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 #372 here.
It’s Episode 372 and we’ve got plugins for Login Redirects, External Product URLs, Inventory and Stock Levels, and Social Proof. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #372
Marcus: It’s Episode 372 and we’ve got plugins for Login Redirects, External Product URLs, Inventory and Stock Levels, and Social Proof. 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 sunny shores of Laguna Beach, California, I’m Marcus Couch.
John: And we have the usual great show here for you today but of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all 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 reviews there and subscribing to the show.
And while you’re at it, take a little bit of time. Drop into our YouTube channel and subscribe to the YouTube channel and check out the training videos that are there. I’ve popped up a couple of new training videos there in the last week, so check ‘em out. There’s a new one there for basic install of WordPress and a Yoast SEO training video – how to set that plugin up is coming up in the next day or so.
Marcus: Nice. And also remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Also go to wppluginsatoz.com and that’s where you can get some information on our newsletter. That’s where we keep all the WordPress news because on this show we like to talk about nothing but the plugins.
John: Absolutely. And there’ll be more interviews coming along here pretty soon. And with that all being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
And we have our usual allotment of six great plugins and right off the top, the first one I’ve got for you here is called Peter’s Login Redirect. This one here came about while I was working on a membership site for a client and we needed a simple redirect to set up on the site so that when people logged in to the website, they were redirected to a specific page after they logged in. And this one allows you to set up a redirect in such a way it’s an easy redirect for specific user roles. You can set it up for specific capabilities and still have blanket rules for all other users, and this way you can set it up for your general users, your administrative, your editors – whatever you’ve got in there.
It makes the task to setting up the redirects a very easy thing, and if that’s all you need, this is a really great plugin for you. Go check it out: Peter’s Login Redirect and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very nice, and I know you’ve got a couple of those plugins here today, so it’s gonna be interesting to see which one wins out. All right, so the first plugin that I have today is something that’s pretty cool. It’s called Multiple External Product URLs for WooCommerce – very long name. But what it allows you to do is create multiple external or affiliate product URLs with your buttons in WooCommerce.
So here’s the deal, John. If I have a product that I’m selling that’s say an affiliate product and I have affiliate links for eBay, I have affiliate links for Etsy, if I have affiliate links for Amazon, I can actually add the external URLs to all of those, have one product description, and they can choose as to which one they go buy from. So it allows you to open multiple external URLs or affiliate links within new windows and have them buy right there. This is exactly what I was looking for with one particular site, it worked very, very well, and I rate this one a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Excellent. This sounds like a really great plugin for setting up a good store for affiliates – an affiliate store.
Marcus: Yes, and that’s exactly what I am working on for it. I have different products; this happens to be apparel that I’m working on and say if it’s a hat, then I want to have the five different stores that this hat is available at.
John: Okay.
Marcus: And you can even – because it’s just a URL that you’re putting in there, let’s just say you wanted to do an eBay search for whatever that item is and then save that URL.
John: Nice!
Marcus: And that’s what you could do.
John: It’s something for me to look into.
Marcus: It does a lot.
John: It’s something for me to look into. I’m starting to build out my own little personal affiliate website over at Hype Club for Men and I think I’m gonna have to keep that one in mind.
Marcus: Yes.
John: All right, well this show here currently brought to you by…
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Absolutely. Drop in to my website, visit me, give me a call. I can help you with all your WordPress needs, especially hosting. When you’re tired of having piss-poor hosting, come visit me.
And of course we do have a contest winner from the August content for the WP Nearby Places, so congratulations to Bear out there who won the contest. And this month here, we are giving away a new contest. We have a new contest. It’s the Ultimate Bundle License Package from WPBookList and this is a nice little contest. WPBookList is a plugin I haven’t yet – well, a plethora of plugins managing books.
