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 #401 here.
It’s Episode 401 and I’ve got plugins for Dynamic Maps, Android App Builder, Bulk Moving Posts, Locking WooCommerce, and ClassicPress options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #401
John: It’s Episode 401 and I’ve got plugins for Dynamic Maps, Android App Builder, Bulk Moving Posts, Locking WooCommerce, and ClassicPress options. It’s all coming up 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 I have the 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. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, I’d greatly appreciate your time over in Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews there. They really do help the show out and I greatly appreciate the time you take to do it.
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So, that’s all out of the way. It’s time to jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, and to start off I’ve got a couple of plugins that I have yet to use but thought you might want to know that they exist. Keep in mind the ratings are based off the descriptions, their site demos (if they have one), and other bits and pieces that I can find as I dig around with them. The reason I haven’t used these is one, I don’t have the time to get them into a test site to test them all out, or I can’t use them in any of my current projects (and I have a couple on the go right now). Not too many, but I do have a few on the go.
All right, so the first one I’ve got for you was sent in to us by Yancho Yanchev and this one here is called Image Map Pro, and this is an image map plugin that creates more than just country or county maps. It creates maps for just about anything – kind of a cool plugin. I really like it. I wish I had a use for it right now so I could dig into it and see what it can do. I do like their test site that showcases the human body where you can click on the different muscles, figure out what the different muscles are, get more information. That’s on their test site there.
They do also have with the plugin you get 50+ maps of countries and continents that are included. You know, custom polygon shapes – basically, you create an SVG map and then you map it with the overlays for all the clickable stuff that you want. A really cool, interesting plugin – something I thought was quite interesting to look at. This looks to be a really cool plugin to check out. You might want to go check it out.
It is a premium plugin; it’s $39 over at CodeCanyon and you can get it there. The link is in the show notes. All in all, it looks pretty great – something to check out. I would give this one a 4-Dragon rating based on everything here. Who knows? If I test it out, it could end up at a 5, so make sure you go check it out. It is called Image Map Pro for WordPress – SVG Map Builder.
And next up I’ve got for you – this one here was sent in by Nissar Mashina and it is a freemium plugin – – and get that one off. It’s a freemium plugin and it’s called Movipress, which doesn’t really describe what it does. It kind of leaves you – what? Is this about movies? But no, it is an Android app builder and what it does is it allows you to create an Android app over on their website and then you can embed and use this app over on your WordPress website.
It allows you to create an app to interface with your clients if you can get them to use the app. It’s kind of something – I don’t know how good or bad it would be. I don’t really do apps myself, so if you’re into apps or building apps, this might be a really nice tool for you to turn your website into an Android app. It does not look to be anything for iPhone, but of course Android has a larger share of the market nowadays, so you might want to check this out.
And there’s a whole lot that it can do: change the appearance anytime/anywhere, use Google Fonts, you know, link articles with different templates. You can add your own logos, save articles, send new comments, support for videos, and more in it. So go check this out. It’s called Movipress and it is an Android app builder and currently I give it a 3-Dragon rating, so go check that one out.
Okay, currently this show is brought to you by …
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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.
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And currently we do have a contest running right now and the contests that we run are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. They were kind enough to provide us with a premium plugin for running all our contests, a really great plugin, so go check out that plugin. There’s a link in the show notes to it.
And our current contest is running for one more week until April 4th. We are giving away a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free and powerful commenting plugin for great discussions. It helps you organize your discussions, makes it easy, and keeps the trolls under the bridge where they belong: away from your website. They can’t get up on top and extract their toll.
So go check this one out and I also reviewed this plugin back in Episode 394, so you can go find out what I really thought about that plugin when I gave it a good review. For more information go check out their website, graphcomment.com. All you’ve got to do to enter the contest is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information on it.
All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Bulk Move. Now, if you’re ever in the middle of redeveloping a website that’s been around for five, 10, 12 years or so – however long they’ve been running WordPress – and they’ve got maybe hundreds or thousands of posts. Well, when you’re redeveloping, sometimes you start to rethink the categories that you have assigned to all your posts or you’ve assigned to bulk amounts of posts.
Well, this is the fate that I faced in the last couple of weeks with a big project that I’m in the middle of redeveloping on. The client wanted to reevaluate their categories for their posts; in other words, move a large chunk of posts from one category to the other. Well, you can do that, you know, at 10, 20, 50, 100 pages at a time in bulk editing mode on the post listing page, but that just takes way too long.
Well this plugin here allows you to go in, choose a category of posts you want to move, and you can move them from one category to the other. Real quick, simple, easy, click and move. You can also move posts from one tag to another. Or you can move posts from a category to a tag. Or you can move custom taxonomies around. There’s a lot that this plugin does. They’re even working on some development for it to add the ability to bulk move pages to posts, bulk move users from one role to another.
