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 #558 here.

Transcript for Episode #558

(Plugins lead-in rock music)  

John:              Alright, ClassicPress Options, there is no real new updates this week although I was on their forum yesterday sort of looking around. They’ve got some really good chats going on in their forum. They’re talking about some changes that they’re making and asking for suggestions for what plugins they really want to have into their core system. So there’s some really good stuff there. If you’re using ClassicPress or interested in it, go check out their forums. There’s lots of good discussion going on there.

Alright, let’s get into the WordPress plugins. The first one I have for you this week is called Conflict Finder – WP Fix It. Now the title alone made me interested in going and checking it out. Because I thought really something that will actually help me find conflicts in plugins? I would like to see how they did this.

I was semi-disappointed when I actually got into it and found out what it really is. I mean it’s a good use and it’s a great plugin you can have if you don’t have FTP access or understand FTP access to your site, this is a good plugin. Because if you’re having plugin conflicts or some issues on your site, the first thing you’re told by all developers everyone is first deactivate all plugins and see if the problem goes away. If it goes away with all the plugins, alright, reactivate the plugins and now start turning them off one by one till the problem goes away, because you know it’s a plugin. You just got to find out which plugin it is.

This plugin here what it does for you is it puts a little button right up on to the plugin thing that you can disable all the plugins in one click. You don’t have to go on to FTP and rename the plugin folder etcetera. And then, once you’re done you can just restore all the plugins in one click. And that’s all it really does for you. It doesn’t really do much else for you. It won’t do you any good if say, for instance, your website has gone into a white screen, the white screen of death. Because you can’t access the page to use the plugin so you are kind of hooked. You’re going to have to do it through FTP. So there is some limitations to it. On the whole, I think it can be a useful tool for some people. Go check it out. It’s called Conflict Finder – WP Fix It, and I give it a four dragon rating.

Amber:           I checked that one out too and I thought it was a pretty good idea but it did seem kind of limited.

John:              Yeah it is. It’s very limited in what it can do.

Amber:           First one up today for me is Magic Popups – Lightweight & Customizable. This is a pretty awesome free and lightweight popup plugin. I wasn’t sure how it looks since it’s so simple. But actually there’s a fairly decent look to it. You know, kind of old school (inaudible 00:23:21) I enjoy it. You can’t really personalize it than just the words and colors. But it does have a pretty decent delay option where you can choose how long before it shows up on your site, and how many times per session it will show up. That’s useful.

John:              Yeah that’s the one that was on the sandbox page when I went in there to check something, it popped up. I was like what’s this? It must be something she’s playing with.

Amber:           Yes I had fun.

John:              Yes.

Amber:           You can add text, you can add a button with an URL. That’s really about it. Very simple, very easy. Very easy to set up too. It’s very lightweight so it won’t slow your site down at all. And if you’re just looking for simple, easy popup like this then this is a great option for you. Magic Popups, I rate it at four dragons.

John:              Very cool. Okay, the next one I’ve got for you and this is one you should look into if you’re doing your own site and you don’t understand commands that need to be put into the HT access files such headers etcetera, etcetera. Because headers are becoming more and more needed for browsers such as Google and FireFox and Brave and others because they’re looking for the security headers in the site.

And there’s ways to get all that stuff installed on to your site putting lines into your HT access file for it. But not everyone understands that or has the time to research all of that. This is a plugin that you can use. It’s a shortcut way of doing it which isn’t always the best way to do these things but sometimes it’s the easiest and only way to get it done so that it’s done.

What this plugin does is it adds the cross script protection, access control out, cross-frame options. It puts in a whole lot of security headers in here. There’s a nice big, long list. And it does that by simply installing and activating the plugin, setting it up. You can go through and see the results of the test before and after all the headers are entered into the site so that you know what the security it’s got on.

Now some of these headers can create problems for your site depending on what you’re doing. So you might have to do a little bit of research to dig into it. But I thought this was a pretty useful tool to help those that either can’t afford a developer to do it or don’t quite comprehend exactly how to get it done themselves and they can simply use a plugin to solve that problem. So something worthwhile to check out to help increase the security on your WordPress website. It’s the Header Security Advance & HSTS WP. And I give it a four dragon rating.

Amber:           That is very helpful. That’s definitely something I’m going to be playing with.

John:              Yeah.

