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 #391 here.
It’s Episode 391 and I’ve got plugins for Page Speed, City Events, World Weather, Auto log-offs, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #391
John: It’s Episode 391 and I’ve got plugins for Page Speed, City Events, World Weather, Auto log-offs, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up next 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 of course we have 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.
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All right, with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, first up here I have a couple of great plugins and these are plugins I have yet to use, but I thought you would like to know about them that they exist, and keep in mind the ratings for them are based on descriptions off their site and using their demo if it’s available. These are plugins that have been submitted to me by developers that I don’t always get a chance to test out, or use, or I don’t have a use for them in my current project lineup, etc. But they seem interesting and they look like they might be valuable plugins to people out there, so this is my way of getting those out and I do have a serious backlog of them.
So first off, we’ll start off with one sent in by Vaishali Soni and it’s called Events in the City, and this is an events calendar plugin for WordPress for setting up and having events into your city. Now, they do have a good demo site for it that displays how well it works and you can – they showcase how it’s for businesses, concerts, parties, exhibitions, sports, etc. in it. It’s a great way you can go and engage your site visitors to display the latest events right into your website. This looks like it integrates well with most themes that you can use. You can sort the events by city, simple shortcodes for placing the calendar into the site, the viewers can book tickets right through the plugin on your website. So if you’ve got something that has tickets for booking, this might be something to investigate and see.
It’s easy to manage as these good things that they say about it – user friendly – and it’s got an organizer plugin. Some of the features let viewers follow you instead of you following them, follow all events, tickets, simple shortcodes, and they’ve got shortcodes for the calendar. You can set it up for the calendar in the city if you’ve got more than one city you have events for. You can set it up by city categories, so there’s a lot to this plugin. It looks like a fairly useful plugin.
It’s a free plugin from the WordPress Repository; something you may want to have a look at and check out. At any rate, based on everything I see and the usability on it, well, I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: Events in the City.
The next one I have for you is called Asset Cleanup, and this one looks like something I may actually get a chance to have a look at. It’s a paid speed booster plugin and what it’s designed to do for you is it’s to go through and clean up the assets on your webpage. What it does is as you’re creating a post, it lists up the assets that are gonna load on the page and you can look through and uncheck boxes to not load those particular assets on that page.
So this one here is designed to work with a caching plugin of some sort. They recommend WP Rocket. But it helps decrease the number of HTTP requests loaded and it helps reduce the HTML code load of the page. It makes source code easier, removes possible conflicts between plugins, and a few other things with it. This looks like it would be a pretty decent plugin to use on a page-by-page basis if you’re looking at improving some of the things on your site little by little, so this could be a real handy one.
All in all, from what I can check out of it from just reading it over, taking a look at everything in it, it looks like a pretty decent plugin so I have to give this one a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out. It is the Asset Cleanup Page Speed Booster plugin from – you can get it at the wordpress.org repository, so go check that one out.
Now they do have a pro version of it available and it unlocks even more features to it, so their pro version here, $39 to $129 of it, go check it out. See the additional features that it unlocks for you. If you find the free version good, you may find the pro version even more worthwhile.
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Next up, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Weather Atlas Widget. Now, this is a really nice plugin if you’re looking to add weather to a website or you need multiple cities in a setting. This is a plugin that works both as a widget and as a shortcode on pages and you can set it up to have as many cities as you want on a page or as many widgets with different cities if you have multiple widgets. All of that is very nice and easy to set up. It’s a fantastic one.
I currently use this plugin in a project I’m working on for an intranet for a company, and they’ve got multiple offices in multiple cities across the country that they have to deal with, and sometimes people want to know what the weather is going to be like. “I’ve got to go to Atlanta this week; I’m coming from California. How bad is the weather in Atlanta?” So they can go to the page on the intranet, they can look it up, they can see the weather in all these cities.
One of the interesting things I found about this plugin was that what it does is it sets up – when it gives you the weather, it color codes the weather from cold blue a hot orange or a hot red and a mild orange-ish color to tell you mild weather. It’s color coded to give you an idea on what the weather might be across those and it’s actually kind of fascinating to look at when it’s on a page with multiple cities on it, because you can see how cold and hot it is across the country.
All in all, a pretty fantastic plugin. I like the way it’s set up, I liked its functionality, and it just worked like it was supposed to – all in the free version. So give this one a check-out. It is the Weather Atlas Widget and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
And feedback – I love customer feedback, whether it’s good, bad, indifferent – whatever it might be, please give me some feedback. I haven’t had any for a while now, so just drop in over to wppluginsatoz.com, send us a SpeakPipe from the lower right-hand corner of the site, you can just click that, record a message, get us through the Contact page, send an email direct to john@wppro.ca, go to @wppluginsatoz on Twitter, Facebook page – anyplace – even comments here on the YouTube channel. All of those I will respond to. Sometimes not immediately but I always do respond to them. Let me know how the show is going, what you’d like to see, any plugins you would like to see. In fact, if you’ve got plugins you’d like to suggest, go use the Suggest Plugin for Review window, and it’s just the plugins that be reviewed, so anything like that. So feedback, feedback, and feedback – keep giving it in.
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That plugin that I just talked about, that can be displayed in Celsius, too as well, and you can actually multiple display Celsius and Fahrenheit across the page. Just got that comment, so there you go.
So anyway, thank you to all our small donors out there. We thank you very much for all your support. The money does not go into my pocket; it just simply helps support the show. One day it might, but not at the moment.
Okay, the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Inactive Logouts. Now, a couple of weeks ago, someone had asked me about an inactive logout plugin and I had recommended one. I’m not sure if it was this one here, but as I’m redoing a project for a client, I realized I had used this plugin in their site to deal with inactivity. They have an intranet site and that intranet site where they’ve got dozens of users on it, they had a problem of people not remembering to log out of the account and people finding it. They’ll log into their kid’s computer or their wife’s computer, or a café or whatever, and they wouldn’t log out, so we had to set something up to ensure that everyone properly logged out of the site and that weren’t left logged in.
