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Transcript of Episode 396 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 396 and I've got plugins for Mobile Apps, Gift Registry, Time Clocks, Custom Fonts, and Site Info. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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 #396 here.


It’s Episode 396 and I’ve got plugins for Mobile Apps, Gift Registry, Time Clocks, Custom Fonts, and Site Info. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #396

John:    It’s Episode 396 and I’ve got plugins for Mobile Apps, Gift Registry, Time Clocks, Custom Fonts, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z.com!

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, you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store, subscribing to and reviewing the show in those places. It really helps the show out and I greatly appreciate it.

Also, take a little bit of time here. Don’t forget, if you’re on the YouTube channel, subscribe to our YouTube channel, hit the bell – notification bell – so you get notification of when we’re going live and the other events that have occurred or will be occurring or when I upload new training videos.

You can also watch the live show every Thursday at noon here on YouTube and I have a show on Saturday nights at 8:00. I make it most Saturday nights and it’s a roundup of all the WordPress news I have picked up during that week. Also a good time for Q&A if you’re so inclined, so check it out. Just follow the channel so you get notifications.

You can also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can join me on the Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook and also subscribe to the newsletter. That would be greatly appreciated. You can get the newsletter which has even more information that is not covered in the shows – either of the shows that occur.

With all that being said, let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

Okay, and I have the usual selection of great plugins for you today and right off the top, I have a couple of plugins that I have yet to use and these are plugins I thought you might like to know about. They’re ones that are sent in to me by developers. I don’t have a chance to get them into a dev site or I don’t have a project they fit into at the time. But I’ve collected so many of these over the last while that I really need to get these shared out to people so you know they exist, so that’s what these ones are for.

So first off, what I’ve got here is a plugin that was sent in by Robin Kumar and it’s called WappPress, and this is a premium plugin. There’s actually two flavors of this plugin. One flavor, what it does for you, is it helps you build an Android app for your website, and that’s the working demo of their site. It helps you build and Android app of your website and helps you build an IOS app for your website with some one-click installations, some quick customizations, and some tweaks to it.

They do have a free version over at WordPress.org Repository that you can download and check out for free to see if it’s even something that’ll be worthwhile for you. But if you’ve been looking for a way to make a quick app out of your website for people to use on their phones, this might just be the ticket for you. So go check this out and see if it’s something of value.

I have yet to check it out myself, but it does look like it could be fairly worthwhile, save you a heck of a lot of time and development costs of building an app if you’re just a simple website and you just want some simple ways to get it done. Go check this one out. It’s called WappPress Mobile App Builder for WordPress and I give it a 3-Dragon rating based on everything that I can see with it.

The next plugin I’ve got for you here was sent in by Moritz Bappert – hey, I think I got it right that time – Moritz Bappert – and this is a plugin for WordPress Gift Registry. It’s a simple wish list for weddings, birthdays, etc. and this is a plugin you can set up on your site. You can create your wish list out there. We all know that when it comes to our birthday or holidays and friends/family/whoever goes, “Hey, what do you want for your birthday?” and you go, “You know, there’s something I was wanting but I done forgot what it is,” this might be what you want.

Maybe you can create a private page on your website, create your list, and then when they ask you, you can give people the link to your private page and say, “Hey, go check out this list and just buy whatever is on that list is what I’m looking for for my birthday.” So you never know; it could save you some time.

Or if you’re setting up for a wedding and you don’t want to register somewhere, you just want to create your own registry on a wedding, use this plugin for it. Lots of great uses for this plugin, so go check it out. It’s called WP Gift Registry and it’s a simple wish list for weddings, birthdays, etc. A really great, little plugin. It looks to be quite a nice tool and I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out.

And currently this website is sponsored by…

Reminders for the show…

Whoops, wrong button.

…all the show notes can be found at —

Wrooong buttons!

…wppluginsatoz.com…

Wrong buttons!

