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 #377 here.
It’s Episode 377 and we’ve got plugins for SmartLink Dynamic URLs, Ecommerce Merchant Reviews and Online Website Antivirus Protections. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #377
John: And they’re off…It’s Episode 377 and we’ve got plugins for SmartLink Dynamic URLs, Ecommerce Merchant Reviews, and Online Website Antivirus Protections, 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 I’m here doing the show by myself again this week. Marcus is still off doing things – show coming to you live on Canadian Thanksgiving Day up here in Candanavia. We are enjoying our Thanksgiving weekend and I decided to just do this show live this week because I haven’t had time yet to prerecord the shows and have a little extra time.
So for those that happen to join us, well welcome to the show. For those that catch it later on after it’s sent out, well, you missed a good show. At any rate – right off the top, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of 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. We’d greatly appreciate your support in those areas for us. It really helps the show out when you do those things.
Also, take a few minutes and stop in to our YouTube channel and check out the screencasts, our training videos, and you can catch us live the first Monday of every month as a guaranteed live show. But other Mondays may come in as I have time to do a live show with or without Marcus. I’m just going to continue getting this show moving forward the way I like it.
So at any rate, also take a few minutes. You can follow us on Twitter, contact us on our Facebook page, all of those places there where we like to make contact with everyone. With that being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, and first off today what I’ve got for you is a plugin that was sent in for review to us by Sebastion Rossi. It’s called SmartLink Dynamic URLs. This plugin here is a plugin that helps you redefine the meaning of what a web link is. It allows you to insert up to five URLs to a single link; each URL selected randomly on a page load as to what that link will go to. They’ve also added a new functionality for geotargeting, so you can geotarget the people who show up on your page and have the link go to specific links, depending on where they’re located or coming from out there on the globe. So it’s a pretty useful tool that could help you out quite a bit with your website.
And this is one that can actually be useful if you’ve got lots of different links available or if you’ve got links that you’re doing some marketing on, you’re doing some A-B testing, you want to direct people to different products depending on where they’re located. Maybe you run a site that has multiple stores and other things. You’ve got one link; you can direct them to the correct store depending on where they’re geolocated from. Now, geolocation does have its problems but it’s generally pretty good.
You can attach several URLs to a single anchor text also. It’s useful for all kinds of links and it’s really a great little plugin. Checking it out, it looks like something that could be very useful somewhere down the road. So anyway, give it a good checkout. It’s called SmartLink Dynamic URLs and I gave it a 5-Dragon rating.
And we’ve got next here – oh, the usual. This show 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.
Absolutely. Give me a call. Me and my team take really good care of you. You can reach me at my website or grab my phone number: (818) 850-7729. We’ll do the best we can to support you.
Also sponsored by X2 Marketing, your full-service digital marketing and brand development agency. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, small business, or enterprise-level company, power up your marketing with X2. And go give them a call, get in touch with Marcus about your digital marketing needs.
And contests – we do have a contest that will be live later this afternoon hopefully. For October we are giving away a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map that was donated by Botrous from the U.S. Maps plugin that we reviewed back in Episode 368 of the show, and this is a plugin that we gave a 5 out of 5 rating to – Marcus reviewed it. I remember reviewing it quite some time back and I gave it the same rating. It’s an excellent plugin – WP Maps Plugins – and it offers a wide range of professional interactive mapping tools. Not just the United States but also offers other countries. Now, we’re only giving away the United States map, but really a great plugin for helping building interactive maps and it is the pro version that they’re giving away for us. So go check out wppluginsatoz.com for contests to enter the contest and get more information on that plugin.
All right, next up what we have for you…we have the plugin that was sent in to us by Jonathan Acosto. It’s a premium plugin, third-party service. I didn’t fully check out the service but it does look like something very interesting if you’re running an e-commerce website.
What it does is it allows you to deal with all the merchant data and get reviews on your website. They have numerous ways in which they go through and figure out the reviews for the products that are listed in your store and they base their reviews a lot on chargeback ratios. They hook into your credit card processor data somehow – your IPN data that comes in to your website. They use that to help figure it out. They also take into consideration the reviews made by customers and they use all of these things in their own algorithmic formula to give out a review of the products on your website.
And it’s a really great, useful tool. It could be of value to you if you’re running an e-commerce site. This one here is for of course WordPress itself, so you might want to check this one out if you’re running an e-commerce store. See if it’s something that could fit you. From everything I looked at, it looks like it could be a 4-Dragon-worth plugin, so I will give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It is called the Boltron an Ecommerce Merchant Reviews Plugin, and it does look kind of interesting.
All right, so what do we got next here? Oh, we’ve got listener feedback audio clips. We don’t have any for you this week and I would love to get some sent to you – put some out there. All we need is for you listeners out there to drop in to our website and go in and give us feedback at wppluginsatoz.com. You can do it either by going to the lower right-hand corner and clicking on the SpeakPipe button or by sending us emails, get a hold of us via Facebook or Twitter. All those areas there, we will respond to you as quickly as we can. We do monitor the stuff; we’re not always on top of it, but I do the best I can.
