All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of Marcus and John’s discussion of the weekly plugins we have reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #415 here.
It’s Episode 415 and I’ve got plugins for Cloning WP Sites, Image Light Boxes, Currency Conversion, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins from A-Z!
Episode #415
John: It’s Episode 415 and I’ve got plugins for Cloning WP Sites, Image Light Boxes, Currency Conversion, 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 minute or two, I’d greatly appreciate your time over on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews.
You can also catch the show live every Thursday at noon on YouTube, where you can listen to me live, subscribe to the channel, check out the training videos, screencasts, and other extra stuff as it gets uploaded to the channel.
Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and you can join us on our Facebook page at WP Plugins A-Z – I think that – no, sorry – wppluginsatoz.com/facebook – let’s get that whole thing out of my brain. My brain froze.
And remember, subscribe to our Newsletter. Drop in over on the website and just right on the front page there, just enter your name, email address, and click Subscribe, so sign up now. You can get lots of great information.
And we are pushing towards Episode 420. It is five episodes away now and it’s going to be an interesting show. Let’s see what I can pull together for that. I’ve only got five weeks to get that ready. We’ll see how it goes.
All right, with all of that stuff out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, first up I have a plugin for you I have yet to use but thought you might want to know about it, and these are plugins that are sent in to me by developers or listeners or anyone recommending plugins that they think should be reviewed. And if I don’t get a chance to actually use them or I don’t have the ability or need to use them, I still want to bring them to you and let you know that they exist.
What we’ve got for you today is called Prime Mover. This is a freemium plugin. You can get the free version over at WordPress.org and it is a WordPress cloning plugin. It clones your WordPress site. It’s got quite a few nice tools to it. It does single restorations, it migrates a single site to a single site, migrates multi subsite to a multi existing subsite, cross-platform compatible, and GenX Apache, Microsoft ISS, it’s got a debug package in it. It’s got a lot of really interesting tools in it I noticed from their screenshots. You know, one of them, it will allow you to export database-only, database media file, or, you know, a package for WordPress debugging or you can export database, media files, plugins, and themes, so it’s a pretty decent one.
They’ve got a premium version of course which has a few more items to it. You know, a premium version/pro version gets faster migrations. You can export the packages to Dropbox, you can encrypt your data – a whole lot more with it. All in all, it looks like a pretty decent entry into the migration and duplication and well, you could even call this a bit of a backup plugin if you like. You could use it to do backups and clones.
So it’s something that you might want to check out if you’re not already settled on a plugin and you’re still looking out there for them. Go check this plugin out, the Prime Mover plugin, and it comes from Codexonics. At any rate, go check this plugin out. It does look to be pretty decent and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
All right, so what do we got this week in the world of WordPress news? We’ve got a nice article here about “Why Your Website is a Target of Hackers?”
Now, I get this question a lot from people, so why is somebody gonna hack my website? It’s just a small, little blog I do, this little bit about a thing, all right? Well, nothing there. Well true, there’s nothing there but this article goes in to describe the SEO value of your website and how spam infections get in there and take advantage of your SEO and use your site for spam SEO work. So this is something you’ll want to read this article through very thoroughly and it helps you understand why small websites are hacked and attacked. There’s also a couple of tips about how to protect yourself and how to avoid it, so you’ll want to check this article out if you’ve ever been concerned with being hacked and attacked.
Next up, we’ve got one here: “Why You Should Upgrade WordPress to PHP 7.” If your WordPress website is not on PHP 7 yet, this is something you’ll want to take a look at and understand why you should be moving to PHP 7. I’ve got – I think I’ve got 95% of all of my websites on PHP 7. I’ve got one or two that I’ve still got some old plugins or other problems as to why I can’t get up to PHP 7 yet. But you’ll want to do that as soon as you can for everything, simply because one, it gives you some really massive speed improvements. You know, one of the things they’ve got here is a nice table that shows you how many requests per second there are in all the different versions of PHP, and you get up to PHP 7.3 and I have noticed it on several of my websites. There’s a significant speed improvement just by jumping to PHP 7.3 if you can jump all the way up to there. So there’s a lot of things to worry about and a lot of things to think about here, so you’ll want to go check this article out, find out a bit about this, and bring yourself up to speed.