That was good timing. Massive fail there. Okay, let’s try that one more time. This show is sponsored by…

Take the work and worry out of maintaining and caring for your WordPress website. JohnOverall.com has 20+ years’ experience and offers hosting, maintenance programs, emergency support, and more to keep your site up-to-date and running smoothly. We offer free estimates and only bill you for the time used, not by the block. While you’re caring for your business, let JohnOverall.com care for your website. Think of us when you think of WordPress. Visit JohnOverall.com.

Absolutely. Come see me for all your WordPress needs, especially if you’re tired of the same old hosting that’s slowing you down. Come see JohnOverall.com for WordPress hosting that won’t slow you down.

Okay, and contests. We do have a contest currently running and all our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin who kindly provided us with the premium version of their plugin for running our contests. Go check out the plugin – really quite great.

We are currently running a giveaway for a one-year pro license for WooCommerce Product Feed Manager, a way to increase your WooCommerce store sales potentially by generating product feeds and uploading your products to the major merchant shops such as Google, Merchant Center, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Amazon, etc. So this might be something you want to check out and this free license is a $269 value, so it’s quite valuable, so make sure you go sign up for the contests. It runs through to the end of February. All you’ve got to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and go register for it. Just your name and email is all we need, so go check this plugin out. We also reviewed it in Episode 388.

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you is one that I started to use for a project I’m working on where we needed to display multiple timeclocks for multiple time zones where the organization has its offices in multiple time zones, and this is an intranet for all of their employees and they would like to know what times are in different zones nice and easy. This one looked like a really great feature to have. You can create multiple clocks really easy and quickly using a widget and I thought, “Okay, maybe they’ve got a shortcode and I can put it on a page because I need to put this on a page,” but no. You can go to their website and you can create JavaScript for it and insert all of it separately that way – a bit more work.

But I wasn’t completely put off at that point but what I was put off at was when I loaded it up to test it and all of a sudden, I was presented with, “Please turn on Flash,” and I went, “Oh, man. All the clocks are produced in Flash? Really? Not HTML 5?” We all know where Flash is eventually going; it’s not quite got there yet, but it’s on its way. You hardly ever see it anymore.

So being that these are Flash, I can’t thoroughly recommend it. It’s still a good tool and a good way to display clocks and times, and they have multiple ways to display the clocks. It just looks fantastic, but this one big Flash flaw is a big issue for me, so I’ll be hunting for another one, so we’ll probably see a few more plugins like this come down the line because I’ve noticed there’s a few of them out there.

At any rate, go check this out if it sounds interesting to you. It’s Local Time Clock and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Listener feedback – I still love listener feedback. Please, all you’ve got to do is go to the website, the lower right-hand corner, click on the SpeakPipe, leave me some feedback or hit the Contact button, send me an email question – multiple ways to get a hold of me and get yourself into the show. And I do try to get everything that comes in during the week into the show. Occasionally I get busy and it gets buried in my inbox, so it takes a week to get to it. But I do get to everything eventually, so make sure you get a hold of me.

This show, also a value-for-value model, meaning if you’re getting any value out of it (and I mean any value). If it saves you five minutes, what’s that five minutes worth to you for saving? Please kick me that funds there. It really helps the show out. If it saves you hours, think about that time. Plus, you know, create the contents, you know, on a week-after-week basis and I get lots of feedback that says the content is good. I occasionally get feedback saying the content is not so good. Whatever it is, if you’re getting any value out of the show, please get some value back to it.

You can donate to the show simply by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to donate to the show. Any amounts over $50, your note is read here in the show each week and linked back to wherever you want it linked back to. All amounts below that remain anonymous and I really greatly appreciate them. And I’d like to say thank you very much to the small, weekly donations that come in and the Patreon donors that are out there. Thank you for your support of the show. Your donations go to help pay for the things such as transcripts, server bandwidth, etc. I really appreciate all of that stuff, so thank you very much.

And the final plugin I’ve got for you here today – the last one is a freemium plugin. This one here is called Use Any Font . Now, this is a great tool. From time to time, you may have the need to use a unique font on your website or a website you’re working on a client. I’ve had it a couple of times when clients give me a very specific font they want to use. And we’ve gone with – there’s lots of ways to work around and get this. But this tool here is a whole lot easier. Now this tool, the freemium version only allows you to upload one font, and what you have to do with this is you install the plugin, then you go to their website. You create an API key and you can buy an API key from as little as $10 or as much as $50, depending on how many websites you want to use it on or how many fonts you want to be able to upload, etc.

