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 #557 here.

Transcript for Episode #557

(Plugins lead-in rock music)  

John:              Alright, so we often, we are still covering over the ClassicPress options that are in here. I’m not doing any time in ClassicPress these days. So I don’t have anything new. Hopefully, you know of any ClassicPress users are out there, you will inform us of what’s happening in the world but we don’t have anything new. But I guess we have had some edits in the Show Notes. They will update the content there.

Amber:           One of the things that’s recently been added into the information is the new chats in the forum.

John:              Okay. Well, make sure you go check that out folks if you’re using ClassicPress or looking to use ClassicPress. Alright, as far as WordPress plugins go, let’s see what do I have first off the bat? The first one I’ve got for you is Gravity Forms Zero Spam. And this is a very nice addition.

If you’re using Gravity Forms you already know that the Honey Pot does a pretty good job in Gravity Forms keeping minimal spam but it’s not perfect. And then, of course, the spammers always find a way through just like the hackers. Well, this is a new one. Well, not new but it’s been around for a while. Been updated recently. At any rate, you install it and activate it and then you go into your different forms and you check another box. And it uses the Gravity Forms, the Zero Spam for you to lower the spam. I’ve just recently added this to a website. And it appears to be working very well to eliminate the spam from the forms, the contact forms which was getting out of hand. And it does get out of hand and it’s a real pain in the neck.

It recommends, you know, instead of using user or re-Captcha on your website try using this instead. Re-captcha actually doesn’t work either because you got a lot of spammers that are manually doing this stuff. This helps eliminate the problem to some extent. So we shall see. But as far as I could tell, it worked fantastic. It’s free and of course it gets a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Go check it out. It’s the Gravity Form Zero Spam.

Amber:           That would be awesome. I like the fact that it’s one of those plugins that you just plug it in and let it go. The first one I have is Mass Users Password Reset. So this was actually sent into us by the creators KrishaWeb. I think I said their name right. And they had something to say about it themselves. So I’m going to read that out first and then I’ll go on to my overview of it.

Mass User Password Reset is a WordPress plugin that lets you reset the password of all users. It can group the users according to their role and resets the password of that group. It sends a notification email to users about their new randomly generated password. The Pro version comes with the multiple methods to reset the password and customized email templates with the new password information. It supports multiple languages and is compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and Dokan-Multivendor marketplace. It has the best user interface in the latest version that supports some advanced features like custom field filter, test mode, and WP CLI support too.

Krishaweb was also kind enough to send us a copy of the plugin file directly. Thank you guys. When I checked this out, it is actually pretty awesome. It’s a handy dandy plugin if you have a lot of users. And when you plug it in, you will find the option Mass Users Password Reset added to your Users menu on the left hand side. And once you go in there, you see all the users and there is a button that says Reset Password. Make sure that you are ready to reset the password of every name that is showing because there is no secondary ‘are you sure?’ thing that goes on. You click it and off it goes. I clicked it to see if there would be any kind of option of setting the parameters for the password reset. There is not but it seems like a decent password generator from the email I got. So sorry dad, I kind of reset your password so you make sure you check your email.

John:              Yeah I saw that. Now I know why.

Amber:           Yeah but this is actually pretty good. If you have a lot of users and you want to do a reset of the password for everyone for whatever reason. Makes it a lot easier than doing it individually. In the Pro version, there is an option to schedule password resets. And you can also get the password reset log which could be very useful if you have a large user base. The free version will do the job for you though you will need to go Pro with this plugin if you are wanting the reminders and the logs. So I rate this at four dragons.

John:              Cool, check it out folks. Alright, the next one I’ve got for you here is called Sebastian. Strange name for what it was.

Amber:           Yup.

John:              Initially, I was pretty excited about it because I thought it would be kind of cool, nice little Easter egg on your site that people could randomly wander into and get up a message and a link to your site. So what it does is once you activate and set it up, it sets up a random one pixel dot, one by one pixel dot that floats around your screen. And if you ever tried to locate one pixel on your monitor screen, well good luck with that.

