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 #378 here.
It’s Episode 378 and we’ve got plugins for Creating Web Directories, Using Any Font and Advanced browser Checking. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #378
John: It’s Episode 378 and we’ve got plugins for Creating Web Directories, Using Any Font and Advanced Browser Checking, 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 all by myself again this week. Marcus couldn’t join me. It’s just troubling with the way my life is and current state and shape of all the additional work I have to do. I recommend to you if you’re ever asked to be the executor of an estate, you say no. It’s a lot of work.
At any rate, right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. 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 and subscribing to the show on those various channels.
Take a few minutes also and go check out our screencasts, training videos, and more over on our YouTube channel, and you can also follow us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. And off our website, subscribe to our newsletter where you can get all the latest bits and pieces and information, news, and other stuff that does not make it into the show.
And the show’s format this week is going to be a little different than it has for the last couple of weeks. I’ve got four plugins I’m going to be covering up today. And just to add a little bit to it – and well, with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, first off I’ve got a couple of web directory plugins that I’m checking out. I have a client of mine that asked me for some information about them. He said he was looking at these and said, “Hey, I’d like your opinion.” I said, “Sure, why not? I can take a look at them and see.”
The first one I’ve got for you is called Web Directory Free. Now this is a freemium plugin. It does have a premium version available over at CodeCanyon. I think it’s $39 for it. But the free version is a very good plugin if you’re looking to create a basic website directory based around your local area, your local neighborhood, or your small town, city – whatever it’s going to be. And what this one allows you to do is go in there and create a directory for any purposes such as classifieds or cars, boats – all sorts of different things.
They make it relatively easy to set up using your current theme by using shortcodes to just insert onto the page themselves. This one here also has some nice advantages to it that a lot of other web directory plugins don’t have in that you can import and export .csv files. This way, you can make the job of building out your directory a whole heck of a lot easier than it would’ve been previously.
All in all, this is a pretty decent plugin. It allows you to do all kinds of things with it. It’s SEO-friendly, it’s got customizations for it, adapted for CAPTCHA. If you want to get some of the full advantage of it such as be able to set it up to collect money from people, putting up listings, PayPal, Stripe gateway, etc., you’re gonna need the premium version for this plugin. They do say it’s compatible with site builders like WP Break Free, Visual Composer, and Site Origin, and you can customize in numerous ways with it here.
So anyway, go check this one out. It’s called Web Directory Free and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Next up here, I have another one that’s a web directory plugin. This is another freemium plugin. It’s called WP Geo Directory. Now this one is a lot like the previous one, expect it’s more extensive. It has more items to it; more stuff you can do if you go for the premium version. The free version is still pretty much the same as the previous one. You can build out a directory website based upon your local area. You can set it up to bring in – set it up – it has built into it some of the free version – this one here has the reviews and other things built into the free version into it.
But to get the full functionality of it, you’re gonna have to pop to the premium version of it and start paying for the plugin. What you’re looking at here when I went and looked over their site of it, the premium plugin add-ons, they don’t quite nickel-and-dime you, but they do get you for all the different pieces. You can either buy the whole package at $199, which includes themes that are built specifically for this plugin, so you can base and entire website off of their themes and this plugin, or you can buy ‘em one at a time and I saw the prices range from about $20 to $40, depending on which item you buy, which could get expensive if you bought them all individually versus buying the whole package and the kit and caboodle.
The nice thing about this one here is that I believe the other one had it, where you can add listings. This one here has a better listing page for where the visitors can come in, add listing pages. They also had a claim page, so if you created a bunch of listings, the owner of that business could come in and claim that listing so that they could customize it up and maybe you could make a few bucks off it this way.
This one here – also, if you’re a developer, you can extend this one dramatically. They have their own hooks and filters built in and available with this, so if you’re a developer and you want to take it in your own direction, you could do that with this particular plugin. So it would help you out dramatically and allow you to take full advantage of what this plugin offers. So anyway, check this one out. This is called the WP Geo Directory and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, this show here currently brought to you by…
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And right now we are currently running a contest for October. We’re giving away a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map donated by Botrous, which we reviewed in Episode 368. The contest is running until the end of October and it is from WP Maps Plugin, which is a plugin reviewed and gave it high rankings, high ratings. It’s an excellent plugin for building out interactive maps across all of the world. They do a great job of producing these maps for you, so go check them out.
Okay, next up – next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Advanced Browser Check. Now, there’s not a lot of use for this plugin these days as virtually everyone has a modern browser. But every once in a while, you’re gonna have – such as one of my clients – they’ve got a website up and they – all kinds of people visit them and people who don’t have modern computers or their computers are lacking, or numerous things wrong. So they would have people hit them with older versions of Firefox or older versions of Internet Explorer being the biggest one – the biggest culprit here. And you need to let the customer know that if they’re not hitting your website with a modern browser, it’s not going to work.
Well, this plugin here, while it’s a little bit old – it’s a couple of years old. It hasn’t been updated in a while. It still works great. I recently needed it for a client that was being hit from the older browsers and the people using the browsers were complaining to them that they couldn’t do things such as make donations on the website, they couldn’t see certain pages correctly, etc., when they found out it was the browser. It was like, “We’re sorry. You have an old browser. Please update it. But we put this in there to help notify people what they’ve hit and where their problems are so that it takes care of the problem.”
