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 #389 here.
It’s Episode 389 and I’ve got plugins for Gutenberg Blocks, Rebranding WordPress, WooCommerce Thank You Page, Live Streaming Videos and Classic Press Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #389
John: It’s Episode 389 and I’ve got plugins for Gutenberg Blocks, Rebranding WordPress, WooCommerce Thank You Page, Live Streaming Videos 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 right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d definitely appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, leaving reviews and subscribing to the show in those places.
Also, please subscribe to the show here on the YouTube channel if you’re not already subscribed. I’d greatly appreciate that, too. You can watch the show live every Thursday at noon and also on Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. I do a strict YouTube livestream of a weekly roundup of WordPress, so go check out the YouTube channel for that information alone. It will not be in the podcast stream.
Also, you can follow us on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join us on our Facebook page or subscribe to the newsletter off of the website in the lower – well, anywhere. Just scroll down the page; you can subscribe to the newsletter or other bits and pieces.
And the holiday seasons are over. We are in a brand new year now. It is 2019 – kind of hard to believe we’re at 2019. It seemed like it was just a simple 20 years ago that it was 1999 and we were partying it up. I guess it was really 20 years ago. Wow!
All right, so also stay tuned for the segment at the end of the show for ClassicPress plugins, and with that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, first up as I’ve started off for the last few shows is a permanent segment now where I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use, but I thought you might want to know about and know that they exist. And keep in mind, the ratings are based off the descriptions in their site and using their demo if it’s available. And these plugins were sent to me by plugin developers. The reason I’m starting to bring them out is because I’ve collected quite a few, thinking I would get around to testing them. Many of them I have no opportunity to test; I don’t have a project to use them in, but they still look like good plugins. And there’s some I would like to use but I just haven’t made the time to use them.
Such as this one coming up here. This is called White Label CMS. It was sent in to us by Ray Milidoni and it’s for rebranding WordPress. So you can use it to rebrand the administration area of WordPress with your company name and keep your name in front of your clients whenever they’re inside there. And if they leave you, well, unless you take it out, it’ll still have your branding in there until they finally figure out how to remove it.
It allows you to go in there and customize the dashboard, control which menus appear for your client. You can set up a customized dashboard it. You can use it to customize the login page. You can use it to control the menus, as I mentioned. You can use it to set up the site with a wizard. It’s a really interesting looking one. They do have a premium version of this – at least I thought I saw a premium version – must be another plugin I was thinking of. Nope, this one doesn’t have the premium version. This is a free version of the plugin.
So it looks rather interesting. It’s one that’ll help you brand up that dashboard so that your clients always know who did the work, so go check this one out. By everything I checked out on it, it looks like a pretty decent plugin and I gave it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: the White Label CMS.
Next up I have here, this one was sent in by Szabolcs Kisded. Yeah, I’m working on the names – I really am. This is a premium plugin. It’s $36. What it’s called is YouLive – Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress. It’s available over at CodeCanyon and what this plugin does for you is if you have old videos that you’ve not used or uploaded to YouTube or short snippets and pieces you want to, you could load this up, connect it up to your YouTube channel, and it will automatically livestream those from your website to your YouTube channel.
It’s kind of a way to add additional content to your website. A very useful little plugin if you’ve got lots of – a backlog of videos or you just want to redo some old content or repurpose some additional content. It’s another way to add additional features and items to your YouTube stream from your website itself.
Now there are a couple of caveats. You’ve gotta be on a webhosting provider that uses FFMPEG, which not all hosting providers provide that. You’ll need to have some bandwidth because you’ll be streaming it from your website to YouTube, etc., so there may be some limitations on whether or not you can use this depending on your hosting provider, so you might want to make sure you’ve checked out a good hosting provider such as JohnOverall.com, which would allow you to do this to an extent. You know, bandwidth is a limited resource for the most part but you’ve got to be aware of what you’re doing.