Okay. It does have an option to increase the dot to about five pixels where you can actually see it floating across the screen. And it ping pongs across the screen much like old pong hitting the edges and then bouncing off in a different direction.

Well, if you set it to have a message and no link, if you mouse over it, it pops up a message, whatever message you type. It pops up a random message. If you set a link on it, if someone mouses over the link, it automatically redirects them to the new website which I thought was a bit of pain because you know you want to give people the option to leave your website. Because if they randomly leave your website they might think you are hacked. So that one there was a bit a problem too. But I thought it was cool. If it was combined together to pop up the message and then offer them to click the link that would be really cool. Because you could have a random message and pop up.

It’s a really kind of cool Easter egg you can hide in and amongst the site. And at one pixel by one pixel, all it would take is then like everyone sits there and wanders their mouse around sometimes when they are scrolling down. They could just randomly pop over and go hey what was that? It did have promise but I was kind of let down on that one little point. Other than that, really great plugin. Go check it out. It’s Sebastian and I give it a four dragon rating.

Amber:           I remember checking that one out a while ago. Okay, this is a very long name; WordPress to PDF, Download as PDF document of any WordPress Post Types, Download Post as PDF, PDF Viewer, PDF Block, View PDF on WordPress – Document Engine.

John:              Wow that’s a mouthful. They really wanted to get PDF into their keywords for their title.

Amber:           They really did. So it has a very long title name. So I was expecting kind of a long name when I installed it. No, once you install it all you see in your list of plugins is Document Engine. So perhaps Document Engine was already taken for the title. But so in your plugins yes you did really download it, you just have to look for Document Engine. And once activate it, you will find the option Documents on the left hand side which is where you get to set everything up.

John:              Oh good.

Amber:           So once I started digging into this I kind of, I found it to be rather interesting design because the way that you set things up is first to set up a button and then you would choose whether that button would be on a post page, attachment, e-landing page, elementor, library, or IG map to connect this to the PDF thing. Like you can choose them all, you can choose one, kind of useful, interesting. They also have short codes where you can just put the button in and the button will bring it up. From there, you can personalize the setup of the PDF version of that poster page or whatever it is that will show up as a PDF that can be either downloaded or opened into a new window. So you can throw in your logo, you can throw in some extra things, whatever you want.

What it’s doing when you put the button in there is wherever the button is, it takes the page it’s on and it turns it into a PDF Viewer. So the person can more easily print it, download it, whatever they need. I could see this as being very useful for like tables, charts, school work for those who home school. I could see it being very useful. It is a completely free plugin, though it was a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to set this up and get it working properly. It is very well designed for what it is. It’s just, you got to learn it in order to use it. I rate it at four dragons.

John:              Cool, go check it out. It could be very useful for your site. Alright, the final one I’ve got here for you today I’m sure I’ve covered this in the past but I don’t remember when. It’s the WP Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon page. And you’re eventually going to need a maintenance mode or a blank out page of some sort. You’re developing this site. You want to keep people’s eyes off of it while you’re developing. Or you want to go into maintenance for a while and you want to keep everyone locked out of the site.

This is a very useful plugin. I have been using this one off and on for several years. Sometimes I switched to a different one from time to time. I end up coming back to this one because it is the easiest and simplest maintenance mode plugin to use. You just install it, activate it, go in, change your titles you want. If you don’t want a background image, you don’t add one or you add a background image for your content, or you can add plain colors back in the background. You can put a countdown timer for how long you are going to be out. Put a message in there that says under development or private site.

I have used it for a brief private sites or to deal with something while developing. It also allows you to stick a little link on the page to allow people to sign in if they are administrator. You can also stick a Contact Us when the site is ready on it so people can sign up for your email list. There are a whole bunch of little simple things it does for you. On the whole, it’s a really great Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon page plugin and it just works, and it’s completely free. So hey, go check it out. I give it a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              It’s the WP Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon.

Amber:           And the last one I have is EasyMerge. I actually really like this. It’s a newer plugin. And it was designed for developers everywhere who work in development and production sites. The way it works is you install it on the production site, activate with a license key which is thankfully you can generate it directly through the plugin. And then, you clone the production site to the development site and then you can begin syncing with the production site. So it is very cool.

