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Transcript of Episode 397 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 397 and I’ve got plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to 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 #397 here.


It’s Episode 397 and I’ve got plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!


Episode #397

John:    It’s Episode 397 and I’ve got plugins for Property Management, Social Connections, Archiving Posts, State of Posts, and Classic Press Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to 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 of course right off the top, don’t forget you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com.

And if you’ve got a few minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, leaving reviews, and those reviews really do help the show and it’d be nice to see some new ones. I haven’t seen any new ones in quite some time from any of those areas.

Also, take a few minutes to subscribe and check out the training videos and screencasts and all of the other extra stuff I do here on the YouTube channel. You can also catch the show live every Thursday at noon PST on the YouTube channel and on Saturday nights at 8:00. I do a show that is not always consistent, but it’s just based around my Saturday evening schedule, whether I can make the show or not, because sometimes I actually have a life and get out on Saturday nights – I know, astounding as that may be.

You can also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And while you’re on the website, subscribe to our newsletter where you get even more information that is not covered on any of the shows I do. My office manager, she does a fantastic job of putting out that newsletter. We’d really like some feedback on how people like it, so please try to let us know.

Right, with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.

All right, first up as usual, I have a couple of great plugins for you that I have not used yet, but I thought you’d might want to know about and know that they exist. Then keep in mind that the ratings on these plugins are based on my reading of their descriptions, checking out their dev site if they have one – their demo site – and these are plugins that have been submitted to me by developers and I was unable to fit in anyway into a project I’m working on or find the time to get them into a testing site to test them out.

So first up, I have one here. It was sent in by Rameez Iqbal and it is called – it’s a premium plugin and it’s from webcodingplace.com and it’s called Real Estate Manager. The plugin is available over at CodeCanyon and what they have to say about it, this is a – Real Estate Manager is a responsive property listing plugin for full-feature real estate listings and it makes a nice portal too, where you can bring in anything from additional salespeople or agents where they can list their properties. It has integration features like property types, property videos, gallery sliders, an advanced AJAX search, Google Maps, and a carousel listing. It has front-end property submissions for it.

            All in all, it’s looking like a pretty decent property management plugin in case you are building out a website for property management. You can see it’s got a whole lot to it just by looking at the thing on the YouTube video. So all in all, it looks like a pretty decent one. Two of the map modes on it, which I’m finding interesting, and I’m seeing this more and more, is because of the way Google Maps started charging for their API keys this last year, it seems the open street mapping system (which of course is free) is starting to gain ground, and this is kind of a cool feature out there. So this plugin here has the leaflet open street mapping built into it.

So it looks like something that could be used by anyone to help keep their costs down, etc. So go check it out. It is called Real Estate Manager and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

The next plugin I’ve got for you was sent in by Chloe Hogan-Weihmann and it’s from appreciationengine.com, and the plugin is called AE Connect. Now this one here is kind of an interesting one to me, because I have a love/hate relationship with social media. And what this plugin does for you is it helps you go out there and collect information.

If you’ve got a website that your users sign into, this plugin will allow them to sign in with their social media. And if they sign in with their social media accounts, you get to collect certain information from that login: things they liked, things they’ve shared, etc. Basically, the stuff they share on social media. It can help you build a profile of your customers and user base, which is of course what happens every time you go to Amazon and Facebook and everywhere else out there.

So then you can use that information to build out something to more specifically target your market and audience. I don’t know if I’d ever use it because I don’t like doing that. It’s something I consider using because it would be a way to help fine tune my marketing. Like I said, it’s a love/hate relationship.

All in all, it looks like a very interesting plugin. I’m willing to bet the configuration setup of it is quite considerable, because it’s been a few years since I’ve set up one of those login systems for a client where social media could log in, but you have to go to the social media place, get API keys, and you go back and forth. It takes a while to get it all official and working correctly so that it stays working, and then you’ve got to stay on top of it because systems change, so it can be a challenge. All in all though, it looks like an interesting enough plugin. You might want to go check this one out if you’re looking at creating that kind of system and it’s called AE Connect and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Okay, and currently this podcast is brought to you by…

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Okay, and contests – we still have the contest. I know there’s been a lot of tweets and stuff going out in the last 24 hours saying that yesterday was the last day, and it was supposed to have ended at midnight on the 28th, so I went and fixed that, so there’s still an opportunity for you to go enter our contest and get your entry in there to win a free license. And that free license is from WooCommerce Product Feed and this license is a $269 value. It’s a one-year license that allows you to set up a plugin, a product feed, on your WooCommerce store where you can directly upload to all the other major merchant platforms without the extra hassle. In a few clicks, you could be uploaded to Google Merchant Center, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Amazon, etc. This could be a way to increase your sales so hey, save yourself some money. Get one year’s license; all you do is enter that contest now.