Amber:           Next up, I have Lite WP Logger. So this is a nice, light plugin, totally free. And what it does, it checks any changes made to your site. It also tracks the log in and all kinds of things. It’s actually very easy to understand, very useful. I was playing around with it last night and I noticed that somebody has been trying to log into our sandbox site over and over from different IP address constantly.

John:              Well, that would be the hackers that are constantly attacking.

Amber:           Yeah.

John:              As far as like get over it. Every website is constantly under attack.

Amber:           I’ve never seen it in real time before though.

John:              Yeah it was actually —

Amber:           It was interesting to see.

John:              Yeah it’s actually rather entertaining sometimes. To this day, I’ve actually had one time when I was really big into fixing hacked websites where the hacker was on the website breaking shit as fast as I could fix it. And so, I finally figured out how he got in there and I kicked his ass out. It lasted, it was a four-hour live battle. It was almost like watching one of those old movies like Hackers or something.

Amber:           Nice.

John:              You know, hackers are in real time. I couldn’t believe it. I was just astounded going through this. I’m sitting there typing stuff in as fast as my fingers can which isn’t all that great. And they are doing stuff and I am undoing stuff. It was really entertaining. It’s the only time that’s ever happened to me once. That was about —

Amber:           It must have been kind of entertaining though.

John:              Oh it was. I was excited. I thought it was cool. It was all in live time, me versus the hacker. And I eventually conquered his ass and booted his ass out and blocked him permanently. But he kept coming from different IPs. It was actually quite entertaining.

Amber:           So I really do like this plugin. It gives you all the information you need in order to understand what is going on. And it also gives you the information not just on like logging in and stuff, but it gives you the information on a free category like specific roles. It gives you the option of checking out the specific roles in your sites to look at the logs up. So very useful, totally free. I rate it at five dragons.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Very cool. There’s not too many of these logger plugins that give you everything you need in the free version.

Amber:           Yeah that’s why I really liked this one.

John:              Alright, the final one I’ve got here for you, and this is for our Canadian listeners. It’s the WooCommerce Email Transfer Payment Gateway using the Interact E-transfer System. Granted, it’s a little bit of an older plugin but it’s still pretty basic. But what it does is it sets up on your WooCommerce sites for your Canadian peers.  Canadians, we like to send e-transfers for some reason.

Amber:           We really do.

John:              It’s become the major way that a lot of my Canadian clients pay me now instead of writing my checks and waiting in the mail. I get my money a whole lot faster, I do appreciate that. But there’s never really been an easy way to do it in WooCommerce before.

You had to set up a special thing and say okay now email me the transfer and email me the password. Well, what this plugin does for you, is it goes through, and when they get to the end, they can choose the payment gateway of the email transfer when they get to payment. And what happens is they fill out the information in there and it automatically emails them a secret question. These questions are auto-generated for each unique checkout on the site. So it’s never the same question. And then, they have to get that email and they have to email that question.

So they get that email and they are supposed to use that answer and their question to send you the email transfer. Also, you get an email with the question so you know what the question is. You don’t got to wait for them to do it as a question and answer response. And it also tells you what invoice the payment is for so you don’t have to spend as much time trying to figure out who sent me money.

Amber:           That’s very useful.

John:              I thought it was a very usefully well done plugin for Canadian WooCommerce users for their Canadian clients for accepting e-transfer payments.  Really great tool. Something to go check out. Add to your WooCommerce site. And I give this one a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Check it out. It’s the WooCommerce Email Money Transfer Payment Gateway.

Amber:           Hamdian (phonetics 00:31:10) added in. I blocked many of the hacker probes with Cloudflare plus the firewall plugin. This significantly reduces server resources which pleased my web host.

John:              Oh yeah absolutely, it does work. You know, but they are still out there. They are still trying. They never ever really stop. They almost all are bots nowadays. There used to be live humans behind the keyboard but not as much anymore. Now the bots go out and do all the hard work. And then, once they get it done, they email the human. The human gets an email with all this information. The human shows up later to mess with your site.

Amber:           Eventually the bots will turn on their masters.

John:              Yeah well, you never know. What’s the one meme here, the greatest joke on humanity now is that computers are now asking humans if they are not a robot.

