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 #402 here.
It’s Episode 402 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chatting, Members Directory, World Time, Content Creation, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #402
John: It’s Episode 402 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chatting, Members Directory, World Time, Content Creation, and ClassicPress Options, 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 of course, I have the usual great show for you today.
But right off the top, I want to put out a public service announcement, and what it is is I am the chair of a local charity organization here, and the sister organization that I work with needs a webmaster for their website – someone to manage it. We’re looking for a pro bono person who would like to manage a WordPress website. If you’re interested in this, please send me an email to john@wppro.ca and I will get all the information and communicate back and forth with you if you want to pick it up, so looking forward to it.
And 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 at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews. You can also catch the show every Thursday at noon live on YouTube and that’s where you can also subscribe to all the videos and other items that we have there, so please check it out.
You could also follow me on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join me on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook or take a couple of minutes and sign up to the newsletter on our website where there’s even more information that goes out on a weekly basis there – stuff that’s not covered in the show.
With all that being said, it’s time to dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, and I have the usual great set of plugins for today and to start off, I have a couple of plugins that I have not tested but were sent to me by developers, so I thought you might like to know they exist. I never get a chance to test them, I don’t have projects for them, but they look to be of use and value to those of you in the community who may be doing work like this that these plugins apply to.
The first one I have for you was sent in by Bianca Allery and it’s called Live Chat & Talk. This is a plugin that will connect your WordPress site through a 3CX live chat phone system. You need to have the 3CX phone system installed. 3CX is a piece of software that allows for VOIP setup of phone systems and you can integrate that then into this plugin and integrate it into your website so that people could do live chatting and talking. Maybe you’re chatting and you need to raise it up to a phone call, get them to call. They don’t have to call you; you can call them. There’s lots of connectivity in this, but you do have to have this phone system installed for the plugin to work.
It does look like an interesting tool and if you’re running a big enough website where you have these kinds of questions and other stuff and you’re communicating with visitors on a regular basis, this could be an additional tool for you to add that extra level of customer appreciation and customer connectedness for your website. So it’s something that may allow you to connect with your customers better, so make sure you check this plugin out. It’s called Live Chat & Talk and currently I give it a 3-Dragon rating. Go check it out.
The next item I’ve got for you here was sent in by Richard Taylor and this is Membership Software. It’s a third-party plugin access to your WordPress website. This is a third-party service; it ranges from free if you have less than 50 members to $239/month if you have 10,000 members, and the prices are varied in between. The costs vary of course depending on the number of members you have, and it offers up a lot of the services you would need for running a membership site.
Now, I have my reservations about using third-party services. I’ve never been a fan of sticking my content into somebody else’s system. I’ve seen it too many times over the years where a great third-party service appears, you get content you build up with them, they become successful, they get bought out by a competitor or something where a competitor kills them, your information gets rolled into a new system. All of a sudden, what you’re used to isn’t there. Or, they may – there’s a possibility the could just go away. The problem of handing your data over to a third-party system – you’ve got to make sure that you can retrieve that data in a usable fashion that you can then take elsewhere, so that’s something to check out with something like this, especially something as important as a membership site, because you could have some really important data there.
So anyway, it looks to be a great service. It does offer up everything you need such as an events calendar, online payment systems, member directories – all of the little bits and pieces for running a membership site. Now again, the content is not on your site; it’s contained on their site. Your website just interfaces with that website, so you’ve got to think about how that’s going to work for you.
At any rate, go check it out if you’re looking for a membership solution that you don’t have to go through a lot of headache to deal with. Check out Membership Works and I currently give it a 3-Dragon rating.
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Currently also, we are running a contest, and the contest ends today at midnight. You’ll want to check it out. I’ll be announcing the winner the next show. It is for the Simple Giveaways plugin and this here – oh, no. It’s not for the Simple Giveaways plugin. What am I thinking, brain? Okay, the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provide us with the premium plugin for the website.
What we are giving away is a one-year expert license for Graph Comment, which is a free, powerful commenting system that makes for easy discussions, easy reading, and helps keep the trolls under the bridge where they belong and off your website. No more disorganized discussions piled on several pages. With Graph Comment, your audience can easily follow the discussions. One of the great things about this plugin is all the data stays on your website, so if ever you decide to leave them, you just revert back to the regular commenting system and you don’t lose any of that data, such as if you were using – I can’t remember the comment plugins that do that, the ones that take the data off your site.
So you’ll want to go check them out. For more information about this plugin, it’s over at graphcomment.com. Make sure you get in there, enter the contest today, and we’ll be drawing the winners first thing tomorrow morning. So thank you very much for all of those who have been participating in our contests and we will have another one coming up shortly hereafter.
Okay, the next plugin I have up for you is called CoolClock – a JavaScript Analog Clock. Now, I know a few episodes back I talked about a few different clock plugins and I had settled on what I thought was a really great clock plugin for a project I was working on where I needed to display multiple clocks in a widget to showcase the projects I’m working on with their multiple offices across the globe. I needed to showcase that in a very nice, clean way and I thought I’d found it. It worked well on my test site.
When I went to put it on the development site, I couldn’t get it to work and I was having problems and I didn’t find it for a little while, but it was a jQuery error and it was conflicting with the FooGallery, and a FooGallery was a must-use plugin. So I had to revert back, and I decided, “Well, let’s go back through that list of clocks I had looked at and see if one I missed.”
