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 #387 here.
It’s Episode 387 and I’ve got plugins for Gravity Forms PDF, Redirection, Creating Videos, Classified Ads and Classic Press Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #387
John: It’s Episode 387 and I’ve got plugins for Gravity Forms PDF, Redirection, Creating Videos, Classified Ads and Classic Press Options, 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 the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a few minutes, we’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, leaving reviews and subscribing to the show. It really helps it out and I really enjoy reading that stuff when I find it and get in there, even the good and the bad and the ugly.
And also, take a few moments – subscribe to the YouTube channel – down below, I think it is – yeah, subscribe, hit the bell so you get notifications of when I’m going live and when I upload new videos, because I will be doing those. I’m slowly – I’m getting back to them, let’s face it. And watch the show live every Thursday noon PST, Pacific Standard Time here on YouTube.
And also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page for other information and take a few moments and subscribe to the newsletter, which comes out every Friday. It’s got other news and information that I don’t cover in the show.
And remember, it is the holiday season – Christmas just around the corner. Hopefully, everybody is all prepared, got all your gifts bought, and well, I’ve got pretty much everything. I’m ready for Christmas except for one bottle of bourbon I gotta buy for somebody. And well, welcome to the show.
And of course, look for – well, look for the new segment as I’ve mentioned at the end of the show for ClassicPress plugins. There’ll be a new segment coming to the website located at cpplugin.com, and that’s the way it goes.
Hey Larry, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Always glad to see you come in.
All right, with that, let’s dive right into some meat and potatoes.
And to start off, I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but though I thought many of you would like to know about. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers. I get quite a few submissions for me to review plugins, but I don’t have time to test every one of them and many of them don’t fit into whatever projects I’m currently working on. But I still think they’re useful plugins that you might want to know about, so that’s what I’m gonna do here at the front. The ratings I give them are based upon their demo sites if they have them or on their descriptions of the plugin. So with that, let’s dive right into the first one.
The first one was sent in to us by Darragh Burke and this the Moovly WordPress Plugin, and you can get the plugin over at Moovly.com. And what they have to say about this plugin is it’s used for creating short videos. Moovly is a third-party system used for creating short snippet marketing videos, etc. It looks like quite the system – not something I would use myself, but if I had time to create it, I probably would. But there’s some people out there that may be using it.
Well, what they’ve done is they’ve created a plugin so you can create those videos from within your WordPress website attached to your Moovly account and then publish them to your WordPress website all in one smooth motion. This is a pretty nice looking plugin for doing video marketing, etc., so if you’re doing that sort of thing, this is something you might want to go check out.
Go check it out. It’s the Moovly WordPress Plugin. You can get the plugin from Moovly.com and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
The next one I’ve got for you was sent in by Blazej Krzymowski – hopefully I didn’t butcher the name too badly. Blazej Krzymowski, and it’s called TerraClassifieds and it is a free classifieds plugin for WordPress. It is a plugin that comes with a theme for creating a classified ad system on your WordPress website. They have a free download of the plugin, they’ve got a premium version there, a live demo of their site. It looks like a pretty decent layout for a classified, and I’ve tried a lot of classified plugins over the years and I’ve had hit and miss success with them, and this one here looks like it would probably suit the purpose quite well.
I don’t know what their premium version is or what the theme that goes with it is costing – any of that information there. But it does look like an interesting plugin for checking it out. What they have to say about it is the TerraClassifieds in alpha version of a classified WordPress plugin they decided to create some time ago. The plugin brings an easy user interface with ads posting. The options are simple and they’re going to successfully add new features step-by-step. So you can download the plugin for free testing, so this might be completely free at the moment until they get it out of the alpha. You can edit ads, add user profiles, users can then login and create their own edit and create their own submissions, etc.
It does look to be a pretty decent plugin for the most part – oh, Moovly – I’ll come back to that in a second. Anyway, this looks to be a pretty decent plugin for the most part and I give it a nice 3-Dragon rating.
All right, so I mispronounced Moovly. It should be Moooovly – put the ‘moo’ in there. We’ll give it the cow moo. How’s that? Better? All right, so anyway, go check this one out. It looks like it’s a pretty decent plugin.
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Okay, and currently we do have contests running – I have four of them, actually – running through to the end of the year. Another two weeks left to enter and I’ve been noticing people are entering these contests. I’m really excited about that after the issues we had last time. All our contests currently powered by Simple Giveaways. They kindly provided us with a premium of their plugin to power our contests. It’s an excellent plugin and the improvements they have made to this plugin over the last year have been fantastic. I’ve really liked every time they’ve improved it. They’ve made it easier, better to use, and they’ve added features to it now that it integrates fully into your theme, etc. It’s much better than it was when I first started. It was good when it started but now it’s better, so go check it out – Simple Giveaways.