From what I understand, you can go back and forth. You can get things from your development into your, you can go back and forth. And from what I understand, you can choose what it is that you are uploading, downloading. Very cool. I can see how this would make life a lot easier for a lot of people out there working on sites.

The main thing is make sure you get it into the production site or get in there and get it activated before you end up cloning it into the development site. This is currently free. So I would suggest that people go ahead and give it a try. It’s got fewer than ten installs right now. I can see this one growing up to be a very popular plugin if it keeps going and if it keeps working well.

John:              Yeah it would. Go ahead.

Amber:           I rate it at five dragons.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Yeah this one here looks like you have WP Merge or WP DB Merge as it used to be called. Give them a run for their money because this is similar to what they are doing.

Amber:           It’s similar but it’s a lot simpler.

John:              Yeah well the thing is everyone wants simple. Simple is the best. Have to test this one out because I would like simpler. I mean WP DB Merge works very well most of the time. But occasionally, I have run into trouble using it and it’s just annoys me when it does that. But anything that would merge the database back from your dev site and save you the grief of doing all that is a–

Amber:           Exactly.

John:              It’s a lovely thing to have. I definitely want to check this one out and hope it works. So I have to test it. I have to test it on the site I’m working on. Okay, yeah definitely want to check out folks.

Amber:           EasyMerge.

John:              Yeah, alright. Well, we’ve got no listener feedback or questions this week. And currently there is no contest at the moment. We’re waiting on people to, the worker bees out there as it says here in the Notes, to return with our next contest. Alright, worker bees get to it. Get us another license to give away so we can set up a great contest for all of you listeners out there who enter the contest regularly.

Amber:           And if anyone out there would like to help our current worker bees, contact us.

John:              Oh absolutely and we do enjoy the contest. They bring a lot of stuff to us. Hang on a second.

Amber:           Oh is the sky falling?

John:              Yeah, the sky is falling. So hang on a second.

Amber:           Well, it doesn’t seem like it’s falling over here. I must be in a good sound. It’s just cloudy up there. Although because it’s so cloudy up there, you know, I might not notice if the cows are starting to fall from the other world.

John:              Yeah, you never know what’s happening. Alright, well let’s roll this thing along here. You got to love life’s stuff sometimes. Alright, we are going to cover up a couple of quick things here to pull us on into the Q&A segment here. First off, the plugins I covered in this show are Gravity Forms, Zero Spam which I gave a five to, Sebastian which I gave a four to, and the WP Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon which I gave a four to.

Amber:           And I covered Mass Users Password Reset which I rated at four. I wish they just called it the Document Engine. WordPress to PDF, Download as PDF document of any WordPress Post Types, Download Post as PDF, PDF Viewer, PDF Block, View PDF on WordPress – Document Engine, which I rated at four and EasyMerge which I rated at five.

John:              Very good. And a couple of reminders. Our meetup, we do have a meetup plan for June 25th and so keep tabs on that. And we will announce when you can go register for that meetup if you are on the Vancouver island and you would like to be somewhere up in the central Vancouver island area where the meetup will be held.

Alright, if you are a developer or know about WordPress, or have something to do about WordPress, or anything along that line, you would like to be on an interview show, simply reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview and schedule an interview. We’ll get you on the show. And that is a separate show from this one and it still goes into the podcast stream for everyone to enjoy. And if you have any plugin suggestions and you’d like to have your plugin reviewed, or you just want to recommend a plugin for review, please submit it to us at wppluginsatoz.com/submitplugin. Alright, that’s that. It is time for us to go into–

(Male speaker)

It’s Question and Answer time!

John:              Absolutely. And you are right Hambian, raining cows will put serious dents into your car. I don’t know where that came from. Did you say raining cows?

Amber:           I sure did.

John:              Oh okay.

Amber:           I said I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s starting to rain cows or something because it’s so cloudy in my area.

John:              Okay that would, you would be able to tell. The splats they make would be horrendous.

