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 #516 here.

Transcript for Episode #559

(Plugins lead-in rock music)  

John:              Alright, ClassicPress Options. Well, ClassicPress looks like it might have a future after all. We are just not having time right now to help and get out there. And there is some stuff out there on ClassicPress. Nothing new from our end of it. If you’re a ClassicPress user, you listen to the show please, you know, kick some information our way and we will get it out there and spread the word for you.

Alright, as far as WordPress goes, what have I got? The first WordPress plugin I have for you today is called Snow Monkey Editor. And Snow Monkey Editor is a plugin that extends the block editor. It adds a whole lot of different things into your block editor for you. It adds things such as extensions, settings for the inspector, block styles, text badges, text highlighting color, all kinds of little titbits in there including some Java script snippets to help with it. Just a whole bunch of additional things that you can use for your block editor. I thought this was a cool one to bring forward to trying to get myself wrapped around the Gutenberg Editor myself. At any rate, this is one to go check out. It is the Snow Monkey Editor, and I give at a four dragon rating.

Amber:           And the first one I have is Click to Contact – Float Buttons. Doesn’t seem like it’ll be a tongue twister but click to contact is definitely a tongue twister. This is a nice looking plugin. Once installed and activated, you will find the settings for click to contact under your Settings menu option on the left hand side.

In there, you have the option of adding your links to just about everything from Reddit to Twitter to Instagram. Once your link is in place, there will be a button automatically created for you. You can choose whether or not the button appears on the left or the hand side hand. Right is the default. You can tell it to stay on the left side.

John:              Cool.

Amber:           It’s completely free, beautifully done, it’s a very nice plugin. I like the way the buttons go larger when you hover over them as well. But the lack of personalization for colors and look and feel of the buttons makes it a little less than what I was hoping for when I first checked it out. I rate this at four dragons.

John:              Alrighty. Next one I got for you is for those of you folks out there that are running your own business, web business, development business, hosting business, this is a plugin I (inaudible 0:19:56). It’s Code Monkeys Proposals – Easily create client proposals from your WordPress admin dashboard. In other words, you can create client proposals directly from your WordPress dashboard. They have got a long explanation about why they created it and how they created it.

But basically, what it does for you is it gives you a default layout for creating a proposal. You can stick your own logo in there, your return information, company name, project name. And then, you’ve got all these little default spots for the company name, client phone all of that. And so, when you’re creating a proposal, you go through and fill out all the information that needs to be filled in for all the different clients. When you’re done, you generate a PDF of it and then you mail it off to your client. I thought this was a pretty cool, useful tool.

Amber:           That is useful.

John:              That could be useful to folks that are just trying to figure out how to get their proposals built up in a nice, professional manner. I don’t do them like this. But I thought it would be useful for those that might just be starting out and looking for an easy way to do it or getting some ideas on how to deal with it. Anyway, I thought it was one that was useful to check out. Go check it out. It’s the Code Monkeys Proposals – Easily create client proposals from your WordPress admin dashboard, and I give it a four dragon rating.

Amber:           And the next one I have is IceCream Elementor Addon. I have to admit, it was the name that initially caught my attention on this. I was imaging like something about an ice cream but it’s not really anything to do with ice cream.

Instead, what you get is four widgets added into your elementor; Fancy Button, Image Gallery, Image Hover, and Menu Image. The Image Gallery is my favorite. It fits all of your images into a beautifully done mason tile style. The Fancy Button is really just a button but you can personalize it any way you want. You can even make it dual color so it’s like pink on one side and purple on the other. That’s what I did when I was playing with it.

The Image Hover, well, it looks sort of, it just sort of shifts upwards when your mouse goes over it. Useful if that’s what you’re looking for though I didn’t find it overly useful for myself. When my mouse hovered over and like the image would go up and half my image would be cut off.

John:              Yeah.

Amber:           But the Menu Image, this one is really cool too. You throw in a picture, and the menu will appear on the left hand side when you mouse over it. The initial set up is actually quite pretty. But you can personalize the menu and set up whatever links you desire. Change the colors, you can do all kinds of stuff with it. All in all, I think this is a great free plugin. A lot of thought seems to have gone into the designs for these four widgets, and they do work really well. I rate this at five dragons.

John:              Cool.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Alrighty, the final one I have got for you here today is an excellent way to waste time on your website or to get your clients or visitors to waste their time on your website. It is the Dinosaur Game. It’s the Dinosaur Game for WordPress. It takes the Dinosaur Game from the Google Chrome and puts it in your WordPress website. And of course, if you haven’t seen a Dinosaur Game you are living under a rock somewhere.

Amber:           Or they just don’t have kids.

John:              Or they don’t have kids, well, everyone runs across it sooner or later. Even I did and I didn’t have kids at the time. So you know, basically you are a dinosaur. You run across the screen, you jump over things, and you just do that over and over again until you finally get bored or irritated.

Anyway, I thought this was cute. It’s fun. It’s kept up to date. You just install it, activate it, and I don’t remember what they said about how to put it on the page but it’s there. And you can play the game and waste time and it is free. And because it was fun, I give this one a five dragon rating.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Check it out, it’s the Dinosaur Game.

Amber:           You could just use a short code and put it wherever you want it to be.

John:              Yeah probably.

