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 #417 here.
It’s Episode 417 and I’ve got plugins for Sponsorships, Customer Loyalty, Preventing Email Harvesting, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #417
John: It’s Episode 417 and I’ve got plugins for Sponsorships, Customer Loyalty, Preventing Email Harvesting, 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 I do appreciate your time over at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes store, subscribing to the show and reviewing it there.
Remember, you can also watch live every Thursday here on YouTube, where you can also check out our training videos, screen casts, and extra stuff as it arrives, so remember to subscribe and hit that little notification bell to get notifications of when we go live or when new videos are uploaded.
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And we are only three episodes away now from Episode 420, and I am lining up some great stoner plugins for your amusement and website entertainment. So make sure you tune in for Episode 420 because hey, it only happens once, right?
All right, well with all of that out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, starting it off, I do have a plugin here that I have yet to use, but these were plugins that were sent in to me by developers or people who think others should now about these plugins. Keep in mind that the ratings are based off the descriptions on their site, using their demo if available, and I may come back around to them at a later date and re-review them after I use them.
The first one I’ve got for you here today came in from Igor Benic, and it’s called Simple Sponsorships – and you might recognize the name here. That’s from the same company that produces the – oh, and I love when my brain does that – the plugin we use for running our contests, the Simple Giveaways plugin. They produce the Simple Giveaways plugin also; it’s a really great plugin there.
But this one here, the Simple Sponsorship plugin, I have yet to use it but it’s something that I will get around to using, especially since they’ve got a premium version that will coming my way to check out pretty soon. But the free version is available up at WordPress.org and the Simple Sponsorship plugin is a sponsorship manager plugin where you can go in, accept sponsorship requests. You can receive payments from approved sponsorships, manage and display your sponsors onto your website, create different types of packages for your website.
For example, if you’re running say a conference and you’ve got gold, silver, and bronze-level sponsorships, you can set these up in this plugin so people can just sign up on your website, pay for it right there. You get it all done and out of the way. You can then set up display areas inside the website for using it. All in all, it looks like a really excellent plugin. It offers up potential sponsors that come to your pages, they fill in the form, you get all the information you’re looking for. You can approve or reject them based upon what’s going on. Once they’re paid, it becomes active and the sponsor will be added to the content, so this is an interesting kind of plugin to look into if you’re doing sponsorships on your WordPress website.
All in all, just based upon how it’s looking so far, I give this plugin a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out, the Simple Sponsorships plugin.
Okay a little bit of WordPress news, information. Got a couple of great articles for you today. There’s a nice article in here from WPMU Dev on “How to Update your PHP to the Recommended Version for WordPress.” It’s a really good article on what you’ll need to do to go through, why you need to update, the current usage of the WordPress version out there, some of the great information and tidbits about what it does for you, and how advantageous it is for you. It’s a really good, extensive, long article to check out. Go check out that article.
Another little article here: “Seven Types of Plugins That Page Builders Have Made Obsolete,” and this is from WP Gears. This is a podcast and I’ve been listening to more and more of the shows from WP Gears. They’ve got quite a bit of stuff. These are little, short snippet show’s I’ve noticed. They’re anywhere from three minutes to about eight minutes in length – little tips and tidbits that help you along your way. You might want to go check those guys out.
This is a really interesting one here that I listened to, and they discuss plugins such as sliders, galleries, tabs, image light boxes, basic forms, portfolios, testimonials – things that page builders have made obsolete. And as I dig deeper and deeper into Elementor, I can definitely see why, because Elementor is quite an amazing page builder.
Okay, and if you are using the Duplicate Page plugin from WordPress, there is a SQL injection problem with it. It was removed from the WordPress Repository and it’s something you’ll want to go check out and find out a little bit about it. I’m looking towards bringing more and more information about plugin vulnerabilities and I’ve been researching websites for that information to bring you the latest and up-to-date information on security flaws in WordPress, as it seems to be getting more and more – well, I don’t know if it’s more and more prevalent, but it is still a problem out there and you’ll want to keep up-to-date on that information.
Now, I do have a little bit of great news on my own right now. This is coming from JohnOverall.com and a new venture who I’ve partnered with, DeWolf Consulting, and it’s called Plugin Dynamics. This is the business that we’ve put together to bring you some new plugins that we have been developing over the last year, and we have four plugins just about ready for general testing. If anyone out there listening wants to give these a try in their beta format, let me know. Just send me an email to john@wppro.ca.
The first one we’ve got that we’re going to be delivering is a Date Calculator. This is a plugin, it’s really great for sales people, promotional people, people who have to get in touch with people. Say you’ve talked to someone and you say, “I need to contact you in 45 days.” Well what date is going to be 45 days from now? You know, like today is July 17, 2109. Well, what date is 45 days from now, and what date would it be if it was 45 days in business days from now? Or, what date would it be if it’s 45 days in business days excluding holidays from now? Well, this is the plugin we’ve been developing. You put in the number of days into it, hit to calculate, and it tells you exactly what the date is going to be. The plugin even accounts for leap years, so this is a really nice plugin in that aspect.
