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 #373 here.
It’s Episode 373 and we’ve got plugins for Disabling Toolbars, Intro Pages, Site Cleaners, WooCommerce Delivery Drivers, Header & Footer Scripts and Private Media. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #373
Marcus: It’s Episode 373 and we’ve got plugins for Disabling Toolbars, Intro Pages, Site Cleaners, WooCommerce Delivery Drivers, Header & Footer Scripts and Private Media. 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 for you today, but 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, subscribing to the show and leaving us comments and reviews there. We’d greatly appreciate that.
Marcus: That’s right. You can also check out our training videos, screencasts, and watch us live the first Monday of every month at 10:00 Pacific Time over at YouTube. We’ve got a lot of new stuff going up there. Remember, you can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s where we keep all of the news related to WordPress because this show is all about plugins.
John: Absolutely. And before we dive right into the plugins here, I want to say a big thank you to those of you that showed up to the livestream for the WordPress Meetup yesterday. Thank you to the listeners out there that showed up. I know a couple did because of the thumbs-up on the video while it was streaming live, even with all the technical difficulties. So thank you very much to all of you that joined in on that.
All right, well with that that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.
Okay, and first up today I have for you Disable Toolbar, and this plugin here is a nice, simple plugin for you that if you’re running a membership site of any sort, eventually you’re gonna run into the problem where you just don’t want your viewers to see that toolbar that shows up at the front of your website – the visitor side of the website – the toolbar that’s so handy for admins. It also shows up for visitors or members that are signed into your site.
This plugin here makes it an easy task for you to turn it off depending upon their membership level or their user level, be it editor, subscriber, contributor, etc. So what you want to do is you want to just plug this thing in, turn it on, go into the settings page, and then tick the boxes for the levels that you don’t want to see it, and it’s all done. It’s a really great, simple plugin. I like the way it works and I give it a 4-Dragon rating. Check it out: Disable Toolbar.
Marcus: Very nice. All right, my first plugin today, I am going to all this month feature a plugin from Envato Elements, which is a great subscription, monthly service, or you can pay annually, and they’ve got all kinds of stuff. It started off with just kind of stock photography and graphics and things like that, but they’ve brought together video and moving backgrounds and, you know, after effects templates and Adobe Premiere templates and things – pretty great stuff. But then they just started putting a lot of WordPress themes and WordPress plugins in there. In fact, there’s over 300 plugins. So there’s a whole new reservoir to tap from in my eyes, and I’m going to start bringing these to light on the show.
And the first one is called WP Mega Intro, and this is really cool because it has like these full-screen hero images and it’s almost like a slideshow before you get to the main website, and I thought this was really intriguing. You can put it in the homepage or you can use it on any page or a post which was even more cool in my eyes, because then I could just make little slideshow presentations out of a page – really cool. So you can have three different types: normal, session, and cookie, so that it will not play the same intro the second time someone comes to the page, which is pretty cool.
It also has the ability to put a video onto the page and if the video finishes, then it can auto-redirect to a different page, like the main homepage or something like that. That was pretty cool. You can do logos, you can have a little button on there that says, “Skip it,” you can change the CSS, and the other cool thing is actually you could import and export the different mega intros to bring them onto other sites, which I thought was really nice because then you could template the thing.
So it does video, audio, different sliders, images, you can do a Contact Forms 7 form, or it just exports and imports pure HTML, which I thought that was really cool. This is a very, very nice plugin and I rated it a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: That sounds kind of interesting and kind of reminiscent of the old Splash Page days to me is what it sounds like.
Marcus: It is, and that is kind of making a comeback —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — especially in mobile.
John: Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed in the sites I’ve been hitting but I suppose everything old is new again.
Marcus: That’s right.
John: All right, well that brings us up to this show here, currently sponsored by…
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Absolutely. In the top right corner, you can find my phone number. Give me a call. I’ll help you with all your WordPress needs.
Marcus: And new to the show —
John:
Marcus: — my company, X2 Marketing. We are your full service digital marketing and brand development agency. So whether you are a solo entrepreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, you can power up your marketing with X2. From WordPress to click funnels, landing pages, to social campaigns, SEO, paid ads, Infusionsoft management – any of that kind of stuff – we can handle it. Go to x2marketing.com, get in touch with me about your digital marketing needs.
John: Excellent. And of course this month here, we do have another contest giveaway. We’re giving away a premium plugin ultimate bundle license from WP Book List. This is a plugin that strives to be the ultimate book management tool for your WordPress website, whether you’re an author, publisher, librarian, or bookstore owner – or simply a lover of books. The WP Book List has something to help you manage it.