Amber:           The last one I have for today is Update Your Footer WP. This is a really useful plugin especially for those who often forget to do the little things like update their copyright notice in their footer.

John:              Yeah.

Amber:           With this plugin, all you need to do is place the short code uyf_wp into your footer and it will automatically update your copyright year for you. It may seem like a rather small thing but really it’s the small things that break us down. I rate it at five dragons.

John:              Very cool.

(Dragon roar)

John:              Alrighty, well that wraps up all the plugins we’ve got for you. And we don’t have any listener feedback or listener questions. And we are still hunting for another license to start a contest. We will let everyone know as soon as we have another contest on the horizon.

Alright, we got to cover up a couple of quick things before we get into the Q&A segment. Plugins I covered up in this show is the Snow Monkey Editor which I gave a four to, the Code Monkey Proposals which I gave a four to, and the Dinosaur Game which I gave a five to.

Amber:           And I covered Click to Contact – Float Buttons which I rated at four, IceCream Elementor Addon which I rated at five, and Update Your Footer WP, which I rated at five.

John:              Absolutely. A bunch of great plugins for everyone to check out. Alright, and a couple of quick things here. There is a meetup. It’s planned for June 25th. I will be giving out the specific information the middle of next month for everyone that wants to sign up and show up for it. You will enjoy it. It will be held at the Oasis. It will take you having RSVP and confirm before you get the instructions on how to get here.

If you’re interested in being interviewed by WP Plugins, you want to be on an interview show, just reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview to book your interview time. I have time set aside specifically for the interviews when people want to be interviewed. And it’s a great show. It sets apart from the podcast. It’s a great way to promote your plugins, your WordPress events, your WordPress stuff, anything WordPress or related to working in the WordPress industry.

If you happen to have suggestions on plugins you want to have reviewed, go submit them to wppluginsatoz.com/submitplugin. And that can be any plugins whether you built it or someone else built it, you are just recommending it. It doesn’t have to be yours. It can be anyone’s.

Alright, with that, let’s wander into —

(Male speaker)

It’s Question & Answer time.

John:              With Amber.

Amber:           So before I get started, if anybody out there have questions they would like to have asked here on the show, send them into me at Amber@wppro.ca and we will get them in here and see if we can stump my dad.

First question I have for you is let me know if you have ever seen this with a plugin: deactivation goes fine, tell it to delete and it takes about five minutes of thinking, then it say deleted. When you refresh, it’s still there, deactivated but not deleted. Any idea what’s going on there?

John:              Bad code.

Amber:           Bad code?

John:              Well, okay, the deactivation-activation is done by WordPress. But the deletion itself isn’t completely done by WordPress. There is supposed to be a little cleanup code in the plugin. Or it could be WordPress itself is not working to delete the plugin. Because WordPress is just supposed to delete the folder. But there have been times when they don’t delete and I have to go manually delete the folder which means that any changes it made to the database are there.

But good coding practice for plugins and it started a few years ago. More and more developers are doing it now. If their plugin makes changes to the database, they are supposed to clean up and remove those changes when you delete the plugin. Because it will run a script before it deletes the plugin. So I would just assume bad code either in WordPress itself or in the plugin itself. But I can’t remember the last time that occurred to me where I went to delete it and it didn’t delete.

Amber:           I have a couple of plugins in my sandbox that just won’t delete.

John:              Oh I would say it’s the sandbox.

Amber:           So my next question to you is how do you delete something off your WordPress site when the delete button won’t work for you?

John:              Oh well that’s easy you FTP in, and go delete the file or delete the folder.

Amber:           And if that doesn’t work?

John:              If that doesn’t work there is something wrong with your server.

Amber:           Okay.

John:              You know, it means the folder or file permissions are completely wrong if you can’t delete it. I mean come to think of it, there is a case that I recall a couple or three years ago where somehow when it was installed, it got the wrong user attached to the files. In other words, it wasn’t the user of the account but it was the root user of the server. And if that happens then only the root user of the server can delete the folder and files. I haven’t had that happen in quite some time.

Amber:           Interesting.

John:              That probably happened because I was being cheap that day. I was logged in as a root and I uploaded the files as a root. I didn’t think about it. But yeah there is oddball things that do happen occasionally. And it is usually due to, if you can’t delete it via FTP then there’s something odd with the file permissions or settings in that account for that particular folder. Basically what I would do is try to delete some other file that was unimportant to see if I could delete other files but I couldn’t delete that, it’s definitely a permission file with that. If I couldn’t delete anything, the whole account might have a permission issue for its account.

Amber:           Would going through C panel do the same thing as FTP-ing in?

John:              Yes C panel is basically FTP. It’s just a different form of it.

Amber:           I always kind of considered them completely different things I guess just because they look so different.

John:              They look differently but it’s still the same kind of access. FTP is using a client program that direct accesses the server only for specific tasks with FTP. C panel allows you to do some much more like you can open up and edit files when you are in Control Panel File Manager. It’s like you do, different levels of things you can do. But it all basically does the same stuff.

Amber:           I have one more question.

John:              Okay.

Amber:           I’ll read it out. When building sites, have you found one style type over another works better in general, or are there style types that you would recommend to the client based on what they are building their site for?

John:              An interesting question. Alright, we will 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)