And the contests we currently have going, you can win a copy of WooHoo, a plugin for editing up multiple areas of your WooCommerce website. That one’s worth £10. You can get a copy of the Interactive U.S. Map from wpmaps.com – very nice maps plugin. If the U.S. Maps don’t work for you, maybe you’ll have to look at – ask them to trade or just buy one of the other country maps. I don’t know if they’ll trade or not. The WP PDF Embedder – this is a really nice plugin. I use this one myself on multiple sites for securing and embedding my PDFs on different websites.
And then you can also get a fee year of Kanban, which is a project management system to help you manage your projects to know who’s doing what, where, and when. So go check these out. These are excellent contests to enter and you can enter all four and then make sure you share them out to all your social media networks. That would be fantastic to help others know what we’re doing here.
All right, the next plugin we have here coming up is one that I have probably covered before sometime in the distant past and it’s called Redirection. I’m sure I have – I just could find it. But this one here I’ve used it off and on over the years and it has come in handy for me, especially when I’ve been upgrading a website or converting a website from HTML – and yeah, that actually still happens – converting websites from HTML to WordPress.
And if you are also going in and changing things in your site, changing your permalinks or other things like that, this plugin here is handy for the issue there, because what it does is it allows you to recreate the 301 redirects that are needed, and create those and manage them. It’ll also monitor for all 404 errors so that you can track those errors and then if need be, create redirects or go in and fix the problems that are caused by the 404 errors.
This is a fantastic plugin. I always find that it suits the purpose, it’s lightweight, does the job, and doesn’t give me any grief, so go check this out. It’s called Redirection and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Listener feedback! We love listener feedback on this show. And this week here I do have a couple of things of listener feedback. Unfortunately, they’re not the best ones but hey, it’s still listener feedback. This one here came in from – well, I’ve got two of them. They came in two separate times from Marcus T., and not the same Marcus who was on the show – Marcus T. And he made mention after the last show when I talked and said I was gonna start covering ClassicPress plugins. So it goes:
Classic Press plugins?
You have got to be shitting me. (I’m trying to avoid cussing as much as I can.)
You should cover Gutenberg Block plugins – not old Classic Press plugins!
I will no longer listen to you.
See you,
Marcus T.
All right, Marcus. Sad to see you go but if you hang around, the Gutenberg block plugins are gonna be added in here to the show, too. There’s gonna be a segment for the Gutenberg blocks but we’re going where people are going.
And then he sent me a second one after I guess he listened a little further into it or read more of the newsletter. And it goes:
Entries for WP Forms plugin…
Again John you have got to be me.
Talking about a form that hacks a premium WP Forms plugin…
You give this crap air time and 3 stars.
No thanks – pathetic!
Marcus T.
Well, I gotta tell you Marcus…well I just had to let people know. Authors submit stuff to me, I think it’s useful, and hacking a premium plugin? That’s a pretty common practice, actually, and that’s the whole point sometimes of open source. If somebody doesn’t want to pay a premium price, they write a hack to hack that premium plugin. Instead of just keeping it for themselves, they figure, “Hey, share the wealth,” so they share it out for those people that want to do it.
The problem is if you take one of those hacks, you are risking that it might not be updated, the developers of the premium plugin may make that hack incompatible – any number of things could happen, so you take your changes. But hey, if you’re say – I was seven, eight years ago when I first started and my budget was literally next to nothing and negative most of the time, using something like this to get by until I could actually pay for it, an excellent thing to do.
And so what can I say? I try not to, you know, push anything out the window anymore. For too long a time on the show, I pushed things off and not do them. Now that I’ve changed the formatting, I’m just gonna cover a lot of stuff and I’m sorry to see you go, Marcus. It’s a shame; maybe you’ll give the show a chance another time and maybe I’ll have some things that you will enjoy.
All right, and listener questions – none this week, so we’ll move on to show donors.
This show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And in that vein, I’d like to acknowledge those who have supported the show in the past week. All donations $50 and over, their note is read out and published here. For those who come in under $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much for supporting the show.
This week here, I’d just like to give a big shout-out to all of those who have donated small donations in the past. Thank you very much. All your small donations really help. The money that comes in through donations to the show does not go into my pocket. What it goes for is it goes to pay for the transcriptions that happen for the show, it goes to pay for server space, the bandwidth, and the etc. that the server and the show runs on, and that’s all it goes for.
In fact, when I did some numbers last month as I’m hitting year end, the amount of donations that came in this year didn’t even cover the cost of transcriptions and the server costs, so it’s nice to know that they help support it, but it didn’t quite cover it. But hey, that’s what it is. I do this show because I like it and because it gets me out there to people.
