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 #384 here.
It’s Episode 384 and I’ve got plugins for Custom Site Registration, Custom Admin panels, Migrating Websites and Mobile Contacts. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #384
John: It’s Episode 384 and I’ve got plugins for Custom Site Registration, Custom Admin panels, Migrating Websites and Mobile Contacts. 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 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, but of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all of the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, please take some time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to and reviewing the show. Those reviews are really great to get back. We love feedback. I do enjoy it and it’s really good for the show, especially if you leave reviews over in the iTunes store. It helps the rankings there. I’m working on other ways to improve that, but review the show if you haven’t already.
And don’t forget, subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and you can watch live every Thursday at noon Pacific Standard Time, the WP Plugins Show as I go live with it on YouTube. And if you’re not already subscribed to the channel, please subscribe to it up above right there – for those of you that are watching.
Don’t forget, you could also follow the show over at @wppluginsatoz on Twitter or wppluginsatoz for the rest of the English speaking world. Join us on Facebook, link in the show notes, to join us on the Facebook page. I’m trying to get that moving forward. And also, subscribe to the weekly newsletter that goes out. It has been improving bit by bit.
And it is the holiday season. Time for giving thanks, and the big thanks to give is yay, Black Friday is over and for those of you that know what I’m talking about, it seems every email list that I ever signed up for suddenly has sprung to life over the Black Friday weekend. I was inundated with emails for specials, sales – on and on. At any rate – and also, remember for those in need, you know, think of other vets, fellow people that are in need, it is the holiday season where everything thinks of everyone else – the one good time of the year for the human race for the most part.
That being done, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes.
All right, what I’ve got here now – to start off, I’ve a couple of plugins that I have yet to use. But I thought you might want to know about them, so this is kind of a new segment. With me doing the show by myself now, I wanted to give more value to the listeners out there. One, yes, we’ve gone live every week now. Thanks, Larry.
The other is this new segment here right in the front, I’m going to have two plugins that I have yet to review but they’ve been sent in to me or I’ve discovered through my research. But I get a lot of submissions from plugin developers and I don’t always have time to test them or they’re not relevant to any of my projects, so I don’t get a chance to properly vet them. But I thought I’d bring them forth, introduce them to you all so that you know they exist, and that you might want them or go check them out. So we will have that as an ongoing thing going forward. Now keep in mind, the ratings I’m gonna give these are based on the descriptions of the plugins off their sites and also using their demo if they have it available.
So first up I have a plugin here that was sent in by Mehreen Hussain and it’s called Pie Register. And Pie Register is a WordPress registration plugin. It is a freemium plugin; you can get a free version right off their website or you could get the premium version at $39.99. This one here is for customizing registration forms. It verifies and moderates registrations, invitation codes, membership payments, two-step verification, social login, email marketing, conditional logic, and more.
It has a drag-n-drop form builder, invitation-only registrations, you can insert the registration form on your site by using shortcodes, it’s got spam protection, two-way login, and more. So this is a pretty robust plugin. The free version might be good enough for you test it out to see how it’s going to work for you. But if you find it works, go opt for the premium version. And based upon all of that, I give this one a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out. It’s called Pie Registration.
The next plugin I’ve got here for you is called Cusmin, and it was submitted to me by Goran Radosevic. Now, this one here, Cusmin – I think is how I pronounce it – Cusmin is a complete customization of your WordPress admin panel. Now, this one here is kind of different and unique. I’ve used plugins to customize and brand the admin panel so that it’s branded under my company name for my clients, etc. This one here is a total SAAS – service as a software – so it’s a complete third-party system. It’s based upon a monthly payment with it.
It’s got a really great idea. It offers up some really fantastic customizations to your WordPress plugin. But one of the things I couldn’t figure out on their site is what happens if say, your client leaves you. Now, I know we don’t ever want to admit it but yes, sometimes our clients leave us for one reason or another and they move on. Now, they go somewhere else. How do they change that back or is it permanent or does it just automatically revert back to the WordPress default admin?
Another happens is what if you decide you no longer want to pay for this service? You’re no longer getting value out of it, you know, and you dismiss it and you put it up on several clients. Does it suddenly revert back for them? What happens? So it leaves it kind of in limbo with me and I wasn’t able to quite figure all that information out, but it is something you do want to think about. Go check it out. They do have a demo site where you can log in and check out how it all works. It seems to work okay in the demo area. At any rate, Cusmin, I give this one a 3-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
All right, what else have we got here? Well, 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.