It includes things such as connecting up to Amazon and selecting the information from there to quickly load it into your website. It has an app that will allow you to scan the ISBN codes off of the back of a book and instantly download that information and more. This is really one fantastic plugin if you’re a book lover or you’re running a book website of some sort. Go check this thing out. And if you want to get yourself a hold of the ultimate bundle, which is valued $83, go sign up for our contest at wppluginsatoz.com.
And if you’re in a hurry to get the plugin, they have a $12 off coupon right now. Just put in ULTIMATE 20, all caps, and save. So – and also, all our contests are currently powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, so thank you very much to them for providing us with the tool to provide these contests.
Hey, and that brings us to our next set of plugins. And the next one I’ve got for you here is called Transient Cleaner. Now, this one her is one I was stumbling across while I was looking for something else and I realized it’s a really great way to help clean up and declutter your website. One of the biggest problems of WordPress is the transients that are created in your database, and the transient data is data that’s created for temporary caching of the database. Their transients are created by your posts, your pages, every time you create a change in your post and save it as a revision. There’s transients created – plugins create transients – all kinds of things are creating transients. And these transients stay in your database and they don’t get automatically deleted and they only get deleted if you revisit that data for some reason, and then it’s automatically deleted but a new transient is created.
So what this plugin does for you is it goes in there and looks for all the transients in your database and cleans them out. Now, you can go in and clean out all the expired transients or you can go in there and set it up so that it cleans out all the transients on a regular basis. It’s a really great plugin. It helps clean up your database, especially if you’ve got a lot of stuff creating lots of transients, and that would depend. Maybe you’ve got a WooCommerce store creating tons of transients for all of the products that people look at, etc.
So anyway, go check this plugin out: Transient Cleaner and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Marcus: Very nice! It’s always important —
John: Oh, absolutely.
Marcus: — to keep your database clean. All right – you know, John, one of the things about WooCommerce is it’s basically built for almost all frontend. There’s really no back office type interface – at least, you know, not without a bunch of plugins.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: But this plugin came about and I thought it was pretty cool. I looked at it, I tested it out. It works pretty well. It’s called Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce. Now, this is for you that use WooCommerce and also have local delivery. It allows you to take a product order and assign it to a specific driver and then it also allows you to track the status of the delivery in almost real-time. So the one thing I did not test was the driver’s ability to actually confirm that something was delivered, so that’s the one thing I didn’t look at.
It includes the sale amount, the items in the order, and the address for which the product is being delivered. It is a great plugin for specific uses but only if you do local deliveries, and in that case, it’s a game changer, so check it out. It is called Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce and I rated it a 4 out of 5.
John: That could be a fantastic plugin for someone running say a flower shop with WooCommerce. Or, I’ve run into the occasional local pizza place that has it, so yeah.
Marcus: Right.
John: That’s actually kind of —
Marcus: Pizza might be too big of a volume .
John: Maybe, maybe not.
Marcus: They have their own system.
John: Yeah, well some local pizza places don’t.
Marcus: Yeah. Truth be told, this plugin was developed out of the marijuana dispensary model.
John: Oh, now there’s another good use for you. I hadn’t thought about that. I should, considering it’s —
Marcus: Yeah.
John: — legal in Canada and starting in a month.
Marcus: Hm.
John: In one month’s time, the entire country of Canada, it’s 100% legal.
Marcus: Well, that’s a good opportunity for some entrepreneur that knows how to develop WordPress in Canada to clean up the market, so to speak.
John: Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, well this brings us up to some listener feedback and we do love our listener feedback. And if you’d like to give us feedback, head over to our Contact page, look us up. Hit us up on SpeakPipe, leave us a message. You can even hit us up on our social media platforms: YouTube or Twitter – and our Facebook page.
Okay, and with that, we do have a letter from – or an email message from a listener today, and it goes like this:
Listen to and greatly appreciate your podcasts. I heard on your latest podcast that you could suggest if a plugin exists for some functionality I am looking for my WP site.
I am looking to sync information, most likely from a custom field using ACF formatted to an authenticated Facebook page. The video link shows what I am looking for (with some cool piano jazz music as a bonus!)
Thanks and keep up the awesome reviews!!!!
-Tom
And well, I did send Tom back an email but for everyone else’s sake, I told Tom I’m not sure which plugin would allow for you the use of advance custom fields. But I did review a plugin that connects up to Facebook for auto-posting in Episode 364 from Web Dorado and I suggested he contact them to see if they can customize the plugin to suit his needs, because there’s quite a few plugins that auto-post to Facebook but I don’t know. Some of them work well and a couple of them I tested back then, they just didn’t work worth crap, and also they’ve got the problem of Facebook is constantly changing their platform, making it hard for people to auto-post. So this is something you’ll be in a constant fight and battle with.
But anyway, good luck with that, Tom. I hope it works out for you.
