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Transcript of Episode 369 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 369 and we’ve got plugins for Extra Profile Fields, Facebook Groups, Language Translation, Envato Elements Template Kits, Gravity Forms Blacklists, and Using WordPress to Brew Beer. 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 #369 here.


It’s Episode 369 and we’ve got plugins for Extra Profile Fields, Facebook Groups, Language Translation, Envato Elements Template Kits, Gravity Forms Blacklists, and Using WordPress to Brew Beer. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #369

Marcus:           It’s Episode 369 and we’ve got plugins for Extra Profile Fields, Facebook Groups, Language Translation, Envato Elements Template Kits, Gravity Forms Blacklists, and Using WordPress to Brew Beer. 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 the Brewery Overlook in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I’m John Overall.

Marcus:           And from the smoky shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.

John:                Yeah, sounds like you’re having quite a time down there with the fires actually moved in close to you know.

Marcus:           Yeah, a little too close for comfort. It’s literally out my backyard so luckily no houses or anything like that have been burned yet but man, it’s close and the air quality sucks. So I’m looking forward to taking my mind off that and getting into some great plugins.

John:               Absolutely. And of course, we have the usual great plugins for you today but right off the top, don’t forget you can get all of the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you have a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving us a review and subscribing to the show there.

And don’t forget to stop in at YouTube. Check out our screencasts, the live shows often up there too, and the training videos – and new training videos have appeared, so go check it out.

Marcus:           Beautiful. And remember, you can also watch us on YouTube live every first Monday of the month at noon Pacific Time. That’s our new time that we’ve got. We just did one last week and boy, we really like the participation that we got. We’d like to get a little bit more, so look out for that. Also remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. We’ve had a couple of great questions from our listeners there recently. And subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we’re going to give you all the discounts, all the news, all the WordPress stuff that we don’t feature here on this podcast, because this podcast is about one thing…and that’s plugins.

John:                Absolutely. And with that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.

All right, first up here what I’ve got for you is a plugin called Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft, and this is a plugin here – if you’re building a membership site or you’ve got numerous people attached to your website and you need to collect more than just the basic information for the user profile area, this is a plugin that allows you to add additional profile fields. You can add any type of profile fields you want, be it numeric, text, collect addresses, phone numbers, collect their sex types – any sort of information you want to collect, this plugin makes it easy.

It integrates well with at least one membership plugin that I know of and I used it because we needed to collect a little more information that a membership plugin had in its forms or the profile system had. So we added this, added in the couple of additional fields we needed. It integrated well and now displays those fields where you want them. It integrates them into the form they have to fill out to register for the site and it just worked quite fantastically.

So if you’re looking for something to add that little bit of extra to your profile fields on WordPress, check out this plugin. It’s called Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! I have a plugin that I use that’s similar to that. Maybe I’ll bring that in the next week or two and talk about that one as well. The first plugin that I’ve got today is for Facebook Groups, and many of you know as I announced last week, I started a brand new podcast. It has nothing to do with WordPress; it’s actually sports-related and I have a Facebook group that I’m starting to promote in. And this is called WordPress Facebook Group Promoter and what it does is it lets you promote and invite your blog readers to your group.

It actually creates a nice little section on the bottom of the page and lets them see, you know, exactly what’s going on as far as a post or page widget or you can actually insert it via shortcode. It’s completely customizable, responsive, totally search engine-friendly. This is one of the very few Facebook group plugins that I’ve ever seen, so I jumped right on it and I’m gonna be using this one on a regular basis. We need a lot more of these kinds of plugins.

It’s called WordPress Facebook Group Promoter and I gave it a 4 out of 5.

John:                Very good. That’s very useful. I kind of like the way that pulls together. The nice thing – the big thing about Facebook plugins I’m finding is anything that pulls from Facebook or integrates with it, they’ve really got to – the developers have to stay on top of it continuously, considering —

Marcus:           Definitely.

