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Transcript of Episode 416 WP Plugins A to Z

It’s Episode 416 and I’ve got plugins for Push Notifications, Managing Files, Improving WordPress Performance, and ClassicPress Options, 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 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 #416 here.


It’s Episode 416 and I’ve got plugins for Push Notifications, Managing Files, Improving WordPress Performance, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #416

John:   It’s Episode 416 and I’ve got plugins for Push Notifications, Managing Files, Improving WordPress Performance, 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 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 reviews. You can also catch the show live every Thursday at noon here on the YouTube channel, where you can also subscribe, hit the subscription bell, you can check out our training videos, screen casts, and extra shows that will be appearing here from time to time.

You can also follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz and join us on our Facebook page at wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. Take a couple of minutes also and go subscribe to the Newsletter where even more information comes out on a regular basis.

And we do continue the push towards Episode 420. What is in store? Well, you’re just going to have to tune in for Episode 420 to find out. I’m looking to have some fun with that because hey, everyone knows what 420 is, right? If you don’t, you’re living under a rock somewhere.

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

All right, and I have the usual great show for you today but right off the top, a couple of – well, I only got one plugin today. I start off with a plugin that you might want to know about, but I have yet to test it out. These are plugins that are sent in to me by developers or listeners, thinking that they’d be interested, and I do think they are quite interesting for you the listeners out there. I just don’t have a use for them yet or not the time to get out and manually test them.

But bringing you one here today is called DigitalPUSH Notifications. DigitalPUSH Notifications, this is another notification plugin and I’m sure you’ve seen it. Virtually every website out there has them now. You hit them and they a pop up that says, “Would you like push notifications?” Every once in a while, I sign up for them if it happens to be a site I want to keep up on. But it’s something that can be of use to you.

This is another plugin and a third-party service that provides you with the access for collecting information, sending out the push notifications, a way for people to subscribe to it on your website. It’s another interesting one. I already have one I’m quite happy and content with, so chances are I won’t test this one out, but it does look pretty good. The process to subscriptions is 100% automated. It allows you to send out the notifications with a post title, the content up to 128 characters, a permalink, and a featured image.

It has subscriptions; you’ve got to go sign up for their service. I dug around in there and I was trying to figure out what their service would cost. You know, most of them have a free bit, like the one I use has got up to 200 subscribers, I believe, and then I have to start paying for it. I’m not sure what this one’s is; they didn’t make it very clear on their website. All in all, it looks like your good, average digital push notification plugin. Go check it out: DigitalPUSH Notifications if you’re looking for one and you haven’t settled on one yet. This one should be all right for you. I give it a 3-Dragon rating.

Okay, this week in the World of WordPress News… what do I have for you? I have a great article from WP Buffs. It’s “15 WordPress News Sources and Media Outlets for WP Professionals in 2019.” Now, I was scrolling through this and checking it out. And while they think they’re fantastic, most of them on here are your pretty average, standard, run-of-the-mill WordPress articles and information. You know, they’ve got WordPress.org, Gutenberg Times, Search Engine Journal, Security, MAWT or whatever (Mullenweg’s website), Wordfence.

While they’re good, WP beginner, they don’t give you other stuff you might be interested in looking, so you’ll want to look this over. There’s a couple of good ones in here, but some of them are just mostly run-of-the-mill stuff. But it is a good starting point if you’re looking for collecting WordPress news and information.

The next article I’ve got up here is an article from WPMU Dev and this one here is an article on “Why You Should Optimize WordPress by Fixing Your Images First,” and this is a really good article describing it – and breaking up again. Must be the internet. I’ll have to check my sound. My sounds look good on the recording.

“Why You Should Optimize WordPress by Fixing Your Images First,” and this is something that I talked about and I run into regularly when a client presents a site to me that needs to be optimized, and the first thing I usually find is that they’ve got all these massive, bloated, mis-sized images in there. And this is a pretty common problem for someone who doesn’t understand how images work or what they’re uploading. They take them from their camera, they go, “Oh, I’ll just upload it to my website.” Well, it’s a 4-Meg picture from your camera. If you upload a 4-Meg picture to the website and while WordPress does make the downsized images, they’re only smaller in size, not usually smaller in compression, as in file size.

This is an article on how to go through, deal with that issue, what you’ll want to do, and why you want to do that, because you need to get your page sizes down as small as possible to deal with the mobile world we live in today. You can use image compressor programs; I use Smoosh, which of course comes from WPMU Dev – a really great one, along with several others out there. So this is an article you will want to read if you’re looking to improve the optimization of your WordPress website, so go check out this article. The link is in the Show Notes.