It’s a WordPress plugin that strives to be an ultimate book management tool, whether you’re an author, a publisher, a librarian, a bookstore owner, or simply a lover of books. It has something just for you. You just plug in the ISBN or ASN number, BookList scours Amazon and other sources for information about it, including the cover images, publication date, pages, and more, and it puts all that information into your website and sets up all the fields. Fields are editable so you can go in and change it all up, has a bulk upload for it. It’s a really great plugin.
So check this plugin out and go sign up for the new contest. It’s an $83 value for the ultimate bundle of all their extensions. And if you’re in a hurry to get it, use the coupon code that they’re offering up at ULTIMATE20 for $12 off on it.
And a shout out to the Simple Giveaways plugin who powers our giveaways on our website, so go check out their plugin, too.
Marcus: Yeah, it looks like a good one. I’ll have to check that out.
John: Well this is one that is kind of interest to me because I’ve made an effort to start reading more books this past summer and it’d be really interesting to see what I can do along with using it to pull in book information on my Hype Club for Men website, so something to really check out.
Marcus: Yes.
John: Okay, and our next set of plugins we’ve got for you here…this one here from me is an oldie but a goodie, and it’s one that I reviewed previously – oh, about five, six years ago, give or take, and I’ve been using it off and on for seven years. It’s called Theme My Login and Theme My Login used to include a ton of free stuff in it. And now they’ve started going downhill about four years ago and then what they finally did was they broke it down into a freemium plugin, creating a core bundle that worked very well and then adding in all the stuff that used to be and now it’s charged as a premium bundle.
Now, this thing here, it’s come a long way from the last time I used it; it had problems. Now it’s smooth, it works. Logging in with it, it goes in and helps you set up a theming system for your login of your website. You can change the login pages in it, you can customize the logout pages, you can set up and use multiple logins and extensions. It’s got a nice legacy extension bundle in here. You can set up restrictions, security, moderation, redirection. Profiles – you can customize up the profiles for your users and more.
I finally had to use this for a client’s website recently when we were going through the membership site and we needed to get in there and do some profile customizations and we needed to set up some moderation and redirection all in one. So this is a really great plugin to go check out. Their premium version is quite nice. I only reviewed the premium version in this one here and I didn’t review the free version, so the premium version here, I give it a perfect 5-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Interesting. I didn’t know that they broke it out.
John: Yeah, well they hadn’t – I’d forgotten about it for a long time and I just – it came back to my attention when I was trying to find a solution to it and Theme My Login kept coming up and I said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot,” and it was like, “Oh, they’ve gone to a freemium model. They’ve broken it all out and like they should’ve done in the beginning.” And now they’re – now it’s quite quality.
Marcus: Yeah. I use it for my membership site, actually. It works pretty well.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: All right, so the next plugin I’ve got is called Stock In, and it is known as – at least labeled – as a stock plugin manage – it manages your stock and keeps records of the stock and inventory that you have within your WooCommerce site. So you can set the stock quantity for each product and the variations of each product like colors and things like that. You can get a stock record for each one of the products – that’s obviously another option. You can sort by different IDs and product names and all that.
This is not what I thought it would do. I actually thought that this would interact with the items that were out of stock and then when you put new stock in, it would actually do something. But it doesn’t and that’s a bummer, because there is one plugin that is lacking in this sphere as far as WooCommerce, it’s managing stock. And if someone receives stock and they go in and say import a particular list or “Hey, Product X now has 20 in stock,” I think that WooCommerce should have something that says, “If the product is out of stock, hey, I want to sign up and tell me when this stock comes in,” and this should do something like that and it does nothing like that. It doesn’t manage any of the stock levels; it just something you could’ve done manually anyway, so to me this particular plugin is a waste. It’s called Stock In and I rated it a 3 out of 5.
John: There you go, one to avoid. Okay, well I’m still working through that problem with my other client who has a brick and mortar store combined with their online store that we just launched for them. That’s challenging for them to figure out how to keep their stock levels correct in both areas.
