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 #363 here.
It’s Episode 363 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Currency, Showcasing Your Team, WooCommerce Convertkit Integration, Nearby Places, and Mailchimp for WooCommerce. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #363
Marcus: It’s Episode 363 and we’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Currency, Showcasing Your Team, WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration, Nearby Places, and MailChimp for WooCommerce. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-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 Victoria, British Columbia, the Brewery Overlook, I’m John Overall.
Marcus: And from the sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And we have the usual great show for you today but first off, happy Canada Day, which just happened for all the Canadians out there yesterday, and a happy July 4th to all our American listeners.
Marcus: Yes, and for everybody else, happy WordPress.
John: That’s it.
Marcus:
John: Go out there and shoot of fireworks anyway just because.
Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
John: Yeah, it’s the holiday weekend United States and Canada seem to tie together. Ours is on the first, yours is on the fourth, and when it happens on a weekend, hey, it’s one great big party here.
Marcus: Yeah, I can imagine.
John: So – oh, it was actually quite good. I actually managed to film the Fourth of the July – or the – Canada Day fireworks down in Inner Harbour yesterday.
Marcus: Yeah, I saw that. Very nice.
John: So yeah, they came out better than I thought they would. So, at any rate, of course – usual great show for you and all the show notes can be found 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, subscribing to the show and giving us reviews. We could really use some there. We haven’t had any in a while.
Marcus: That’s true. If you can, take a few minutes, leave us that review. In iTunes it does help to bring a new audience to the show and drive show awareness for others, and I think there’s one or two people out there that use WordPress, so why not help the audience to discover what it is that we do? We are 362 shows deep, times – you know, multiply that by six plugins, and boy, that’s a ton of plugins – almost 2,000 that we’ve reviewed. So give us some credit, give us some love, give us your attention, and check us out at the iTunes Store.
Also remember, you could check out our training videos, screencasts, interview, and watch us live just like right now. They are on YouTube every first Monday morning of the month at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time. Also, go to wppluginsatoz.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We’d like to keep all the WordPress news stuffed into the newsletter and not in the show, because we talk about plugins here.
John: Absolutely, and the newsletter is getting much better out there. There – there’s my new mascot for the show. All right, so that being said, it’s time for us to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, and first off the plugin I’ve got for you here today is called WP Nearby Places. This is a relatively new entry into the WordPress marketplace. It is an excellent tool to add to your site if you’re running a destination business in particular. Maybe you’ve got a bed and breakfast, a hotel, even just a bar or a pub and you want to showcase all the stuff that’s around you. One of the things this plugin does for you is it uses Google Places to enhance a Google Map on your website and then you put your address at the center, and then it showcases all of the businesses and location around you of interested, depending on the Google Places categories you choose. And you can set that zone any distance you want from 1 to 100 kilometers and showcase all of the places in and around your neighborhood.
I tested it out, I’ve thrown it up on one of my test sites, which I probably will use this plugin to enhance that site even further. And what I used it for in particular, I needed a new place to get my hair cut. My barber decided to retire and I needed a new one. I couldn’t figure out where they were located around me, so I plugged it in and sure enough, boom, a whole bunch of them appeared around me. It’s like, “Well there they are. I just can’t find them.” But it is really great in helping you do that.
It’s relatively easy and straightforward to use. It comes in three flavors; it comes in a basic which is free over at WordPress.org, it comes in a pro, and then a premium version – adds on different things as you go up to enhance it. I got to test all of it and as a free version, it gets an absolute 4 because, you know, if they’ve got a premium version, they always get one point off. But the pro version, I found it to be fantastic, worked excellently. All you have to do is make sure you get your own Google API and of course, I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Pretty cool! I wanna check that out.
John: It’s a really nice plugin. I really like the way it works. It produces the map – it also – when you get the pro version or the premium version, you get an additional function to where you can showcase specific businesses around you in another strip above, so you could go around to those businesses and try to sell them advertising on your site and say, “Hey, we’ll showcase your business in these little ad spots.” It’s kind of like one of the things they had on their website when I looked at it.
Do you remember when you checked into hotels and used to get that big little map that showcased all the businesses and all the ads around the edge of the map —
Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
John: — for all the prime businesses?
Marcus: Yeah.
John: That’s what this does for you, except it does it in digital format and it’s all mobile-ready, so…
Marcus: So do you get to – excuse me and start it again.
