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 #357 here.
It’s Episode 357 and we’ve got plugins for Patreon, Easy WooCommerce Login, Marketplaces, Importing CSV Files and a new way to Redesign WordPress Comments. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #357
Marcus: It’s Episode 357, the Magnum Edition, and we’ve got plugins for Patreon, Easy WooCommerce Logins, Marketplaces, Importing CSV Files, and a New Way to Redesign WordPress Comments. 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 the sunny shores of the Beachside Bunker in Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And we have the usual great show for you today and of course right off the top, don’t forget 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 on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and reviewing us there. It really helps us out.
Marcus: Yeah, and if you are interested, every Monday morning we do this show live on YouTube – actually, every first Monday of the month we do the show live on YouTube at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. You can also check out our YouTube channel for training videos, screencasts, and all kinds of other stuff. We’re adding new things all the time.
Also remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and remember, go to our website, wppluginsatoz.com, and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we keep all the news that’s related to WordPress that’s not plugin-related because we love to keep the plugins the heart of this show. So check out the newsletter at wppluginsatoz.com.
John: Absolutely, and with that being said, time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
And we have our usual allotment of six great plugins today, and first up I have another plugin sent in by one of our listeners out there – developers – and this one came from Ozgur Zeren, and this is a Patreon Pro plugin. And what it’s for is if you’re a Patreon user, you use Patreon for all of your listeners out there or your show, or whatever you might be doing and you’re collecting Patreon. You know that Patreon has its own set of pages where you can lock content up and use it to allow your users to see this content only if they’re subscribed or at a certain level or Patreon at a certain level.
Well, what this plugin does is it allows you to bring that stuff over to your website instead of using Patreon’s site. It uses the Patreon API system to allow you to lock content in your website based upon your Patreon settings. You can set up posts for Patreon only with parts of the post. You can put custom banners in there. You can have random posts to allow random stuff to appear for Patreon users. You can have public and private posts, lock the content down until they hit a certain level of Patreon donations, etc., etc. Pretty much everything you can do over on the Patreon site, you can now do over on your WordPress website with this plugin.
Now, you have to be a Patreon user that gets a fair chunk of change, I would think, considering the cost of this plugin, that 36 Euros. Being for most people, that’s somewhere between $45 and $50 to $60 for the plugin, but it may be worthwhile if you get a lot of donations via Patreon and you do a lot of locked content via Patreon. And this is a way to keep control of your content, instead of having it in the control of some third party that well, whatever whim they may shut you down or change their rules, or whatever happens.
At any rate, it seems like a pretty great plugin in that aspect but being a pro version, it is only a 4-Dragon rating plugin. So go check it out: Patreon Pro.
Marcus: Nice! I like that. I especially like the gate part –
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — where you can actually have the Patreon hook-in —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — to see whose paid to see specific content. That’s really cool.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: All right, so the next plugin I have is WooCommerce-related but not too specifically. It’s called WooCommerce Login/Signup Popup, and it’s a very cool, lightweight plugin that allows users to log in or sign up anywhere from the site with just a little, simple popup, without having to go to a signup page or a registration page or something like that. You can just keep it to a little kind of a modal popup that comes up and they can do everything from there. It’s totally shortcode-based, so you can do this pretty much anywhere.
It’s nice if you want to actually kind of tie this in to where before they can actually add a product, maybe you want to have them sign up as a customer or any of that type of thing. But this is pretty cool, fully customizable, you could totally change around the CSS and all that, too. It works anywhere on the site, so you can put it in sidebars – anything you want to do. It’s called WooCommerce Login/Signup Popup and I gave it a rating of 4 out of 5.
John: Nice. I’m gonna be having so much fun with this WooCommerce website that I’m working on.
Marcus: See?
John: There’s so many things to pull together for this site!
Marcus: I know.
John: But it’s my first WooCommerce site in about 9, 10 months, and I’m just so excited because we’ve covered so many WooCommerce plugins in the last few months – most of them from you. But hey, a lot of them are stuff that I will be able to use on this site.
Marcus: Well, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I am doing a site that requires the customer to log back in, because it’s sort of a medical/beauty procedure —
John: Mm-hm?
