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 #390 here.
It’s Episode 390 and I’ve got plugins for Site Performance, Classified Ads, Gutenberg Blocks, Site Security and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #390
John: It’s Episode 390 and I’ve got plugins for Site Performance, Classified Ads, Gutenberg Blocks, Site Security 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 of course I have the same great show for you this week, as every other week. But right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.
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All right, with all that being said, it’s time to jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, first up as I have – start off with a couple of plugins I have yet to use but I thought you might want to know they exist. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers that I don’t have time to test. I don’t have a project in the works currently that I can use them in, etc. But they looked interesting enough and I’ve had a very big collection of these for a long time that it’s time to get them out there and let you folks know about them.
Now keep in mind, the ratings on them are based upon what I think about the way their descriptions are, their demo sites if they have one, etc.
So first off here I have one that was sent in to me by Ante Laca, and this one here is called WP Performance. It looks to be another caching plugin to help improve the speed of your website. And when you set it up, it sets up – it’s got a lot of checkboxes in it. They can go in there, it’s got – it creates of course cached HTML pages much like every other caching plugin out there. It does look kind of interesting. It looks along the lines of all the rest of them. It doesn’t look like it has anything special or unique to it from all the other plugins that I’ve checked out.
But if you’re looking for something different than the standard caching plugins that are available, go check this one out. This one here might be just what you’re looking for, so go check it out. It is called WP Performance plugin and I give it a 3-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
The next one I’ve got for you, sent in by Blazej Krzymowski. I’m working on the names. Really, I am. This is called TerraClassifieds, and it is another classifieds plugin. It’s a free classifieds plugin from their website at https://www.pixelemu.com/wordpress-plugins/i/245-terraclassifieds, and again, it is a classified plugin that allows you to go through, create up classified ads, user registration, edit/add user profiles, etc. It’s a standard WordPress classified plugin that does look kind of interesting. Their demo of it, not too bad. It’s a good layout from what I can see. I don’t know if it requires a theme to get this layout. (Some do, some don’t.) It might just be the standard way it sets up. I’m willing to bet it’s a theme because they also sell themes off their website.
So this is one that you may want to check out if you’re looking for a classifieds plugin. I’ve used several over the years. I think WP Classifieds, another WP Classifieds plugin is the one that I use. I bought a premium one years ago that gave me a great license on, so I still use that one when I do build a classified site. They’re not nearly as popular as they used to be, but every once in a while you’ll run across the need to build one up. So anyway, go check this one out. It’s a pretty decent little plugin from what I can tell and I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: TerraClassifieds Free Classifieds WordPress plugin.
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Okay and contests – I don’t have the new contests set up. I do have a couple of keys in the works and it does take a little bit sometimes to get these things fully organized and set up and working. But we do have a couple of them that are coming your way and our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. If you’re looking to do a giveaway on your website, go checkout the plugin, Simple Giveaways, an excellent plugin. You can get it free – a free version off of WordPress.org or the premium version, which is really nice for managing all the little details of a contest off of your website. Excellent plugin.
All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is of course a Gutenberg plugin. Well, not of course, but – all right, well you’ve gotta get used to it. I’m slowly wrapping my head around Gutenberg and starting to work with it and deal with it through a couple of small projects at the moment. And I have started playing with Gutenberg and there’s some things I like and many things I still don’t like about it. It is confusing at first after being so used to the standard theme – or the standard editor. But once you start wrapping your head around it, you can work with it. But the blocks are actually kind of a nice feature and basically what it is is boiling down to me is it’s just another theme builder or another page builder system, or a page builder plugin, which is what it should’ve been.
But anyway, one of the nice things about Gutenberg is all of the blocks that are coming up, and this plugin here is called Premium Blocks for Gutenberg, and this is similar to the one from last week except it’s a different set of blocks. More and more plugins are bringing these in and they’re bringing their own uniqueness to the blocks that they’re creating.
Now, I’ve only used this one here for the maps block, and the maps block on this one is really kind of nice in that it allows you to get in there and do some customizations to the map. You can create a custom image marker, it lays out the map in a really good custom stylizing, so it’s something you can check out and use. And they do have several blocks for this plugin. You’ve got – they’ve got the banner blocks, they’ve got button blocks, icons, pricing tables, sections, and more. There’s a whole bunch that this plugin can do for you as far as adding blocks to your Gutenberg website.
Go check this one out. It’s called Premium Blocks for Gutenberg and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, listener feedback – audio clips. We don’t have any this week but I really would love to have some to showcase. If you would like to give us some feedback, you can email us direct off of our website from the Contact page, hit the SpeakPipe in the lower right-hand corner of the page, or you can send an email direct to john@wppro.ca, or contact us via Twitter and Facebook. I do get back to you as soon as I possibly can and then I do bring your comments to the show to showcase with everyone else.
This show, also 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 over the past week. Anything $50 and over gets their note read out and published here. This week, I would like to acknowledge and say thank you for all the Patreon donations that have come through this month. They’re small donations but they really do help the show. The money doesn’t go into my pocket. It helps pay for things such as the fantastic transcripts that go up every week. Also, it helps cover the basic costs such as servers, etc.