Okay, this podcast currently brought to you by… oops – wrong button. We want this one…
Are you tired of the same old web hosting? Not having the resources you need to run your website properly? Having a lack of control? Then you need JohnOverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, JohnOverall.com provides high-quality, fast server performance. Visit JohnOverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.
Absolutely, and come see me for all your other WordPress needs, especially if you’ve had hacked, cracked, or compromised WordPress website in any way, I specialize in fixing and repairing WordPress websites.
Okay, and contests – I am still pulling that one together, so there will be a new one coming. Our contests are powered by Simple Giveaways, an excellent plugin for setting up contests on your website. They were kind enough to provide us with their premium version of the plugin for the show to run its contests on, so go check them out.
And if you’re looking for information on contests and stay up to date, you can listen to the show, subscribe to the Newsletter where they’re announced, or just go check out wppluginsatoz.com/contests to find out more about it.
And next up I have for you a really nice plugin. This one here is one that I discovered while I was working on a theme for a client. I helped rescue a website about a week or so ago that was severely hacked and running an older kind of theme. While they didn’t have the money to rebuild their website, they could afford to get it fixed up and moved over to my hosting service, so it was faster and secured also along the way.
But what this had, we had some problems here as I was going through it and she had already been complaining about her photo galleries and not displaying very well, they’re hard to organize. And for this client in particular, it was really useful for them to use the built-in photo gallery in WordPress. It’s a really nice, simple photo gallery. You can set up your images from three to 10 across and everything else. But the theme that’s on this site, it interfered with the photo gallery’s proper popup function for some reason, and without having to dig through and find the correct problem, we opted to just look for a plugin solution to this.
And this plugin here, the Easy FancyBox, works beautifully with this and it overwrote what the theme was trying to do, and it allowed us to set up fancy popup galleries without a whole lot of effort and work on it. It worked very beautifully, it solved the problem we needed in an excellent way. It was very smooth and easy to set up and it is a free plugin, and ones that work like that, well of course they just go right to the top with a 5-Dragon rating.
Go check it out: the Easy FancyBox plugin if you’re looking for something that’s easy and simple to set up simple, fancy popups on your WordPress website – or for a client for that matter.
Okay, feedback – I do love feedback. If you would like to leave some feedback, have it read out here, ask me questions, tell me how good, bad, indifferent you think about the show – all of that – you can leave it on the Contact page at wppluginsatoz.com. Or you can go to the lower right-hand corner where it says, “Leave a message,” leave me a SpeakPipe message. I haven’t had one of those in quite a while so hey, anyone out there want to record something, I’ll be happy to play them on the show, so record me a SpeakPipe message.
Also, a little bit more feedback. WP Plugins A-Z has made another Top 10 list of plugins you must follow, okay, and this is Top 10 Must-follow YouTube Channels about WordPress. Stay up to date in 2019. So they’re talking about WordPress channels here, so it’s still right in there with me. And while I’ve, you know, made the list, it’s quite nice. It’s a good, quality list of sites and a couple of them I’ve followed and checked out, so go check out this list and it’s really quite cool. It’s from CMS2CMS, and that is a plugin I have reviewed in the past, so go check out the back history of WP Plugins. Just type in “CMS2CMS” and it’ll come up for you. It’s a really excellent plugin; I’ve used it a couple of times over the last seven or eight years, so they’ve been around quite some time.
Okay, this show is 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 the show out. You can do that by donating money to help the show or submitting artwork at WP Plugins A-Z Art Generator. Submit articles, news, and information, submit plugins suggestions for reviews, or something I might not have thought about. Any of these things really help the show out, cuts the time I have to spend going out and researching and digging up everything that I bring to you folks every day. And maybe you’ve got some stuff that you think other people want to know about. Please just go to the website and submit it.