John:                — how often Facebook changes things. So as long as they stay on top of it, it could be a great plugin.

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay, well this show here currently brought to you by…

Twenty eighteen is a year of growth. Your website should reflect the growth and change within your business. Show your customers where you are going in 2018 by letting JohnOverall.com work with you to update your website. Let JohnOverall.com take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your website with our maintenance program, hosting, emergency repair services, and more. 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.

Absolutely. Contact me for all your WordPress needs. And it’d better be soon thought, because I’m booking my schedule up now for three or four weeks in advance.

Marcus:           Nice.

John:                Okay, and of course we have a contest currently running. WP Nearby Places has volunteered to offer up another license for us to give away for a contest. So if you’d like to win yourself a license for WP Nearby Places, a great plugin which allows you to integrate Google Maps and showcase all your nearby neighbors, it’s a really great plugin. So go check out the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contests and enter the contest. There’s also a link in the show notes directly to the contest.

And for more information on the plugin, check out the interview I did with the developer, from Albert Harlow. There’s a link in the show notes to the interview with him.

And if you’re in a hurry, there’s a discount coupon for it at 25% off. Just use the coupon code FLASH. And to let everyone know, contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, thanks to them very much for offering up the pro version of the plugin for us to use for all our giveaways.

Marcus:           Very nice.

John:                All right, and our next set of plugins we’ve got for you here – the next one I’ve got for you is called Translate WordPress with GTranslate. Now, I’ve been building a site where the client wanted it to be translatable easily without a lot of work and a lot of effort. This is an excellent for doing just that. It’s very simple to use. It uses Google Translate and all you do is push the plugin in, then go in and make a few settings onto it. Choose the languages you want to be translated to, and choose the language you want to translate from. Maybe you’ve written your website in something aside from English. Then you insert the shortcode somewhere on the site where you want it to appear and it appears as a perfect drop-down and then they just select the language they want it to appear and it gives a machine-translated version – not a good translation, because machine-translated can have its problems.

But it’s a very quick, easy way to get what you want done. Easy to set up, easy to use, a really nice plugin. Go check it out: Translate WordPress with GTranslate, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Is it French? Are you translating French?

John:                No, no. No, he wanted to be able to translate into…I can’t remember all the 10 different languages.

Marcus:           Huh.

John:                Not just French but he wants – he’s doing something that’s going global and he wants to be able to hit Spanish and English – English, Spanish, French…I can’t remember beyond that.

Marcus:           Nice! Nice – okay. The next plugin I’ve got here really surprised me when it came out. This is called Envato Elements Template Kits, and this is actually a beta plugin. But if this is beta, I can’t wait to see what the final looks like. Envato Elements Templates are specifically designed for things like different page builders, like an Elementor or Beaver Builder or some of the other page builders.

So what you do is you just install this plugin to your site and then you can browse the growing library of different template kits that Envato has. So each kit is make up of kind of multiple small templates that work together visually and they’re kind of tailored to specific niches.

Hey! Look, I’m getting a customer already…

John:                Yeah, that would be me. Go. Sorry about that.

Marcus:           It’s okay. Let me start this again.

John:                Yep, not a problem, man.

Marcus:           All right, so this next plugin that I’ve found is called Envato Elements Template Kit, and this was a shocker to me when I saw it. What it does is after you install it, it allows you to get access to Envato Elements Templates for Elementor, Beaver Builder, and even some of the other page builder plugins. So you install it, you browse their library of different template kits, and each kit is kind of made up of multiple smaller templates that work together visually. They are designed for different niches like real estate or car dealerships, or there’s other blank ones for agencies and anything like that.

So once you find the ones that you like, you import them directly into your library or you just create a new page based on that specific template, so they’re like page templates. You can combine templates to create, you know, inspiring quality, different websites, in a lot less time and a lot less effort. And John, like you, I love Envato Elements and all of their products. I have paid for the service since the day they announced it, and to me it’s worth every penny. This is called Envato Elements Template Kits and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.