It does look rather interesting and it’s something that kind of interests me, but not sure I have the time to deal with that. But anyway, go check it out: YouLive – Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
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Okay, and our contests for the last month are done and we have winners! Winners, winners, winners! We do have winners. They’ve all been notified as soon I get verifications back that I hit them, they’ll get all of their keys, etc. And so who do we got? The copy of WooHoo went to Craig. The copy of Interactive U.S. Maps went to Martin. The WP PDF Embedder went to Larry. And the free year of Kanban went to Martin. Lucky you, Martin. You won two! That’s what you get for entering all four, you know. You have a better chance of winning.
So congratulations to all our contest winners. I don’t have the new one up yet but we do have more contests coming in next week’s show. They will be all prepared and set up and announced, and then you can start entering to win the next set of licenses that we are giving away.
And if you are a plugin developer and you would like to support the show, hey, donate a license key of a plugin for a year or whatever and you can submit that stuff off of the website itself, so thank you very much to all of those who participated in the contest. We greatly appreciate your support of the show. And the contests are powered by Simple Giveaways Plugin, who kindly provides us with the premium version of their plugin for our contests. Make sure if you’re gonna run contests, check out that plugin. It works very, very nicely, allows you to collect all the information, and then in the end all you do is click a button and poof, it automatically selects the winner from everyone who’ve entered, so it is truly as random as the computer can be. So thank you again for all of that support and joining us on that.
Okay, the next plugin we’ve got for you here – this one here is the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer. This plugin here is one that will help you to increase your sales on your WooCommerce website. This one here, if you are running a WooCommerce site, this may be a good plugin for you. What it does for you – this is the one that’s got the premium version; that’s how I got confused. It’s a freemium model. Their premium version is only $10, so it’s a great plugin for you if you’re running your own WooCommerce site. It allows you to customize up the thank you page, the page they land on after they’ve paid their bill and they get their notification. It’s usually just kind of bland, gives their name, information, what they bought, and they’re done.
This one here allows you to customize up that thank you page where you can add additional coupons to say, “Hey, thank you. You bought this. Here’s a coupon to buy some other stuff.” If you have a local store, you can add maps to it so that people can find your maps. If you have – you can make the information easier to read. Let’s go check out their demo page here and this shows you everything that it needs.
It allows you to – there we go – taking its sweet time loading. There you go, check out their demo page. So it allows you to set a custom coupon, their order confirmation is a lot larger, you can add customer information and billing, where it’s going to be going to them, their order details of what they got, and then add cross-sales and up-sales to this. So it’s a really nice, useful plugin. The premium version has a few additional features to it that you might want to look at.
Some of the premium version features are – here we go. Wrong one. That’s why…we’re bouncing around here, having a really good go of it. Happy New Year’s, Larry.
So the premium features here for this is that it adds related products, recent products, sale products, recently viewed products form, featured products, top rated, bestselling, related up-sales, cross-sales. You can add multiple coupon settings with rules, so for instance, you know, they buy three of something, you can give them additional coupon. Lots of good ways to use it with their premium and at $10 for the premium, that’s a pretty affordable premium plugin.
So this is something if you’re running a WooCommerce store, selling products, you might want to give this one a checkout. It is the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay…feedback. I do like listener feedback on this show, and if you would like to provide some, please go to the website and hit the SpeakPipe down on the lower right-hand corner. Leave me a message there. Voice messages are great; I get to play it out on the show. If you don’t want to leave your voice, just go to the Contact page and leave an email for me. Send an email and/or send feedback via iTunes and…my brain has just lost it today. Maybe it’s the New Year?
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And this show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get some value out of it, please give some value back to the show. And that value can be anything: by donating cash, helping out with the show by volunteering to do little things like improving my sound. I have a volunteer listener who is willing to take a look at the sound and see if he can help me fix the little errors that I am not able to correct in the sound, so we’re going to get that fixed – so anything that you can do.
