClassicPress you can check out the tutorial site. We have a link to that.

John:              Okay, there you go. Check it all out but let’s talk about our WordPress plugins this week. What Plugins do we have for you? Well, the first one I have for you right off the bat is called is Disable WooCommerce Bloat. This is a plugin, if you’ve used WooCommerce, you know about all the crap it loads up. Now this is a really great plugin. It helps you get rid of all of that extraneous bloat that is in WooCommerce.

Now you can go in there and disable things, the bloatware such as the WooCommerce admin dashboard, the analytics and reports unless you really, really want those. You don’t have analytics somewhere else, the notification bar, the marketing hub, the WooCommerce home screen, all of those little things that are just unnecessary, you know, get rid of all that junk.

You can clean up the admin interface by disabling WooCommerce notice, the status metabox, the marketplace suggestions, the WooCommerce extension sub menu. All of that is truly absolutely unnecessary. You know, you can disable options to help your shop run faster such as the strength meter, scripts and styles, cart fragments, widgets, and more.

There is just a whole bunch of stuff in WooCommerce that’s really unnecessary. A lot of it’s been added over the few years to enhance the site or enhance WooCommerce, and sometimes the enhancement just bloated up. And this is especially useful if you are running a small store and you don’t need all this stuff for your small store, get rid of them. Your site will run faster. You will be happy. Your clients would be happier because your site runs faster. Anyway, I thought it was a really great one. It’s a freebie out there. So you want to go check this out and I give it a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              It’s Disable WooCommerce Bloat.

Amber:           I can’t hear the dragon.

John:              Oh you didn’t hear the poor dragon?

Amber:           I didn’t hear the poor dragon.

John:              He is making noise or he did make noise.

Amber:           Okay so the first one I have for today is called Query Monitor. This is a plugin made for developers. It is a developer tool panel for WordPress. It enables debugging of database queries, PHP errors, hooks and actions, block editor blocks, enqueued scripts and stylesheets, HTTP API class and a few more things.

In order to use it, you have to go into your plugin page. The word Settings is under the plugin. You have to click on that and it brings up the whole dashboard of everything that you can start working through. This I would personally think is a very useful tool to have on your site. It’s light weight, totally free. I rate it a five dragons.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Alright, the next one I have for you here is called Emergency Management. Now this one here is a very useful tool but I would only use it in an absolute emergency. This is particularly useful if you’ve been hacked or compromised in some way. Because what it does for you is it allows you to get in there and it resets all selectable user passwords, their roles and users and/or to delete the related sessions that they might have. It will also go in and reset your KEYS and SALTS to refresh your encryption on your site. And on a password reset, all the users will be informed by email that it’s been reset. And there’s an expiry function that expires it out so they can get it all set.

Anyway, this seemed like a really great tool to help clean up your site in an emergency or if for some instance, you really want to mess with everybody on your website and make their day miserable by forcing them to go reset their password for no apparent reason. Anyway, I thought this was a great tool that could be well used by many people out there. You will want to check this one out. It is the Emergency Management tool and I give it a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

Amber:           Oh I almost heard that time. A quick question, how would you go about using that? Would you?

John:              You would install it, activate it and then follow the steps to your user database and select them all and hit the Reset. It wipes out their current passwords and they can’t log in until they set a new one and wiped out their–

Amber:           I mean if you’ve been locked out and you can’t log in to load it in, would you FTP it in?

John:              Yeah you would FTP it in but if you’re locked out of your WordPress website something is wrong with you because as long as you’ve got FTP access, you are never locked out.

Amber:           This is true.

John:              As long as I have FTP access, I can never be locked out of a WordPress website because even if I don’t have access to their database because I have a script I can run for your FTP that inserts me as the administrator into their website.

Amber:           Definitely a very useful plugin that one.

John:              That’s not a plugin. It’s a script I wrote about five years ago. Because I was trying–

Amber:           I am talking about Emergency Management.

John:              Oh yeah that’s a very useful plugin to help clean it up and reset your site.

Amber:           Next one I have is Worthless Plugin.

John:              Okay.

Amber:           This is a fun plugin that you plug and play. It throws up random notices into your dashboard that are totally useless but rather entertaining only for the one who added the plugin.

John:              Yeah so it is designed to annoy some other developer who is giving you grief and you just want to throw it in there for his next logging.