John:                Now with this template kit, I assume it signs into your Envato Elements account. Is that…?

Marcus:           Yes.

John:                Okay. Yeah, Envato Elements is nice. I’ve had it for almost a year and a half now and I’ve used it quite a few times for little bits and pieces here and there, but I never thought about using it for template kits for a theme. That’s interesting.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                Definitely it’s something to look into. Okay, and listener feedback…this show loves listener feedback and if you want to give us any, you can reach us via our Contact page, SpeakPipe on the lower right-hand corner of the page, reach out to us through any of our social media, via our Facebook page or YouTube channel or the Twitter – that’s the one. For some reason, Twitter keeps slipping out of my head (maybe because I hardly ever use it).

At any rate, send us your questions and we will be happy to answer them to the best of our abilities. Get yourselves some free advice by reaching out to us.

And this show here is value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, hey, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show with $50 or more in donations over the past weeks. And this week here, we actually have another donation from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. and they donated $50 with the following note:

This donation is on behalf of Classic Bike Spares https://www.classicbikespares.com.au who sell replacement parts for vintage Norton and Triumph motorcycles. It is a WordPress website with a customized Woocommerce store created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au .

And a final bit: Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez.

Thanks a lot, Jez. We really appreciate your support. And that’s —

Marcus:           Very nice. And yeah, that’s a great way to get a follow link from us —

John:                Yep.

Marcus:           — in terms of making that $50 or more donation. I had an interesting runaround, John, with somebody who emailed me at WP Plugins A to Z —

John:                Yeah?

Marcus:           — for some hosting review site —

John:                Oh!

Marcus:           — and he’s like, “Yeah, we want to do some sort of a paid blog.” I said, “You know, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           “Why don’t you just donate to the show and we’ll take care of you that way?” and they decided against it. It’s like man, you people just don’t understand the power that we have here —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — in terms of our links.

John:                There you go.

Marcus:           So, you know, it’s a great thing to do if you’re really trying to pump something as far as, you know, a particular property or something for a client, or things like that. That’s a really great way to do it, so you kind of scratch our back and give us some value, we give you some value back.

John:                Absolutely. And a big thank you to all of those who come in under $50 – much appreciated. Every little bit helps.

Marcus:           Yes!

John:                It helps cover the costs of this show, the transcripts, the bandwidth, and all the little essential extras that are required to run a website. And if you want to support the show, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show. There’s numerous ways there you can support the show.

Marcus:           What did you just call the show?

John:                wppluginsato(zed).com/

Marcus:           Oh!! You didn’t say ‘zed.’ You didn’t say ‘zed.’

John:                Sometimes the ‘zee’ slips out.

Marcus:          

John:                Every once in a while, the ‘zee’ slips out.

Marcus:           Caught ya slipping.

John:                Yeah, it took me years when I moved to Canada to break using the ‘zee’ and go to ‘zed’ and now I’m at the ‘zed’ and it’s hard to go back the other way.

Marcus:          

John:                The pendulum swings back and forth. All right, our final set of plugins we’ve got for you here today – the last one I’ve got for you is called BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist. Now, this plugin came – I found this plugin due to a need for a client. We’d already installed on their forms – we’d already installed ReCAPTCHA, set up the honeypot, and they were still seeing spam from specific domains or countries in particular. But the spam was coming through with a specific dot after when they fill out the need for an email address in the forms, so they were still spamming them.

So what we did was we went into this and this plugin here allows you to set up specific filters for blacklisting, and you can just go all the way down to – if you wanted to filter out .ru domains from ever being able to submit to your site, you set that up and it does that. If someone sends a form in with a .ru domain in an email address, poof, it’s gone. It will never arrive in your email box. It just gets turfed.