John: Hm?
Marcus: Do you get to pick the different categories —
John: Yes.
Marcus: — or types of businesses —
John: You do.
Marcus: — that end up being in there?
John: You get to pick all the categories based upon what the Google Places offers up —
Marcus: Hm.
John: — and there’s a lot of categories in Google Places.
Marcus: Wow, that’s great!
John: So…
Marcus: All right, let’s talk about my first plugin here, and it is called Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Boy, that’s a mouthful.
John: That is!
Marcus: Let’s talk about what it does though. If you use ConvertKit – which ConvertKit is sort of an email platform. It’s much like InfusionSoft in the sense that it does different types of campaigns and funnels and things like that, except it doesn’t cost $700 a month; it’s $45 a month. And now you’ve got this plugin which is Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration, which merges the two together.
So what you can do is create custom fields in ConvertKit and then integrate it through this plugin and what happens is anyone who either – that you can sign up for something. Let’s say a registered user comes in and looks at something in the cart but they don’t buy. Well, ConvertKit can actually recognize this, that they put something in their cart and – or they viewed something, and you can actually do a follow-up email campaign around that. Give them a special discount code or something like that for something that they put in their cart and didn’t buy. That’s a really good way to actually make somebody convert. Or perhaps you just want to add them into your email list. This does that as well.
So check it out. It’s called Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration. If you use both WooCommerce and ConvertKit, you must use this plugin. I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: That’s pretty nice. I kind of like that. I’m not sure I’ll use something like it, but you never know since I’ve picked up another WooCommerce job, so…
Marcus: Yeah, so let me tell you also some of the other kinds of things that it does. Say a customer that is a repeat regular customer and they may have just placed their tenth order, or maybe their orders have now surpassed $1,000 or $10,000, or whatever it happens to be. Then you can send them a special thank you. You can send them, you know, an invitation to go out to dinner or whatever it happens to be, so that’s one of the nice things that’s involved in this. So it doesn’t always necessarily have to be based on a purchase; it can be based on some other account statistics that is in the backdrop.
John: Nice! All right. Well, that being said —
Marcus: Some other accounts statistics that is in the backdrop.
John: Excellent – nice. All right – and we’ve got a feedback. Why did we get a feedback? Well, that being said – Hang on 30 seconds.
Marcus:
John: There we go – got it.
Marcus: Talking to yourself, are you?
John: Talking to myself. I was hearing you repeat exactly what I commented on and I was like, “Wait a minute. What happened?” Oh, I realized I opened up another window and it started feeding back. Okay, let’s move along here then.
That being said, what we’ve got is this show here currently brought to you by:
Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ 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 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.
Okay, and yes, give me a call. I can help you with all your WordPress needs —
Marcus:
John: — from hosting to fixing up your website. And we do have a contest currently running, and this is thanks to Albert Harlow over at WP Nearby Places. You can listen to the interview I did with him in Interview Show #22, and this contest is starting this week. We’re giving away premium licenses from WP Nearby Places and it’s the premium version which has all the great stuff I just recently talked about. It helps you create very useful Google Maps for your website and site visitors. Get more info there. You can go up and sign up for the contest at wppluginsatoz.com, and we’re looking to be giving away possibly a license a week for this contest here —
Marcus: Wow!
John: — instead of holding it for an entire month. So this could be kind of an interesting one although we’re only live once a week, it could end up that way. But follow the newsletter for the specific information on that. And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, you can go get a 25% discount off the plugin and it’s using the code – wrong code written in my notes and I’ve been —
Marcus: ILOVEWPAZ.
John: No, that’s the wrong code.
Marcus: Oh no.
John: That’s from the other one. You need to go to their site and it’s FLASH is the code.
Marcus: Oh.
John: F-L-A-S-H is the code. Twenty-five percent off coupon – so I got the wrong notes in there. That happens once in a while. At any rate, it’s a really great plugin. Go check it out, go sign up for the contest – wppluginsatoz.com.
Marcus: Yes, and hey, remember that if you want to submit a plugin for a future contest – if you’re a developer and you want to get some exposure for your plugin, go to our website. You’ll find all the details there on how to do that.
