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 #393 here.
It’s Episode 393 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Tools, Automotive Listings, Displaying Pages in Widgets, Duplicating Menus and Classic Press Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #393
John: It’s Episode 393 and I’ve got plugins for SEO Tools, Automotive Listings, Displaying Pages in Widgets, Duplicating Menus and Classic Press Options. 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 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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With that all being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
And I have some great plugins for you today and to start off I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use, but I thought you might want to know that they exist. These are plugins that have been sent in to me by developers for review. That can be done off of the WP Plugins A to Z webpage. I know they exist; I can’t always fit them into any project I’m working on and I don’t always have time to get them into a testing site to see how they test, but I thought you might want to know that these plugins exist and are out there. They might be something you can use.
Now the ratings are based off of their descriptions and their demo site if it’s available. So first off, the one I’ve got for you here was sent in to us by Adam Bullas and it is called Opace Essential SEO Toolkit. This plugin here is an essential SEO toolkit and what it does for you, what they have to say about it, the SEO Toolkit is a very powerful suite of tools used by Opace every day and will be particularly beneficial in roles such as SEO, web development, and digital marketing, as well as many others.
As with any other toolkit, there is a range of tools. Each of them helps you get to a different part of the job done. The tools opened in their current URL, the settings can be modified from the Essential SEO Toolkit plugin installation screen. When you have configured the SEO Toolkit such as needed, you can then go to one of your posts or pages and use the plugin in the right-hand admin panel of the post and you will see the SEO Toolkit meta box. Click on any of your categories to drop down the list of the sources.
The toolkit includes things such as the following: audit tools, backlink tools, social shares, counters. All in all, not looking like too bad of a plugin – something you may want to go check out. It doesn’t look like something that’ll replace Yoast, although I’m really hoping something will come down the pipe that does that eventually. Other than that, not a bad looking plugin all in all. I give this a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: the Opace Essential SEO Toolkit.
The next one I’ve got for you is called CarDojo Lite. This is a freemium plugin also. They’ve got a free version over at WP Plugins and what this plugin is for is if you are a car dealer, automotive marketplace, selling RVs, motorhomes – well, pretty much anything that has a collection of stuff that you want to sell, this might work for you in that aspect. It’s designed for vehicles and car details and fields and filters in it. CarDojo is a powerful tool that manages the most important aspects of a vehicle sales website.
It’s used for more than just car dealers; it’s RVs, boats, campers, motorcycles, trailers, semi-trucks – even planes. If you’re building a dealer website, this might be a nice little tool for you to add in there. It’s kind of like a classified ads section for car dealers. All in all, it’s looking like a pretty decent plugin. They do have a more advanced version over at CodeCanyon, which is their premium version of it, so you might check it out there. But I give the free version a good to see if it’s a value to you. All in all, this looks like a very nice, simple, straightforward plugin. I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out: CarDojo Lite.
Okay, this show here currently brought to you by…
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And contests – we are currently running a contest. All our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Thanks to those guys for providing a premium version of the plugin to run all of our contests. It’s an excellent plugin if you’re running contests on your site, this is a plugin you should look at.
Current contests – we are currently giving away a one-year pro license for WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. This is a plugin that allows you to feed your WooCommerce store out to multiple product feeds such as Amazon or – I can’t remember the other ones at the moment. A really great plugin. It’s a value of $269, one you want to check out. We also covered this plugin in Episode 388, so go check this one out and enter the contest. Just simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest. All it requires is your name and email. And if you’re already signed up for the newsletter list, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Page in Widgets. This plugin here is a little bit older but it still works well and it even works in Gutenberg. I’ve been testing it out as I’m rebuilding an intranet site for a client. And what we needed this plugin for is we have a page that listed up a whole bunch of documents and we’re building a custom front page that has movable widgets so that any of the users that sign into the site, they can move those widgets around to their preference so every time they login, they get a different front than everyone else that logs in. They get the most important stuff up there.
But we wanted a way to display certain pages on that front page and since the front page is made of widgets, we needed to be able to display the pages in widgets. This plugin works fantastic for that. Now what I have found out is that it tends to work best with simple text and HTML, versus if you’ve got a fancy page built in a page builder, so keep that limitation in mind. It’s mainly made for simple text and simple pages, versus the more complex pages to display them in a widget, and then you can put those widgets wherever you put widgets on your website.
It works well. You just install it, activate it, choose which page you want to display in the widget from the drop-down of pages that are available in your site, and you’re good to go. Fantastic plugin, works excellent, sets up well. All in all, it might be an older plugin but still great. I give this one a perfect 5-Dragon rating.
Feedback – listener feedback. I do like listener feedback. It’s been a while since I’ve had any. I’m looking forward to it. You can do it by simply going to wppluginsatoz.com, the lower right-hand corner, hit the SpeakPipe bell on the corner – right in the lower right-hand corner. It the SpeakPipe bell or you can email me directly off the Contact page of WP Plugins A to Z. Send me your info, feedback, tell me if I’m doing well, doing not so well – any feedback is great. If you’ve got a question or you’re looking for a very specific plugin, feel free to send it to me. I’ll do my best to find it for you, so send it all in.