Fantastic plugin. Even though it’s out-of-date, it works great, does exactly what it’s supposed to, so of course I give this one a top 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, and listener feedback! We do like our listener feedback here on the show, and the more the better – good, bad, indifferent – please sent it all into us. We like to check it out. Even occasionally we get something from iTunes. We recently had an iTunes review and it was popped up – it’s from utilitylocator, United States, US Store, and it said:
“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!”
Well, thank you very much. We appreciate that, utilitylocator, and that’s what this show is all about to try and bring you great plugins, and it helps me, too.
And this week here, we do have a SpeakPipe from Ken Richman, PDF Print Flyers, so take it away, Ken…
“Hey, thanks for reviewing my WooCommerce plugin, Print Flyers Lite – much appreciated. Four out of five? Yep, I’ll take that. That’s pretty fair. Obviously, there’s the premium version Print Flyers from print-flyers.com. That’s print-flyers.com. If you ever fancy reviewing that, let me know; I’ll send you a copy. Much appreciated, take care.”
Thanks, Ken. Much appreciate you leaving us a SpeakPipe, and absolutely, I’ll send you an email off so you can submit the premium version for us to review. We’ll bump you up to a five.
And this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, we would like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week or month, depending on when we’re doing the live shows. All donations $50 and over are read out and their note is published here in the show notes.
And there is a new form for donations. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and you will hit that form. And for all those that came in below $50, they remain anonymous and we thank you very much.
This week’s donors are – came in October 9th from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., and his note says:
“This donation is on behalf of Mayfield Osteo https://www.mayfieldosteo.com.au,a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with the efficient and innovative Elementor. Thank you for continuing to review WordPress Plugins. Jez”
Thank you, Jez. You have been a fantastic supporter of the show and really appreciate it greatly – all the support you’ve given us.
Next one up here, this one came in from Botrous from WP Maps Plugin, which of course we’re giving that one away this month.
“This donation from WP Maps Plugin is on behalf of https://www.wpmapplugins.com/ who offer free and premium professional looking interactive maps of different parts of the world (continents, countries, states, etc.). Thanks for your time, effort, and for your valuable reviews.”
Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. All of that support really helps the show out. It helps us cover the costs of doing the basics of the show: paying for the transcripts (which get up just about every week as soon as we get them). They’re up now. Our transcripts are completely up-to-date. It covers the costs of having the server, bandwidth, etc. for the website. All of the little miscellaneous stuff – nothing ends up in our pockets – not yet, anyway. Not until we’ve got tons and tons of development and then who knows? This could become a full-time gig – although I tried that once; it didn’t quite work out and I went back to working for a living.
So a big thank-you to all our donors under $50. You know who you are, and for those who’ve set up small weekly and monthly subscriptions through PayPal or Patreon, thank you very much. And if you’d like to support us through Patreon, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/Patreon to get there, or click a link in the show notes.
All right, and the final plugin I’ve got for you here today…is called Use Any Font, the freemium version. Now, this one here is one I’ve got on one of my client’s websites, and the reason we went with this was she was looking for a very unique font. She wanted to make her website look like old typewriter on there. And now where there’s fonts available, she’d found a very specific font she wanted to use.
What this plugin allows you to do is use any font in such a way that all you have to do is have the original .ttf, .otf., woff file, and then you can upload it and it will convert it and play it onto your website for you. You can then assign it in quickly and easily without the hassles of CSS, etc., etc.
It’s quick and easy to set up, supports all major browsers. The font conversion is within the plugin interface font uploader. It also uploads directly into the WordPress editor, supports font formatting, and more into the site.
So hey…we’ve got a pinger here…go away. Messages, messages, messages…
Embed fonts – multiple fonts can be used but you have to go to the premium version. Now, the premium version of this is actually for a personal site; it’s only $10, so it’s really quite affordable. So you can use the fonts directly inside Divi Builder, Site Origin Page Builder, and probably other visual builders using the classes in them.
All in all, a pretty great plugin. But of course since I only checked out the freemium version, we have to give it a 4-Dragon rating. Take one point off because it’s got a premium version. I have to test the premium version before it can get a 5.
So anyway, that wraps that up. Go check this one out. It’s called Use Any Font , and it’s available at the WordPress Repository.
Okay, so closing out this episode here, I covered up the Web Directory Free, which I gave a 4 to; the WP Geo Directory (freemium version), which I gave a 4 to; the Advanced Browser Check, which I gave a 5 to; and the Use Any Font (freemium version), which I gave a 4 to.
As – check out all the couple of quick reminders. We do have another WordPress Meetup. And for those that you watch the WordPress Meetup Live when we did it, it seemed to broadcast live, but it was reversed, and that was because I was using the wrong camera on my iPhone. That’ll teach me – something I’ve learned. So every time I do these things, I get better and better at the technology.
So the next one will be on November 29th and we’ll be broadcasting it live. I’ll be giving a presentation and maybe a second one; it depends on whether the other person lined up comes through or not. So at any rate, it’ll be a great presentation full of useful information and titbits. Be sure to tune in for that live show.
Also, you can go check out all our previous shows, episodes, and other things that we’ve done through YouTube over at our YouTube channel.
Also, stop in, sign up for the WP Plugins A to Z contest at wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest…and that’s all we’ve got for you now, so 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.
John: Take care.