Oh, and as far as value goes, if you can’t give money, hey, give some other help. We’ve had a couple of other people help out. One of our listeners out there really helped out me getting the sound a little better. Hopefully, the sound even comes across better this week. So anything you can do or you think I could do to help improve the show, please send me the information. I do listen, even if sometimes critiques are hard to take. I still take it to heart and listen.
And if you’d like to support the show, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to hit the donation page where you can go in, name, email, choose the amount you want to donate, and just click ‘enter’ and off it goes to PayPal, so help me out that way.
Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got this week for you…this is a security plugin. It’s called WP Hide & Security Enhancer. And you may have a need to maximize your site security to the extent that this plugin can do for you. Now, most of the time your site security boils down to installing Wordfence or something else – Cloudflare, prevent the spammers from getting in. But sometimes you may want to just hide everything from everyone. Even if they hit and look at the code on the page, they get there and they won’t even be able to determine that it’s an actual WordPress website.
This plugin hides everything from prying eyes. It will not only hide your login URL, but the locations of your plugins, your uploads, your themes, it blocks XML RPC, API, it blocks direct access to all folders. In fact, it will do such a good job of hiding everything that the online detectors that many people use – they go, “Is this a WordPress website?” and they put in your URL, it comes back and says, “Oh, yeah. It’s a WordPress website.” What is this theme? It’s telling you what the theme is, what plugins are installed, etc.
This actually hides that information to the point they’ll look at it and say, “Nope, WordPress isn’t running there,” so this is a very, very interesting plugin. I’m actually going to be doing a tutorial video on this one, so I’ll be putting that up and showcasing how it works for you. It is such a great plugin that of course I had to give this one a 5-Dragon rating.
Go check it out: the WP Hide & Security Enhancer to maximize your site’s security and to hide everything that exists.
Okay, ClassicPress options…I do have a ClassicPress option this week. I do have some little information thought to feedback from last week. I talked about the Wordfence plugin working well in ClassicPress – and it does work – it works very well, but there is a caveat to it. And one of the things that Wordfence does is Wordfence goes in and it looks at your site, continuously looking for changes in the files, and it monitors it partly by monitoring the file name changes.
So what happened to me was a couple of days after I installed and activated this, I got a notification from Wordfence – actually, it wasn’t even a couple of days; it was within 24 hours. I got a notification that I had a whole pile of file changes in this ClassicPress site that I was testing it on, that they’d all been changed and possibly infected. And when I went in and looked, what it had done is it picked up all the file name changes that were done by ClassicPress. So if you switch to ClassicPress, all your WP files are changed to CP files; they’re defining it as ClassicPress.
So Wordfence is not programmed yet to ignore the CP files. Hopefully, Wordfence is going to come onboard for ClassicPress; we don’t know. But if they don’t and you see that, you’ll know it’s not — that’s not an actual problem. But it still works well for dealing with the other issues on your site. So you can still use it but that’s a nice notification there about the issue that Wordfence is having with ClassicPress.
This week, the plugin I have for you though that does work in ClassicPress, as far as my testing so far goes – something I use continuously and have been using for over eight years, it’s the PowerPress plugin for podcasting by Blubrry. This is an excellent plugin. I’ve been using it since way back when I first started the show eight years ago and I’ve watched this plugin grow up, enhancements, improvements, speed, better tweaks. It still has all of that and my tests on ClassicPress show that it does seem to work effectively with no problem, so you can use it and go check it out: PowerPress Podcasting by Blubrry. You can use it in ClassicPress and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
So that’s our ClassicPress options for this week.
All right, closing out this episode…I covered up the WP Performance plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the TerraClassifieds, which I gave a 3 to; the Premium Blocks for Gutenberg, which I gave a 4 to; the WP Hide & Security Enhancer, which I gave a 5 to; and PowerPress, which I give a 5 to.
And a couple of final quick notes: Don’t forget, it’s coming up quick: WordPress Meetup here coming to Victoria. This is the monthly meetup that I do here. It will be broadcast live. It’s on January 22; it’ll be at 6:30 p.m. and for those that can’t make it, check into our YouTube channel where it will be broadcast live. I’m giving a presentation on Gutenberg and what I think its future in WordPress is, and how it’s going to impact the community and how it impacts people using it.
And then we’ve got another fellow here who is giving us a presentation on what it’s like to be a WordPress freelancer and five years of being a freelancer and what he wished he had known, so going to be talking about the things he had learned along the way, so it’ll be a very interesting evening of information, so make sure you check that out.
Also, be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And for a final note to developers who would like to support the show, please, if you would like to offer up a premium license to give away, head on over to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Give us all the details and information about your plugin and submit it to the show for a contest.
And if you would like to suggest a plugin for review and you’re a developer, please go to the usual form for plugin submissions and I will get them appeared on the show. If I can use them, I will give a better review. If I can’t, I will put them into the first two for the beginning of the show.
Okay, that’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you this week. This has been a quiet, easy week as far as things go and I didn’t get any responses back last week to my request that if someone wanted to have discussions after the show was over. But if anyone would like to see that if they’re coming into the live show, I will hold open a small segment at the end of the show as soon as I get people who are talking to me.
That’s all I’ve got for you now. 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 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.