Marcus: Yeah, this is not the one.
John: Nope. Okay, well one to keep out. All right, well listener feedback – we really like listener feedback and in that vein there, I do want to acknowledge the listeners that are listening to us live to the show. Right now we’ve got four people up – well, we had four and we’ve backed down to three. Hi Manny, hi Larry. Thanks for coming in to the show. Nice to see you guys in there. And if you’d like for other folks to listen to this via the podcast itself, get us feedback. You can come join us on our monthly show. It’s usually the first Monday of every month. I had to skip Monday yesterday unfortunately due to a family emergency. My father is in the hospital, so I had to go up there. But we’re back at it today and we always get back live for the first Monday of every month if we possibly can. It’s usually scheduled for noon, sometimes a little bit before or after.
And if you’d like to give us feedback, please drop into our website at wppluginsatoz.com. You know, you can leave us feedback via —
Marcus: SpeakPipe.
John: — SpeakPipe, thank you. Via SpeakPipe or Contact page or you can contact us on our YouTube channel or at Facebook or Twitter – any of the multiple places there, we’d love the feedback so…
Marcus: Nice. So it looks like we’ve got one email from a listener that says:
Hello there,
Thank you for telling me about this WordPress plug-in to compress my pictures here: wppluginsatoz.com/image-optimization-youtube-error-fixes-image-handlers/
But then I discovered that adding plug-ins to my site it caused the site speed to go down, which kinda ruins the purpose. So that is why I decided to look around for a free online tool.
After some exploring, I wanted to suggest it as an alternative to the plug in.
https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/imagecompressor/,
This is a free online tool that allows you to compress pictures that are up to 50 MB in size both in jpeg and in png format! So maybe sharing it with your users can help them too.
In hope I helped back, Angie.
Angie, that is a good one. The one I actually use is called tinypng.com and that one works the best. Also if you’re looking for a good image compression program, you could use wpsmush, S-M-U-S-H, which is a pretty good one out there as well. But anyway, thank you for your feedback. We do appreciate it, Angie.
John: We do appreciate it. Thanks, Angie. All right, and this show is a value-for value model, meaning you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those that have supported the show with donations of $50 or over by reading out their note and publishing it in our show notes every week. And in the monthly show we like to acknowledge those notes live, and we’ve got a few of them to read out here.
And for those that come in under $50, they remain anonymous. We thank you very much and like to thank everyone out there from Patreon and the other small donations that come in through the month. They really help the show out. And with that, let’s alternate through these ones. Marcus, I’ll take the first one.
August 8, 2018
Jezweb Pty Ltd.
Note from Jezweb Pty Ltd:
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 customised Woocommerce store created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au . Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez
And I will be back in a sec…
Marcus: Okay, and continuing now…we’re looking at another donation from Jezweb. He’s got a bunch here, so let’s go through these. The first I’ve got is:
This donation is on behalf of Newcastle Towing and Transport https://www.newcastletowingtransport.com.au/ move cars, trucks and machinery. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with the always innovative Elementor. Thank you for continuing to review WordPress Plugins. Jez
We’ve also got:
This donation is on behalf of Gillian Lana https://www.gillianlana.com a career coach and teacher in Australia and Europe. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au. Thank you for continuing to present the WP Plugins podcast. Jez
So we appreciate all of those different donations that Jeremy has sent out. He actually built that last one with Elementor, which is something that I’ve been getting into lately as well, which is pretty cool.
John: Thank you very much there, Jez.
Marcus: Thanks – yeah, big thanks to him. That’s huge support every single week. We do appreciate it. Big thanks to everybody who came in over $50 and we do read them out like that and we’ll give you a backlink. Even if you want to submit it on behalf of a client, that’s a pretty cool thing to do to not only get recognition, but also to get a nice little bit of link love for your client. Thanks everybody who reaches out to us on Patreon. You can go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and get everything there as far as all of the different donation things. And wppluginsatoz.com is where you can get information on all of it, so thank you very much to all of the supporters out there. We really appreciate your help.