And we do have another contest in the queue, which I’ll be talking about next week, so that’s coming down the line, so we won’t break in the contests this time – woo-hoo! And in a little bit just for Simple Giveaways plugin, they are the ones who provide us with the plugin for our giveaways system. It’s a very nice plugin. They provided us a premium version of their plugin, so I’d like to give a shout-out to them. Go check it out if you’re looking at having any types of giveaways on your site; an excellent, easy-to-use plugin.

And to enter the contest, simply go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and just simply make a couple of clicks and enter your name and email address and you’re in. That’s all it is. And if you’re already on the mailing list, hey, you won’t be put on it again – I swear, honest. We won’t send you two or three, unless you give two or three email addresses. (Now, we know no developer has more than one email address, right?)

Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Archived Post Status. This is a plugin that came about from a request from one of my clients. Now, if you’ve had your website for any length of time, you know how many posts you have in there. And if you start doing some cleanup and you want to remove posts, you have basically two choices in the default WordPress install. The first choice is to throw it in the trash can. The second choice is to turn it into a draft to take it out of view of the public.

Well, my client asked me, “Is there another way I could just archive this? I don’t want to throw them in the trash because there’s other admins and they might accidentally empty the trash…” which is a high possibility. They empty your trash, then you’ve lost everything. He was like, “Can we just archive them? Put them into the archive?” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s find out!” So I did some research and came up with this excellent little plugin. It is a little old right now. It’s a couple of years old. It doesn’t really have a whole lot of installs, surprisingly. I wish I would have known about it sooner or I’d have been bragging about it more.

But it’s a very nice plugin because what it does is it adds you a new section in your post editing or page editing block where you’ve got published draft and trash is all you really have. It adds an archive section, so you can then change a post to be archived and it puts them in that column there, which makes it easier to sort your posts and easer to add – to save something in an archive that you can then refer back to later. And then when you’re really, really sure you don’t want it, then throw it in the trash.

So this is a really great plugin. Very simple to use, very straightforward, it does it exactly what it’s supposed to do, and of course what happens when that occurs? This is a 5-Dragon rated plugin. Go check it out: Archive Post Status.

Okay, and listener feedback. We do love listener feedback here, and we do have a little bit this week. Well, I’m not sure if it’s listener feedback on the show, but it’s definitely listener feedback from the YouTube channel. And he didn’t leave a name for us, but I’m still gonna play it because it’s a really nice thing to have and we’ll let him take it away.

Hey John, thanks. I appreciated it. I bought a product with a complete website and it had Easy Appointments – you know, the free plugin in there – and their attempt at explaining how to use it was pathetic and I found I was in the dark. But then I found your video and I really appreciate the help.

There you go. Didn’t leave a name but thank you very much. I appreciate you talking the time to send us a SpeakPipe back on that and I’m glad the video for Easy Appointments has helped. It’s actually one of my higher reviewed videos, surprisingly. I need to update it and add some more information to it, but bits by bits. So hey, if you’re on the YouTube channel – anywhere – feedback. I’m always happy to get it and play it out for everyone to hear.

And this show, a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, if it saves you five minutes, 10 minutes – anything at all – please, give some value back to the show. You can do that simply by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate, where you can donate to the show, and I would greatly appreciate it. The donations do not make it into my pocket. They help pay for all the little extras that the show does, such as transcripts, server space, etc. – all the little things that are just required to run a website.

And for donations, those who donate to the show $50 and over, they get read out here with their note and $50 and below, they all remain anonymous. And this week, I would like to give a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the podcast. Thank you! That is to me as good as donating to the show. I don’t give shout-outs in that area there but thank you very much for hiring me. If you’d like me to shout out after you hire me, I’ll happily do that. But for the most part, I just assume it’s anonymous.

Also, we have a donation this week from Jezweb Pty. Ltd., who donated $50, and this is their note:

This donation is on behalf of Damiens Newcastle Party Bus Hire https://www.damienspartybus.com/ — which is it looks like you can hire a bus and go party out in Newcastle, Australia, which would be kind of cool and fun! It’s the best bus for wedding parties and more. It is a WordPress website created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au built with Elementor – and a big shout-out to Jez, who is helping me out with the Elementor stuff, and he’s built it with Elementor using the J Theme Jello.