Amber:           Well, it got me chuckling yesterday. I mean I have Adobe going in, in my sandbox. So every time that I get a new notice from this plugin, Adobe will be like Adobe has held your notices. So just the whole thing made me chuckle even more. I rate it at five dragons.

John:              Alrighty.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Okay and the final one I have for you is a very useful one if you are the owner of a website and you want someone to temporarily access your website for a brief period of time, and you don’t want to go through the headache of creating an account for them. What this allows you to do is it creates a secure, self-expiring, automatic log in link that you can send via email. And they can use that link for whatever timeframe you’ve given them to access your website. When the timeframe runs out, the link expires. They lose access to your website.

It’s a great little tool to help you out if you’re doing some development or you need to call in some outside support or help to your website. You need someone to just look at it briefly whatever the reason being. And you don’t want to have to create them as a user on your website. You just want them to come and look. You can create this link, email it to them, and say here you have access until this time tomorrow or the day after. After that the link expires. A really useful tool. Something I thought that many people could use. And I give at a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              That’s Temporary Login Without Password.

Amber:           Yeah that one I could see being (inaudible 00:26:21) useful as well.

John:              Yeah.

Amber:           Last one I have is WP Pranks because this is my absolute favorite for April Fool’s. And with April Fool’s right around the corner there, I wanted to bring some fun stuff. This plugin has not been updated since I brought it last year when it was already a year out of date. But it still works beautifully.

You get to choose from the following pranks for your site: turn the website black and white, turn everything upside down, hiding all odd numbered paragraphs, turning everything blurry, adding a poop emoji to the upper left of the page, turning all text into Comic sans font, or making all the fonts insanely large. I think this is an awesome one for April Fool’s for pretty much anyone.

John:              Yeah make great April Fool’s joke.

Amber:           I rate this at five dragons.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Well since you have got it installed you are one of the fewer than ten that are actually using it.

Amber:           Yeah I’m really sad that a fewer than ten people use this. Like we are now just doing some research to see what kind of April Fool’s plugins I could find. There were so many jokes and so many prank plugins a few years ago. But they have all vanished from the ether man.

John:              Oh, they have all lost their sense of humor.

Amber:           Yes like it’s sad. People need to get their sense of humor back and start playing pranks on one another again.

John:              The tech industry seems to have lost its sense of humor. I miss the tech industry’s sense of humor. It was so much fun in the beginning. There was always something but now they just don’t seem to have a sense of humor anymore. If you do create a joke, they all freak out at you. It’s like what come on relax you know. These are jokes. You’re supposed to have fun. You’re supposed to have some fun in life. Anyway that does sound like a fun plugin. It would be a fun plugin too since it’s a couple of years old to have someone fork it and make sure the code is up to date and secure. And then add a couple of others to it.

Amber:           Oh I would love for that to happen.

John:              Yeah.

Amber:           One of the plugins I came across, it was a really cool idea. What it used to do was is you put a Short code in your page and it would, wherever you put the Short code, it would turn that one bit of your page, slowly rotate it till it was upside down, I thought that was really cool.

John:              That would be entertaining as hell.

Amber:           Yup.

John:              People would be like what’s wrong with my computer? Alright. Well, looks like we have some listener questions. We should have somebody create us a jingle for this for when we do get listener questions.

Amber:           That would be cool.

John:              Alright, you can take it. Read it out.

Amber:           Hi Amber and John. Love the show! I need to upload photos to my site and I know that changing the size by inches or centimeters doesn’t actually change the size (3.92 megabytes). I read I should change the pixel size. What is the best way and the best pixel size to have on your website? Are there rules of thumb to follow? Thanks. Not Photo Savvy.

John:              Okay, you want me to take that?

Amber:           Yes.

John:              Alright. Inches is useless on computers. I used to publish a newspaper. I guess it’s been 20 years now since I published a newspaper. When you publish print, everything in print is done by inches or centimeters. The web was just coming into its own, back in 1999, when I was publishing my paper. And the internet or the web computer screens don’t work in that. They work strictly in pixel sizes.

You could have a one pixel picture that takes up all the way across your screen. It would be a little blurry at one pixel but the pixels define how sharp the picture is going to be. So when you are creating images, it’s created in pixel sizes.

And so, if you want to get a smaller file, if you’re looking at a smaller file because you list 3.92 megs here, your only way really to get the smaller file, well there are two ways. One is you can change the pixel sizes but that could impact the image and how it appears on your website. The best way is to just compress the image.