Marcus: I agree. That is a complete custom job, and I wouldn’t commit too much to it as you said, because Facebook changes things all the time. Especially after this whole privacy thing that happened —
John: Mm-hm.
Marcus: — and the whole bit. They’re very strict —
John: Yeah.
Marcus: — and even in groups that I own, I’m having a big trouble – you know, a big difficulty getting things to sync over, so it doesn’t work like it used to. Before, the sky was the limit, but now it’s very tough.
John: Now it’s tough. Okay, and this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week and at the live show of every month, we read out their notes, because the rest of the shows are pre-done and ready to go for you. Anyway, this show here hit it in just under the wire. We got a donation from Jezweb Pty. Ltd. and his note says:
This donation is on behalf of Hotel 77 https://www.hotel77.com.au/ accommodation with beach views in Newcastle, Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor.
He seems to be doing more and more sites with Elementor. And as a final bit:
Thank you for continuing to review new and interesting plugins. It would be interesting to hear of your experience and reviews on disabling Gutenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like WP Disable. Thanks. Jez
Well, thank you, Jez and appreciate that. I’ve actually got some stuff coming in this direction on Gutenberg because I’ll be presenting on Gutenberg at one of my upcoming meetups, so I’ve got a lot of research to do to write it up. And disabling it, yeah, that’s my main goal right now. And cleanup and declutter plugins, well, I’ve got one today but I’ve got more that are coming along the way, and I’ll check out the one called WP Disable. I don’t recall ever testing that one.
Marcus: Yeah, me neither.
John: Okay, and a big thank you to our donors who came in under $50. You know who you are and thank you very much for those who have the small subscriptions over at Patreon. Subscriptions came through for this month; thank you very much. And if you’d like to support the show, head over to wppluginsatoz.com/donate for information on how you can donate and support the show.
And that brings us up to our final set of plugins for the day. And the last one I’ve got here for you is called Insert Headers and Footers. Now from time to time, it’s going to be necessary for you to insert some code into the header section or the footer section of your templates, and you can do it of course manually by editing your page. But if you update your theme, you could wipe that stuff out – kind of a pain. Some themes make it very easy for you to do this by creating a blank spot for your header and footer. Other themes, they don’t put that in there for some reason.
And so what you end up needing to do is use a plugin such as this, Insert Headers and Footers, which creates the blank spots that you can insert any JavaScript, HTML code, plain text, or anything you want to put into your header or footer area quickly and easily. And I needed this recently on a theme I use regularly which doesn’t have a header and footer access easily to just insert some tracking stuff into the header area. This plugin just made it real easy. It’s a quick one; it’s one of my favorite type of plugins: plug it in, set it up. It doesn’t add any weight to the site and you just add your code and go.
Fantastic little plugin: Insert Headers and Footers and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
The Dragon wasn’t sounding right tonight.
Marcus: Very nice. Well, keep the button handy. The final plugin that I’ve got is called Private Media, and this is pretty interesting. Have you ever wanted to make any media private? Like images or videos or any files that you upload? PDFs – things like that? Stuff that you don’t want hot linked or Google to index or people to look into your upload file and see? Well, this plugin actually will take care of all of that.
So basically you can lock the access to items in the media library by making it so that someone has to be logged in and when somebody actually has to have access level to see it, not only just being logged in. Pretty cool. It does not break the images that are not set to private; instead, what happens with the private images is it’s replaced by an access denied SVG picture, which is pretty cool.
John: Cool!
Marcus: So if you ever wanted to lock down anything within your site – let’s just say you sold photography and they were stock images or things like that. I know you had one of those sites one time.
John: Oh, yeah.
Marcus: I worked on a client that had a site like that and that was the thing. If they have the link, it would actually sometimes just give them that.
John: Yeah.
Marcus: So this eliminates all of that. It’s called Private Media and it’s rated a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Very cool. Yeah, I like that. I did have one once and I ran it for a little while and realized it was more work than it was worth.
Marcus: Yeah.
John: Okay, well that closes out this episode here. I covered up Disable Toolbar, which I gave a 4 to; Transient Cleaner, which I gave a 4 to; and Insert Headers and Footers, which I gave a 5 to.
Marcus: And I talked about WP Mega Intro, which gets a 5; Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce, which gets a 4; and Private Media, which gets a perfect 5 out of 5.
John: Okay, and a couple of quick reminders and promotions. Go check out the WordPress Meetup group. We have our next meetup on October 9, 2018 and again, I will livestream it and I’m pretty sure it’ll go much better this time, because after the glitches I had in last night’s promotion, then I worked out the problem, so it’ll be fantastic.
And I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to Angel in Hawaii. Thank you for your support and I much appreciate it and I’m glad we solved the problem with the website you’re working on. And thank you to everyone else who supports the show.
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.