And I like to acknowledge all the Producers who have supported the show in various ways each week. Donations $50 and over are credited with Producers credit in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the show. For those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much.
This week’s Producer of the Show is Jezweb Pty. Ltd., and they have come in with a donation of $50 and they’ve got a note here:
This donation is on behalf of Classic Bike Spares https://www.classicbikespares.com.au/ who sell replacement parts for vintage Norton and Triumph motorcycles. It is a WordPress website with a customized Woocommerce store created by Jezweb https://www.jezweb.com.au . Thank you for continuing to review and discover new WordPress Plugins. Jez
Thank you very much, Jez. I really appreciate your support of the show. You have been a tremendous supporter over the last couple of years and its thoroughly been appreciated, so you are one of the first to be crowned with the Producer’s Credit as we start to move forward with this new line here.
I’d like to give a big thank you out to our donors who came in under $50 and those who have set up weekly subscriptions and all these small, little subscriptions really help the show out. Thank you to the Patreon donors – there we go – all I could get was “P” out of my head. That sounded really horrible. All right, so thank you to all the Patreon donors out there and all of you other small donors out there. The small donations really help the show out and thank you to our new Producers who are donating time and artwork for the show, and a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the podcast. That’s as good as donating to the show.
So if you want to give some value back, you can submit artwork at the WP Plugins A-Z Art Generator at wppluginsatoz.com/artwork. You can visit wppluginsatoz.com/donate and create a donation amount that fits you. And this show is listener supported and we can use more than just money to help the show out.
I’ve got a little bit of a special call out for anyone out there. I am in the process now of redeveloping the WordPress Plugins A-Z website. I’ve started the redevelopment of the WP Plugins A-Z site and I’m doing it using Elementor and planning to improve many sections of the site. If anyone out there is interested in donating time, please reach out to me at john@wppro.ca and I will help integrate you into helping me redevelop this site, because it desperately needs a good redevelopment right now. So thank you very much to everyone.
All right, next up I have another plugin for you that’s called CBX Currency Converter. This is a freemium plugin and this freemium plugin came about while working on a client’s project and we had need to find a good, easy-to-use, currency converter. And there are lots out there to choose from but many of them require manual settings, you know, for your currencies which you have to go in and manually update the base currency to keep it fairly accurate. Some of them, if you get them, they’re automatic but they have an API key that has a fee type to it, depending on how many calls it has. There is a whole lot of different types of currency converters out there I’ve found out. There’s none that are just really simple – not none – there are very few that are easy, simple, and free to use.
Well, I found one here. This one is easy to use, it’s free, and after a couple of minutes of setting up a free API key, you have access to about 95% of the world’s currencies. There’s a couple of them that are missing from minor countries and that’s all that I could really see. But all the major currencies that we needed seemed to be in the system and that worked well. The setup was fast and easy, it fit beautifully into the site, it only took a couple of minor CSS tweaks for a perfect fit.
The premium version does offer you the ability to add custom currency conversions if you need custom currencies, and it also supports Bitcoins if you want to show off Bitcoin conversions. So this is something to check out if you’re looking for a currency converter plugin for your website. The other bonus with it is it works well with not only a widget, but also a short code, which has become a very important thing for me.
It’s amazing how many plugins I’ve run into in the last few months that are like the perfect plugin, but they only work in a widget and I can’t use the widgets on a page; I need to be able to put my short code to use when I’m trying to do it on a page. So I don’t understand why developers go to the hassle – or go to all the work of building out a really nice plugin and then don’t add a short code into it. It’s not that much work. Usually what happens is I end up forking that plugin and adding the code necessary for a short code. It really doesn’t seem to take all that long to get it done. So anyway, something to think about, developers.
But if you’re looking for a currency converter, go check it out: CBX Currency Converter, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress Options. What do we got for ClassicPress this week? Well, ClassicPress this week I still haven’t tracked down some decent plugins to test out and I’m still kind of looking at it because I’m trying to find ClassicPress-specific plugins and I know they’re going to start appearing within the next coming months. But at the moment, not so much.