And there is multiple ways to compress images out there. There’s plugins you can get that will compress images you upload. If you use Photoshop or any other photo editing program, you can compress the image there as a JPEG into a smaller JPEG which still maintains most of its sharpness. There’s a lot that can be done for it.

The rules of thumb to follow for creating image sizes, well that’s a tough one because the pixel size is going to depend on where you are putting it on your website. You know header images tend to be larger than other images. Featured images are square. There is no real rule of thumb as to the size of image for it. It all depends on what you’re going to do with the image and how you are going to use the image.

But it can be a chore and working with images can be a nightmare and a half that’s been the bane of one of my problems for years in this business is getting the right images and the right sizes especially nowadays with all of the responsive stuff, the mobile versions to be able to get the image to compress down properly and still be viewable. That’s always a challenge to do that. So good luck with it. Thank you much Not Photo Savvy.

Amber:           Hopefully that helped.

John:              Alright. This is the last week of our contest.

(Jingle)

John:              Absolutely. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Thanks to Steve Goodtime and Brant Matthews for that jingle. And you only have seven days left to enter for your chance to win the lifetime single domain license with Interactive Geo Maps valued at $49.99 or basically $50.

Really great plugin. We’ve reviewed the plugin. We interviewed the developer of the plugin. You know, you can find out all that information on our website. You might want to go check this plugin out. It’s great for creating simplified maps of different items and things out there. You may or may not have a direct use for it but you know it’s worth entering the contest. All we ask for is your email address and all we do with it is send you a newsletter. And we don’t sell them. I never really found out how to sell them. You know, maybe I could sell emails. No, I’m just kidding. Just kidding, we don’t sell or give away your information. All we want is your email address so that we can send you our newsletter. So it doesn’t take much to go enter the contest and you might be the luck winner. So get out there and do it.

Okay, we need to cover out a few things here before we move into the Q&A segment. This week’s episode, the plugins we covered are, I covered up Disabled WooCommerce Bloat which I gave a five to, the Emergency Management which I gave a five to, the Temporary Log in Without Password which I gave a five to.

Amber:           And I covered Query Monitor which I rated at five, Worthless Plugin, I love that name which I rated at five and WP Pranks which I rated at five. Very much a five day today.

(Dragon roar)

John:              There we go. Dragon roar a couple of times for us because yeah this is a rare occurrence where everything is five, literally everything is fives in the show. The show number is fives, the plugins are all fives, everything is fives all the way across the board.

Alright, we do have a meetup coming. It is coming for June 25th. You want to keep tabs on it on wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. The date is probably not going to change but you never know. And we’ll let everyone know when they can start registering for the meetup. It will be limited on the number of guests that are allowed to be here. And it is a multi-podcast meetup. So it’s not just WP Plugin show. It’s also there is No Agenda show and the Tavern talk show. So we are going to get a few people from different audiences to show up to it hopefully.

Amber:           I think it will be so much fun.

John:              It will be. It will be very entertaining. Alright, a couple of other quick things. You know, if you want to be on an interview show, simply contact me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. If you have plugin suggestions or reviews you would like to have submitted, please go over to wppluginsatoz.com/submitpluginreview. Alright, with all of that being said, off we go to.

(Male Speaker)

It’s Question and Answer Time!

John:              With Amber.

Amber:           It’s so funny. I heard that jingle and the one before that but I didn’t hear quite a few of the others. It’s weird how on days like today I will hear most of them and not all of them.

John:              Some of them I think are softer recordings. I have never gone through and balanced out all of their sounds from the different jingles.

Amber:           Okay.

John:              I can do it. I just don’t make, I got to make the time to do that sort of thing.

Amber:           For our question and answer time, if anyone out there has any questions they would like to have asked on the show, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca and I will get them up here and we’ll see if we can stump my dad. The first question I have for you today is what do you do if you are three months or more behind in updates? Is there a way to take care that you don’t break your site?

John:              Alright, well if you have gotten three months or four or more behind in your updates which is a semi-regular occurrence to me on my primary sites because like the plumber’s pipes they never get fixed, yeah there is a way to take care of it and don’t break your site. Well there’s not guarantee it won’t break your site but there is a way you can take care and guarantee that you can put your site back the way it was before you broke it.

