All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of Marcus and John’s discussion of the weekly plugins we have reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #333 here.
It’s Episode 333 and we’ve got plugins for Multiple Shipping Addresses, Site Health Checks, Lowering Site Resources, Custom HTML Pages, Shopify Integration and an Advanced WP File System. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #333
Marcus: It’s Episode 333 and we’ve got plugins for Multiple Shipping Addresses, Site Health Checks, Lowering Site Resources, Custom HTML Pages, Shopify Integration, and an Advanced WordPress File System. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A to Z.
WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 60,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join John Overall and Marcus Couch for this weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins A to Z.
John: Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.
Marcus: And from Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And of course we’re here to do the WP Plugins A to Z show, giving you one of the greatest shows out there on the internet for WordPress plugins, and as usual, you can find all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time subscribing to us over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes store and leaving us reviews there. And you can also find us live on YouTube along with our YouTube channel contains several training videos and numerous other pieces of information that will help you out.
Marcus: That’s right. We go live every morning at 10:00 Pacific Time —
John: Every morning? Once a week.
Marcus: Well, every Monday.
John: There we go, Monday.
Marcus: It seems like every day.
John: It seems like every morning.
Marcus: And you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Also remember you can get all the latest news for WordPress and some of the other views that don’t make it into the show material by subscribing to our newsletter from our site at wppluginsatoz.com.
John: All righty, and of course we do have the usual six great plugins for you today coming from various parts of the internet and recommendations from people, and we’ll start them right off the top. Here we go.
Okay, first up the plugin I have for you today is called Health Check, and this plugin here is one – it’s a simple plugin that’ll help you determine a couple of good basics of your site, help you find out some of the things that are occurring in your site, tell you if you’ve got a recent version of PHP, if you’re running MySQL and it’s updating compatible, and these two items are actually kind of important. I did some work for a client last week who one of the problems on his site, his server was still running PHP 5.2, which can create all kinds of issues, including security issues, so these are things you’ll want to check out.
It also takes you in there and helps you to look at the transients that are running in your WordPress website and gives you the ability to clear those transients out or clear out the inspired transients. These are items here that when they’re loaded up can actually cause your website to slow down. Transients are used in many different ways throughout WordPress and plugins, themes – other things to preload data. The other thing it helps you is looks for auto-load options, and these are options and plugins and themes that are preloaded, and these too can use up memory and space on your WordPress website, causing issues during load. This is a way to help identify some loading issues.
All in all, a really great little plugin to give you a quick look at it and help adjust some of the items in your website. So check it out: WP Health Check and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Outstanding. All right, the first one for me, continuing with my trend of every week giving at least one WooCommerce plugin. This is called WooCommerce Multiple Customer Addresses, and the whole theory behind this plugin is to let the customer enter in and save multiple billing and/or shipping addresses – mostly shipping addresses – which can be used during the checkout process.
So the plugin allows the user to save a new address directly at checkout or in the My Account page within WooCommerce and you can select any of the predefined shipping or billing addresses, just like what Amazon.com does, and Amazon’s great for this. It’s nice if I have something I want to send my mom or my godmother or anybody else on my list, I can actually select just their shipping because I have it pre-saved. So this is just like that functionality that you see on Amazon; outstanding plugin and I rated it a 5 out of 5.
John: Yeah, that’s pretty handy. I’ve used that feature in Amazon myself to ship to different places when ordering things, so it’d be nice if you’ve got a WooCommerce store that has products that are shippable to other people, so…
Marcus: Absolutely.
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Marcus: And John, anyone listening to this show, you’ve obviously got a enthusiastic passion for WordPress. Why not write about something unique within WordPress? I am now the WordPress editor for Smashing Magazine, one of the biggest web design resources online, and I’m looking for a few folks to write great articles about WordPress. It allows you to get a lot of exposure for yourself and your work, and the nice thing is you get some money in the process.
If you’re interested, just go to marcuscouch.com/smashing. I’ve got a video there that tells you all about the process. There’s a form that you’ll fill out and it has an instant autoreply that replies back with more information, guidelines, things like that. Again, a great opportunity to contribute to the WordPress community, to get exposure, and to get a few hundred bucks for the effort. So check it out: marcuscouch.com/smashing.
John: Yes, if you’re a WordPress developer or writer or even running your own business, you want to do this, especially if you’re new into the industry. This is a great way to get your name out there.