This turned out to be an excellent plugin for dealing with that issue. It works very well. You can set up a countdown popup on it to determine how long – you know, after it’s been idle for a little while, it pops up a reminder that says, “You’re inactive. We’re gonna log you out,” giving them a chance to stay logged in. If you don’t need to log them out, you can set a wakeup message where the user will not be logged out, but instead a wakeup message will be showed when they’re inactive. You can set custom popup messages and you can use concurrent logout functionality with it. One of the really neat functions of this one (and this one was particularly important) is if you’re a crazy user like me on web browsers and you might end up with 20 tabs open at a time, you’ll log into a site, you’ll go open up another tab, be doing information you need to get for the other site, and you might spend 10, 15 minutes elsewhere before you come back. In that time period you could be logged out. This has a multi-browser tab support and what it means is that if you’re on another tab and you’re still active in the browser, it won’t log you out. It only starts to count down when the mouse stops moving on the computer. So if you’re doing anything, your mouse hardly ever stops moving if you’re not looking at it. So that was one of the really cool features about this plugin that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Other than that, it worked great. It’s still in use; we’ve been using it for quite a while. They’ve got some filter hooks and additional tweaks you can do to the plugin. All in all, there’s a whole lot you can do. I ended up tweaking this plugin a bit to customize it for my client’s site so that we got it so that the users were logged out if they left it idle. Great plugin, a fantastic one. Go check it out. It’s called Inactive Logout and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, the final thing I’ve got for you today is ClassicPress options. And this is here because I feel that ClassicPress is going to be continuing its growth for quite some time. They are going to siphon off – in my personal opinion, they’re going to siphon off approximately 30% of the WordPress community as it currently was in December when Gutenberg launched, because there’s a lot of people that just can’t use the Gutenberg functionality. Now of course, WordPress has promised they’re going to support the Classic Editor for a couple of years, but that’s only guaranteed until 2021.
Believe it or not, 2021 will be here before people know it, and what happens then? Are they gonna extend it? Probably not. They’re probably going to turf it at the time. And then what’s gonna happen to the people that have been dependent on the ClassicPress Editor for that whole time to hold their sites together? Then they have to switch and move. Well, many of them are switching and moving now over to ClassicPress. This is why I’m covering these plugins because I have to switch one site for sure to ClassicPress and I may have others. The nice thing about ClassicPress is it’s just like working in WordPress; it’ll just be cleaner and leaner is what they’ve been doing to it. They’ve been making it cleaner and leaner and a little bit faster. We’ll miss out on some things, but I think the ClassicPress community is gonna grow up quite nicely over the next couple of years.
At any rate, I’ve got a plugin for you here and the plugin of course is a standard plugin. For a while I’ll be covering the basic, standard plugins for ClassicPress because there’s some essentials that you need, and one of them is a good SEO plugin. Currently, the Yoast SEO plugin which I use – I use it across virtually every site I build. I use the Yoast SEO plugin because it’s very nice, it’s user-friendly, and it’s something you can explain to your clients quite well.
It works well with ClassicPress. It seems to have no problems with it. The compatibility is nice, the setup is the same, the functionality seems to be the same, so all in all, it seems to be working quite nicely. Hopefully it will stay it that, hopefully Yoast will see the value in keeping it compatible with ClassicPress as they age. If not, I’m sure somebody will fork it and move it along for a ClassicPress version of it.
Also as a side note, one of the things I noticed when I was doing this today – testing this plugin – is that when you are searching for a plugin in the Repository using ClassicPress, of course it searches the WordPress Repository, because that’s where all the plugins are right now. Well, they’ve added a note that appears in the plugin listing to tell you if this plugin is currently compatible with the current version of ClassicPress that you have installed. I thought that was a nice touch.
What it shows is it shows the vast majority of plugins are going to be compatible, but that is going to change over time. So keep that in mind if you end up going to ClassicPress. Eventually, your plugins and things are gonna change and unless your developers can see the money in it, they probably won’t change with it.
At any rate, that covers up everything for this show. I covered up the Events in City, which I gave a 3 to; the Asset Cleanup, which I gave a 4 to; the Weather Atlas Widget, which I gave a 5 to; and the Inactive Logout, which I gave a 5 to; and the Yoast on ClassicPress, which I gave a 5 to.
And final reminders here…don’t forget, we have a WordPress Meetup here in Victoria coming up next week. It’s on Tuesday, the 22nd of January and this seminar here is going to be me talking about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress and how I think about what it’s gonna do and how it’s impacting WordPress. Also, I have another speaker, Jacob, who is going to be talking about life as a WordPress freelancer. It should be a very interesting presentation and seminar. If you can make it and you live in the Victoria area of British Columbia, Canada, come on down. It’s held at the local center. You can get all of the information off of meetup.com. If you’re not in the area or you just can’t make it, this will be broadcast live on my YouTube channel as a livestream and it will be up there after it’s over. So please come check it out; either come check it out via YouTube or come check it out live. We’d really appreciate seeing you there.
And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. It would be greatly appreciated.
Okay, and the end. I actually have a Yoast tutorial up. There is a Yoast tutorial in my tutorials on the channel. Just do a search in my channel for Yoast and it should appear. I’m pretty sure I did one not too long ago actually, because I did a presentation on Yoast back in the fall – September/October I did a presentation on Yoast, so go check that out.
All right, well that wraps it up. What else have we got? That’s all we got. Take care now, bye-bye.
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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: And there we go. That was a rough close. I kept hitting the wrong buttons.