In that vein, I do like to acknowledge those that donate $50 or more by reading out their note here, so if you do that, you get your note read out. For those under $50 it remains anonymous and I would like to thank all the anonymous donors who – the small donations and the Patreon donors. Those little amounts really do help the show out. They help pay for the things such as the transcripts that I have done, the bandwidth, the server hosting space, etc. All of that does cost money, so none of that actually gets into my pocket.
When I ran the numbers last year, the donations didn’t even cover the transcripts, so we’ll leave it at that. So thank you very much and please support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where all you gotta do, fill out the form and enter the amount of donation you would like to leave, and it gets donated directly via PayPal, so I appreciate all the help and support we get there.
Okay, the last plugin I’ve got for you today is Easy Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks Collection. And yeah, you knew it had to be coming. It’s Gutenberg time; I’m going to be starting to talk about Gutenberg and I’m starting out this week on a Gutenberg website – a newer project I’m doing, so I’m gonna build it from Gutenberg up to see how Gutenberg pulls together with everything that I’ve been doing over the last eight years and see how it is for putting in the content and everything else I’ve gotta deal with.
So at any rate, this one here is a blocks plugin. It creates a whole bunch of premade blocks for you. Currently, they have nine blocks and they have – it looks like they’ve slated to have 26 blocks in this plugin, so I imagine as they update it, it’s going to have even more blocks in it. Currently, it has a testimonial block, an alert notification block, a call to action, card image and text, heading and subheading, block quotes – hm…get that tongue twisted around – block quotes, testimonial slider, and a click-to-tweet block. Now, the click-to-tweet one might be interesting for me. I currently use a plugin called Click to Tweet, so we’ll see how that works. Click to Tweet is kind of a useful tool.
At any rate, lots of different blocks in it and it’s a pretty good start for blocks. There are a lot of blocks being built, and blocks looks like it’s going to be the new theme for WordPress Gutenberg – Gutenberg, because the themes themselves are gonna become redundant eventually, I believe, just because of the way Gutenberg is going. But the blocks won’t, so there will be customized blocks for doing customized content, and they’re starting to appear. They’ve been appearing for a while.
I remember back in the spring of last year when it was announced, I did a few block things, but I never really got into Gutenberg. I just set it aside because it was too much to deal with at the time. Now it’s here, we gotta deal with it and those of us that are definitely – we’re going to be staying in the WordPress community, well this is what we gotta deal with.
At any rate, a very nice plugin, the Easy Blocks plugin is, and I give this a 4-Dragon rating. Full Gutenberg, although I’ve used any custom-built blocks. I don’t quite understand the thing there – oh, okay. Well yeah, I’ll be finding out the difference in customized, built blocks and the full Gutenberg blocks and seeing all the different pieces. Like there may be redundant blocks being built all over the place, much like the – I haven’t . Haven’t used any Gutenberg custom-built blocks, okay. That makes more sense, Larry – makes much more sense.
Okay, yeah, it’s gonna be a tough go and I’ve seen lots of interesting blocks here and there. You know, I’ve seen entire block sets being produced, because there’ll be more than just what’s needed in Gutenberg itself, I imagine. So it just may create a whole new niche market for WordPress is building custom blocks.
All right, finally, I do have the ClassicPress Options because as I said, I still got to maintain the track down ClassicPress simply because of a corporate client I have that has two sites we will not be able to move off of – move into Gutenberg, just because of what we’re doing, so I’m testing things out.
At any rate, this week here I have tested out for security purposes on the site, I’ve decided to test the plugin that I use a lot, and I know a lot of people have things against it but I personally find it works quite well, and that is Wordfence Security. A very nice plugin – I have found Wordfence to be very decent. They used to have a major issue with using up resources on a site, but somewhere around a year and a half or so ago, they seemed to have cured that error for the most part and they have settings in there that can help you tweak it. I’ve even managed to get this plugin to work over at Bluehost and – I’m trying to think of – GoDaddy. You know, places where they have severe restrictions on resource usage on the servers.