Well, this one I missed in the system. I needed something that was able to produce multiple clocks with shortcodes, set up multiple time zones, give a very clean look. This one here was even better than the first one I looked at. It gives you these really nice skins that you can choose from for your clocks. It can set up with a shortcode, so you can set up multiple clocks within one widget block.
You can also take this one here and it’s got another function that the other didn’t have, and that when you set up dial clocks and people see the dials, they don’t know if it’s a.m. or p.m., just off the dials of the clock. And with international time zones that I’m setting up, there’s some zones that would be in the a.m., some in the p.m. Well, this one here has another added thing that you can turn on that turns on a little digital function, which is in the middle of the clock face that tells the time in digital format and sets it for a.m./p.m.
Really nicely done, nicely laid out, an excellent plugin. It’s free, sets up well, functions, and it played well with the other plugins that are using jQuery, which was a major bonus. So go check this one out. It’s CoolClock – a JavaScript Analog Clock, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, and listener feedback. I would really love some. Just hit me up on the Contact page up on wppluginsatoz.com. You can also get the SpeakPipe down in the lower right-hand corner of the website and leave me a SpeakPipe voice message. I’ll play it out for everyone to hear, answer your questions – all kinds of stuff. Think of it as a way to gain some insights from an expert and save money.
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Okay, the next plugin I have up here for you is called Edit Flow. Now, this plugin here is one that would be very useful, and you might be able to use it for yourself too if you’re a single author, but this seems to be mostly usable if you have multiple authors on your site. I have a client currently – we just launched their site. They have five people in their office, all of them contributing content, all of them doing it through separate login accounts so that they know who’s creating the content. But there’s still one overall person who manages the content and makes sure it’s happy.
This is a plugin to help you do that. It allows you to set up a work flow so that you can set up on here an edit flow that will allow you to go from the point of conception to completion. It has a calendar. You can set up so when certain content is due. You can set up custom statuses for the content, if it’s in edit, if it needs a review, if it needs a rewrite, if it needs to be published, set up all these different things.
It offers up the ability to add editorial comments that get passed back and forth with the notes so that if someone says, “Hey, take a look at this and read it,” the person who reads it can leave editorial comments, making suggestions on how to change it and make it better. It’s a really nice way to gain control of all your editorial content on your website, and something you will want to have a look at and check out.
A really nice little plugin. It seems to flow quite nicely from the free version. They do have a couple of premium support pieces in it that could be of help with you, so go check this out. It’s called Edit Flow and currently I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, and finally we have ClassicPress options here for you. And of course, since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has been gaining ground, and I’ve noticed lately it’s gaining ground at even more rate. After this last week’s fiasco with WordPress (and if you haven’t heard about that, just go google “Jetpack and inserting ads.” That’ll give you exactly what you need.) So anyway, I imagine ClassicPress will gain a few more people.
At any rate, this week here I have a plugin specifically for ClassicPress. They now have a list of plugins on the ClassicPress forums that will allow you to search up and see plugins that are written specifically for ClassicPress, not just for WordPress and ClassicPress, but pure ClassicPress.
This week here, what I have for you here is called Registration Honeypot, and this is a plugin that allows you to go in, plug it in turn it on. It adds a hidden input into the ClassicPress registration form and if the input contains any data when the form is submitted, the account won’t be created. This is a spammer prevention tool. I’m beginning to wonder, does this exist for WordPress? Because it would be a really nice tool to have, because I have sites that the spammers just won’t leave alone.
So at any rate, this is a very nice tool, fantastic, and free plugins that just work, do a job and do it right, only one thing for them: this gets a 5-Dragon rating. Go check it out: Registration Honeypot.
Anyway, well that wraps up the plugins for this week. I covered up the Live Chat & Talk, which I gave a 3 to; the Membership Software, which I gave a 3 to; the CoolClock, which I gave a 5 to; and then the Edit Flow, which I gave a 4 to; and then the Registration Honeypot, which I gave a 5 to.
And one more time, I’d like to give a special shout-out to Steve Schmidt at nowowl.com for his donation of the WP Plugins A to Z logo. We thank you very much.
Also, the next WordPress Meetup, which if you didn’t catch it, you can go catch last night’s WordPress Meetup which was a presentation on WordPress SEO 101. The next Meetup is going to be on May 21st and the subject has yet to be determined. In fact, I might have a different speaker for that night, which would be cool for me – I mean one less presentation for me to actually prepare for. So go check it out. The information can be found at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for all the information for that.
Be sure to subscribe and check out the YouTube channel where you’ll find training videos, screencasts, and of course, the live show here every week.
And a final note to developers: if you’d like to support the show and you’d like to donate a premium license to be used for future contests, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. Or, if you would like to have a plugin reviewed, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-review to get a plugin reviewed. Submit it; you don’t have to be a developer to submit a plugin you think should be reviewed.
And one final reminder just about the fact that I am looking for a WordPress developer would like a pro bono project, I am stacked to the gills with my pro bono projects. I can’t take on another one anymore. I’m full on that. At any rate, it is for a health cooperative and it is a really great local organization here in Victoria. If you would like to support and help them out in some way, please get a hold of me and I will get you hooked up with all the information to manage and maintain this site.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so thank you all for tuning in and listening to the show today. I greatly appreciate your time. Y’all have fun, take care. 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.