And currently, this show is brought to you by…

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.

All right, yeah. Come visit me for everything you need and WordPress needs, especially if you’ve got a website that has been hacked, cracked, or broken in some other way, I specialize in fixing those.

Contests – we do have a contest this week, and all our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin – a fantastic plugin. They’ve made some improvements to it that I just recently discovered, and they make it even better to set up and run a contest on your WordPress website, so you will want to check out this plugin.

So what have I got this week? You can go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests, and the current contest is we are giving away a one-year license for the WP Pay Per View plugin, which I reviewed in Episode 411 of the show. The WP Pay Per View is a WordPress Pay Per View plugin that allows you to sell access to your streaming video content. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to charge a fee for access to their video content. It supports Vimeo, YouTube, YouTube Live, Amazon, and more. You can check them out at WPPayPerView.com.

And I also have an interview coming up with Russ, the developer of this plugin. The interview is going to be released next week and we discussed the WP Pay Per View plugin and a few of his other plugins that he produces, so this is a really cool one to check out and go sign up for the contest. And remember, after you’ve entered the contest, if you share it out on social media, you get even more changes to win the contest, so be sure to get out there and sign up for the giveaway for the WP Pay Per View license, a really great plugin.

For the following plugin I’ve got called File Manager, a big warning to you. This plugin, you can do serious damage to your WordPress website if misused or if someone accesses and has higher access to your WordPress website than they should have, and they can gain access to this. It’s a great plugin – fantastic if you’re unfamiliar with FTP or the use of the C-panel file manager or any other way, this plugin allows you to access all the files in your hosting account for your WordPress website and beyond. It takes it all the way down to the root directory of your hosting account, which means you can get into the quarantined files, the thumbnail files – it’s a whole lot. You can get below the WordPress directory files, so it’s not something you’ll want to take lightly and let anyone gain access to.
You can use it to edit, move, upload, download, zip files, and more. This is a pretty powerful plugin to have on your WordPress website, and it even allows you to get in there and edit something such as your WP config file. Your WP config file is the golden goose for your whole WordPress website. It has your passwords, your salt keys – everything needed to pretty much destroy your website or take over it, depending on what someone is trying to do. So keep that in mind. Remember, with this kind of powerful tool comes the great power and great responsibility, so keep that in mind. A fantastic plugin; it works very, very well, very, very smoothly, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Go check it out. It is the File Manager plugin for WordPress.

Okay, listener feedback audio clips – I’m looking for listener feedback. Anyone, send it to me. Just go to the website Contact page, send me an email from there, you can email me directly, john@wppro.ca, or hit the little SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner and send me a SpeakPipe message. I haven’t had one of those in quite a while. It’d really be kind of cool to get some of them in here.

And this show is a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, then 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 by submitting artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Submit articles, news, and information to spread out and give to everyone out there. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews or anything I may not have thought of.
I like to acknowledge all the Producers who have supported the show in various ways. This week’s artwork comes from Angel Lemus of koadigital.com. He has some really great art and other designs on his website. Go visit his website and give him some love. He’s got a really great portfolio of work.

Any donations $50 or more are credited with an Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the show. For all of those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much for your support. All those small donations really do help the show out very much. Those small subscriptions, they help defer the costs of the server bandwidth, the time and plugins – anything I have to pay for for the website – so thank you very much. So thank you to all the Producers for donating time and artwork. I also want to thank Angel, who has volunteered to help out with the redevelopment of the WP Plugins A-Z site, which is being redone in Elementor as a massively redesign for the website.

There is even a possibility I’m looking to do some other things out there. I’m in the process of preparing to do an experiment of migrating a very mature website from WordPress to ClassicPress, so this is some other information that’s coming out. So the Elementor project is going to improve many sections of the site, so if there’s other people that are interested in helping, please let me know.

Okay, next up I have a plugin for you. It is called ClinicalWP Core. This is a freemium plugin and this plugin here is one that allows you to do some performance tweaks to many sections of your WordPress website. It is a freemium plugin, so they do have premium add-ons that allow you take it to a new level. Some of their key features in here is you can set max page post revisions, set the trash removal, customize the WordPress system, sender, name, and email address, create admin dash notifications, remove hidden code from copy-pasted text, various quick toggle options, force the server to send keep alive signal to improve site connections, cache user avatars, it allows you to adjust the memory for the WordPress usage without having to add code to your config file. There is a whole lot of tweaks in this.