Marcus: — site, and they have to fill out specific kind of release forms and that kind of thing. And I’m doing to where they come back in and it says, “Okay, we’ve…” – I’m trying to hook in digital documents too, and that’s a plugin I’ll be bring to the show soon, as soon as I find the right one —
John: Nice!
Marcus: — to where they can look at a form and sign digital documents and then it saves within their user profile that they signed it. That’s coming. So a lot of things I’m trying to keep within the WordPress ecosphere and this plugin is definitely one of them: WooCommerce Login/Signup.
John: Absolutely. All right, well this show here currently brought to you by…
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Absolutely. Contact me; I can help you out with all your WordPress needs.
And we do have a contest currently running on the website. We are giving away a premium license from bracketspace.com, where we are giving away a bundle pack of extensions for their Notification Plugin, and the bundle pack graciously donated by them, will extend out their free plugin. There’s a link in the show notes to the plugin itself, which is downloadable.
You can test out the plugin and then see what kind of extensions you need. And if you’re in a hurry for the plugin itself, you can get 25% off buying the plugin by using the coupon code ILOVEWPAZ until the end of May 2018. You can get the core plugin here on the website, link in the show notes, and the winner for this contest will be announced on our live show in June. So the contest runs until the end of May and then we’ll announce the winner at the first show in June. And the current contest currently powered by Simple Giveaways Plugin.
Marcus: Cool.
John: All right, and the next set of plugins we’ve got here, this is another plugin sent in to us. This one here was sent in by Ankita Lai, and it’s WC-Marketplace, another WooCommerce plugin, and this is a premium plugin. And WooCommerce Marketplace helps you when building an e-commerce marketplace from scratch, converting existing WooCommerce store into a marketplace, where you can allow your users to set up and sell stuff within your WooCommerce store.
It allows the vendors to create individual stores, manage their inventory, shipping, while you earn a commission on their sales. So this is a plugin to help you make money off of your WooCommerce store if you’re turning it into a market place, maybe thinking something like Etsy or some other similar marketplace. Maybe you can find a little niche that’s not fully covered yet and set it up. This might be a nice tool for you to check out.
It looks like a pretty great plugin. Go check it out. I give it a 4-Dragon rating: WC-Marketplace.
Marcus: That’s pretty cool. And so that’s specific to people – to if you’re gonna have multiple sellers?
John: Yeah, if you’re gonna have multiple sellers. It’s to take your WooCommerce store and turn it into a marketplace so that your users can set up their own little sores inside your standalone —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — and they can control their shipping and everything else, and then you collect a commission off of every sale that’s made.
Marcus: Nice.
John: Etsy does that to everyone.
Marcus: So the next plugin I have is called WP Comment Designer Lite and it’s a free WordPress plugin and it helps you change the layout of how WordPress comments look and how the comment form itself looks, too. It has three different templates that you can pick or you can choose your own. You can, you know, modify that. It has basic comment like or dislike options if you want to put that into the thing. You can rearrange the comment form fields, it has total pagination, you can show or hide the comment replies, you can show how it threads. You can make it more like text message-based or other things. It’s pretty cool.
I haven’t really seen too much out there that does anything with WordPress comments, so check this one out. It’s called WP Comment Designer Lite and I gave it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very cool. Yeah, I like the idea of modifying the comments on websites – on the ones that still use them, anyway.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: All right, well this show, we really like listener feedback here, and if you’d like to leave some for us, you can leave it on our Contact page. You can hit us up on SpeakPipe, the lower right-hand corner of the website, or you can email us directly, and we will get your comments into our shows. We’ll answer questions for you. If you just want to tell us how fantastic we are, we’ll take that, too. Pretty much anything, man. Kick it out to us and we will get it into the show.
Also, this show being a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. You can do that by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, where you can choose from the multiple donation options there or you can join Patreon and become a Patreon of us. We still use that. Other than that, hey, all show donors that are $50 or more, we will announce out in the show and they get their note read out. If you throw some links in there, we keep those in there too, so you also get a double bonus from us. Our links are not no-followed; all our links are followed from our website. It doesn’t matter where they go.
Marcus: Right.
John: And yeah, that’s it. Go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show.
Marcus: Yep, reach out, help us out. We do appreciate it.
John: All right, last set of plugins we’ve got for you here today. I’ve got another one here; it was sent in by Clara Torson and it’s called the Ultimate CSV Importer. Now this plugin here is one that allows you to import CSV files into your WordPress website. You can also export them and they’ve got a specialized export tool that allows that to happen and then you can edit them, reimport them back into your website.