Amber:           Last one I have for today is PodInbox – Accept Voice Messages on Your Website. I think this is actually a really well made plugin. Essentially you are getting voicemail to your site. The first thing you need to do if you don’t already have it is create a PodInbox account. There is a free version. In the free version, you get one PodInbox for one podcast on one site. I think that’s actually a pretty decent deal.

Once you have that you need to grab your Show ID, which you just click the button in the plugin once you have it activated and grab your Show ID. And then, you just need to enable the Floating Button Widget and decide where it will show up; in the header, the body, or the footer? Also, you can choose whether the button shows up in both desktop and mobile or just one of the other. And you get to configure the button, not overly much just the colors in the free version. Though it is a lot of options for free version of everything. I think this is really useful if having a voice box for your site is something you really want to have. And there is no limit on how many voicemails you can get.

John:              Well that’s cool.

Amber:           Yeah. The original coloring for the button is just red with white lettering and they actually did a good job. It’s not an ugly red and it’s not overly noticeable on your site. It just kind of hangs out in the bottom corner. Just out of your main site but available if anybody is interested. And even though it requires a third party to make this plugin work, I still think it is awesome. It’s PodInbox – Accept Voice Messages to Your Website. I rate it at five dragons.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Very cool. Well we already have something like that on our website. We just don’t, it hasn’t been used in a long time. It’s SpeakPipe.

Amber:           Yeah.

John:              And we have been using SpeakPipe for going on seven or eight years now. I used to get a lot of SpeakPipe messages. But they’ve kind of dropped off in the last couple or three years where we barely get one anymore.

Amber:           People don’t even like to leave voicemails on the phone anymore, they would rather text.

John:              Yeah I know. It is sick. So what you need, you need a texting block on there. Alright, well that’s all the plugins we’ve got. And we got to cover up a couple of quick things here. Well, we got no listener feedback this week. Wait a sec, we do.

Amber:           Yes, we do.

John:              Well, you get to read it then. I didn’t even see it.

Amber:           Yeah. This is sent in from Andrew. He wrote to me and said Hi, just wanted to say I’ve been listening for the past couple of years and really appreciate the effort you and John put into the podcast. Thanks for all the hard work. I also think Amber has been a great addition to the podcast. It’s nice to have the contrast of someone new on the space along with a veteran. Keep up the good work. Andrew.

John:              Yeah, thanks Andrew. That’s pretty cool. I like that one.

Amber:           Yeah makes me feel pretty awesome. Even though I’m the green horn, I still feel like I am a good addition now.

John:              Well, you get to learn sometime. Alright, and contest, we don’t have a current contest. We’re still hunting for another license to give away from some big hearted developer out there that wants to get some promotions and support the show. We will have them. As soon as we have one lined up, we will bring it to you and let you know all about it.

We’ve got to cover up a couple of things here before we go into the Q&A segment. Plugins we covered on this episode were: I covered up Conflict Finder – WP Fix It, which I gave a four to, Headers Security Advanced & HSTS WP which I gave a four to, and WooCommerce Email Money Transfer Payment System which I gave a five to.

Amber:           Just quickly Hamidan said, listener feedback, I rate this show five dragons.

John:              Excellent, thanks Hamdian, we appreciate that.

Amber:           I covered up the plugins Magic Popups – Lightweight & Customizable which I rated at four, Lite WP Logger which I rated at five, and PodInbox – Accept Voice Messages on your website which I rated at five.

John:              Very cool. Alright, and we do have a meetup planned for June 25th. Keep tabs on this. It will be going into our meetup calendar real soon, probably in the next week or two as I finalize plans. It’s going to be held at the Oasis. So it will be by RSVP only. And you will only get directions to the Oasis once you have confirmed your RSVP. So make sure you follow.

It’s going to be a bit of two-step process. You have to go check it out on WP plugins meetup calendar, and you’ll have to go register for it over at the Rouge’s Tavern meetup calendar. Because it is going to be a bit of combined meetup between the Rouge’s Tavern, WP Plugins, and No Agenda meetup. So it’s going to be a mixture of a lot of different people from a lot of different outlooks in life. So it should be loads of fun at the Oasis.  Barbeque because it should be nice and sunny on June 25th. With a little luck we won’t have rain and have a nice sunny day up on the deck, the patio. And by then, my chickens will be in the chicken coop.

Amber:           Yay!

