All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John’s discussion of the weekly plugins he has reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #309 here.
It’s Episode 376 and we’ve got plugins for Drawing on Images, Switching Images and HTML Sitemaps and more, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #376
John: It’s Episode 376 and we’ve got plugins for Drawing on Images, Switching Images and HTML Sitemaps and more, 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. And unfortunately today, Marcus couldn’t join me. He’s off doing some other things at the moment, so it’s just me for the show and it’s going to be a slightly bit different than usual.
But before we get into that and jump into that, I want to play and honor respects for my father who passed away on September 10th last month, and I wanted to play him Last Taps and respect for CW04 Gerald Wayne Overall.
Okay, with that being done…many people who have listened to the show or watched to check out the show notes all month, you’ll notice I had dedicated the show to my father and it’s been a very busy month for me. So with that, let’s proceed with the show and of course right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to us and leaving us a review.
And don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel where you can catch the show live the first Monday of every month and usually it’s at noon on those first Mondays of each month. But occasionally I have to move it such as today I had to move the timeline simply because I had a couple more things to deal with in my – with my father passing away. So please follow us up on Twitter or on our Facebook page.
We do try to answer anything that comes through there on our social media platforms. And you could also jump over to our website and subscribe to us on our website. Just go to the lower right-hand corner. You can click to subscribe to the newsletter where we send out regular weekly information. And also if you want to get a hold of us, click the bottom button in the corner and leave us a voicemail. We get those up into the show as soon as we possibly can.
Okay, so with all that being said, let’s move on to the first plugin I have here today.
First up what I’ve got here is a plugin called Draw Attention, and this plugin here is one that helps you create interactive maps on your images for your website. You can map any image you want with it. The free version (which is what I checked out) allows you to edit up and have one image available. But if you need more than one image for it, you have to go to the pro version.
It’s a really nice, useful plugin. You can use it to draw all kinds of things onto a photo image and then it creates a popup window when people mouse over it for additional information. Very useful plugin; there’s lots of other tools out there that do similar things, but I thought this would be an interesting one to bring to the table for people. Okay, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out. The plugin is Draw Attention and it’s available in the WordPress Repository.
And this show here currently brought to you by…
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And to let everyone know, we have had a winner from last month’s contest for the ultimate bundle from WP Book List. Congratulations to Craig and his information will be going out to him shortly for it. It was valued at $83 and we do have a couple more contests that I haven’t fully prepared yet, but they’ll be coming back for next month, so make sure you check the newsletters for when they go live. So subscribe to our newsletter to check that out for when it goes live.
And what else do we have here today? Let’s see….no, I’m not doing 10 plugins solo, sorry. It’s only six and I’m only doing my three today and talking about a few other things, so thanks Larry. I will be more interactive though today than usual. Thanks to those that have joined us live. I really appreciate the live viewers that show up and say hello.
Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you is a nice little – a great little plugin that can come in handy for folks. It’s an Image Switcher plugin. Now, somewhere in the past we’ve reviewed similar image switcher plugins, but this one’s brand new. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to put up two images and when people mouse over it, it swaps the image for them. It’s not a slide across and compare but a swap back and forth between the two images. You can put up before and after image, you can put up two different images that allow it to pop up. You can create a shortcode from the thing to put the images anywhere you want. You could create them as custom post types is what it does and allows you to use a shortcode to place it anywhere within your site that you’d like.
It’s a really nice plugin; it works great. It’s fairly easy and straightforward. Being brand new, they’re still working on the additions to it and stretching it out. But at the moment I found it to be quite an excellent plugin and it’s one that I had to give a 5-Dragon rating to.
Okay, could make for a short show but I try not to leave it too short today. Now, we do have a fair amount of things up and coming into the future and right now, we’ve got a little bit of listener feedback and other things to talk about, and we do love listener feedback and the show and we put it back to the show to say thank you for your time. And this week here, we’ve got a new iTunes review which came in and the iTunes review came in by Utility Locator USA Store and it says:
“Hey guys! I love this podcast and seriously look forward to each episode. The team always have great new plugins for review and I have discovered a bunch of plugins that I would have never found otherwise!”
And so thank you very much, Utility Locator. I really appreciate those reviews in the iTunes store and if you can, take a few minutes if you haven’t already done it. Please give us a review in the iTunes Store. Let us know what you think – good, bad, ugly. We prefer the good but hey, we’ll take anything.
And show donors – this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, we’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past weeks and month since we only do one live show a month now and the other three are prerecorded. All the donations $50 and over are read out in the live show and their note is attached both in the live show and the prerecorded shows throughout the month. For those that come below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much. We would also like to thank out the Patreon donors.
Well, this show’s donors are from early September. We had Jezweb Pty. Ltd. who donated $50 and their note:
“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’s using that more and more, so thank you very much, Jez. And,
“Thank you for continuing to review new and interesting plugins. It would be interesting to hear of your experience and reviews on disable gutenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like wp disable.”
My experience and reviews on Disable Guttenberg and cleanup or declutter plugins like WP Disable. Thanks, Jez. Well, I think I’ll stick that one in the review queue – WP Disable – but there will be coming down the line as we hit Guttenberg stuff disabling plugins. And declutter plugins, I haven’t used one in quite some time. I used to use them all the time but I found more effective ways of doing the decluttering.
