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 #309 here.
It’s Episode 406 and I’ve got plugins for Time Tracking, Stock Tracking, Gamifying Your Website, and Auto Linking for Classic Press, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A to Z!
Episode #406
John: It’s Episode 406 and I’ve got plugins for Time Tracking, Stock Tracking, Gamifying Your Website, and Auto Linking for Classic Press, 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 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 me reviews. They eventually do make it into the show.
Remember though, you can also watch live every Thursday at noon here on YouTube, where you can subscribe and check out our training videos, screencasts, and the extra shows that do appear, and we do have a few coming up in the following month. Please follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. You can also join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, drop in to the website, subscribe to the newsletter. You get a whole lot of additional information there and my marketing manager, she’s such a sweetheart. She puts so much additional information into there that you will really enjoy the newsletter, so be sure to subscribe for that.
All right, with all of that out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, well first up I have for you a great plugin today. For a while there, I have been doing a couple of plugins at this part here, where people – developers and others – have been sending plugins in to me, submissions, to be reviewed, and that pot is finally working it down to where I’m going to drop it back to just one a week for a while until it gets too big.
So this week here, the one I have for you, it was sent in by Craig Schmidt from jumpstartdev.net and it’s called GraviTsheets, and this is an interesting plugin. It’s new and it’s just getting launched out there to the world, so I’m going to tell you a bit about it. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to use it myself, because what it does for you is it connects up Gravity Forms and Tsheets. Tsheets is a time tracking software, a third-party software system, and I already have my own time tracking.
But for many people, Tsheets is something that they use for setting up their shifts, employee shifts, or if they’ve got multiple employees that go to different places for clients, to book in client jobs, etc. And some people use Gravity Forms in their website as a way for people to book these spots, and what happened is they had to go through and they had to transfer the data from Gravity Forms into Tsheets and things will get lost or misplaced or put into the wrong times and other items like that, and then follow-up became a problem. You know, following up to make sure the client was happy, the work was done, etc.
What these guys have done is they’ve created a connector between Gravity Forms and Tsheets so that you take your Gravity Forms items, you fill out the info, it’s automatically submitted to Tsheets, it creates the shift for you. It also creates follow-up items in your Tsheets for you to follow up with your client. This looks like it’s gonna be quite the fantastic plugin and it looks like it’s going to really help those out there that use these two different items, and they’ve been partnering with some other folks. They’ve given me a call and talked to me on a few things, and I’m sure more information will come out about this as it gets moving forward.
There’s a good writeup in the show notes of what they submitted to me, so you might want to go check that out. But all in all, this is looking like quite an interesting and fantastic plugin. And currently, based on everything I know about it, I’m gonna give GraviTsheets a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
Okay, and this show currently brought to you by…
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All right. Yes, hosting that won’t slow you down – come visit JohnOverall.com. Yeah, finally. A new commercial! Can you believe it? After – I don’t even know how many episodes. Okay, and if you’d like to replace that commercial with yours, please feel free to get a hold of me.
Contests – we currently do not have a contest. We are still reaching out to developers to see if one wants to get a contest up and running. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, which is a fantastic plugin. So make sure you stay tuned to the show, the newsletter, and the website for information on contests. As we get them, we will get them announced up again. And you can check that out by going to wppluginsatoz.com/contests.
Okay, the next plugin I’ve got for you here today is called Stock Market Ticker, and this one here is a plugin that allows you to get in there and track stocks. Tracking stocks can be an interesting and sometimes even profitable pastime. You can sign up in a myriad of places to keep track of all your stocks and other stuff. But if you want simplicity, if you want to you can simply add this plugin to your website and choose your favorite stocks to track.
Kind of a nice plugin. It’s very simple to set up. It can be used as a widget or a shortcode on the page. You do need to create an account over at financestockdio.com and get an API key, but it is a free account and it sets up really quickly and easily. It allows you to go in and just set up a ticker tracking stocks and they have a multitude of ways to set it up in there, numerous backgrounds and adjustments you can have. You can have charts and all kinds of interesting stuff.
This is something that I’ve been looking for for a while, based upon a hobby – not even a hobby – nice investment stuff I started a few years ago and I’ve been wanting to do something with it, so this will start to appear on one of my pet project sites that never gets to see the light of day. At any rate, it’s a really cool plugin, Stock Market Ticker, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
Okay, and this show here, we do like – I do like listener feedback, audio clips, anything like that. So if you would like to be featured in the show, make sure you drop in at the website there, lower right-hand corner, use the SpeakPipe to leave me an audio message. I’ll play it on the show, answer your questions to the best of my ability, even do a lot of research for you. It’s a great way to get free research from an expert.
You can also hit me up on my Contact page or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter, and I will do the best I can to answer it. And if you’ve got suggestions for plugins, feel free to make those, too. I’m always looking for interesting plugins to review and talk about on the show.
This show, value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And for those of you out there, all the producers that help make this show happen, please – you know, if you get any value out of it, if it’s worth five bucks of your time, please donate $5 back to it – something to help out. Any donations $50 or more, they get a note read out in the show and anything below $50 remains anonymous, so thank you very much to those that have donated. The Patreon donors, thank you very much. Your Patreon donations have come through this month, I really appreciate them, and for all the other small, weekly donations that help out, so thank you very much for that.
The donations never make it to my pocket – not yet, anyway. They basically help cover the costs of the server, the transcripts, and other miscellaneous things that happen here on this show. And if you would like to donate, please just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. Put the amount you’d like to donate into the form and simply go straight to PayPal and donate to the show.
