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 #383 here.
It’s Episode 383 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Analysis, Rebuilding Thumbnails, Displaying all image sizes and Hiding Content, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #383
John: It’s Episode 383 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Analysis, Rebuilding Thumbnails, Displaying all image sizes and Hiding Content, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
WordPress, it’s the most popular content management and website solution on the internet. And with over 80,000 plugins to choose from, how do you separate the junk from the gems? Join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins. This is WordPress Plugins from 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 have the usual great show for you today and right off the top, 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 us and reviewing the show. Reviews really help the show out quite a bit and I look forward to getting them.
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And a little note out there, it’s Thanksgiving Day for all you Americans down there in the States. I hope you’re enjoying it and stuffing your bellies full of turkey. Usually turkey dinners aren’t quite ready except, well, maybe back East where it’s about 3:00 right now back East, so you should be getting right close to turkey dinner. Enjoy your turkey dinner, your Thanksgiving table, and remember, do us all a favor. If you’re recording the fights on Black Friday, flip your camera horizontal. That way we get a really good view.
All right, with all that being said, it’s time we dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, and today I have four great plugins for you, and I’m changing up the order a little bit as the show – as I figure this out. I think I’ll be bringing four plugins per episode and what I’ll do is I’ll have the least best plugins in the beginning and I’ll try to put the best one at the last. It may or may not have worked today, but in the future that’s what I’m shooting for.
So first off what I have for you is a plugin called AFC Content Analysis for Yoast SEO, and this is a plugin here that allows you to do the content. If you used Advance Custom Fields plugin on your website, then you may want to have a look at this plugin, because what happens with Yoast is it doesn’t automatically pick up the Advanced Custom Fields in its analysis for SEO. By installing this plugin, you can then add those advanced custom fields into the Yoast analysis for your website and pick that information up and help it figure out where your SEO settings are and what should be done.
A really great plugin, nice and simple to deal with. Set it up and just start using your SEO analysis on Yoast. Anyway, I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: AFC Content Analysis for Yoast SEO.
Next plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Display All Image Sizes. This one here is one of the more interesting things about WordPress themes is how many images they make from the master image that you upload to the site. And with a little extra code into your functions file, you can create more images. If you have custom sizes you need above and beyond what your theme produces, you can set that up so that you upload an image, it’s automatically cropped for you.
While dealing with this has often been a challenge, especially for my clients, we have one theme I work with my client. By the time it’s done, it creates – you upload an image, it creates an additional nine images that are used in various spots around the theme, and one of the problems is it crops them at different points: the center, the top, and so you’ve got to be able to tell a client, “You need to upload an image that looks like this. The cropped image that’s going to be used in your image above your post is going to be this image,” so you’ve got to know all of those sizes.
Now, you can go look through the code to find it, but what this plugin does for you is it allows you to go in and in on the media attachment page, it sets up a drop-down, so you can see all the different image sizes and then you can click on those and get the URL for that. I used that to create a template for my client to help them be able to determine their images and what’s going to happen from their original and all the crop sizes down. It’s a nice way of dealing with the issue.
The plugin was fantastic, saved me a lot of grief and time, so go check it out: Display All Image Sizes and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
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Okay and contests…now we had been running some contests and unfortunately, well, the contests are – we’re putting them on pause until December. As I review everything that is being done with them, it seems for the last contest we ran last month, there were no entries to the contest. I don’t know if it was the plugin we were giving away, what it was, but I’m pretty sure it’s my fault and due to the lack of my proper promotions and managing, also with all of the changes – major changes in my life – the show and everything else over the last two months. There’s been a lot going on.
So what I’ve decided to do is just put the contests on hold. I do currently have four premium licenses from developers to give away from various plugins. We’ll be coming back with the December 6th show announcing all the contests. I’m going to run the contests in a slightly different format than I’ve done before, so this is a way to help improve it. The contests are a great thing; it’s a great way to get your hand on a premium license. Make sure you go check them out.
You can easily go see what the latest contests are by going to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information and we’ll have more stuff being published and posted up there next week. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean just me. I have a small team of people here. I have a small team being, you know, three of us total at the moment, although business has been growing. But as I bring on more people, we’ll have more people doing this stuff and things are improving.
That brings us up next to the next plugin I have for you here today. Now, this next plugin is an oldie but a goodie. It’s called AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild. Now, AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild is an old plugin. I’m sure I’ve reviewed this in the past and it’s an excellent plugin. Now, I had to bring it forth again because I’m in the process of rebuilding a website and of course every time you change themes in a website, your new theme has its own set needs for images – for all the thumbnail images – meaning every image that’s underneath the master, much like the plugin I talked about previously.
Now, what this plugin does is it helps in there using AJAX. It goes in and rebuilds all your thumbnails, regenerates them from the master image that was uploaded, and this is an important tool. Now, this tool can be useful not only if you’re changing themes, but if something happens to your images or you get a corrupted image, this is a great way to regenerate those thumbnails. The nice thing about it is there’s lots of other thumbnail regeneration plugins. There’s even a few third-party thumbnail regeneration systems out there.
This one does it locally on your site, helps you keep control of your data. It is minimal impact on the server. In fact, it does it nice and low-end, so even if you’re on a cheap shared hosting provider who doesn’t give you much resources, you can generally even run this tool there to get by and regenerate the plugins. A really great plugin, it works great, still kept up-to-date. I’ve been using it myself for a few years now.