The Metric Conversion one, this is conversions from standard to metric and it not only covers feet and meters, it covers pounds and all kinds of conversions. This has taken a couple of different types of plugins and we did some forking and upgrading, and we’ve produced something great.
We’ve got another clock plugin. This is taking some of the plugins from when I was doing all that clock research and we ended up forking one and turning it into something better. It’s the Clock de Resistance.
And the final one which is going to be our key plugin, which is going to be a freemium plugin. It is Tabular Data Dynamics. This is a plugin that is going to be producing all kinds of data tables with lots of features such as import, export, CSV – a whole lot of stuff in this one. This plugin has been in development for quite a while and it’s finally coming to a head.
So if you’re interested in checking them out, hey, check me out. There’s a new website that’s coming soon that’s in development. It’s at plugindynamics.com, and Plugin Dynamics will carry all of the plugins that we are going to be producing over time. So that’s the big news from me and as we get closer to launching these out, you’ll hear more and more of them because well hey, my show – I get to promote as much as I want. Until people are paying me to promote them, then I’ll happily, you know, put my promotions aside and take their money.
All right, and speaking of promotions, this show is brought to you by….
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Contests – we do have a contest currently running. All our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin – fantastic plugin. They are kind enough to provide us with the premium version of this plugin. They’ve just recently updated it with even more great stuff in it, so make sure you go check out the Simple Giveaways plugin.
Currently, we are running a contest until July 31st where we are giving away a license for the WP Pay Per View plugin, which was reviewed in Episode 411 of the WP Plugins A-Z show. The WP Pay Per View plugin is a WordPress pay per view plugin that allows you to sell access to streaming video content or any other video content. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to charge a fee for access to video content, supports Vimeo, YouTube, YouTube Live, Amazon S3, and self-hosted videos. Check them out at wppayperview.com.
And also, make sure you go check out the interview I did with Russ Mate from WP Pay Per View, talking about this plugin and others that they have created. So the interview is up on the wppluginsatoz.com now, so go check it out. If you want to enter the contest, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests, where all we need is your name and email address. And don’t forget, once you’ve signed up for the contest, share it out through social media to get more chances to win.
All right, next up for you I have a plugin called Customer Loyalty for WooCommerce. Now, customer loyalty is nothing strange to most people who shop in grocery stores or pretty much anywhere these days. They ask you, “Hey, do you want to sign up for our loyalty card?”
“Oh, sure,” you say.
You get a discount on it. Well, you can do the same sort of thing with your WooCommerce store.
This is a loyalty card that you can set up on your WooCommerce store. The loyalty rewards can be punches on there, it can be points they collect. The features are you can offer up coupons, give them instant redemption of things, your clients can then sign into their account to see how their point standings are. You can encourage people by offering up special points on specialized items, like instant bonus points, etc. All kinds of ways to encourage people to spend more money on your WooCommerce store.
A really great plugin. It sets up pretty decently for the most part and works out pretty well, so go check this one out, the Customer Loyalty for WooCommerce. A nice, little plugin and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Listener feedback – I’m still waiting. It’s been a while. I don’t know, maybe people don’t think I’m as interesting or they just don’t want to talk to me, or they’re scared to be talked about. I have no idea. But I do like listener feedback. I take it, good, bad, ugly, the indifferent. I used to get it all the time. I don’t know what’s happened.
Anyway, you can do it through the Contact page on the website. Fill out the form, send me an email. You can – lots of options there on the pay on how to interact with me and the show. You can hit the little SpeakPipe button in the lower right-hand corner. Leave me a SpeakPipe message, I’ll play that out on the show. All kinds of ways. I take questions, I take comments – anything of that nature.
This show is supported by you, our Producers, as 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 support the show. You can do that by donating money to help the show out, submitting artwork to WP Plugins Art Generator, submit articles, news, and information via the contact form. Submit plugin suggestions through the plugins suggestion form. Or anything else I may not have thought of. I am always up for anything to be submitted to help improve the show and information that you think other people may want to know about. Feel free to get a hold of me and send me that information.
In that vein though, I like to acknowledge all the Producers who have supported the show in the past week in various ways. This week’s show art comes from Angel Lemux at koadigital.com. He has some great art and digital designs and he supplied us with a fair number of images for the next few shows. If you’d like to beat him out, then hey, submit a few ones and let me choose, feel free. But thanks a lot, Angel. I really appreciate the artwork. It’s really quite an improvement, and for those who don’t know, I’m changing the artwork on every show that goes out so that we get fresh artwork in the iTunes Store and everywhere else the show is displayed.
Also, donations $50 and over are credited with an Executive Producer credit. It is a real credit; if you want to, I’ll vouch for you. Just hey, tell people you’re the Executive Producer of Show Number etc., and you also get an Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes.
For all of those who come in below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much. This week, a big thank you to all the Producers who came in under $50 and to those who have set up weekly subscriptions, all those small subscriptions really help the show out.
A big thank you to all of those who have hired me because of listening to the show. Thank you. That is as good as donating to the show. It helps encourage me to keep going.