Marcus: Definitely.
John: I’ve got a couple of articles that I’m working on right now that will eventually get to you.
Marcus: Oh, good.
John: They are some nice – what’s the word I’m looking for? – processes. Processes for doing certain things in WordPress that I’ve been documenting and all I’ve got to do is get them refined down. Once they’re refined down, they’re coming your way.
Marcus: Hm. Great!
John: So that’s one good thing you do is if you have processes in WordPress, this is a great way to get them out there, share them with the community, and get paid for your time at the same time. Also, people start to know your expertise.
Marcus: Definitely, and this is a global website, too.
John: Oh, yeah.
Marcus: So people all over the world end up seeing it.
John: All right, well this brings us to our next set of plugins. This next one I have up for you here is called WP Shopify. What it’s for is if you use Shopify or you have clients that use Shopify and WordPress (and I have a couple that do; they just opted for Shopify over WooCommerce for simplicity sake. And also because they were small.) But you still want to get those Shopify items into your WordPress website. This plugin here was a premium plugin and I forgot to bring the author’s name in here who sent it out to us, but I’ll make sure that’s in the show notes.
It’s $19 over at Envato and it is a pretty nice, simple plugin that will allow you to bring in Shopify items into your website and then do adjustments and tweak them so that it’s nice and clean and fits. Then they even end up with the checkout box right there on your website. So if they buy it, the checkout procedure proceeds right there without them having to leave your website, so this is actually a really nice feature of this plugin. So anyway, it’s pretty decent. Check it out: WP Shopify and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Nice! Shopify has actually improved a lot.
John: Yeah, well —
Marcus: I mean, it’s one of the go-to e-commerce platforms and it’s not that bad. People would think oh, I need something else like WordPress or things like that. It’s not always the case. Okay, so I’ve got a second stellar plugin here. This one’s called WP Custom HTML Pages. Now John, there are instances where you just want to create an HTML page. You don’t want to go through all the WordPress stuff, all the rest of it.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: This could be like an embed or an affiliate thing or a different page or templates or whatever – anything. You know, maybe there’s a custom form in the backend or something like that that goes to a different platform. Well, this plugin – check this out, John. So what it does is you enter within the plugin specs you enter in the HTML page that you want to use. Then you go create a new page within WordPress – not a post, but a page – and you enter in the shortcode for that HTML that you put in.
So what happens is when it comes time to rendering out that page, instead of just a templatized page that goes along with your website, instead because you’ve got the HTML and you’ve got that custom HTML code, it only displays that HTML on the page.
John: Oh!
Marcus: It doesn’t do any header. It strips out any of the WordPress formatting. In fact, you can’t really even tell that it’s WordPress at all, and this is an amazing, cool new plugin that helps when you’ve got all of those custom HTML cases that you need to use and you don’t necessarily want all the bells and whistles that come along with WordPress, so I rated this one a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: This has got all kinds of uses for building your landing pages.
Marcus: Yes.
John: And still keeping them tied into your sites.
Marcus: That’s right.
John: Yeah, that’s very nice because a lot of times, landing pages are custom HTML pages and —
Marcus: Mm-hm.
John: — they are sometimes a bit of a pain to get displayed or to remove your headers and footers, which you want to do, so —
Marcus: Right, this does all of that.
John: Nice, nice. Very nice item. Okay, well this show here, we really like to get listener feedback and we haven’t had any for quite some time. Our last review in iTunes was July. You know, we haven’t had a SpeakPipe in months and the only contacts I’ve had is people recommending their plugins or sending their plugins into me to get reviewed. So anyway, that being said, we’d like to get some listener feedback. Head over to our website, wppluginsatoz.com, where we have all kinds of options there and even links to take you directly to iTunes and other places.
Marcus: Hey! There’s somebody now.
John: There’s somebody now.
Marcus: Feedback.
John: So at any rate, feedback. We want feedback, so go check it out and also to let you know, this show is a value-for-value model, meaning that if you get value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we would like to acknowledge those who’ve supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over are read out and their notes published. For all those that come in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.
This week here we’d just like to give a big thank you to all our donors who came in under $50 and those who set up weekly subscriptions, and those small subscriptions do help the show out. Remember, the show does take time, effort to promote. And although coming in the next few shows, you may hear of some changes that are going to be occurring. So at any rate, you can support the show by going over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate.
