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Transcript of Episode 413 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 413 and I've got plugins for WooCommerce Discounts, Post Excerpt Control, Adding Images to Menus, and ClassicPress Options. 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 #413 here.


It’s Episode 413 and I’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Discounts, Post Excerpt Control, Adding Images to Menus, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #413

John:   It’s Episode 413 and I’ve got plugins for WooCommerce Discounts, Post Excerpt Control, Adding Images to Menus, and ClassicPress Options, 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 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 in the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a review. Hey, if you’re listening to your iTunes or somewhere, please leave me some reviews. Let me know how things are going. Or you can leave me comments on YouTube. I’m happy to have those, too!

All right, and you can also watch me live every Thursday at noon on the YouTube channel, where you can subscribe, check out our training videos, screen casts, and extra shows as they appear. You can follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz. Join me on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook and for lots of other tidbits and other information, subscribe to the Newsletter. It’s real simple to do; just go to the website, enter your name and email address, confirm it, and you’re done. You can get great stuff there. My marketing manager, she does a great job of getting the Newsletter out week after week with lots of great information.

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

All right, and as usual, I have a great set of plugins for you today and to start off, I have a plugin that I have yet to use but thought you might want to know it exists. Keep in mind, the ratings are based off of the descriptions on their site and using their demo if it’s available, and these are plugins that are submitted to me by various developers or users who recommend plugins, and I just don’t get a chance to actually physically test them. But instead of just letting them go into the waste bin, I bring them to you, so you might know about them and maybe check them out yourself.

So first off, I have a plugin that was sent in by Premium Woo Developer and this is called After Order Discounts for WooCommerce. Now, this is an interesting little plugin in that what it does is it allows you to set up multiple ways of creating discount coupon codes for your regular customers. The plugin provides for ways for you to create a coupon code, which is based on order conditions or on a fortune wheel, where you can create a coupon where they spin the wheel and get a specific discount based on where the wheel lands.

You can create an unlimited number of rules with different conditions and discounts. You can also show the Wheel of Fortunate at any selected page. The plugin is relatively easy to use, they say. They do have a demo site so you can go check out the functionality. It looks pretty decent from the back end from what I can tell, and it looks like it could help you improve your sales on your website. Maybe offer upgrade discounts or spin the wheel and get 10% off their next purchase. Who knows? Something like that to encourage people to keep coming back to you.

It does look like a rather useful plugin if you’re running a WooCommerce store, so go check this plugin out. It’s called After Order Discounts for WooCommerce and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

All right, a little bit of news from the world of WordPress. Here’s a great one; this is a great way of how the news media doesn’t always portray things in the greatest light. It’s titled “Disgruntled Security Firm Discloses Zero-day Flaws in Facebook WordPress Plugins.” Well, if you were under a rock last week, you might not have caught the news, but Facebook’s official plugins – two of Facebook’s official plugins – have zero-day flaws that could be exploited, and this disgruntled security firm, when I looking this stuff up, sometimes I find it’s just – they’re talking about the exposure of these flaws. Or the disgruntled security firm – well, this disgruntled security firm has had their run-ins with the WordPress forums, which is why they’re considered “disgruntled.” I don’t blame them sometimes. But go check the article out. It’s really quite good.

If you use any of these two plugins, Messenger Customer Chat or Facebook for WooCommerce, you need to make sure these plugins are updated, because they eventually – I think they got them up to date. I’m not sure. I hadn’t read whether there’s been some updates on them. At any rate, if you’re using them you either want to disable them or make sure you’ve got an updated version of them, because they do allow – open up a massive security hole in your site.

This leads us into the next article. This is an article of “How Do WordPress Sites Get Hacked? What Does the Data Say?” Well, many people don’t realize that WordPress core in and of itself is probably very, very secure. It seems to be very secure; they’ve got a dedicated team to the security for it. They put out regular patches for the core, but that’s not where most websites get hacked from. The vast majority of WordPress websites are hacked because one, they – not keeping the core up to date. Another is through their plugins.

Over 50% of all WordPress websites are hacked through a plugin, usually a plugin with a flaw in it, such as the two we just described, or plugins that have gotten out of date and the flaw has been exposed, or through a plugin that you have turned off and are not using, so keep that in mind. And then second in the list is brute force and then core, theme, hosting, file permissions, and it goes down the list. This is a really interesting article to take a look to see where the flaws are in WordPress and how it gets hacked, so you might want to keep that information in mind. And if you’re managing customers, you’ve got to keep this information in your head as to how you’re building out security of the sites you’re building.