There’s other ways you can donate and support the show too, and some time this week I expect to complete it, maybe early next week actually, because I keep forgetting this week’s almost over. And that is if you want to contribute artwork to the show – you know, the artwork that shows up in the podcast feed, the podcast apps that play this show, the artwork that shows up on the website. If you’ve noticed, the artwork has started to change and has started to take on something a little more dynamic, look a little better than it used to, and this is something that I’m trying to improve dramatically.
But I’m not an artist, so I can only do so much. But if you want to submit artwork to me, I’m more than happy to take it, and there will be a way on the website to submit the artwork, so something you might want to consider. All right, so thank you very much to all those that support the show.
All right, the final – not the final – the next plugin I’ve got up here, because we’ve got one more after this. The next plugin I’ve got up here is called GamiPress, and this is an interesting plugin. This is something that I’ve been looking into more and more and seeing how I can use that for the WP Plugins site, and it’s gamifying your website. This is a big step from what I hear in many marketers and other podcasts such as No Agenda and a couple of others I listen to that have gamified their show.
What they mean by that is while you get your audience involved in the show by offering up rewards for when they donate. They’ve got donation level rewards; they get badges or titles or other things. It’s basically just acknowledging them in the community for their contributions and how they support the show. And as that happens, you get more and more people that are willing to donate. It’s an interesting thing, and this is a plugin that helps you build out that gamification of your website.
It allows you to create a points/achievements/ranks format in here, so when people contribute with comments or posts or donations, they get recognized points. And one of the things they’ve got in here is they’ve integrated this plugin with multiple other WordPress plugins such as LearnDash, LifterLMS, WPEP, WP Courseware, Gravity Forms, Caldera Forms, WP Forms, Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce – so all of these other major plugins, when someone does an action in one of those, their points are collected in this plugin and it puts them forward in it.
All in all, this is a very interesting plugin. It also has third-party addons. They’ve also got additional addons for it to make it work and expand it, so it’s one that I’m starting to slowly work with. At the moment, a fantastic plugin. You know, being a freemium version of a plugin, we give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out: GamiPress, a way to gamify your WordPress website.
All right, and finally we have ClassicPress Options. This is eventually going to expand out, I’m sure. Since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention. This is a hard fork of WordPress, and it’s focused on the business website world and it’s been looking pretty good. We’re into May and they’ve started to gain a lot of attention. They’re starting to grow a little bit. They’ve released their official Version 1.0 of the plugin, which is quite stable. I’ve used it to build out a couple of websites. I’m currently building out another new website on it, which I’m trying as hard as I can to stick with pure ClassicPress plugins to see how I can deal with it.
Currently, unfortunately, there’s a limit on the number of ClassicPress-specific plugins, and I am looking forward to when the ClassicPress world, with the expansion of the number of ClassicPress-specific plugins and their own repository. Currently, there aren’t a whole lot of ClassicPress-specific plugins, but I do know it’s going to grow, and I will eventually have to expand this segment. Who knows? It could even take over the whole show.
At any rate, this week’s ClassicPress plugin that I’ve checked out – it comes from AzureCurve and it’s called Conditional Links. This one here is kind of interesting to me as I was reading it, and I’m building out a new website. The reason it captured my interest is I’m rebuilding, I should say, up a website from scratch. Something from – I should give the years – many years past when I published an Arts and Entertainment magazine, I had a columnist who did a dream analysis and advice column in there. I’m rebuilding the website up in ClassicPress and I’m looking to keep it as much in ClassicPress as possible.
What this plugin does for you is it can help with my internal linking as I’m bring in older content and new content in that with a simple shortcode, this will allow you to automatically add links. It will automatically add links based upon a slug or a title, and if the slug or title doesn’t exist, it just returns plain text. So it’s a really interesting way, because I know that there’s words that are used that relate to other columns or items that’ll be similar and it will allow for internal link building, and this is something you could do after you’ve got a website. You can just go back and add things. But I’m trying to do things going forward so I won’t have to double-back on it.
All in all, it’s looking to be a fantastic plugin and it’s something you might want to check out if you’re looking at ClassicPress and you’re working in the ClassicPress world, go check this plugin out from AzureCurve, and it’s called Conditional Links. Currently, I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, and as a side note, if you want to find a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins, there’s a link in the show notes which takes you to their current list of the plugins.
All right, well that wraps up the show for today. I covered up in this episode GraviTsheets, which I gave a 4 to; Stock Market Ticker, which I gave a 4 to; GamiPress, which I gave a 4 to; and Conditional Links, which I gave a 4 to.
And a couple of reminders, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be May 21st and will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. And for location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. Initially, I was gonna be presenting but I’ve managed to find someone to take over presenting for me. The topic is going to be the same; we’re going to have Shawn DeWolfe. He is going to be presenting and he’s going to be talking about WordPress maintenance and management and the best things you can do for maintaining and managing your WordPress website, so make sure you tune in for that, check it out. Or if you’re in Victoria, please come down to the Meetup. It’s only $5. It helps cover the cost of the room. I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit on those, either, but that’s my thing as I’ve tried to give back to the community wherever I can.
And be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for more information, little bits and pieces. And if you have suggestions on a plugin you would like to have reviewed, please submit them on the website at wppluginatoz.com/submit and I’ll get them into the show as soon as I can.
And a final note to developers out there who have premium plugins and if you would like to support the show, please donate a premium plugin license we can use in a future contest. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest to submit all of the information and I will create a contest around there. Your only cost is that license, which, well pretty much is a minimal cost to you, because it’s just you giving away the one license and maybe some support for that license for a year. So go check it out. It’s a great way to get a lot of promotion from the show.
That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you today, so I’m going to let my girl take us on 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.