There you go. Come visit me for all your WordPress needs, especially WordPress hosting when you’re tired of all of the hosts that give you grief and never the resources you need to get your job done. Come see JohnOverall.com hosting. Limited, exclusive hosting.
Also, contest-wise, I mentioned it in the last show that the contests are a bit on hiatus right now and they will continue to be that way until probably next week as we’re sorting out what happened and occurred with last month’s contest that went nowhere. I’ve got several premium licenses to give away from several different developers. I don’t know if I’m going to do them all at once, once a week somehow, but I need to get people to respond to and enter the contests or otherwise they’re a pointless venture. So look forward to those coming up. And for information on that, you’ll be able to check out wppluginsatoz.com/contests.
Okay, next up – next plugin I have for you here today is something that I used about five or six years ago and it is a service as a software and it’s called CMS2CMS Connector. Now what this is for – this is a software system I was using about five years ago when they were relatively brand new and they hadn’t quite worked out all the bugs in their system. And what I was doing was I was migrating OS Commerce stores over to WooCommerce and we were trying to maintain and keep all of that content from an OS commerce store into a WooCommerce, because if you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember the day when OS Commerce was the ranking, leading e-commerce platform on the internet versus WooCommerce now.
So anyway, I was doing lots of transfers and it was very affordable for a reasonably sized store or small store. When you’ve got a really big store with thousands of products, it got to be a little bit costly. But if you had a store that big, you generally had the money to afford it. I had one client we had to migrate 40,000 items, and that’s when I ended up turning to these guys here because of the process.
Well, I recently had to use it again and what I used it for recently was for a site that was hosted on Google Sites. And if you’ve never used Google Sites, which of course I had never done, it is a HTML nightmare mess from what I can figure out and getting it over to WordPress is either manually copying the pages and the content one page at a time – whatever you’re going to do. It just takes way too much time. And I looked at this and I went, “Wait a minute,” tripped across this while looking for a way to migrate it and I went, “Okay, well let’s check these guys out again.”
It worked beautiful. It worked like a charm. There was a couple of glitches in the content that came over, but that was due to how the Google Sites was releasing it and not their fault. It was just one of those things but it was minor amounts of fixing versus doing all the pages over again, and it was a relatively small site so it was really quite affordable to move this site over. The process was much better than I remembered it to be and they now offer even more CMS2CMS transfers than they used to, and they go back and forth from one CMS to another, not just from something to WordPress, but they’ll go from WordPress to something else.
It’s a whole lot – these guys have really rounded out their business quite well and it works great. So anyway, a really great plugin that works. Go check it out: CMS2CMS Connector and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, listener feedback – I love listener feedback and I’ll catch it here when it shows up in the stream too for those that show up in the stream and stick around. And to get back to you Larry, yeah, it was the first Thursday in every month up until about two weeks ago when I started going live every Thursday. Yeah, new sounds, too. I had to change out a whole lot of things, so it is now live every Thursday at noon. It fit into my schedule, which is the reason why I lost Marcus from the show due to the way my life changed several months ago – a couple of months ago when my father passed away. It changed a lot of things. So yeah, thank you. Glad you like the new sounds and the new dragon. I like him too better – much better.
Also, a little bit of other feedback for the show this week. We do have an iTunes review – a really great one to counter the previous review that was read out a couple of shows ago. And it comes from EasySchoolRegistration in the Czech Republic and its title is “Just Awesome” a five-star review and it says:
Thanks for the awesome work you are doing. I love interviews with plugin developers, so thank you very much from EasySchoolRegistration. Much appreciated.
And this show, a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. In that vein, we like to acknowledge those who have supported the show over the past week. All donations $50 and over and their note is read out and published here in the show notes. For those who come below $50, they remain anonymous. We thank you very much.
And this week’s donors – well, I just want to say thank you to all of those who have small, weekly subscriptions and monthly subscriptions that support the show. If you’d like to give a small subscription to support the show, you can do it via PayPal directly off of our website at wppluginsatoz.com/donate or you can do it through Patreon. So thank you very much to those who support the show. And those donations do not actually make it to my pocket; they never have, at least not so far. They actually go to cover all the base expenses of transcripts and hosting, etc. for the show.