This is a really nice blacklist plugin for Gravity Forms and it’s free. It’s relatively easy to set up. I believe they have a bit of a premium version available to it, but the free version works quite well. Go check it out: BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

Marcus:           Very nice! I’m a big Gravity Forms user, so I might try that one actually.

John:                Mm-hm.

Marcus:           Very cool.

John:                I’ve found it perfect for this client here and I’m thinking this might be perfect for a couple of other clients that are having just little niche – you know, every once in a while, some spammers, they hire some humans to actually fill out the forms. It’s the only way I can figure it because a bot wouldn’t be that meticulous.

Marcus:           Hmm…

John:                And they just spam ‘em.

Marcus:           Yeah. So I’ve got a final plugin here that’s a little crazy, John. But I saw it and I knew that this was for you.

John:                Ah!

Marcus:           …maybe.

John:                Maybe.

Marcus:           It’s called BrewPress and this is where we get into an area that I would probably classify this as the internet of things, but with a WordPress twist. This is a brewery controller that runs on a Raspberry Pie and allows you to brew beer by using WordPress. You can actually run BrewPress on any website to test and create the dummy batches, but you can enable the control of a physical heating element and pump if you install WordPress on Raspberry Pie – those little computers you —

John:                Yeah.

Marcus:           — can get for like $30 or $40.

John:                Oh, yeah.

Marcus:           And it controls the entire brewing process as far as the pump and the heating element, all within WordPress.

John:                Thank you.

Marcus:           Very interesting, which leads me to believe if sometimes I get malware and get hacked —

John:                Mm-hm?

Marcus:           — and some hosting instances, does this mean my beer vat can get hacked, too? I don’t know.

John:                If it’s connected to Raspberry Pie, and the internet —

Marcus:          

John:                — I suppose it can be. That’s one of the problems of the internet of things. If it’s connected to the internet and it runs a program, there is a way to hack it.

Marcus:           Absolutely. So anyway, I thought this was probably one of the more unusual plugins that I’ve ever seen. But I have no way to test if it works because (a) I don’t drink beer (b) I don’t have a Raspberry Pie and (c) I don’t have like a 50-gallon tank that I can actually create the stuff with. So somebody out there, if you’re into brewing yourself and making your own craft brews and all the rest of it, check this out. It’s called BrewPress and I rated it a 4 out of 5.

John:                That’s kind of a cool plugin! I don’t brew beer; I like to drink it, but I don’t brew it.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                So I just watched the brewery right across the parking lot and smell them like they were brewing beer today, so hey.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                It’s – but it would be a process. It would definitely be an interesting thing to play with.

Marcus:           Yeah, and actually now you’ve got something to talk about. You’re, “Hey, you know, our worlds can collide if you really want them to. I’m a WordPress guy and you’re beer people. We can…”

John:                Well, their website is built on WordPress.

Marcus:           Yeah.

John:                I didn’t do it, but it is a WordPress website.

Marcus:           Hm.

John:                Okay, well that wraps us up here. I covered up in this episode the Profile Extra Fields by BestWebSoft, which I gave a 4 to; the Translate WordPress with GTranslate, which I gave a 4 to; and the BSK Gravity Forms Blacklist, which I gave a 4 to.

Marcus:           And I talked about the WordPress Facebook Group Promoter, which gets a 4 out of 5; Envato Elements Templates gets a 5 out of 5, and BrewPress, just because of its originality and uniqueness, I gave this one a 4 out of 5.

John:                All right, and don’t forget to support the show and also I’d like to put out a couple of other reminders. Please go check out the Victoria WordPress Meetup group and our first session is going to be September 5th and I’m going to be recording those sessions and getting them up on the YouTube channel, and they will be the first attempt at livestreaming or just recording for YouTube, so it should be great and it will be a good time and event here in Victoria, so go check it out.

Also, be sure to check out our YouTube channel for all the screencasts, training videos, and more. And a note to developers, if you would like to support the show and offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests.

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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