Thanks, Jez! And they’ve created their own little theme. He’s turned me on to this little theme that they use for Elementor to give it it’s very basic settings and I’m just starting to dig into Elementor and switch out of all the other theming systems I was using. Jez has offered to help me work through this thing to create some of the fantastic websites that I’ve seen him do, so thanks a lot, Jez and thank you for donating and supporting the show. It’s really appreciated.

And again, if you want to support the show, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and just fill out the form, go straight to PayPal, and make your donation, and I greatly appreciate it.

Okay, and the final plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Post State Tags, and this is another one that comes from the same client with when we created the archive – put the archive plugin in for. And one of the things that happens if you get a great big long list of posts that are in various states, either, you know, password-protected, scheduled, pending – you know, all of those things. I can be hard to read on a standard install, because you only get that little thing you’ve got to mouse over, you see it.

Well, what this one does for you is it takes all of those things, including the archive button, and it colorizes them and makes them stand out for you, so you can know in an instant what state that post is in, whether it’s still private, whether it’s pending, whether it’s drafted, whether it’s trashed, published – whatever you’re doing with it.

A very simple plugin. You install it, you go to its configuration settings, you set the colors you want for things, then you save it and poof, it just works. Another one of those great, free plugins that just works, does something simple that could help enhance your life when you’re creating all those posts and managing all those posts in the backend of your WordPress website. So go check this one out. It’s called Post State Tags and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

And finally, we’ve got a little bit of a ClassicPress Option for you this week. And for the ClassicPress-specific – well, they’re not specific because right now we’re still running in parallel paths with ClassicPress, so a lot of WordPress plugins work in ClassicPress. But I’m trying to search for plugins that have either identified as working in both ClassicPress and WordPress or ones that are specifically identifying specifically for ClassicPress. I’ve brought you a couple of those, but most of them are working for both of them.

But this is another one that is working for both of them. It’s Shield Security for WordPress and they should go /ClassicPress just to irritate the WordPress.org system. But the one nice thing I’ve noticed in the WordPress.org Repository is that if you put ClassicPress into the search category, you’ll get a listing of about 75 plugins right now that identify as being as working with ClassicPress, and I imagine that number’s just going to grow as ClassicPress grows, especially since they just released Version 1.0, Release Candidate 2, which means they’re about to have their first official version out.

At any rate, this is a very simple shield system. It uses firewalls and a whole bunch of other little things in it, similar to – from what I can see from testing it, it’s similar to WordFence in the things that it does, except it doesn’t send you as many emails as WordFence does, which is one of their big claims. It’s, “Hey, you don’t need to see all the stuff about, ‘Hey, somebody’s bouncing against your site. They didn’t get in. Do you really want to know?’” If you do, well, you get emails.

But what happens is after a while, you get ad-blinded by those emails; you don’t even see them anymore. You just delete them because you don’t even know if they’re valid, so you don’t read them. So in this case here, they only send you emails when something really needs attention.

So this is one to check out. It looks to be a pretty good security plugin and it has stated that it works for ClassicPress, which is a plus, so you know it actually works in that system. Go check it out. It is called Shield Security for WordPress (or in this case, Shield Security for ClassicPress), and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

All right, and that wraps them up. In this episode here I covered up the Real Estate Manager, which I gave a 3 to; the AE Connect, which I gave a 3 to; the Archived Post Status, which I gave a 5 to; the Post State Tags, which I gave a 5 to; and the Shield Security – you can say that five times real fast – Shield Security, which I gave a 4 to.

And a couple of quick reminders. The next WordPress Meetup for Victoria is on April 3rd and I’m going to be taking it back to a bit of a basic level. I’m going to be doing a presentation on SEO 101: Basic WordPress SEO, and this is a little different than what I did back in the fall. This is gonna be a little more focused and on things to do and not do on your WordPress website, so it will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel, so you can check it out here if you can’t make it.

But we’d greatly appreciate it if you would show up for the meetup. And to get to it, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup and check out all the information and be sure to follow and subscribe to the YouTube channel for notification on when we go live with that show.

And be sure to subscribe to the channel so you can get notifications for everything that goes up there for be it an extra show or an extra training video or an impromptu video – you never know. A bug might get up me one day and just say, “I want to do a video.”

And a final note to developers: if you want to support the show and you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in future contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.

And also, stop off at the website and subscribe to our newsletter. And that’s all I’ve got for you now. I’m gonna 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.

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.

John:    And there we have it! All right, I don’t have a lot of time for questions today. I’ve got to go pick my kid up at school who got out early today. For those of you that listen to the show, this is a little snippet that’ll be on the podcast is there were a couple of great questions from giftedones1981 and you can go check out those by going back to the YouTube channel and watching the beginning of the video.

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