And if you’ve got questions, it’s a great way to get free advice. Send us questions to the show, we’ll research it, answer your question here on the show, getting you an email on what to do.
And this show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And we like to acknowledge our weekly donors here, monthly donors, by reading out any notes that they provide us. Fifty dollars and over gets your note read out in the show and all links and everything you provide are provided there, so support the show. And for those of you that came in under $50, we greatly appreciate your small support. All donations to the show currently only go to pay for things like transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. – all the miscellaneous things that are required just to get the show produced, running, and on air. So make sure you go check those out.
There is a new link to donate. I’ve made it much easier to donate to the show. Simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, fill out the form, set your amount for the donation, and then just donate. It’s a whole lot simpler than it used to be. I had it too complicated; I really apologize for those that wanted to donate and it was too complex. Well, no longer. It’s a very simple and easy to do. Go check it out: wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Donations are all collected via PayPal.
And finally, what do we got? Oh, we just have the last plugin I’ve got to talk about here. This one here is another plugin that was sent in to us. This was sent in by Alan Wait. It’s a third-party service. It’s called WebDefender and this is a third-party service. I haven’t created my account with them yet to fully test it, so I’ve gone through and just reviewed everything that it does. But it is a free service at the moment. I imagine eventually they’ll have to charge for it because let’s face it: nothing’s truly free out there in the world today.
But what it does for you is it gives some smart protections on your website, help prevent hacker attacks, security, anti-spam protection, it helps stop brute force bot attacks, it provides a smart firewall, so it might be something similar to WordFence, which – who knows? If this one checks out, I might want to do it but third-party services, you know, I hem and haw about third-party services. They’ve got good things and bad things.
Hello, Manny. Nice to see you at the show. Yeah, it’s Canadian Thanksgiving here.
And it also provides some diagnostic information for you for vulnerabilities detection, blacklist monitoring, built-in malware removal, security hardening, and some GDPR tools for those of you that have to deal with the GDPR. (Well, which is a fair number of us, unfortunately.)
At any rate, it looks like a pretty great plugin. Being a third-party service though, I can’t give it a 5 because third-party services are always kind of tough, so I give this one a 4-Dragon rating. It’s called WebDefender and go check it out if you aren’t already happy with the setup on your site, looking for something different for security protection for your WordPress website, give this one a go and check it all out.
All right, so before I head to closing out the episode, I know that I’m doing things a little bit different. I decided to, you know, take my Canadian Thanksgiving holiday and do a live show instead of prerecorded shows, because I haven’t had the chance to catch up on my prerecorded shows as it’s been very busy the last month for me. It set me behind the 8-ball quite a bit. For those of you that have been following me, you know the full details of it. Simply to say, my father passed away and it was a tough go for a little while.
At any rate there, what I’m going to do I may do for a little while is do an occasional Monday show when I have the extra time to pop one in. You’ll just have to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notifications of when they’re happening and see what’s up. And Marcus may or may not be able to appear with me on those Mondays aside from the dedicated Monday which is the first Monday of every month and when we prerecord the shows. So we’ll see how it goes.
This month here is a little bit of an oddball for me, so it could just be me doing it and I’ll have to bring in a little more information just to make the show a little bit better than just me with three plugins. I may have to bring it to four or a couple others or bring in a little bit of information. I’ll try to put that here at the end of the show so that you’re not wasting all of your time.
At any rate, closing out this episode of the show here, I covered up the SmartLink Dynamic URLs, which I gave a 5 to; the plugin that allows you to put as many as five URLs into one link on your website or into an anchor text. The Boltron an Ecommerce Merchant Reviews Plugin, which allows you to set up and determine what your store ranking or rating might be. It looked like an interesting kind of plugin to check out. And also I covered up the WebDefender, which is the free website security protection plugin for WordPress – third-party service but still a free service. And as we know, most free services usually end up paid after a while – they have to. They’ve got to pay their bills, too.
And as a few reminders here, please check out our YouTube screencast. For those of you that like to watch live, tomorrow evening, the 9th of October starting at 6:30 Pacific Time will be the livestream of the Victoria WordPress Meetup group where we have two speakers: myself giving a presentation on how to choose the correct theme for your WordPress website and then my buddy Shawn who is giving a presentation on all the cool things you can do with GravityForms. He does some amazing things with GravityForms and he’s gonna showcase them all to us and he’s even got a link to his slide notes and everything else which will be published shortly after the presentation. So it’s something you’ll want to check out just to see what we’re doing out here on the West Coast of Canada as we expand our WordPress Meetup group.
And also, you’ll see more WordPress training videos up and coming. I’ve got my new computer online; I just don’t have it completely organized and set up. But as soon as that’s online, more training videos and other things will be coming your way.
So that pretty much wraps up everything I’ve got for you. I’ll let my girl take it out to say thank you very much for stopping in and listening to 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.
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: And that’s all. Take care.