So thank you very much for everyone and if you would like to support the show, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to support the show. Just fill out the form, choose the donation amount you want. It goes directly to PayPal and there we go – nice, simple, and easy way to donate. I do have Patreon still running although I’m probably not gonna be promoting it too much. I still have a few Patreons over there but it’s much better if you can directly donate via PayPal. More of the money will land into my usage because Patreon takes their cut and then they take a bigger cut than PayPal takes if it goes directly to PayPal.
All right – with that, this brings us up to the next plugin we’ve got here. It is called Gravity PDF and this is a freemium plugin, a very nice one that I recently used in a project I was working on. And in that project that I was working on, we were creating a really customized form with columns and we needed them to stick. We had sections and when you submit that form normally via Gravity, it puts it in a big, long block. It just stacks them one on the other; it doesn’t keep the columns together, etc.
To keep that like that, what you have to do is you have to make that form into a PDF so that you can then have a nice PDF document, Gravity PDF works great. They have four basic templates that you can work with right out of the box, which are very nice. I was fortunate enough to be able to use one of the basic templates with it. They have premium templates that are available for it that are premade for multiple types of formats in there, and they’re really quite nice looking. Or if none of those work, they’ll create a custom template just for you based upon your form and what you’re after.
A really nice plugin. The free version of it, normally free plugins don’t get a 5 right off the bat because when they’ve got premium add-ons and etc., this one here I have to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
Right off as a freemium plugin, simply because it provided everything needed in the freemium plugin without having to go buy anything, and a lot of freemium plugins don’t do that, so very impressive with it. Gravity PDF – very nice plugin. Go check it out and if you need PDFs created out of your forms, this is the plugin to use.
Okay – and finally, ClassicPress options. Now, this is a segment here for those that are going to ClassicPress and unfortunately, I’m stuck in both camps as I’ve mentioned a couple of times. I’m gonna be sticking with WordPress for the long period, but I have a couple of sites that I have no option but to go to ClassicPress, because the way Gutenberg is going is just not going to work with the massive customizations of these sites, so I’m gonna have to stick with it.
But what I’ve started this week here is just started working with ClassicPress. I haven’t started playing with the plugins but what I did – and I’ll be releasing the screencast of it later today or early tomorrow. I did a screencast using one of my sandbox sites where I test so much stuff and I used that for a conversion to ClassicPress. The site was running WordPress 4.9, it had 34 plugins installed in various states of on and off, and it had a couple of custom plugins that are in development for me right now – plugins that I’m having customized and developed. So I got to test it in that environment. I got to test their conversion process. They actually have a plugin for converting to ClassicPress.
I found the process was extremely painless, worked very well, and it was very nice. I haven’t tested Yoast with it, but I will. There’ll be more coming about that. So what I did test it with was the conversion process; it took all of about five minutes to convert. Then I went in and I looked at the file structure to see what they converted and changed in the file structure, because I like to understand the back-end of it. And they changed a bit but mostly it’s just file names that changed. The folder structure stays the same; they’re still using the WP folder structure. I don’t know how long they’ll hang onto that folder structure. Eventually they may have to move away from it and maybe they won’t. Hard to say but so far, so good.
I did test a couple of plugins with it and those plugins worked fantastic right off the get-go. They are currently in Beta 2 of ClassicPress. I noticed that today in updates. It even does some really interesting things. It updates the plugins directly from the WordPress.org repository, so that’s an interesting feat that’s going on right now, so this is something you’ll want to consider with it.
And I got one comment here: Thinking of going to ClassicPress but as you know, I’m worried if WordFence and Yoast will work for future version of ClassicPress. That’s a really tough one to know what’s going to happen there, because for a while ClassicPress is going to be on the same parallel lines as WordPress. But sometime over the next year as Gutenberg massively diverges and ClassicPress continues to hold the line, they’re gonna be on separate paths entirely, so it’s hard to know what’s going to happen as time goes down. Maybe Yoast will see there’s a large enough audience at ClassicPress to maintain a plugin there or maybe somebody else will have to take Yoast plugin and fork it. It’s really hard to say.
As I’ve said previously many times, personally I think about 30% of the current WordPress community is going to be leaving it, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff in Twitter, Facebook posts, everywhere, where a fair number of people have already left the WordPress community, so it’s gonna be an interesting one. Me? I’m gonna be stuck in both camps because I’ve got clients that need WordPress and the way Gutenberg’s going, and I’ve got clients that are gonna be there. Fortunately, they won’t be too far apart even when they completely diverge.
