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Transcript of Episode 345 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 345 and we've got plugins for Quad Menus, Native YouTube Subscribes, Landing Page Builders, Displaying Code Snippets, Login Editing and Amazon Polly. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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 #345 here.


It’s Episode 345 and we’ve got plugins for Quad Menus, Native YouTube Subscribes, Landing Page Builders, Displaying Code Snippets, Login Editing and Amazon Polly. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #345

Marcus:           It’s Episode 345 and we’ve got plugins for Quad Menus, Native YouTube Subscribes, Landing Page Builders, Displaying Code Snippets, Login Editing, and Amazon Polly. It’s all coming up 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 the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                And we have the usual great show for you today. But of course right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review or subscribing to the show, and it’s as simple as…

Marcus:           Oh, gosh. You’re gonna make me hit…Hey, Siri!

Siri:                 

John:                Oh, Siri didn’t catch that time.

Marcus:           Hey, Siri!

Siri:                 

Marcus:           Subscribe me to the WordPress Plugins A to Z podcast.

Siri:                  Just to confirm, would you like to subscribe to the podcast WordPress Plugins from A to Z by John Overall and Marcus Couch, WordPress Plugin podcast WordPress?

Marcus:           Yes.

Siri:                 

Marcus:          

John:                All done!

Siri:                  Okay. I have subscribed you.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           Thanks!

John:                It’s simple as that. There you go. You don’t have to type anything or do anything.

Marcus:           Nope.

John:                That’s how easy it is to subscribe to it.

Marcus:           Nope, you don’t even have to get out of bed.

John:                There you go, so that’s how easy it is, folks. Go subscribe to the show and then you can catch every episode as they come out live – or not live, but —

Marcus:           Subscribe on your girlfriend’s phone, your husband’s phone, your —

John:                — everybody’s phone!

Marcus:           — boyfriend’s phone…

John:                Everybody’s phones.

Marcus:           If they’re in the shower, make them subscribe. Come on.

John:                There you go. Build our subscription list. All right, and you can stop in at our YouTube channel, check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live, and next week our show will be live, so make sure you check us out. And follow us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz, where we will make sure it’s all notification there or on our Facebook page.

Marcus:           That’s right. And hey, also go to our website, wppluginsatoz.com and subscribe to our newsletter because that’s where we talk about all the news and all the stuff that’s important every week. Here, we just stick to the plugins.

John:                Absolutely, and speaking of the plugins, it’s time to dive into the meat and potatoes of the show.

And we have our usual great allotment of six great plugins and first off I have for you a plugin here called QuadMenu, which I forgot the link to. But this one here is a plugin – it’s a freemium plugin – submitted to us by Juan Mastromarino – god, I’m good at butchering names. Anyway, QuadMenu is a new WordPress mega menu plugin which gives you horizontal and vertical layouts designed for developers. The WordPress mega menu includes many powerful features that will blow your mind, customize the admin panel, allows you to change the colors and menu layout easily at your fingertips.

The panel allows you to create and unlimited number of skins as it includes an instance for each theme location in your theme. So this is a really great plugin. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, but it looks to be quite nice if you don’t have a theme that has the built-in mega menus. This is a nice way to add the mega menus to your theme, and those are pretty useful for displaying up your posts and pages with images and other things when people hit the menu. It makes for a very sharp website I’ve noticed.

So go check it out: QuadMenu. You can get the free version from their website and the premium version is there also. I believe it starts at about $39 and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! And I take the pronunciation is Juan Mastromarino.

John:                Mastromarino, there you go. Thank you.

Marcus:           Yeah. All right, let’s get down and dirty here. Let’s talk a little YouTube. You know, one of the things that I think we do incorrectly is a lot of times we – let me get some water here, John.

John:                Absolutely.

Marcus:           This is some deep-thought stuff. I need to get ready.

John:                Forty-two.

Marcus:           Okay, so let’s talk about YouTube here for a second. One of the biggest mistakes that I think we all make in terms of linking out socially is that it doesn’t – we don’t ask somebody to follow us straight off. It’s like, “Hey, share this,” or do something else, and it doesn’t really hook the person. It may help for one particular post, but it certainly doesn’t subscribe them to anything.

Now, here’s something that’s called Native YouTube Subscribe Button that actually provides a native YouTube subscriber that self-updates itself as to how many subscriptions or, you know, subscribers that you actually have. So if you want to put YouTube anywhere on your site, you should be doing it with this button that automatically subscribes somebody to get all of your future content from now on. That’s just plain simple.

John:                Nice!