John: Absolutely. All right, our next set of plugins we’ve got for you – the one I’ve got for you here is called Team Showcase. Now this is a plugin initially – and there’s just a slew of team presentation plugins, and this one looked pretty good for this specific task I was working on for a client. And it started out really well, it worked really well, we started entering the data, we got it up there, and then I started having some layout issues with it and it wasn’t quite pulling the information correctly from the plugin to display on the website. I was – okay, kind of off a little.
They do have a premium version, so I thought, okay, well maybe the premium version will help solve it. Let’s see what they want for it and maybe it’s worth taking the chance on the premium version. I do that sometimes when they have a premium version that’s around $20, $25. I figure it’s worth the risk; roll the dice and see. At any rate, I was having such problems with it and I wanted to give it a really good, fair shake to make sure it was a good plugin.
So I went to their website to buy it and of course I couldn’t figure out where to buy the plugin, even with the link they provide in the plugin or off of the WordPress.org site to go to the website and buy it. It didn’t land. I go through their website, couldn’t figure out how to buy the plugin, and then I decided, well let me just contact them and see if that helps. Their contact page was not very clear, it was hard to get it, difficult, and all in all, I just had a very poor experience around the support for it. I did finally manage to get the contact out to them and then sent them an email, and that was over a week and a half ago and still nothing back.
So hey, this plugin here is one I can’t recommend and I really hate to do it. It’s been a long time since I brought one in this low, but I’m giving this plugin, Team Showcase, a 2-Dragon rating. Wah…wah…wah…
Marcus: Ew…womp…womp…
John: It happens, man, and I just have to warn people when I actually tried to make an effort to use the thing.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: So…
Marcus: All right – well, they can’t – sometimes that’s why we separate the junk from the gems, right?
John: And sometimes we’ve just gotta tell you about the junk so you don’t —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — waste your time, because I wasted several hours on this and now I’ve got to redo everything that we did with the plugin with another one.
Marcus: Yeah, it sounds like they spent more time on their logo than they did the actual plugin. I don’t want to slam them, but…
John: Yeah, they did. I don’t know.
Marcus:
John: Though the plugin is relatively new but hey, it looked like it was going to be something good.
Marcus: Give some feed – you know, respond to people when they talk to you.
John: Yeah, respond – that’s the thing. Respond when you get an email, man.
Marcus: Yeah. Okay, so the next one I’ve got for you is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart and I hope that this one actually does something that’s of good value. It’s called Export Media Library and what it does is it does exactly what it says: it exports the media library. With just a few clicks, you can actually download all of your media as a zip file in one shot. It just adds a new subpage under the media section in your WordPress dashboard and with one click, it just starts downloading a zip that has all of your media in it.
Now, what’s scary about this that I haven’t really tried yet – like I should put it on marcuscouch.com and just try and export the 1.7 GB —
John:
Marcus: — of podcasts and videos and things like that that I’ve done and see what happens. I don’t know if it would make a zip file that —
John: See if it chokes?
Marcus: — if it’s that big. But who knows?
John: It might, so…
Marcus: So this is a little bit easier than what you might find in terms of downloading FTP – you know, downloading an entire FTP of your uploads directory in WordPress, because then it would still be splintered off. But I think if you wanted to just backup all the media that you had, this is a really good way to do it. I would do it mostly for backup purposes, but there’s probably other uses as well.
So it’s called Export Media Library and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Excellent.
Yeah, it looks to be really nice. I wonder if it would choke? I’d have to try it on my site and see how bad it would choke because we’ve got six years of podcasts up on my site.
Marcus: Right. Yeah, I have about 1,200 episodes of all the different shows that I’ve done and been on and things —
John: Yep.
Marcus: — on my site, so I’m curious to see how it works.
John: All right, now listener feedback period, this section here is sponsored by WP Nearby Places. Customize your Google Maps to skyrocket your search engine rankings with WP Nearby Places. WP Nearby Places lets you easily create Google Maps for your website with you specified location at its center. Your site visitors will have the ability to quickly search what is around your specific location like no other mapping plugin.
Using the power of Google Maps, WP Nearby Places also uniquely breaks down neighborhood locations by category, such as restaurants, parks, police, and depending on which version you purchase, provides the location’s name, address, URL, website address, phone number, and distance in either miles or kilometers from the central location.
There are three versions available. The basic, which is available at WordPress.org, the pro, and premium version, which you can click the link in the show notes and it will take it to you at WP Nearby Places. For details, check out all their licensed versions. You know, show off your neighbors by categories, featured neighborhoods, the most exciting features, the ability to feature neighbors on your website and in your maps of nearby places.