Okay, well, that’s about it. I covered up in this episode the Moooovly – Mooooovely WordPress plugin, which I gave a 4 to; the TerraClassifieds, which I gave a 3 to; the Redirection plugin, which I gave a 5 to; and the Gravity PDF plugin, which I gave a 5 to.
Now, I do have one end-of-show thought here today and this is just pertaining to some interest info. It’s going to become a complete post. I wasn’t certain it was going to become a complete, separate post but it is, and it pertains to my WordPress.org account. I don’t use it a lot. What I’ve tried to do over time – yeah, it would’ve been nice if they’d have stuck with the Classic Editor instead of the hard fork. What I tried to do with my WordPress.org account is I’ve been using it to post up the reviews I’ve done on the show and then I was linking back in the review back to the WP Plugins site. It seems I got in trouble for that; I hadn’t realized it. They said they’d sent me emails, I’ve never seen them, so they suspended my account.
I’ve been in talks back and forth with them and it looks like they’ll give me back my account, all the past posts I put up for reviews. It looks like they’re gonna delete it. I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to even mention my show anymore in the posts, to be able to give the reviews – I don’t know. I’ll be getting some specifics on it but this’ll be a complete post separate talking about this and what I went through to get this done. Yes, me, suspended – I know. Imagine that. I’m one of those bad boys that doesn’t always comply with rules. Or if I don’t see rules and there’s no rules, I’ll say, “Hey, I can do it,” so what can I say? That’s what happens when you take risks to do things.
Anyway, it looks like it’s probably going to work out but we’ll see exactly what happens, but it will be a separate post. It was going to be included here but because they’re communicating and talking, I thought they were just gonna shut me down because that was the first email I got from them, was they’re just “Ah, you’re shut down. Go away.” But after going back a couple of times, well okay, they’re willing to talk, so we’ll see what happens. As long as they’re willing to talk and willing to work it out, I’m all good with it.
Yeah, definitely – definitely a bad boy.
All right, and final reminders: Gutenberg – go check out the two long shows I did on YouTube about Gutenberg and what I think about it. There’s gonna be more coming on that. I have more that’s gonna be done the next week. I’m lucky; I happen to be kid-free for the next four days, so I’m gonna do a fair chunk of work in the next four days. Whenever my boys aren’t here, I get a whole lot more work done.
Reminders – WordPress meetups that are coming. The next WordPress Meetup for Victoria is January 22, 2019 and this is the WordPress Victoria Meetup group. This is the group that I run and manage and we do a seminar once a month where I give a presentation. Sometimes I give two presentations. Block editor? Okay. My enunciation that off? Anyway, I give two presentations and so I invite people from the local WordPress community to come and talk, give presentations. Sometimes they’re directly on WordPress; other times they’re not.
The fellow who’s coming to talk, Jacob Buurma, he’ll be presenting on what I wish I had known – a-ha moments from five years of WordPress freelancing. So he’s gonna give some insights and secrets about his five years of freelancing as WordPress. It’s gonna be an interesting talk and then I’ll be presenting a presentation on Gutenberg and what I think is the future of WordPress with Gutenberg in it, so this is gonna be an interesting talk.
For those that can’t make it, it will be broadcast live on YouTube. It starts at 6:30 p.m., so be ready, hit the bells – you know, get notifications when it goes out. We’ll try to make sure we have lots of notifications of it going out, so go check it out. If you happen to be on the island or in the local area, please come out. It’s gonna be a really great time.
And be sure to subscribe to the channel down below if you’re not already subscribed. One of the things I realize is if I get to 1,000 subscribers, I can start doing a few more things with this, so I would really love to see that happen. It’s kind of nice that I have over 200 now; I hadn’t even noticed that I was actually gaining subscribers on this channel. Now I’m actually kind of interested in moving it forward.
That’s pretty much everything I’ve got and – oh, okay Block Editor – WordPress is preferring Block Editor overseeing Gutenberg. It’s a thing. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m gonna call it Gutenberg. I almost want to call WordPress Gutenberg because it’s no longer WordPress. In so many ways it’s Gutenberg Block Editor. Block Editor is just a fancy way of saying this is going to be a – what’s it called? – a theme editor plugin. It’s like it could’ve been a fantastic plugin by itself. Yeah, get those subs – there you go.
We’ve got a few things for planning. My marketing manager has been working on lots of stuff coming in the new year on things that are happening. So at any rate, I need to wrap it up and get this going. Half an hour is about all I can really do for folks. Anything longer than that, it goes out into the podcast and I lose all the people who are used to 15- to 20-minute shows. It’s really kind of bizarre: I lose my host and my show got longer. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.
But thanks everyone for showing up and listening and that’s all I’ve got now for you. Take care, bye-bye. I’ll let my girl take us out of here.
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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.
John: That’s all we got now. Take care.