Now, with the premium features, you can get in there and adjust things like image sizes, manage your media library a little bit. There’s just a whole lot that this plugin does for you. It’s a fantastic little plugin. If it wasn’t freemium, I’d probably give it a 5, but of course because it’s freemium, it gets knocked down on a point since I didn’t get to check out the premium versions of anything. Anyways, so this is a 4-Dragon-rated plugin. Go check it out: the ClinicalWP Core, which allows you to tweak and adjust your WordPress website with all kinds of little bits and pieces in it.

All right, ClassicPress Options. Since the release of Gutenberg and its fallout, ClassicPress has garnered a lot of attention. They are almost one year old next month, so they are not even a year old yet, so October, September, you’ll have to listen to the interview I did, and it is coming along quite nicely. I’m looking forward to some of the stuff that’s coming down the pike from ClassicPress. I’m looking for more plugins in ClassicPress.

If you’re a ClassicPress developer and you want to get some plugins reviewed, send them to me. I am not afraid of ClassicPress; I embrace it entirely. I’m still going to be embracing WordPress, but let’s embrace ClassicPress. There’s room enough for both.

News on ClassicPress – there is an interview out now that is live with James Nylund and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress. This is two of the leads for the ClassicPress project team. Michelle Coe is the lead designer and James Nylund is the lead developer. It was a fantastic interview. It talks about – we talk about the past, the present, and the future of ClassicPress: where it’s been, where it is, and where it’s going, so go check out this interview. It’s a great interview; they were really great folks. I really enjoyed talking to them and I’m looking forward to seeing how everything comes together on ClassicPress. So without tipping the hat on what’s coming down the pike, go listen to the interview. There is some little tips in there on what’s coming down the pike.

If you’re looking for how to migrate over to ClassicPress, check out the great tutorials over at omukiguy.com – that’s a tough one for me. He’s got some great looking videos on his YouTube channel and other bits and pieces. He talks about migrating from ClassicPress. He still talks a lot about WordPress, but this is some interesting stuff.
If you’re looking for an interesting perspective on converting from WordPress to ClassicPress, this is an article by Elisabeta77, talking about her ClassicPress journey so far. So there’s little bits of information I’m pulling here and there for ClassicPress, so go check it out. ClassicPress is still a fantastic addition, I think, to the CMS world and something that is going to grow, especially with some of the things coming down the pike, which is going to suddenly make it more usable than it is.

And of course there’s resources you can go to: the ClassicPress Club at classicpress.club. Go check out their forums for the must-have list of plugins. There’s a list of ClassicPress-specific plugins on their forums. The links are in the Show Notes.

And of course, the little bit I was alluding to earlier is I am going to be running an experiment over the next few weeks of migrating a fully mature WordPress website over to ClassicPress and recording the results of that for people to see on any problems I run into along the way. This is a website that is almost nine years old, so it’s got a lot of content over the years. It’s been a very active website over the last nine years, so it’s got a lot of content, it’s had a lot of plugins in and out, so this is going to see how it works. We’re also going to see how ClassicPress handles managing all the plugins that are currently in it that are essential to this website and its functionality. I’m doing it all on a dev site; I wouldn’t dare do this on a live site, but it’s going to be an interesting experiment, so you’ll get to see it

as it comes to pass.

All right, so that closes out this episode. The plugins I covered were DigitalPUSH Notifications for a 3, the File Manager plugin, which I gave a 5 to, and then the ClinicalWP Core plugin, which I gave a 4 to.

All right, and of course final reminders. There is that new interview with James Nylund and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress. Go check that out. The next WordPress Meetup is on July 14th at the Boston Pizza here in Victoria.

Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for all the information about it. It’s going to be our last meetup for the summer and we’re not going to get together again until sometime in September, and it should be a really great get-together. If you happen to be in the Victoria area, come on by and say hello, have some pizza, have some beer.

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 every week at noon – every Thursday at noon.

If you have suggestions for plugins you’d like to have reviewed, please submit them to the website, wppluginsatoz.com/submit-plugin-review.

And for all developers, if you’d like to support the show, donate a premium license to be used in a future contest, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.

And finally, be sure to subscribe to our Newsletter.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you today. This has been a bit of a challenging technically one but hey, it’s still fun. I’m gonna let our girl take us on out of here.

Reminders for the show: All show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A-Z 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 leave us a review on our Facebook page using wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. 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 notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.

John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at 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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