There are places in any neighborhood where there are, main event, the main attraction of why someone would travel there, and to that neighborhood. For instance, Starbucks Nearby is the main attraction for a lot of neighborhoods – a winery, a park, famous restaurant, and more. So go check out WP Nearby Places.
Marcus: I’m gonna have to.
John: And —
Marcus: You keep talking about it so much!
John: Well, we’ll be talking about it for a while. They have sponsored this show for a little while.
Marcus:
John: They have sponsored this show for a little while. So one of our – a sponsor for us – been a while.
Marcus: Nice.
John: So at any rate, listener feedback… we would really love to get some. You can leave it on the website at wppluginsatoz.com; just go down to the lower right-hand corner, click on the Ask a Question, leave a comment via voicemail, or you can contact us via our Contact page. Leave us – ask us questions. We will answer them if they arrive – when they arrive.
And show donors…this show, value-for-value, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that, we would like to acknowledge those who have supported the show over the past month with donations of $50 and over and their note is read out and published here. And for those who come in below $50, they can remain anonymous and we thank you very much.
And this month here, we have had Jezweb Pty. Ltd. They gave us $50 back in the middle of June, so of course any donations that arrive in the middle of the month get all shouted out in the live show. And his donation was on behalf of Transcend Health at https://www.transcendhealth.com.au who are physiotherapists and exercise physiologists in Newcastle, Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb at https://www.jezweb.com.au. One of the plugins Jezweb used on Transcend Health is an Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon, and it works really well to embed images and has a bunch of easy adjustments, so thanks a lot, Jez. You have been a really great support for the show over the last year and a half, and your support has been truly appreciated.
Marcus: Yes, and I love it how our listeners connect with us —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — because I use that exact same plugin.
John: There you go. I haven’t tried —
Marcus: And I don’t think I’ve ever brought it up or recommended it.
John: Yeah? No, it hasn’t been to the show. It hasn’t been to the show. I don’t – I didn’t recall it, so…
Marcus: Yeah.
John: At any rate, thanks a lot, Jez, and a bit thank you to those who came in under $50. And for those of you that are still on the Patreon subscriptions, we still get those small amounts – thank you very much. And if you would like to support the show, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate or go to our Patreon channel, which I left running because we had some small ones and you can support us there with a small amount on a monthly basis.
So thanks everyone and to that supports the show.
Marcus: Yes – yes. It goes a long way. Believe me, we’re very frugal with the money that we get donated, and —
John: Yeah!
Marcus: — and it goes to transcripts and hosting, and just pretty much straight back into the show.
John: Back into the show, man. Back into the show, and I’ve been spending a lot of my own money on the show this year and that I’m building myself a new computer system with new recording and everything else that’s gonna be done.
Marcus: Hm.
John: Take me about four or five months to pay for it all, but it’s a good chunk of change going into it, so by the end of the year, the whole sound for the show will change – and change for the better again. And if you’ve been listening for any length of time, you will notice that the sound has gotten better over time. At any rate —
Marcus: Almost too good, because sometimes I listen to the show and I hear my chair squeak.
John: Yeah, well that’s your microphone so…
Marcus:
John: Put more sound dampening – I need – I’m getting the blockers. What are those? I forget what they’re called.
Marcus: Like you stick foam?
John: Yeah, something – no, no. The – ah, never mind.
Marcus:
John: It’s gone out of my head. It’s to block all the external sounds and pick up only the mic. It’s what they use on the No Agenda show.
Marcus: Oh.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: Noise gate.
John: Noise gate, that’s what I’m looking for. Noise gate. I’m getting noise gates for it all, so that we’ll actually get true silence. So that being said, our final set of plugins we got for you here today. The last one I’ve got is called MailChimp for WooCommerce, and as I’m finishing up one of my WooCommerce projects, I realized, well, we haven’t connected the MailChimp up to the WooCommerce yet and I wanted and easy way to do it with the least amount of problems.