The best one if you’re a developer, spend the $50; it’s a lifetime license for as many fonts as you want on as many websites as you want. But what it does is with the API key, you upload a font from your website. It gets sent to their conversion servers. Their server converts the font into a web-usable font for you, sends it back to your website, and it’s stored now on your website – not stored on their servers. So you get the font local. It’s delivered locally from your website, so it’s immediately served to your clients. No slowdown, no lag – nothing like using the Adobe font system unfortunately where there’s a lag or even the Google font system where occasionally you see the lag.

This can be just direct, fast, and simple. So if you’re using Open Source fonts or free fonts or fonts you’ve actually paid the license fee to use on your websites, this is a great tool for you to get those embedded in your websites. Now I would’ve given this thing a 5-Dragon rating, but I only used the free version and the rating on it is unfortunately at 4 Dragons, but otherwise this is really a great tool that you’ll want to check out if you’ve been doing some customized fonts and you’ve been going about it in the old-fashioned ways of converting them yourself and uploading them, or, you know, getting them from other services and sources.

So go check tool out, Use Any Font , and again, a 4-Dragon rating.

And finally, the ClassicPress Options for this week, and this ClassicPress Option for this week here – and of course, these are not just ClassicPress-specific plugins at the moment. Well, sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. Today’s plugin is not just ClassicPress-specific, but they’ve done something kind of cool that I just recently discovered about developers.

You can search the queue term “ClassicPress” at the wordpress.org repository and there seems to be dozens and dozens of plugins there that are labeled as working for ClassicPress from their developers, because the developers had to label them. What this one here does – and I think a few more are starting to do – they’re putting in code to determine whether you’re loading this plugin into ClassicPress or loading it into WordPress – kind of a cool thing, I think.

This one here, when you load it up into your ClassicPress site, all the information that is pertinent to ClassicPress. If you load it up into WordPress, it’s all pertinent to WordPress. Now what this one is, this is a nice, simple tool. This is one to find out what shape your website service is in, what the site data information is. You know, what server you’re on, what themes are installed, what plugins you have, what type of database it’s using, how much memory, etc. – all of the stuff that’s used for diagnosing to help figure things out when you’re bringing information in. You need this kind of information.

It’s a really great tool, works very well in ClassicPress. In my ClassicPress install it works quite well, so one you’ll want to go check out. It is the ClassicPress – this is called Site Info for ClassicPress and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.

Okay, and that wraps it up! I covered up in this episode here the WordPress Mobile App Builder, which I gave a 3 to; the WP Gift Registry, which I gave a 3 to; the Local Time Clock, which I gave a 3 to; and the Use Any Font , which I gave a 4 to; and the Site Info for ClassicPress, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders… if you didn’t make the WordPress Meetup last night, I’m told it was quite good and informative. I think I did a great job in my presentation. I haven’t looked at the YouTube video, but there is a YouTube video up for it. You can go watch that. It seemed to stream quite nicely. I don’t know if it caught me onscreen very well, but I think it caught the presentation screen and Dean did a great presentation on the different server types for email servers and the best ones to use, so go check that information out.

We do have another meetup coming in March – no, April. Yeah, we’re skipping most of March and we’re going to April 3rd I believe is when the next meetup is, and anyone in the Victoria area, come down and see it. If not, you can be sure to catch it live on the YouTube stream, so go check it out. All further information is at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.

And be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for wppluginsatoz.com. And a final note to developers, if you want to support the show and get some free advertising for yourself, donate a premium license to the show and we will showcase that in a contest up and coming and talk about your plugin week over week until the contest is completed. Some great, free advertising for you. Always looking for those great giveaways.

Okay, and that pretty much wraps it up, so we’ll let my girl take us out of here properly this time.

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.

Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notification of all new videos. Also, follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

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.

 

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