But coming up in about a week, I will be releasing an interview I did with two of the leads for ClassicPress. I did an interview with Michelle Coe, the lead designer, and James Nylund, the lead developer. I had them on for one of my interview shows and I’m just getting all the notes prepared for that and I’ll be getting it out. It was a really fantastic interview, some really great insights about the past, present, and future of ClassicPress, so you’ll want to stay tuned and subscribe to the podcast to make sure you get that when it comes out. I’m gonna actually put that one up here on the YouTube channel. I’m gonna start getting the interviews up to the YouTube channel.
ClassicPress, I’ve got a couple of pieces of news articles, a couple of older articles, “ClassicPress as an Alternative to WordPress” from Rough Pixels, where they discuss what ClassicPress is all about and their commitment to build out themes that are compatible to ClassicPress – a really interesting article and it’s a really nice, positive take on ClassicPress.
I’ve also got another one here. It’s from Omukiguy – okay, I butchered that. I’m sorry. “Hello No WordPress Gutenberg! Hello ClassicPress.” This is an article about someone who was talking about using WordPress, developing for WordPress, and how they ended up making the switch over to ClassicPress. It’s really quite an interesting article and it’s an interesting take on what’s happening and what they think is next for ClassicPress. So these are a couple of really good articles. They’re a few months old now, but they’re still relevant at the moment, so go check that information out.
If you’re also looking at ClassicPress, there are a couple of ClassicPress resources right now. Of course the forums at ClassicPress.net and there’s a link in the Show Notes to a list of must-have plugins that they’re looking for and whether or not they’ve been found to be built out for ClassicPress. There is also the list of ClassicPress-specific plugins that is there that is being curated by Code Potent. And then there’s also a secondary forum type board that’s not affiliated with ClassicPress, but it’s the ClassicPress Club and it’s a smaller place to get in there and talk and for people to chat and have some communications. So you’ll want to check this information out.
ClassicPress of course as I’ve been talking about for the last – oh, about six or seven months, and somewhere around December when I first started talking about it – has come a long way and it’s less than a year old, I discovered when I was doing my interview. I thought it was much older than that, but ClassicPress wasn’t started until August of 2018, so it’s come a long way in a very short time. So you’ll want to check out ClassicPress if you’re looking to avoid Gutenberg or you have business-specific needs for it. I have some of those needs and some of my clients need to be on ClassicPress. Some of them may need to be on WordPress, so I think it’s just gonna be a split field.
All right, well that’s pretty much it there. Closing out this episode, I covered up the plugins Prime Mover, which I gave a 3 to; the Easy FancyBox, which I gave a 5 to; the CBX Currency Converter, which I gave a 4 to.
And the last little bits… some reminders. There is a new interview online right now. It’s with Ed Bardwell and Will DeWitt of Rainmaker Digital Services, where we talk about the 10 whatchamacallits – ah, brain cloud. Yeah, we discussed 10 Ways Entrepreneurs Screw Up Online and How to Fix It. It’s a really great interview, so go check that one out.
Also, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on July 14th, so that’s just over a week and a bit away. It’s at the Boston Pizza here in Victoria and to get all the information, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup. If you’re local, please come down and say hi, say you listen to the show. You know, let me know that you heard something on the show about coming down and checking it all out. It’ll be a great afternoon; it’s just a socializing meeting where we’re meeting at Boston Pizza in the afternoon, having some pizza, beer, and just some talking – maybe get some ideas on what people want to see for next year’s lineup of speakers.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, if you have suggestions for plugins and you’d like to have them reviewed, please submit them on the site at wppluginsatoz.com/submit. If you’re a developer and you’ve got a premium license or a premium plugin of any sort and you want to submit a license, please go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest. And finally, be sure to subscribe to our Newsletter. Check all that out.
So that’s all I’ve got for you here today, so I’m gonna 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.
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.