The first thing you do is go FTP download a complete backup of all your plugins, everything in your WP content folder, and download a complete backup copy of your database and get it nicely secured on your local computer. And then what you do is you go in and you start updating plugins. If you’ve been doing your updates for a while, you will know the plugins that are relatively shelf stable. In other words, they don’t tend to break anything when you update them. So you go through and you update those ones. And any other plugins you know that’s often times they don’t often break as much as they used to. They used to really have problems but plugins that are known to create breaks such as WooCommerce, the WordPress itself. Trying to think of a couple of others. Some calendar plugins. There’s a few–

Amber:           Elementor add-ons.

John:              Elementor add-ons.

Amber:           There’s a couple of elementor add-ons that drive me up the wall.

John:              Yeah it’s like there’s plugins you learn as you update that do have problems. They don’t always have a problem but they have had enough of a problem to where there is a good chance if you weren’t doing the incremental updates and you’ve jumped from say 3.2.5 to 3.2.9, you know, you’ve missed four versions of the plugin. So there is a chance that you know you could break something. So you can update them. And then you update them one at a time and you keep track of which ones you are updating.

And every time you update one of the plugins that are possibly problematic, you immediately go check your site to make sure it’s still working the way it’s supposed to. It takes a little longer to update websites this way when you’ve gotten behind but safer. It’s safer that way. And if it does break well you’ve got that backup of the previous version of the plugin which you can re-upload to fix the site.

Now there is a plugin out there. I can’t remember the name of it to revert to previous edition plugin. I have tried it a couple of times. It does seem to work. And it’s another thing you can do is have that plugin installed so you have a way to immediately revert. But suppose you broke something and you can’t get back into your dashboard which happens. Now you actually have to be able to FTP the old version of the plugin up there.

And then, the other thing is if you didn’t back it up yourself and you forgot to remember what version of the plugin you had, now it becomes a problem of how do I get that plugin version back? If you did remember the version of the plugin you had, you can always go to the WordPress.com website for plugins and you can download back versions of almost every plugin. Most plugins out there allow you to download versions all the way back to their first release.

Some of them have eliminated that which I find sort of sad but most of them don’t. Most of them allow you to do it. So you can get back to it. But the biggest thing you want to do and always before you update, any time before you update, make a backup copy of everything before you even do standard updates. I know it sounds pain in the neck but believe me it will save you hours of grief if something goes wrong.

Amber:           A quick note about the plugins that have removed the ability to download the previous versions. So far as I can tell, a lot of the ones they have moved it from WordPress, they have it available on GitHub. But that’s something that I have noticed. It’s kind of becoming a trend is removing it from WordPress and putting it on GitHub.

John:              Yeah well whatever works. Okay, next question.

Amber:           Is there, just an addition to this particular question, is there a way to update the plugins like incrementally say you go from version 3.2 to 3.3 before you get to 3.10?

John:              Yeah you could download it manually from the source and then FTP above one step at a time.

Amber:           Good to know. Next question is what would be the best course of action to take an upgrading a site in total that is 8 to 15 months out of date.

John:              Repeat everything I just said before. Rewind the tape and just listen to everything I just said before.

Amber:           So it’s really nothing different.

John:              There is nothing different. It’s exactly the same process. There is no point in me rehashing all of that because it’s the same process. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 to 15, two or three, or four years out of date. It’s the same process.

Amber:           Okay, well in addition to that question, how do you know if you need to stop a plugin at a certain version?

John:              It depends on how much custom codes you have in your site. I mean I have had to do it on a couple of websites where I have had to stop it at a version. I went to a new version and the custom code was no longer working. Instead of rewriting all the custom code to match whatever they changed, we just stopped at the version that’s there because the plugin was stable. As long as the plugin is stable, you just stop and leave it there. And then you go use the plugin that manages updates, the update manager plugin. And then, you click it so that it no longer gets notifications of updates for that plugin. So you don’t see it asking for updates. You don’t accidentally update it.

Amber:           Alright. I have one more question here. Is there a way to check a site’s security to see where it stands before you upgrade, or do you need to upgrade everything before you can actually tell where theirs security stands?

John:              Okay, well that’s kind of an interesting question. We’ll come back to that one after we let our girl take us on out of here.

(Female speaker)

Reminders for the show: All show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A-Z is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also leave us a review on our Facebook page using wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

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)