Now we’ve got another plugin. It seems to be a week of plugins that have some problems in them. The WordPress Chat plugin bug lets hackers inject text and steal logs… and this is the admins of the WP Live Chat Support Installations, so if you use WP Live Chat Support for WordPress, you should immediately update the plugin to the latest version, because the current version there allows people to get in there, inject text, and steal your logs, and this is a very important thing. So this is another interesting article, and this is something you’ll want to pay attention to, so go check this article out if you’re using this particular plugin.

The final piece of news I’ve got for you here is – this one’s a little bit older – actually no, it’s relatively recent. It’s a couple of weeks old but it was really big a couple of weeks ago. The “WordPress Sites Worldwide Hit with The Call Girl Search Engine Pollution.” This is a web spam campaign. It was mostly targeted towards Koreans, but it impacted many people across the globe. Now, it’s a nice article talking about how this hack was done, a little bit about how to prevent it, and some stuff you’ll want to pay attention to. So go check out this article.

So it’s a good roundup this week of security articles and you’ll want to make sure you keep the security of your WordPress site up to date.

This show currently brought to you by…

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Absolutely, and I can also handle all your WordPress needs, especially if your site has been hacked, cracked, or something else. I specialize in fixing broken WordPress websites and get them back up and running.

Contests – our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who have kindly provided us with a premium version for our contests – a really great plugin. You’ll want to go check that plugin out. Oh – it looks like their web-page is a little bit broken at the moment, but their plugin still functions and it’s a great little plugin. We use it for all our contests. We currently don’t have a contest running, but we will have one coming soon, so stay tuned to the show, the Newsletter, or go check out the website at wppluginsatoz.com/contests for more information for when we announce the next contest.
All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Advanced Excerpt. This plugin here – well, there are times when you need to control or add specialized excerpts to your site. I recently had to help a client out with this. He was using a theme that when you did not have a proper excerpt on the post or page, it created an excerpt based upon the first paragraph. And then it did a really nice thing was it added the text, “Read more after that,” so people could click and continue onto the rest of the article.

Well, what we were doing in fixing up the SEO on his site, and of course having that excerpt in your page really helps with the SEO having a good, crafted excerpt. And when we started doing that, we noticed that his excerpts no longer were consistent and plus they didn’t have the “Read more” link, and this was a flaw in the theme he was using. It wasn’t a flaw anywhere else. But his site had been built out, he was happy with the theme, so we needed to find a way to make the excerpts properly work.

We discovered this plugin here, the Advanced Excerpt plugin, installed it, and lo and behold, it set it up beautifully. It allows you to control the excerpts, even allows you to put HTML code in the excerpt block, which is a fantastic thing, having HTML code in the excerpt or block. You can also limit the excerpts to a specific number of words, and it will cut that off at the end of a sentence versus in the middle of the line if you’ve got more words than you’ve allowed in your excerpt.

It’s a nice way to keep your excerpts consistent, it adds that little “Read more” link at the end. There’s a whole lot more controls you can do with this plugin to your excerpts throughout your website, so a fantastic plugin, worked exactly the way it’s supposed to do, simple, and of course, free! Where else does this plugin go but a 5-Dragon rating.

Go check it out, the Advanced Excerpt plugin.

All right, listener feedback. I do love listener feedback. Please folks, send some my way. I’ll be happy to share it with the rest of the listening audience. You can contact me off the website Contact page, you can hit me up on SpeakPipe, send an email direct to john@wppro.ca – multiple ways to get a hold of me. Facebook, Twitter, all kinds of ways. I’ll be happy to bring your information to the show if you’ve got specific requests for a plugin or something. I’ll be happy to do the research and hunt it down and find it – anything like that. Think of it as a way to get a little bit of something for next to nothing but your time.

This show, also being a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back by becoming a Producer and helping support the show. You can do that by donating money to help the show or submitting artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. You can submit articles, news, information, submit plugin suggestions for reviews, or something I may not have thought of. Please folks, this is your show as much as it is mine. I do this not just for myself but for you, so join in, help me produce this show by providing things you want to hear, and you would like to see shared out.
I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways. Thanks to our new Producers for donating time and artwork. This week’s cover art comes from Angel Lemus at koadigital.com, K-O-A- digital dot com. He has some really great art and digital designs on his website, so go give him some love there and you’ll see his art starting to appear not only in our iTunes art, but on the website everywhere. And as soon as I’ve got a little bit more art, I’ll be creating a gallery that showcases all the artwork that is submitted so that will be a great way for people to share that art there. The art is through Creative Commons, so it’ll be able to be used for pretty much anything.

Donations of $50 and over are credited with a Producer credit in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the show. And for all of those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much.

This week, I would just like to say thank you to all of the small donations out there. They really help support the show. The money doesn’t make it into my pocket as of yet and currently it just goes to help pay for the transcripts, the server bandwidth, etc., basically just the costs to run this show, and currently it’s not even covering that. But – so hey, think about that. Help the show out, folks.