So this plugin still does work. I find it quite nice, so I decided let’s check it out on my ClassicPress testing site, and it does work. It installs, it activates, it doesn’t seem to slow down, it seems to function well at the time being, so I would say yes, Wordfence is something that is good to go with ClassicPress, so go check it out. As I said, it’s been a staple in my website building for several years now and I’ve tried other security plugins but they just didn’t always do as well as what I found Wordfence to do, especially when a site actually does get hacked. I’ve always found it to be a whole lot easier for me.
Tutorials for Wordfence – I do, and it’s probably out-of-date, so I will actually create a new tutorial for it. That’s a good idea. I’ve needed a plugin to create a new tutorial for. I’ll create a new one for Wordfence. Yeah, it’s quite a nice plugin and they changed the interface about eight months ago, and when they changed that interface, it just – they made it harder to use as everyone does. So let’s improve your customer experience by changing the interface. Yeah, you improved it by hiding everything that used to be in plain sight, so it’s quite irritating in that aspect, but they’re still a great plugin.
So anyway, go check it out: Wordfence for ClassicPress. I give that one a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, so closing out this show here, I covered up YouLive – Livestream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress, the White Labels CMS, the WooCommerce Thank You Page Customizer, the Easy Blocks Gutenberg Blocks Collection, and the Wordfence Security for ClassicPress.
And end-the-show thoughts, I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of ‘em here today. It’s been a relatively quiet week; the New Year rolled in nice and smooth and quite for me, although I did stay up a little too late playing video games, so maybe that’s why I’m still out of sorts. I still haven’t recovered from staying up all night playing videogames. I know better than to do that. But every once in a while, we just gotta do things we know we shouldn’t do to see if our body can still take it. And as the body gets older, it gets harder and harder to take that kind of abuse.
Oh, I do have reminders. The WordPress Meetups – I have the WordPress Meetup coming up this month at the end of January on January 22. This one here, I am gonna be talking about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress, how it impacts websites and businesses. And I have another speaker, Jacob Buurma, who is gonna be presenting “What I Wish I’d Known – A-ha Moments from Five Years of WordPress Freelancing.” So he’s gonna talk about his last five years of WordPress freelancing and the things he wished he’d had known sooner. He’s a really great guy, a great speaker, and this is going to be streamed live to the YouTube channel. If you can’t make it, but we’d really appreciate you if you’re here on the island – anywhere within Victoria – come on down to it. All of the information is available on our Meetup website. The link is in the show notes to go sign up for it if you’re not already signed up for it, so I look forward to seeing everyone there that comes out for it.
And also finally, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Well, you can’t hit that button up – hit that one down below. Down below, there’s a button, so subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the bell for notifications. That way, you get notified when we’re going live and when the new videos are uploaded of any sort.
And just spread the word! Tell folks about it. One of the things I’d like to do is I’d like to accumulate over 1,000 subscribers this year for the YouTube channel, then I can actually turn it on and use it for other promotions. There’s other features that get turned on at 1,000 subscribers that I’d like to access – including monetization. Monetization might be nice; it wouldn’t give me much, but I imagine a few extra pennies a month would actually be useful.
And a final note to developers who would like to support the show…you want to offer up a premium license? Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter all your information, and submit your license to the show for a contest. I’ll work up the contest; all you gotta do is provide the information.
One other subs $4,000 – oh, 1,000 subs; 4,000 – I almost hit 4,000 hours of watch time. I get a lot of watch time on my training videos. My training videos, I’ve got – one of my training videos has got 4,000 hours of its own; it just keeps getting used over and over again. I had a training video for a brief time that the developer had used in their notes, and that one there got tons of usage for a while until the video became obsolete, which happens when you do a training video. They’re good for about six months to a year, I noticed, and then they gotta be redone because developers change everything.
But yeah, thanks a lot, Larry. I appreciate you coming in on the show. Thank you to the other people who showed up – much appreciated. That is what we’ve got, so I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here and you all have a good day. 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 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.
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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.