All in all, this is a pretty nice plugin and having used it, fantastic plugin. It does what it says it’s gonna do. It’s really quick and easy. It gets that stuff out of your way and it allows you to move on with more productive work, so this one here, a fantastic plugin – free – go check it out. Bulk Move for moving your post categories around gets a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, and feedback. I do like listener feedback when I can get it. It’s been a while, so go hit the Contact page, send me an email, go hit me up on SpeakPipe at the lower right-hand corner of the website. Send me a SpeakPipe message. Any way – you can also send me an email direct to john@wppro.ca. Go to our Facebook page, Twitter – any number of ways to get a hold of me. Send me feedback on the show, send me comments, send me questions – anything. I’m looking for any kind of feedback, folks. Send it in. I’ll happily help it out.
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Okay, and the next plugin I’ve got here for you – this one here is called Lock My WooCommerce. This is a really nice plugin. It’s relatively new and what it does for you is if you’re running a specialized membership WooCommerce store, this could be an excellent plugin for you. And what I mean by that is maybe you’re running a wholesale club, maybe you’re running a members-only eStore – you know, something specialized where it’s not open to just the general public; it’s only open to the membership that you select to come in here.
This plugin locks down your WooCommerce website. It hides it without affecting the theme. It hides it from sidebars and official widgets. It creates a login form with a custom message for you. Its option to allow – it has an option where you can allow users to see a store, but they can’t interact with the store. It’s a way to sort of, you know, entice people. “Hey, join our club. Get all this cool stuff. You can buy all this cool stuff from us.” It’ll even hide the store from search engines for you so that you don’t get it indexed or they don’t come in through the backdoor of search engines.
All in all, it looks to be a pretty fantastic plugin for specialized use in WooCommerce by locking your WooCommerce store down. Go check this one out. It’s pretty useful if you have that particular niche market. All in all, it looks great. I think it is worth a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: Lock My WooCommerce.
And the final thing I’ve got for you here today is the ClassicPress option for this week. And of course, if you haven’t used ClassicPress – maybe you don’t need to but you many need it – is a fork of WordPress that is focused on business applications of what WordPress used to do well and with Gutenberg does not do so well (as I’ve discovered in at least one instance).
Now this plugin is called WP ADA Compliance Check, and this is one here that I’ll probably be testing out for WordPress, so I’ll bring it back again after I’ve given it a full test-out. It allows you to get in there and run the ADA compliance checks, some basic checks on your WordPress website, to see if you’re in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, this mostly applies to Americans, but it could create problems for everyone else across the globe in some areas, especially doing business in the States.
And as we know in the last year, many big, giant websites, people with big pockets, are being sued for ADA violations on their website, which if you’ve ever tried to do ADA compliance on your website, it takes a fair amount of work to do. So this is something you might want to check into, check out this plugin. If you’re using ClassicPress, this plugin does work in ClassicPress.
It seems to function just fine. I didn’t run it through all its tests, but I did run some basics on it, and it installs, activates, and allows you to start doing some checks on it, so go check it out, the WP ADA Compliance Check Basic plugin and I give it a 4-Dragon rating for ClassicPress.
Okay, well that wraps it up. In this episode here I covered up the following plugins: Image Map Pro for WordPress, which I gave a 4 to; Moviepress Android App Builder, which I gave a 3 to; the Bulk Move plugin for moving bulk categories, which I gave a 5 to; the Lock My WooCommerce, which I gave a 5 to; and the WP ADA Compliance Check Basic, which I gave a 4 to.
And a couple of last reminders: another thank you out to Steve Schmidt, the creator of the logo that we use on WP Plugins for his generous donation of the WP Plugins A-Z logo we currently use, and that’s from nowowl.com, so go check him out. And another reminder – the last reminder here – next week is the WordPress Meetup in Victoria on April 3rd. It’ll be broadcast live on our YouTube channel here, and this meetup here is going to be covering SEO 101. I’ll be giving the presentation, presenting it out to the people who show up and to the live YouTube audience and for those that want to come back and watch the show later.
This is a great presentation. If you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come on down, say hi, tell me you heard about it on the show. I’d be really thrilled to hear that. So go check it out at meetup.com, wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. We’ll take you to the link for all of our events that happen at the Victoria WordPress Meetup and events.
And a final reminder, please subscribe to the channel down below. Hit the subscription bell and then hit it again to get notifications since YouTube is always messing with stuff. They make it very difficult for people – you’ve got to hit this twice. Yeah, you’re subscribed. Are you sure you’re subscribed? Hit it again, so make sure you do that.
All right, and that’s pretty much – oh, one final note out to developers who would like to support the show. If you’d like to donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to enter all of the information needed to support the show. Hey, it’s great free advertising for you. You get like several episodes of advertising, promoting and plugging your plugins. You know, all you gotta do is supply that license and we’ll do all the rest of it.
So thank you very much to everyone listening to the show. I appreciate your time and that’s all I’ve got for you, so I’ll 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.