John:              You can go out and feed my chickens and look at my really cool chicken coop I just finished this week. Alright, that’s pretty much it. Oh a couple of other quick things. If you want to be on an interview show, if you’re a plugin developer, or know a plugin developer, or you like to talk about something WordPress related, you can reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview to schedule an interview. It’s an excellent show. It’s part of the podcast feed but it’s not part of this show. It’s a separate show. Stands on its own.

And if you have suggestions on plugins you would like to be reviewed, you have your own plugins, you just think some plugins we should review, you can go submit them over at wppluginsatoz.com/submitplugin. Alright, that would be it. It is time for —

(Male Speaker)

It’s Question & Answer time.

John:              With Amber.

Amber:           Before I get started, anyone out there has any questions they would like to have asked on the show, send them into me at Amber@wppro.ca and we will get them answered to the best of our ability.

John:              Absolutely.

Amber:           First question, when taking over a site that is new to you, what are the first three things you look at?

John:              Okay, when I get a website that’s new to me and it’s been around for a while, the first thing I look at is I go in and look at all the plugins that are installed to see what plugins they are using so that I can get an idea on how it’s put together. And then, I look at theme that is used with it.

Once I get an idea on all of that mess then I need to get FTP access so I can go look at the file structure to see if they’ve maintained a normal file structure for WordPress or they have decided to be creative, which is really a pain in the neck when someone gets creative with WordPress file structures. Because you can restructure your WordPress file structure so that, it was a good or an okay idea back in the beginning, you know, like nine-ten years ago. That was when people used to hide their WordPress content folder in another sub-folder somewhere. And they had redirects. Anyway, it turns into a nightmare the longer it goes. It just becomes a pain.

So I go in and I look at those three major things so I can figure out how it’s built, what plugins are used? And which plugins I know from my experience work well together, which ones don’t work well together. If I get an idea on, for example, everyone has a Contact Us form of some sort. They use forms on their site. I want to know what form plugin they are using. Whether they are using one of the ones that are a pain in the ass or not pain in the ass or one of the really good ones. I want to know what kind of security plugins they have if any. Do they have problems? If they’ve got membership site, what membership plugin they are using because some membership plugins work better than others. So it’s basically you want to get an idea on the structure and the functionality of the site to figure out all the different pieces in there so I have a good understanding of it. It’s all basics.

Amber:           Makes sense. Next question, say this new to you site is running oddly slow, what is the first thing you look at as the likely cause?

John:              Plugins.

Amber:           Thought so.

John:              You go look at the plugins and see what plugins they are using because there are plugins that work but they slow sites down. I don’t have any off the top of my head right now. But when I’m looking at the plugins, my memory kicks in there and it goes oh yeah that plugin is a known problems. But plugins are often the biggest thing in there. Everyone thinks it’s the number of plugins. It’s not the number of plugins. It is which plugins are used. It’s not the number because the number can go really high in plugins. It’s the plugins that are being used and whether they were coded decently. That’s the first thing.

Amber:           What would be the next thing you would look at after plugins?

John:              After plugins, I look at the theme. Plugins and theme are the two things that slow down WordPress the most. And there are themes out there that have plugins built in to them. Unfortunately, they are still in use. They were a great idea when they were first introduced and I even bought into the great idea. Well, we’ll just have it all in the theme. We won’t have to worry about plugins anymore.

Well, it turns out that that sort of mess creates problems two or three years down the road when you’re dealing with plugins that are in the theme that are not updated because they are part of the theme. They are not in the plugin folders so they don’t get updated. The security holes appear. It was a really great idea but unfortunately it just didn’t stand up to the test of time. And so, plugins and themes are the big problem.

After that, then I start looking at file structures or HT access commands or how it’s routed, the server host that they are on. You know, do they have firewalls in the way? The list gets pretty long after that.

Amber:           Okay.

John:              So there’s a lot of things there. I have a whole list of things in some documents that I’ve written up about this in the past to help guide my way through it.

Amber:           And the last question I have for you, when checking for plugin conflicts, is there a way to check that does not involve turning off and on your plugins?

John:              Okay that’s going to be an interesting question to talk about folks. And we will come back to that. For those listening on the podcast, you got to come over to the YouTube channel to catch out, to find out what the answer to this one is. We’ll be right back after our girl takes us on out.

(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.

(End of Audio)