And it turns out MailChimp actually creates a plugin to connect MailChimp to WooCommerce, which was very quite sweet. This one here was a very excellent plugin. It sets you up, it fits the bill perfectly for connecting up your MailChimp and your WooCommerce together. It inserts the checkbox for the checkout page for people to sign up for your newsletter and it also allows for the integration of your newsletter into added bonuses, such as allowing you to get the abandoned shopping cart back. You know, someone abandons their shopping cart, you can have an email that is generated and sent out to them if they manage to set their email address before abandoning it or they have an account.
It allows you to send follow up emails for purchases after they purchase something. You can set specific emails to follow up with them and more, and the integration was really quite easy. It went together quite smoothly and all around, just a great plugin for connecting MailChimp up to your WooCommerce store, and of course I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
Marcus: So there you have it. If you use WooCommerce and you use MailChimp —
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: — or ConvertKit, those are the two biggies —
John: Yep.
Marcus: — in terms of email delivery. This one episode gave you two different options on how to do that.
John: Absolutely. There’s some serious value for you folks.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: Save some time.
Marcus: Okay, and I’ve got one more WooCommerce plugin actually, and this is not intentional. These just come up like this.
John:
Marcus: This one is called WooCurrency, and actually what it does is you get to select the currencies that you’d like to use on your website for the countries that you service, and it automatically changes the exchange rate every day through a web service and it makes sure that all of them are accurate. Based on what their IP address is, you actually get to see your products within your WooCommerce store change the currency and automatically update itself.
If their country, whatever they select, has not been selected in terms of – you know, if it doesn’t pick it up, the actual default WooCommerce currency will be used. So check it out – it’s very handy if you’re doing sales over the border. Let’s just say if you had a US and Canada customer base, this is something really, really good for changing the exchange rate out. It’s called WooCurrency and I gave it a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice! I like that.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: I’ve got a client which is gonna be taking US and Canadian dollars, so this one here could be quite useful.
Marcus: Yep.
John: All right, well that closes out this episode here. I covered up WP Nearby Places, which I gave a 4 and a 5 to due to the free and the premium versions; Team Showcase, which got a womp-womp 2; and then MailChimp for WooCommerce, which got a 5, so that’s a good roundup.
Marcus: And I reviewed Enhanced WooCommerce ConvertKit Integration – gets a 4 out of 5, Export Media Library gets a 5 out of 5, and WooCurrency gets a 4 out of 5.
John: Very nice, and be sure to go check out our YouTube channel where there will be some training videos coming up there, because I have to produce some for a couple of clients, so you get the bonus time. I get paid for my work and you guys get the benefit of seeing the added stuff, so that’ll be coming up real soon and that’s also the live show gets placed up there as a permanent fixture.
And a note to developers, if you want to support the show and offer up premium licenses to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to donate that and more. And of course, take some time, sign up for the newsletter. And as one last thing, I’d like to say thanks to all the listeners that showed up to listen to us today. There was actually a few of you there. Hey, very nice to see a few people show up and listen to us, so thank you very much.
Marcus: Nice. Yeah, we’ll have to plan this out as a Q&A one of these days.
John: Well, I’ve got more help. I hired another person to work for me.
Marcus: Oh!
John: And she is helping me get everything organized to the point where I hadn’t been able to. She’s quite efficient and she’s pulling together more stuff, so this included in the stuff that’s happened. She managed to get all of our transcripts up to date up on the website. They are now current as of Episode 362 and she’s actually started taking our reviews that we’ve done and placing them up in the WordPress.org site.
Marcus: Yeah, the Repository.
John: The Repository for all of the plugins we’ve reviewed there, so she’s started doing that, so those things are starting to happen now that I have someone that is dedicated to those tasks. So more and more stuff is happening, folks.
Marcus: Hm.
John: You know, I’m still keeping the show alive while, you know, working my business forward, so look for more great stuff coming your way as time moves on.
Marcus: Yeah, and I’ll be honest with you. I’m building a new site right now for a client and it’s kind of challenging. It’s taking some of the plugins that John and I have talked about – gosh, two years ago.
John: Yep —
Marcus: — and implementing them.
John: Yep.
Marcus: And there’s bound to be – every time I come up with a new project or John has a new project, we have a different need —
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: — for that particular client and we love to share some of the things that we’ve done in terms of the plugins that we used and some of the problems that it solved.
John: And problems that it solved or the problems we’ve run into with plugins too, so…
Marcus: Yeah, so we keep them here, right on the show.
John: All right, well that’s a wrap. That’s all we’ve got for you now, so 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.