Okay, and finally the last plugin I’ve got for you here today. This one is to help you with your mobile. It’s called Mobile Call Now & Map Buttons. Now, I’m in the middle of a project now and one of the most important things for this client is for their mobile. People will want to call them or they will want to have directions to their place of business – two big things. Now, there’s multiple ways you can do this. Some themes have it built-in to automatically produce these buttons. The theme I’m working with doesn’t have it and I went to search for an older plugin that I used to use for this and came across this one as a new plugin, and it turns out it’s one of my favorite types of plugins. It’s simple, easy to use.
What it does is it simply adds two buttons to the bottom of your mobile version and it adds a Call Now button where if they click that, their phone will come up and say, “Would you like to call this number?” They say “Yes” and they call it. The map button or directions button (depending on what you want to label it), click that, it automatically opens up Google Maps and gives them the directions to the place. It shows it on the map.
Really nice – you don’t have to go through the API issues with Google to set this up. All you have to do is enter the address in it and it makes a normal map call into a search engine and brings it up, so you don’t have that headache. It’s very easy to set up. The colors of the buttons are easily changed right there in the backend to match your theme or make them stand out better, depending on what you need to do. It’s easy to adjust the mobile screen sizes. They have a preset selector where you can select what size you want it to show. Do you want it to show up on tablets? Make sure it’s clicked. Or do you want it to show only on smaller smartphones? Whatever – you just choose which one you want and it’s done.
A very sweet plugin, very straightforward. I really like the way this one’s set up. Go check it out: Mobile Call Now & Directions Plugin and I give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
Yeah, you’d think I’d hunt down 5-Dragons just to use the new dragon. All right, well that closes out on this episode here. The plugins I covered was Cusmin, which I gave a 3 to; Pie Register, which I gave a 4 to; the CMS2CMS Connector, which I have a 5 to; and the Mobile Call Now & Map Buttons, which I gave a 5 to.
And before I hit the reminders, I just want to reiterate to folks out there about where the show is right now and what’s happening. The show is going to continue forward. It’s going to be just me in the seat for a while. I’m still doing interviews with developers which appear as a separate show that gets downloaded. I’m looking at a way to make that go up as a livestream, because there’s a plugin I’ve discovered that you can upload stuff to your site and then hit a button and it will automatically livestream it to YouTube at a later time. Kind of an interesting thing; one that I’m going to work with and play with a bit. Other than that, they’ll just be in the iTunes or on the mp3 download area or the podcast area of the website – downloadable – and it will appear in the iTunes stream or whatever subscription you have.
And yeah, just me for a while, so thank you everyone for coming in and tuning in to the show. I really enjoy doing it and I’m enjoying the way it’s changing and moving forward. And as I’ve gotten some new equipment, this is actually a new microphone today. Hopefully the new microphone has improved the sound tremendously along with learning a little bit better how to use my mixer and the controls of all the new software, so that’s it.
A couple of quick reminders…meetups – WordPress Meetups – I do those here in Victoria about every month. There’s no meetup for December but the next one is on January 22 and you can go to meetup.com to see when it will be. If you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come out to the meetup. I’d love to see you there. If not, we do broadcast it live to YouTube, so make sure you’re subscribed to the channel and click the bell for notifications so you’ll get a notification when we’re going live. That way, you can check out the meetup. That one’s getting better too as I figure out the way to do the recordings on it for best viewing on it. The last one turned out not too bad, so next time, even better. Every time I do this, I get better.
Be sure to check out the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A to Z with other training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show every week.
And a final note to developers, if you would like to support the show, offer up premium licenses to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to donate a license that we will use in a future contest. And also if you’d like to, register and enter to book an interview. Just go to Book an Interview on WP Plugins and you can book an interview with me. I have specific time slots set up during the week that are available. You can find one that’ll fit your schedule and there we go. I allocate specific time just for that.
Finally, check out and subscribe to our newsletter, so thank you very much and thanks, Larry. I appreciate that – and better pics. Yeah, well I’m working on those. It’s little by little. That’s all we got for you now. I’ll let my girl take us out of here.
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 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.
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 and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
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.
John: Take care now, bye.