So make sure you give some value back. Submit your artwork, visit the donation page at wppluginsatoz.com/donate.
And next up I have for you a plugin to help you deal with spam or bot harvesters on your website. This is called the Email Address Encoder. Now, this is a really interesting plugin. This is a really interesting plugin here for your website. Now, its only real value is if your email address is relatively new and the bots don’t know about it, if you’ve got an email address like me that’s been floating out in the wild for years and years, it’ll help alleviate some of the spam but not all of it.
What it does for you is once you install it and activate it, it then looks through your content on your website for email addresses. You know, your name @domain.com, etc., and then it encodes that in the code so that when bots come through to harvest email addresses, they don’t see the email address so they can’t quickly harvest it. What they see is an encoded version of your email.
It’s still a clickable email that can be used by your visitors on your website. It’s still user-readable, but it’s not machine-readable. They do have a premium version of this plugin which allows you to encode phone numbers and also to do more in-depth encoding throughout your website with minimal amounts of effort. This does require a small amount of effort to go through.
All in all, a pretty decent plugin. It sets up quite nicely and could help you alleviate and prevent – not eliminate, prevent – spam from arriving into your email inbox. So go check it out, especially if you’re setting up a new website for a new client or something. This would be a great tool to help, you know, prevent spam from arriving to them. It is the Email Address Encoder and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, ClassicPress Options. Well, of course I was doing a little bit of checking and it turns out people are still not happy with Gutenberg. I went and looked at the Gutenberg plugins where people are leaving reviews and they’re still expressing their dissatisfaction. It must have been eight much later now and there’s still that 4:1 ratio of dislikes to likes, ones to fives, the 4:1 ratio of how much people are really hating Gutenberg. And if you’re one of the folks that are disliking Gutenberg and you’re sitting there using the Classic Editor and wondering what’s going to happen in a year and a half’s time when they stop supporting it, well, you can start thinking about ClassicPress. I know I have, and I’ve started building out more websites in ClassicPress.
What’s happening in the world of ClassicPress? Well, for starters you can check out the interview that I did with James Nyland and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress, two of the leads for the ClassicPress team. It’s a really great interview and it discusses some of the past, present, and what the future holds for ClassicPress. The ClassicPress Milestone Version 1.1 is due for release later this month, somewhere around July 24th is their target date. And from what I checked today, it doesn’t look like that date has changed yet, so hopefully we’ll see what happens when they release their Version 1.1 and see what kinds of improvements they’ve made over the Version 1.01 that is currently out there. So stay tuned for that.
A little bit of general information, if you want to check out some up-to-date news on ClassicPress, make sure you go check out the ClassicPress Hub News. It’s a great link in there. They’ve even got a link there to my interview with James Nyland and Michelle Coe in there and other bits and pieces about what’s happening in the ClassicPress world, so go check out that website there.
And I’m still looking for new plugins that are ClassicPress-specific and I imagine those will start appearing when they get their own repository. That’s when I think it’s going to be one of the big things and I’m hoping that repository arrives sometime soon.
So check out the ClassicPress Club. You can go check out the list of must-have plugins for the ClassicPress must-have list at their forums. If you want to get involved, go check out their forums and there’s a whole lot of information there.
So that’s all we’ve really got for ClassicPress this week and I do know that more and more information will be coming and arriving soon.
All right, well that covers up in this episode here I covered up the Simple Sponsorship, which I gave a 4 to; the Customer Loyalty for WooCommerce, which I gave a 4 to; and the Email Address Encoder, which I gave a 4 to.
A couple bit of reminders and commercial promotions, etc. There is a new interview up on the website with Russ Mate from Mate Media, and that is talking about the WP Pay Per View and other plugins that they make.
The WordPress Meetups are all done. I wish to thank everyone who came out for the July 14th Meetup and it was really great to have a couple of listeners to the show out there for it. I really much appreciate you coming out for the meetup and the next WordPress Meetup will be in September. We take August off and as I get announced out and all set up, we will have all that information here along with on the website and everywhere else I can get it out there.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A-Z where you will find training videos, screencasts, and of course the live show, every Thursday at noon here.
If you’ve got suggestions and would like to have anything reviewed, please submit it to the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit. And for all developers, please submit your contest information to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.
All right, and one quick question to deal with, him being had here with a question. The plugins I talked about, the beta plugins that are out right now, they are not published or posted anywhere. If you want to get your hands on them, you’ve got to send me an email and I will send you a copy of them to test and play with, because they are strictly beta until – well, until we finished out the Plugin Dynamics website and I’m still working through the documentation for the plugins. You’d be amazed, it sometimes takes longer to write the documentation than the plugin itself. It’s just crazy.
But that’s all I’ve really got this week and anyone who wants to hang around after to ask me questions, feel free. And if you’re listening to this on the podcast stream, make sure you come tune into the live show and ask me questions after the show is over. That’s all I’ve got now. Hang out afterwards for anything after. I’ll let my girl take us on out of here.
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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.