Marcus:           That’s where it’s at. So check out this plugin: Native YouTube Subscribe Button. I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Yes, that’s something I’m starting to realize is very important as we demonstrate in the beginning of the show is subscribe, make it as easy as possible for everyone to do that. Not only share your stuff, but subscribe to it.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                All right, well this show here is brought to you by JohnOverall.com:

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20-plus years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time you used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

                        There you go. Go support me.

Marcus:           And speaking of support, we are happy to see all of the people enter our contest for the premium plugin by Foliovision called the FV Player Pro, and next show we’re going to actually announce the winner. So check out that plugin if you haven’t already over at Foliovision.com.

John:                There you go, and we’ll have more contests coming your way shortly as soon as we have – actually, I have another license in the queue from another developer who I interviewed recently, and that’ll be coming up as soon as this is all set up and announced out.

Marcus:           Great!

John:                Okay, and that brings us up to our next set of plugins here, and the next one I’ve got here a free plugin that was submitted by Umar Bajwa, and this one here is called PluginOps Page Builder – Landing Page Builder, and it builds landing templates, page designer, coming soon, and more. This is a page builder plugin – if you don’t already have a page builder built into your website, it’s another one of the multiple page builder plugins that I’ve seen out there.

This one looks to be pretty nice to use, has a drag-n-drop layout builder, visual page editor, opt-in forms, lots of widgets, WooCommerce products, live form builder, MailChimp integration, and more. So go check this plugin out. It’s called PluginOps Page Builder – Landing Page Builder and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Yeah, nice. I love a good landing page.

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           Well John, one of the things that, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of is editing blog posts and articles that are related to WordPress. But one of the hardest things that I’ve found is actually when somebody wants to talk about adding in PHP code or JavaScript code or things like that, it’s really hard to kind of get that to line up correctly in format in a blog.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           You really can’t show it that it works well in a form that also adheres to the type styles and the formatting stiles of the rest of your posts. But I found this plugin; it’s called Code View, and actually it lets you embed the programming code within your posts, but the cool thing is – and I’ve seen that before.

But this actually gives you the line numbers of the code as well, so that’s really a nice benefit. It’s a great point of reference and that’s exactly why I wanted to use it. I had stuff that was a couple hundred lines long as it was pretty crazy, so it looked really nice when I installed this plugin which is called Code View, and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, that’s kind of cool! I like that. That’s always quite handy. I know that some of the stuff I’ve been working on is going to have code and other snippets in it when is start publishing it in a couple of months. So this can come in quite handy when it’s time to display the code snippets that I need to display in there, and —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — I’ve got quite a few of those.

Marcus:           What’s interesting is it kinda – when I was doing this kind of thing and when I was experimenting with this particular plugin, I was reminiscent of my youth when I first got into computers and I’m about to age or date myself here by saying this.

John:               

Marcus:           Well, when I first started —

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           — there were magazines that came out —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — that had the programming code – the program, actually – in the magazine.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — that you would – there was no disk in the magazine.

John:                I remember those.

Marcus:           There was you and your fingers and a whole afternoon of typing this program in word-for-word, letter-for-letter, number-for-number.

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           And praying that you didn’t have a typo somewhere and make a syntax error.

John:                Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I remember my early days in the computer world.

Marcus:          

John:                Much like that, I still have my original program I wrote on paper punch tape.

Marcus:           Geez.

John:                Actually, I should have it framed and put it on the wall, because it’s really kind of cool.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Nothing out there can read it anymore. Once upon a time, I could read the punch holes myself, but yeah. The very first program I wrote on paper punch tape.

Marcus:           Wow. All right, so let’s get into some listener feedback, shall we?

John:                Absolutely, and if you would like to participate and be active on the show, all you gotta do is go to wppluginsatoz.com, go down to the lower right-hand corner, click on the SpeakPipe where you can leave us a voice message we’ll play on the show. We’ll answer that question or you can go to our Contact page, leave us an email, or contact us on your Facebook or Twitter pages.

Marcus:           Yep, and this came in from a message on our Facebook page. The question is from Adam in Jackson, Tennessee: “Hi, John and Marcus. I love the show and have the need for a plugin.” Boy, did you pick the right place, Adam. “I want to be able to accept Bitcoin as either a donation or an exchange for swag on my site. What’s the best plugin to use?”

Hmmm…what do you think about that, John?

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           Bitcoin. Would you take a Bitcoin for services?

John:                Sure, if they were giving me Bitcoin. Depends on the services, though.

Marcus:          

John:                With the way it’s falling right now, I might reconsider it. But…

Marcus:           All right, well the best Bitcoin setup that I’ve seen so far is actually from an outfit called BitPay, and the plugin is in the show notes. It is called BitPay for WooCommerce. It sets up just like any other payment gateway that you’d use in Woo, you normally would set up like Stripe or PayPal or anything like that. It actually connects to a BitPay merchant account, which you do need to sign up for. But a mere 24 hours after signup, you will be ready to accept your very first Bitcoin into your WordPress site, Adam. So check it out. It is called BitPay for WooCommerce.