Go check it out: the AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild and I still give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Feedback and listener clips – now this week we’re kind of lacking in listener feedback. If you’re listening out there to the show, please take a couple of minutes. Drop in to the WP Plugins A to Z site, leave us some feedback in the SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner, pop in to our Facebook page, leave some feedback there, send something out via Twitter (@ me at it), and I will see it. Or just send an email directly to us off the Contact page and we’ll get your feedback on here, good, bad, important, ugly – even just questions about what you would like or questions about plugins. I do my best to answer everything. Sometimes things get dropped and lost through the cracks but hey, we want it all, so send it all to us. We’d greatly appreciate it.
And this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, I’d like to acknowledge those that have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over, their note is read out and published here, including all of the links that are in that note, so you can get some really nice link juice out of it. For all those who come in below $50, the remain anonymous and we thank you very much.
This week, we’d like to thank Jezweb Pty. Ltd. – donated $50. And from Jez,
This donation is on behalf of Vital Building and Pest Inspections in Sydney, Australia https://vitalbuildinginspection.com.au/ —
This is a really nice website.
It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor.
And the Elementor system is pretty nice. I’ve been checking it out. I haven’t quite flipped to it yet but before long I will be in there, checking it out. So thank you, Jez. Really appreciate your support of the show. And a big thank you to all donors who came in under $50 or who’ve set up small weekly subscriptions or monthly subscriptions through Patreon. Thank you very much.
Your money actually just helps support the show. I can’t even buy a beer with it yet because it’s used to pay off the natural expenses of running a podcast. But thank you very much. If you would like to support the show, you can go do that by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and you can just fill out the form, donate, go straight to PayPal. I really appreciate that. Or if you want, you can go drop over to Patreon and support us over on Patreon’s site. And I’m going to be revamping the Patreon and what is offered up through the Patreon site at the moment. It’s been a while since I’ve been there and it’s been a while since I’ve given any time to these sorts of things.
All right, and that brings me to the final plugin of today. Now, the final one I’ve got for you here today is called WP Hide Posts. Now, this plugin here may not make a lot of sense on initial thought processes and what you’re looking at with this plugin here is there are times when you create a post or a page and you may need to hide that post or page as much as possible from being indexed, being found, as much as it is reasonably possible. I mean, Google can eventually find it unless you privatize it completely. But you’ll want to do this. You’ll want to hide it from the archive pages, hide it from the front pages, and this plugin makes that task an easy thing to do.
You just plug it in, go in there, click a few boxes, and it’s all set and ready to go. Now, they do have a premium version that’s available for $3 which unlocks a couple of extra things. A really nice price for a premium plugin. What it does for you though is it hides the post or page from the front page – your home page, depending on your theme, the category page listing, the tagged page listing, the author’s page, the archive pages, the search results, and the feeds. It keeps it out of all of those places.
Now, there is one caveat to it is that if you have an auto created site XML file (which is auto created if you use Yoast or Site XML Creator, or whatever), you can’t hide it from the Site XML file, which is the one problem. Now, you could tell Google to not index it if you’re using something, and there are ways to tell it not to index it in other places, so that’s what you’ll want to do with it. I mean, it’s a very excellent plugin. It makes the job easier. I had to use it recently with a client when we were going in and we created a post that they needed to have protected and hidden from their client.
Okay, and of course, go check this one out: the WP Hide Posts plugin, I give a 5-Dragon rating to.
And closing out this episode, I covered up the AFC Content Analysis for Yoast SEO, which I gave a 4 to; the Display All Image Sizes, which I gave a 5 to; and the AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild, which I gave a 5 to; and the WP Hide Post, which I gave a 5 to. Look at that, I had almost had a winning hand today – almost. But three out of four aces.
A couple of quick reminders…don’t forget the WordPress Meetup is coming up soon here in Victoria. If you would like to participate or check it out, our meetup here happens about every month or so, and what I’d like to do is invite you all out. If you happen to be on the island here is to come out to the meetup. It’s on November 27th and we’re going to be talking about SEO and site optimization. The presentation is going to be put on by me and my good friend Shawn DeWolfe, who helps me with development and creates a lot of the plugins that I have in development right now – excellent fellow – and it’s going to be quite the seminar and we’re going to livestream the seminar.
So make sure you tune in to our YouTube channel, subscribe to it, so you get notifications. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, hit the bells, and that way you’ll get notification of when the stream goes live. And this time around, I’ll make sure I record it so that none of the stuff in the background is reversed. (Yes, I learned from the last one.) We make mistakes, we learn. It’s really a great presentation. It’ll be up to two hours in length and so come check us out there. And if you happen to be on Vancouver Island, come on down. The presentation is gonna be in Esquimalt, so you can find all of the information at meetup.com for it.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for wppluginsatoz.com, where you can find training videos, screencasts, and of course the live show every Thursday at noon.
And a note to developers who would like to support the show…if you want to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contests and fill out all of the details there and give us the information and we can give away one of your licenses. You get some nice promotions out of it.
And that pretty much wraps us up for everything. I don’t have much else to say except thank you to everyone who’s been listening to the show and supporting the show over the past seven years. I really want to thank the few listeners I know out there that have been supporting the show since pretty much day one, which is, you know, 383 episodes now. And as you heard last episode, I am unfortunately off on my own now because of the changes I’ve made. I’ve lost my cohost due to the way I set up the show to coincide with my schedule. It unfortunately conflicted with his and I just couldn’t bend on it any further. I have to move forward with my life as I see fit and move forward with this show as I see fit. So I would appreciate anyone out there, you want to support it, comments, anything about the changes, let me know what you think and feel about it. I’d greatly appreciate it.
And be sure to stop in to our website at wppluginsatoz.com, subscribe to our newsletter. That’s pretty much all I got for you, so thank you very much. Take care now, bye-bye.
Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the Friday newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A to Z is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.
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John can be reached at his website at JohnOverall.com or send him an email, john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us 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.