Amber:           Not if it’s only just starting, there’s too many clouds that are hanging low. It would take them getting all the way down to near the ground before I could see them right now.

John:              Well you never know. Alright, off you go. Have your questions.

Amber:           Before I get started, if anyone out there has any questions they would like to have asked on the show, please send them into me at amber@wppro.ca and we will get them up on to the show and see if we can stump my dad. And yes, usually it is raining cats and dogs not cows but I wanted to be different. First question is what’s the difference between intranet sites and corporate sites?

John:              Okay that’s a fairly straightforward question for the most part. Intranet sites and corporate sites or you could just say public facing sites.

Amber:           Okay.

John:              Okay, because in intranet site, corporations in particular they have lots of employees. And so they have their own little network inside their corporation generally. They have their own little, not always their own service but they have their own IP address that that company owns. Those IPs belong to the company. And when people log in to their network, they are all connected to the same network. And they have their own servers inside their corporation where everyone can access the central files or the files particular to their rank in the corporation.

And so what happens is that the intranet site is a site that the employees can communicate with each other. And the intranet site allows them when they are at their office computer to log on to the intranet site and not have to use a password to access that. It’s just automatically they gained access into the intranet website. But what’s needed sometimes is these employees they work from home nowadays. They travel etcetera, etcetera and they will still need to access the intranet website outside of it.

So you build up a website that allows the corporate infrastructure IP network to access this website as if it’s part of their internal network. But yet, if they are outside their corporate offices, they can still log in to the intranet site with their user name and password to gain access to the intranet site. The intranet sites often have things like employee lists. They have employee lists, what’s that the department of human resources. The human resources documents that they might need, news and information about what’s going on in the company.

And so that’s a secured network website. It’s a secured website. Nobody can get in there. In fact, spammers can’t even register on the site because the security protocols written for the site means anyone who registers for the site must have a corporate email address to register for the site. So it’s a really kind of an interesting website. I manage one for a corporation right now. So it’s a really interesting thing to deal with.

Now the corporate website being the public facing website is the website that the public sees, the website that showcases what they do, who they are? What they stand for, all the other things that corporations do. And that’s the big difference in corporate websites. It’s the public facing website that the public can see access to whatever extent you let the public access. And the intranet is for the employees only or for groups. You can also take intranet and you can use it for clubs and organizations and make it a website like that.

Amber:           Cool. Hambian really distracted me there for a moment because he wrote can’t get the image out of my head. I wonder what the splash radius of a falling cow is, and is it different for unmilked dairy cows versus other types?

John:              Gosh, yes that is a scary kind of image.

Amber:           Well, we would like to leave an impression.

John:              Alright, well you can read out your second question but I think I made that mute.

Amber:           I think so. What’s different about setting up an intranet site from setting up a corporate site? Well, actually no, you didn’t really explain that because like what goes into the design and development? Like what is the difference between the two?

John:              Not much really. Aside from the intranet site isn’t usually as pretty or fancy as an external corporate site because the external corporate site you want pizazz, you want to showcase. You want to demonstrate your capabilities whereas the intranet site is all about internal information. You know the biggest difference between the two is setting up the security protocols. That’s the biggest difference between the two is security protocols. Who can access it? How can they access it? Where can they access it from etcetera, etcetera?

Amber:           Okay.

John:              Sort of you know like one of the things that happens is many corporations have VPNs to VPN into the corporate network. And when someone VPN’s in, their IP address is now that of the VPN. So they should be able to access their corporate network with the corporate intranet without having to log in because they have VPNed into their corporate site or their corporate network. So it’s all about the security protocols, the biggest difference between the two, aside from how they look and feel it.

Amber:           Your alter ego said internal, more usability for staff.

John:              That’s what it boils down to.

Amber:           Yeah, the last question I have is kind of two in one question but it’s really the same question. What is the hardest site you have ever built and what made it so hard? And what’s the easiest site you’ve ever built and what made it so easy?

John:              Alright, well we’ll come back to those questions after we close out so that we can wrap the show up and let the 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)

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