And September 11th, Jezweb Pty. Ltd. sent us in another $50.
“This donation is on behalf of Krosstech https://www.krosstech.com.au who sell storage and workshop equipment in Australia. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor, Woocommerce and the Yith Quote Request plugin. Thank you for finding new and interesting plugins to review. Thanks. Jez”
Well, thank you very much, Jez. Your support of this show has just been amazing over the last year. Really, truly – it’s been great. You’ve helped cover the costs of the servers and the transcripts that we get up, which actually are pretty current now that I have some help and support to get those things up and online and keep them up and current, so thank you for that. All the monies that are collected from donations, they go straight back into the show. They don’t make their way into our pockets.
And a big thank you to donors who came in under $50 and for those of you that have small weekly subscriptions and the monthly Patreon subscriptions. Thank you very much for your support. It’s really a big help. It helps offset the costs. If you’d like to support the show, you can go over to weppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show, so please help the show out there. We’d greatly appreciate it.
Okay and yeah, there’s the Jezweb site. All right, and what do we got here? Over at Patreon and you can support the show over at wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Yeah, I’m a little scatter. It’s been a rough month. Not only obviously I’m the executor of the estate, so I have a lot to do. I’m still not done. Quite a lot goes into it.
All right, my final plugin today is WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap. This is a sitemap plugin – I know sitemaps aren’t used all that much anymore, especially the old HTML ones, but this one I kind of like and it’s a brand new plugin and it’s reminiscent of what I used to do and occasionally I do need an HTML sitemap. And if you’re not familiar with them, the HTML sitemaps were the old navigation page where you used to land on or create for websites back in the beginning of the internet so people could find their way around your website better because creating the menus was a bit more work than it is now.
But occasionally it still comes in handy if you’ve got a really crazy, deep site. The other thing is it gives a lot of internal links to your site that can be useful, so it’s something you may want to check out. Go see this plugin; it allows you to build the sitemaps in multiple ways. You can do it for pages or posts or tags or a mixture of everything. It creates a shortcode that you then place on a page and it automatically generates the sitemap.
It’s a very nice plugin. It does an excellent job of setting things up for you. I found it to be quite useful. It also allows you to create a site map with images on the page using the featured images too, so there’s multiple ways you can create the site maps themselves on this. So go check this plugin out. It’s called WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap and again I give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
Yeah, I think it’s definitely worth some SEO stuff there, so yeah. So it’s one you might want to – you do want to check out. I know that I’m going to be adding it into my WP Plugins site because I still have troubles navigating my own site since it’s been growing for eight years. Lots of stuff in there; the bigger it grows, the more it gets to locate stuff.
What else do we got here? Well, that’s all the plugins I’ve got this episode and I will be bring more stuff to the table. There’s a lot coming the pike for the show but closing out the show on the plugins though, I covered up Draw Attention, which I gave a 4 to; the Image Switcher, which I gave a 5 to; the WordPress Simple HTML Sitemap, which I have a 5 to.
Now I do have some more screencasts that are in production set up for it now. I have a new computer that’s being built this next week, so my production is gonna get a whole lot easier once I have a computer that’s more up to speed for everything. And so I’m going to be producing more of those training videos that I’ve been producing.
There’s also – for those who live here on Vancouver Island or Western Canada, if you want to come over to Victoria and visit, we have the monthly WordPress Meetups, which are all now scheduled through until June of next year. They’re up in meetup.com and you can join the meetups and I’m going to be livestreaming those out. After the bugs of my first meetup, I now know what I’ve got to do to make sure the livestream actually works the way it’s supposed to and we’ll get that out for everyone. That is some stuff that is going to be really great.
I’ve got several speakers aside from myself presenting, so it’s not just me talking all the time and bringing in some different points of views. Our next meetup is going to feature a speaker who is going to come in and talk to us about all the cool things you can do with GravityForms and he’s got a whole litany of types of forms and how you can use GravityForms in your website to do multiple things, so it’s something you’ll want to come check out or at least check out the livestreaming version of it, which will be October 9th. The link will be up on your YouTube channel for live events this week and it’ll happen at 6:30 Pacific Time. So if you’re on the East Coast, sorry, it’s a little late but the show will be up there on our YouTube channel after that.
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And some of the usual reminders here, well, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. All the notes of course at wppluginsatoz.com and I’m supposed to let my girl read it all out, so I will let her read this all out for us.
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.
John: I guess I’m gonna have to hope that Google got me a good cast this time because I forgot to start my backup tonight. All right, so thank you all very much and that’s all we’ve got for you now. Take care, bye-bye.
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.
John: That’s the main show. I’m going to take care of a couple of other little things here. So yeah, hi, Luis. Thanks a lot for popping into the show. Sorry, it’s a short one today but Marcus was unable to join the show and I’m just getting back to my normal life after three weeks of a lot of stuff on my plate. So check out the live show feedback. It’ll be great and I appreciate everyone coming out and more is coming along the line soon. And who knows? I may even do the occasional live show here throughout the month just for fun. Anyway, take care now. Bye, everyone.