This show also a value-for-value model, meaning if you’re getting any value out of it – I mean any value – if this show saves you five, ten minutes, hey, what’s five or ten bucks for that? You know, please give some value back. You can do that by simply going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate where you can fill out the form, donate $5 through PayPal. It only takes a couple minutes of your time, and virtually everyone who works online now has a PayPal account. If they don’t I’m not sure how they’re making transactions. It’s like with their credit cards.
Also, if you donate $50 or more, your note will be read out here and any links you put into it will be linked right back to there, so all that information gets yourself a link back and a good readout of your note, and our appreciation – my appreciation – for helping with the show. But you can support the show by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate or you can also go to our Patreon page and donate there, and I’d like to thank the Patreon donors and the people who have given small, monthly donations to the show, so thank you very much for all your donations.
The final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Duplicate Menu. Now this one here is one that will save you tons of time if you’re working on a site rebuild. You know, you get a site that’s got a fancy menu, lots of different items in it. You’re not gonna use them all but you’re gonna use the vast majority, so you’re gonna use 50-60% of that menu. You’ve got to remove them anyway but you might want to add more items back to it, so you can build everything from scratch, which you know how long it takes to build out a menu in WordPress.
What this one does for you is it duplicates that menu for you, allowing you to have a duplicate of the old menu for safekeeping in case you need to go back to it and start over again, which, believe it or not, it does happen. I know. Mistake? Nah! They never occur.
So at any rate, you get in there, figure it all out, duplicate your menu, put it all in. It saves you tons of time. Fantastic plugin, very simple, works, does exactly what it’s supposed to. I really like this plugin. I’ve been using it off and on for years as I go into redeveloping websites. Go check it out: Duplicate Menu and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
And of course I do have ClassicPress Options. Everyone knows that WordPress has made a few mistakes in the last few months and one of those was, well, Gutenberg in some aspects. But what that did was it caused problems with a large segment of the WordPress community, in particular business websites that used very customized versions of pages and metadata and everything else. Gutenberg doesn’t seem to handle it very well. I’ve got that exact experience with one of my clients and a couple of websites that they have where we just can’t use Gutenberg. We actually tried. I activated it on a test site and it just broke everything – just by activating Gutenberg – that’s all we did. We went to 5 and it broke, so we’re gonna have to stay with Version 4.9 which has actually been forked off into ClassicPress, and ClassicPress is starting to grow. As I follow that community, I can see it growing and I knew it would be a matter of time but this is one of the first ClassicPress specific plugins I have run up against.
Now currently, ClassicPress plugins can’t be gotten through the Repository or they don’t have their own repository yet. They all seem to be on GitHub and other repositories such as that. You have to go download them and upload them manually. It takes a little bit more time but probably worth it.
The first one I’ve got for you here today is called Username Protection, available on GitHub. And what this one does is this is ClassicPress, it provides many helpful REST API endpoints. (Some of the endpoints left over from WordPress, I’m sure.) And for the most part, they’re handy, they’re useful, but you want to block off certain endpoints. And what this one does is this blocks off the endpoint for users to access your users, blocking that REST API in it. A very simple plugin, very straightforward. You just install it, activate it. They even give you a couple of ways to test to make sure that it’s working properly, so a very useful plugin, something you will want to check out, and I have seen a couple other ClassicPress plugins appear in the last week which I will be bringing forward in further shows, so stay tuned. We’ve got more coming down the line from ClassicPress and this plugin here, Username Protection, I give a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, so closing out this episode, the plugins I covered are Opace Essential SEO Toolkit, which I gave a 3 to; CarDojo Lite, which I gave a 3 to; Pages in Widgets, which I gave a 5 to…and I seem to be missing one. Absolutely. The Duplicate Menu, which I gave a 5 to and the ClassicPress plugin, Username Protection, which I gave a 4 to.
And a couple of quick reminders…the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be held on February 20th, 2019 and will be broadcast live on YouTube. I believe I’ve actually figured it out for the next one. You know, it’s taken me a few. I’m slow, but I actually get there, believe it or not. I make a lot of mistakes along the way but I do get there. It’ll be a good broadcast I’m sure this time. So for more information and location of it, you can go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup, take you to the Victoria Meetup page so you can get the location and the time for it on February 20th, which it’s gonna be 6:30 at any rate. So I will be doing the presenting in February. I haven’t found another presenter yet at this time, so I’m thinking it’s just going to be one presentation and it’s probably going to be on WordPress security – securing up your WordPress website and backing things up, etc. – the presentation I was supposed to give in January but I put off.
And a final note – oh, and be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel – just one more reminder on that. And a final note to developers who would like to support the show… if you’d like to offer up a premium license to give away, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter all the information there, and we will happily take your donation and create a contest around it and get you all kinds of promotions for your plugin.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you the show here today. I’m going to 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.
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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.