John:                There you go. Make sure you accept Bitcoin in about a month when it’s really gonna be cheaper and —

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                — who knows? It could keep falling.

Marcus:           Yeah, and I take cash, so if you want to tip some of that.

John:                Yeah, cash…

Marcus:           Cash some of those coins in when you’re done —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — I’ll take it.

John:                All right, well this show here is also a value-for-value show and meaning that if you get some value, please give some value back. And to do that, all you have to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, where you can enter any amount you want or pick one of the ready options there to donate to the show. The money that comes in through donations is used to support the show by helping to pay for our general expenses such as hosting, bandwidth, and also transcriptions and more – all the usual expenses for running a podcast is paid for through the donations to the show. So please support the show and if you donate $50 or more, you get a link that you can place into the show notes and also we read and acknowledge you out on the air.

Marcus:           That is correct, John.

John:                All right!

Marcus:           And with that…

John:                Our final set of plugins for today, and the final one I’ve got for you is called Logy, the New Era of Login/Registration. Now, this plugin here is one that helps you customize up a login page. It gives you some secure advance registration, allows you to reset password systems with a responsive design, it’s customizable, it gives you a frontend login page, it allows people to login with their social accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn).

You can limit login attempts with this plugin, you can hide the dashboard and toolbar for normal users – lots and lots of options in there, including a CAPTCHA system using Google reCAPTCHA. So this is a pretty nice way to customize up and add in a login section if you’ve built a site that doesn’t have it built into the theme you used. So go check it out. It’s called Logy, and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Nice! I gotta start doing that to my sites a little bit more.

John:                I’m slowly remembering to do that to my sites. I finally have it on JohnOverall.com, my customers have a complete interface for logging into both their control panels and also into the website, and they’ll be entered in there for when I start including training programs and other things into the site.

Marcus:           All right. You sitting down?

John:                Absolutely.

Marcus:           All right, this last plugin is called Amazon Polly. This is gonna change a few games, or at least in my head it is, okay? Very interesting new plugin that I’ve got both my eye and my ear on that was developed by both Amazon and WP Engine. Now, Amazon Polly is kind of this new service. It’s a text-to-speech thing, but the speech is awesome. It’s not like that robot or that thing that calls you and says you’ve got to pay your taxes or they’re gonna come arrest you —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — on your voice mail, like that robot that calls. It actually has dozens of voices across a variety of different languages, so you can select an ideal voice and build engaging speech-enabled applications that work a little bit different in different countries too, so it can translate and all that stuff. Now, this is kind of what freaks me out: you can use this Amazon Polly and actually generate and audio feed for text-feed content and insert it into an embedded player or you can publish it as a podcast.

John:                That’s interesting!

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Wow, that’ll change the game.

Marcus:           So….

John:                Wow.

Marcus:           As soon as I saw that, I went, “Mmm…that’ll do some damage.”

John:                Yeah, no kidding!

Marcus:           So, yeah. It’s Amazon Polly. I’m gonna – I got something going on. I gotta figure out what this thing – and I’m gonna report back on future shows. But for now, just the mere intrigue and mystery of this alone make it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Yeah, no kidding, and there’s just some really nice options here for it, and this is gonna – this’ll help dramatically with accessibility for people on websites, too.

Marcus:           Yeah, absolutely! And the fact that it does stuff like, you know, how multi-  you know, multi-language on your WordPress site and all that?

John:                Yeah, mm-hm?

Marcus:           And then it combines with like Amazon’s services and training and all that stuff?

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           I mean why did Amazon and WP Engine both work on this? That’s what I – it’s like where…what’s going on with this?

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           So everybody check it out. It’s called Amazon Polly, and let me know what you’re doing with it.

John:                Yeah, no kidding. This’ll be interesting to see how this one develops over time. Okay, well that closing out this episode here, I covered up QuadMenu, which I gave a 3 to; PluginOps Page Builder, which I gave a 3 to; and then Logy, which I gave a 3 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the Native YouTube Subscribe Button, which gets a 5 out of 5; CodeView, which gets a 4 out of 5; and Amazon Polly, which is our mystery question mark, but it gets a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very nice! And also a final note here out to developers: if you have a premium plugin you would like to support the show, you can offer up a premium license for us to give away. We’ll create a contest around it and promote you and your plugin out there. All you’ve got to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and get yourself lots of free promotion while – well, pretty much free, because you’re just giving away a license, so it is free promotion. So anyway, check it out and we’ll be happy to share you out there to our audience out there. And 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 @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 @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.

 

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