Marcus: There you go. Very important and please help us out.
John: Okay, and this brings us to our final plugin for today. The last one I’ve got here for you is called Remove WordPress Overhead. This is another plugin to help you clean up your website and speed it up a little bit. And what this one does for you is it goes into your WordPress installation, and you have all kinds of standard links that are in all default WordPress installations. You have HTML links, header links, links to other areas, which you may or may not be using. You might want to consider disabling the emojis, the JSON API, the canonical URL – even a WooCommerce generator from Meta. There’s all kinds of things here. You’ve also got widgets that you might not use such as the archives, calendar, links – all of these different items in here you might not use.
So what this plugin very simply allows you to go in and disable those items with a simple toggle switch. Go turn them off, see if it helps improve your website. All in all, not too bad. It turned out to be a pretty easy plugin. It does help out a little bit and improves your site quite dramatically, so I give this one a nice 4-Dragon rating. Check it out: Remove WordPress Overhead.
Marcus: Nice. Any bit helps when you’re taking different resources out. I mean, even if it’s a half a second load time faster.
John: Hey, that happens. A second makes a world of difference to people.
Marcus: That’s a huge deal. Yeah, a huge deal. All right, let’s round it up here. The last plugin that I have is called File Manager Advanced, and I tried this out and it’s really cool. What it is, it’s kind of a pseudo C-panel or kind of an FTP client, I guess you could say, that you use right within the WordPress dashboard. It allows you to do all the stuff that you’d expect from an FTP, you can edit, delete, upload, download, zip up, copy – anything you need to do that a traditional FTP client does. But this lets you do it all within the WordPress admin dashboard.
So if you wanted to do things like upload say 300 images and you don’t want to go one by one by one by one, or you don’t want to go through the default media library editor, you can actually use this thing and drag from your desktop or Windows right into this thing and it will take care of that through a advanced file system. Pretty cool advancement – this is something that I’ve seen on other kinds of platforms and now it’s come to WordPress. It’s called File Manager Advanced and I gave it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Cool! You had the acing hand today.
Marcus: Mm-hm.
John: All right, well that closes out the show and this episode here. I covered up WP Healthcheck, which I gave a 4 to; WP Shopify, which I gave a 4 to; and then Remove WordPress Overhead, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I reviewed WooCommerce Multiple Customer Address, which gets a 5; WordPress Custom HTML Pages gets a 5, and we just talked about File Manager Advanced, which gets a 5 out of 5.
John: All right, and closing out with a little bit of commercial and promotions. First one up, I am supporting men’s health and family issues. Please support me and this Movember. You can see by the great beard in my YouTube video here that I’ve been going. Go on over to my Movember page at mobro.co/johnoverall and donate for men’s health issues. My goal this year is to raise $1,000 and you can help by donating anything. Currently, I’m at $100 so hey, ten percent of the way there. I’m trying.
Also, don’t forget you can go check out the screencast over at YouTube that we have there along with training videos. And a note to developers who would like to support the show, if you want to offer up premium licenses to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and fill out all the form and information there and we’ll create a plugin contest to give away one of your licenses and promote you in the process. And that’s pretty much everything we’ve got. Anything else, Marcus?
Marcus: Nope. I want to wish everybody in the United States and all who celebrate a Happy Thanksgiving this week.
John: Oh, yes! It’s Thanksgiving down there in the States this week. I forgot about that. Happy Thanksgiving to all of the Americans out there and all the ex-patriots across the globe.
Marcus: Yeah, Black Friday is coming. How many people have their websites together to take all those orders and who doesn’t? We shall find out.
John: Yeah, they’ll find out real quick which ones are gonna hold up and which ones are gonna crash. All right, well that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care. Bye-bye. Make sure you tune in after the credits to check out the extended version that gets put up on YouTube, where I demonstrate one of Marcus’ plugins. That’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.
Reminders for the show :
All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Thursday newsletter for more useful information directly to your email inbox. Wppluginsatoz.com is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and choose one of the weekly donation levels or make one that fits your budget. Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, or follow the show on Twitter at @wppluginsatoz.
John can be reached through his website at www.JohnOverall.com, or send him an email to john@wppro.ca. Marcus can also be reached through his website at marcuscouch.com or Twitter at @marcuscouch. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
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.