You can create a monthly donation at Patreon or just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate to create a donation in any amount that suits you.
All right, next thing I’ve got for you is a plugin called Menu Image. This plugin here, I was originally going to use this plugin to add images to a menu on a site I was working on. In particular, what I was looking to do was I was going to add some social media icons to a menu for a theme that didn’t support them in the menu, and this looked like a very simple way to do that.

You add this plugin and what it does is it adds a new section in your menu editor that will allow you to go in, upload images, and you can stick that image in front of or after your menu text, or you can hide the menu text, and this was my goal was to hide the menu text and just have the image there for people to click on to the different social media links.

Unfortunately, the theme I was working with on this particular project was not compatible with this plugin. It just didn’t work the way it demoed and tested out for me, and I had to abandon it. But it’s a really great looking plugin. It seems to do a really great job and if you’re looking for something like this or you just want to add image icons in front of your menu items without having to go through a whole lot of work, this is a plugin you’ll want to go check out. Go check out Menu Image and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.

And so to cover off a little bit more, what did I do instead? I found a way of using Favicon – not Favicon. What are those icons called – those text icons? Using text icons in your menu? There’s a great article out there. I’ll get a link and try to get that into the Show Notes.

Okay, ClassicPress Options. What do we got for ClassicPress Options? Of course, since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention. This fork of WordPress focused on business websites and looking pretty good. They’re moving along at a decent pace at the moment. Anyway, they’re moving along at a decent pace right now with the development of ClassicPress. It’s in Version 1, I believe, and I am looking forward to seeing how it develops. I’ve got a couple of websites I’ve built on ClassicPress.

I still weigh whenever I do a new website now. I weigh the pros and cons of whether or not to go with ClassicPress and it’s going to end up more and more that way, I’ve seen. I’ve covered a lot of news and information in the past few weeks about companies that are dedicating more time to ClassicPress and companies that have committed to supporting ClassicPress while staying supporting of WordPress, so this is going to be a while. They may have hit a minor plateau at the moment, but I’m sure they will suddenly have a spring forward.

Currently right now, there’s not a lot out there as far as news and information goes with ClassicPress. I don’t have a lot of plugins at the moment. I keep hunting for them, and I haven’t found any new ones yet. I’ll have to cover up some of the lesser-needed plugins that exist in ClassicPress to help that out a bit. But I know that there’s some news in the ClassicPress community about a fork of WooCommerce, a fork of a plugin for SEO that works better than the Yoast one does.

There’s a lot of information and this is going to take a little bit of time. But right now, I’m just going to – well, we’ll hold it this week nice and even with talking about ClassicPress and how great it really is, because I do see it as a great thing. I just – at the moment there’s not a lot to it and there is more information that will be coming out in a soon time period, I hope, but we shall see. So that’s really all I’ve got for ClassicPress this week. There’s not a lot there but more will be coming. I’ll make an effort this next week to pull in even more stuff on ClassicPress.
So that covers up – in this episode I covered up the following plugins: After Order Discounts for WooCommerce, which I gave a 3 to; the Advanced

Excerpt, which I gave a 5 to; and the Menu Image, which I gave a 4 to.
A few reminders out there… there is a new interview that got published out this week, and that interview is with Tom, Zach, and Michael from Rebusify – ha-ha, I learned how to pronounce their name – and it’s a really great interview of all three of them talking about Rebusify and how well it works. It’s a plugin for getting verified – about their verified interviews plugin for – ah, somehow, I got all that messed up. It’s talking about their Verified Reviews plugin for WooCommerce that uses the blockchain. It’s a really great interview. They’re a great bunch of guys; I was happy to have them on the show, so go check out the podcast. Go check out the episode of the podcast and check out the stuff in the Show Notes and check out their website at Rebusify.com.
Also, the next WordPress Meetup is in Victoria on June 23rd – that’s this coming Sunday, considering today is June 20th, and it’s going to be at the Boston Pizza in Victoria, where we’ll be – it will not be broadcast live on YouTube. It is just a social get together to talk about WordPress and meet and greet some people and have fun. So if you happen to be in the Victoria area, please come on down to the Boston Pizza in Victoria. The link is in the Show Notes. You can get there by going to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for all the specifics and information.

Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A-Z, where you can find training videos, screencasts, and of course the live show here every week at noon. Always happy to have people in here asking questions, having fun. The audience has been growing, so I look forward to seeing it develop.

Don’t forget, if you’re a developer out there and you want to support the show, you can donate a premium license which will be used in a future contest.

Please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest and be sure to take a few moments and subscribe to our Newsletter.

That’s all I’ve got for you, so I’m gonna let my girl take us out here. So take care now, bye-bye.

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 screen casts 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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