It’s also got some very unique stuff. You can import multiple fields that’s got a mapping tool in it that allows you to remap the headers of your CSV to the different fields of your website. You can manipulate them into pages, posts, WooCommerce fields, etc., etc. It’s a pretty advanced tool. It is a pro version plugin, so it’s something you might want to go check out. It looks to be something I may be using in this WooCommerce store I’m working on, because they’ve got a CSV file of stuff that we’ve got to get into the site, so I’m looking to see how we’re going to pull all that content in, so it’s something I’m sort of looking at. But you might want to go check this out and it’s called Ultimate CSV Importer and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very nice! Very nice. All right, well we’re talking about WooCommerce a lot and I want to talk about something that I’ve been doing, and this plugin is called WooCommerce Wallet. It’s a credit/cash back refund system. What it does is it allows customers to store their money in a digital wallet. Now, this helps if you’re doing a rewards system or anything like that and the customers can actually use the wallet money for purchasing products from your store.
They can add money with various payment methods, you can put something on file, or you can change the cash back rules according to the cart price or what the product is or any of that. So the customers after purchase received a cash back amount in their wallet account and the administrator can process the refunds to that wallet as well. So it’s really kind of cool the way that it works.
They can use various kind of payment methods, so maybe they’re doing a partial payment with customer rewards and then the rest of it they use their credit card. It will take care of all that, this system. It sets a cash back kind of fixed rate, so maybe you can only have $100 per year cash back, even if you, you know, charge a lot or maybe it’s $1,000 cash reward, or whatever it happens to be. You can set that. So this is a very handy tool to help kind of promote your system to keep customers coming back. It’s called WooWallet Credit Cash Back Refund System. There is a pro version, which always takes a point away, so I rated this one a 4 out of 5.
John: Yeah, very cool. That’s something I might be interested in. I’ll talk to my client. Well, I’m just gonna have so much to choose from on this site.
Marcus:
John: I don’t know where I’m gonna go!
Marcus: Yeah.
John: Lose my mind on plugins. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.
Marcus: Well, here’s what you do, John, and this is to any other developer or designer out there. Keep in mind what these plugins can do and what they can’t do.
John: Hm.
Marcus: Create sort of a summary as to what they do with their capabilities and some of the requirements that are there. And then when you’re approaching a client, say “Here is sort of your a-la carte options.”
John: Yeah, absolutely.
Marcus: All right? Do you want to have a rewards system? A cash back system for your clients? It’s gonna cost you $1,000 for implementing that system, and then you use this plugin and you pay for a license, and then you go from there. The maintenance on this cash back thing is maybe gonna be an extra $20 a month on top of the regular maintenance fee. Okay, do you want to have popups for your thing? You know, any different things like that.
John: Oh, yeah.
Marcus: Put a menu of options and that way when they look at your menu of options, they’re like, “Holy crap, this is stuff I never even thought about.” Or, what if there’s absolutely no reason that anybody needs cash back?
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: They don’t want this, right? But at least you’re giving them that option to do it, and that’s the way I would approach all of these different systems.
John: Oh, absolutely. All right, well I covered up in this episode the Patreon plugin, which I gave a 4 to; the WC-Marketplace, which I gave a 4 to; and the Ultimate CSV Importer, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I talked about the WooCommerce Login Setup/Signup Popup, which gets a 4 out of 5, WP Comment Designer lite, which gets a 4 out of 5, and we just talked about WooWallet, which gets a 4 out of 5.
John: And a couple of quick reminders: This next Sunday on the 27th, I want to let anyone know, especially my Island listeners here that we are having a WordPress meetup to celebrate WordPress’s 15th birthday on May 27th. It’s a Sunday between 1:00 and 3:00 at the Boston Pizza in Victoria, so hey, go check out our meetup.com meetup for it, or anyone else who happens to be visiting the Victoria area and you listen to this show, hey, come join us at the meetup and say hi. You can meet me and see all the rest of the insane WordPress people here on the island.
Marcus:
John: And also, a note to developers: If you’d like to support the show and you’d like to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, where you can leave us all the details for that.
And that’s pretty much all I’ve got for you. Take care now, 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.