John: Absolutely. Thank you all very much. Much appreciated. I had to get the door to let my kid back into the apartment – half day of school today for ‘em.
All right, and this brings us to our final set of plugins, and the last one I’ve got for you here today is called Custom Login Page Customizer. Now, this is a very nice login page customizer. It does have a premium version in it, but it allows you to go in and customize up the login page with background images, change the colors, your header, change the login button colors. It’s got a whole lot of nice features.
If you opt for the premium version in it, you can start moving around that login window from left to right. You can fade it out, give it a clear, see-through appearance. There is a lot of little tweaks you can do to this. It gives you a really fancy custom login for your website, which is actually a little bit better than the one from Theme My Login. Used in combination, you can actually have some pretty decent setups with it. I’ve found it to work out quite nice.
So anyway, because it’s a freemium version and the pro version, that automatically ticks off one point, so I give this one a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out, the Custom Login Page Customizer.
And…
Marcus: Very nice. I like it. Okay, the final plugin for me today is called Proof Factor. Now, you may have been on a landing page or a signup or something like that and seen something pop up that says, you know, “John from Victoria, B.C. just bought this thing,” or…
John: Yeah.
Marcus: You know, “Marcus from Laguna Beach just purchased this” or “…just signed up to the webinar,” whatever. That’s typically done by this service called Proof, which is pretty expensive. This is called Proof Factor and it does the exact same thing. You can hide it from specific pages, you can loop notifications, you can scale it, you can seed it, you can do WooCommerce stuff – all that kind of stuff. Basically within 10 minutes you can have it up to where it sort of derives that in-demand factor that we all love.
So check it out. It’s called Proof Factor. It’s a great way to sort of create that sense of urgency for people that are buying on your website or signing up to something on your website, and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Excellent. That’s something for – to definitely consider and look into, especially if you’re trying to showcase stuff.
Marcus: Yes.
John: All right, well closing out this episode, I covered up the Peter’s Login Redirect, which I gave a 4 to; the Theme My Login, which I gave a 5 to; and then the Custom Login Page Customizer, which I gave a 4 to.
Marcus: And I talked about the Multiple External Product URLs, which gets a 5 out of 5; Stock In gets a 3 out of 5, and Proof Factor gets a 5 out of 5.
John: Excellent. And a couple of reminders and promotions. Everyone that’s on the island of Victoria, hey, if you get a chance, come on down to our meetup – well, our meetup actually tomorrow is sold-out. I shouldn’t say “come on down,” I’ve actually got 32 people scheduled to show up and two of them are sitting on the waiting list right now, which is kind of nice. It’s also going to be streamed live on YouTube. It’s already set up so if you’re listening to get a chance, drop into our YouTube channel and check out the live stream. I’ve been practicing and setting everything up, so provided we have minimal amounts of technical glitches, this will be streamed lived.
It’ll be me giving two presentations; one presentation on the basics of WordPress setup and then how to set up the Yoast SEO plugin. And if you miss those, there will be more WordPress meetups coming, one a month all the way until next year, and I’ve got three guest speakers coming in to give presentations on various things for WordPress, so it’s going to be quite the information – and all of them are going to be streamed into the YouTube channel and saved there. So go check it out at the Victoria WordPress Meetup group.
And a note to developers who’d like to support the show: if you’d like to offer up a premium license to give away, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and leave us all the information there.
And then also stop into our website and subscribe to our newsletter. And that’s pretty much all I’ve got for you. Anything left, Marcus?
Marcus: No, that’s all we’ve got this time.
John: All right, and one last thing I want to say. Thanks, Larry. My dad, I’m not sure how much better he’s gonna do, but time will tell. I’ll feedback people on that as it goes along. So anyway, thank you very much for dropping in and listening. You all take care. 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.