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 #418 here.
It’s Episode 418 and I’ve got plugins for Forms & Surveys, Cron Management, Data Base management, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #418
John: It’s Episode 418 and I’ve got plugins for Forms & Surveys, Cron Management, Data Base management, 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 we 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 on Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and the iTunes Store, subscribing to the show and leaving reviews.
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And we are only two shows away now from Episode 420, and I’m lining up some great stoner plugins for your website. So you make sure you tune in for Episode 420. It’s going to be interesting.
All right, with all that out of the way, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, I have the usual great lineup 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 about it and know it exists. Keep in mind, the ratings are based off the descriptions off their site, using their demo if it’s available, etc.
Today’s plugin was sent in by Maarten Behr, and it is called Tripetto, and this one here is a WordPress plugin for smart forms and surveys. It is a premium version plugin and what it does is it allows you to set up your website with a customizable form and surveys that you can set up. It’s got a visual form building tool, rich question types, advanced tags. You can add in file uploads, matrix – basically, pretty much everything you can do with any other forming system out there.
It looks to be an interesting kind of forming system. Unfortunately, I’ve got one right now and setting this up, I just didn’t have the time for it. But it does look like a pretty decent one and lays out. It’s got a premium version of it and with the premium version, you get the ability to add additional theming and styling. You get to remove the Tripetto branding, so it does leave you branded until you get the premium version. It’s got a custom goodbye page, slack notifications, Zapier integration, and updates and support for it. So, you know, you might want to – if you find the free version works really well for you, go check out this plugin and you may be able to jump up to the premium version to advance yourself.
All in all, it doesn’t look like too bad of a plugin for using forms and surveys, so go check it out. It’s called Tripetto. It’s available up at the WordPress Repository and the links are in the Show Notes and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, a little bit of WordPress news, information. All right, this week here a couple of security information news. One of them, the All-in-One WP Migration – if you’ve been using that, they have had a cross-scripting vulnerability that has been patched. But if you haven’t updated it and you’re using it, make sure you get in there and update as soon as possible. Now, from what I was reading, one of the things with it is it lets people that have access to the site to compromise other user admins, but, you know, it’s still something to be concerned about and checked into.
So you’ll want to go check this out and deal with it.
Ah, spam callers. Spam callers on Skype, what a pain in the neck.
All right, so go check this out and make sure you’ve updated it.
A little bit about another vulnerability here in the Ultimate Member plugin – if you are a user of the Ultimate Member plugin on your website, be sure you get in there and update this one. This one has a vulnerability that’s pretty critical. If you’ve got users in the site and they turn out to be hackers of some sort, they can get in there and access your WP config file and write to it and/or delete it. This could be a serious concern, so if you’re using this plugin, the Ultimate Member plugin, get in there and update that one ASAP. It needs to be dealt with.
A couple other little bits and pieces of information here, a nice article from Yoast about “Podcasts: The New Blogs.”
Well, I’ll go with that. I’ve been doing podcasts for eight years now. I’ve always found it to be a great blog. So it’s a really great article about how podcasts are going to be indexed by Google now, and a little bit of more information on the schema around it. So you might want to check this article out.
Another interesting article. It’s “Nine Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment in WordPress.” If you run a shopping website and you find your shopping carts are being abandoned, there’s some great tips and tricks on how to improve shopping cart abandonment and eliminate the problem. So go check this article out. The links are all in the Show Notes.
I do have a couple of other pieces of news for you. Oh, one fun piece of news here – I tripped across this. If you are interested in the Apollo moon landings, you can go to GitHub and get all of the code that was used during the Apollo services, so the source code for the Command and Lunar modules, all available on GitHub, so go check it out. It just seemed like a kind of fun think.
All right, what else have I got here for you? A little bit of news from me. Plugin Dynamics is coming to life. We’ve got four plugins that are really close to being ready for the general public. Anyone who’s overly interested in testing out the – one of them is just slightly past beta but the others are still in beta, and I’m more than happy to share them with you if you send me an email.
We’ve got four plugins out right now that we’re getting ready to finalize, a Date Calculator, a Metric Conversion tool, a Clock de Resistance, a Tabular Data Dynamics plugin, and in development queue we’ve got a couple of plugins there. One of them in particular is a Tarot reading plugin. So Plugin Dynamics is coming to life and the website is in development and it will be along probably in the next month as I figure out the way we’re going to manage the plugin registration, the licensing, and everything else, because a lot of the plugins we’re creating are going to be freemium plugins. (Surprise, surprise.) You know, eventually, we want to get paid for our work. (I know, the horror of it all.)
Okay, and you’ll be able to check out Plugin Dynamics at plugindynamics.com.
Okay, this show currently brought to you by:
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Absolutely, and if your site’s been hacked, cracked, or any other technical issues that might be occurring, give me a call. My specialty is fixing up broken WordPress websites and saving you a ton of money.
And we do have a contest currently running. The contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who was kind enough to provide us with the premium version of their plugin for our contests. It’s a really fantastic plugin and working well. They keep updating it regularly with new improvements. So if you’re looking to power up contests on your website, go check out the Simple Giveaways plugin.
And our current contest, we are giving away a license for the WP Pay Per View plugin, which was reviewed in Episode 411. WP Pay Per View is a WordPress pay per view plugin that lets you sell access to streaming video content, perfect for anyone who wants to charge a vee – I’m tripping over my words today – charge a fee for access to video content. It supports Vimeo, YouTube, YouTube Live, Amazon S3, and self-hosted videos. You know, go check them out. The links are in the Show Notes.
You can also check out the interview I had with Russ Mate from WP Pay Per View, talking about this plugin and the others that they create, so go check out that information there.
All right, the next plugin I’ve got up here for you is called the Advanced Chron Manager Debug and Control Freemium plugin. Now, from time to time as it occurred to me most recently, you encounter issues with the WP Chron on your website or client’s website and you need to know what’s happening with the WP Chron. You may want – you may have stuck events, you may want to delete or add new schedules to your chron list. Basically, you just want to get in there and see what’s happening behind the scenes.
This is a really great plugin for helping you deal with that. It allows you to get in there, check out and see what are all the registered events, you can pause/start events, delete unscheduled events, copy/paste, add in new events, add new schedules to it. You can get in there and do a few other tweaks and tricks to it. One of the interesting things you can do to it is it makes it real easy if you want to get in there and undo the WP Chron PHP and start using the real chron job if it’s available on your hosting provider. That WP Chron, this will enable the server schedule, it will disable the WP Chron plugin – or the WP Chron built-in in WordPress, and it gives you the exact command you need to write for your website into the WP Chron system for your hosting provider.
A very useful tool. You don’t have to try and figure it out. It gives you a reasonable time suggestion of 5-15 minutes to automatically run the chron, because it does need to be run regularly. And one of the interesting things that a lot of people don’t realize about WP Chron is that WP Chron is dependent upon visitors to your website to actually activate. If you’ve got a high-traffic website, not a problem. But if you’ve got a low-traffic website – say your website gets, you know, 50, 200, 300 visitors a day, that’s not a lot of spread, because the chron only instigates every time a new visitor hits your site.
And if you’re spreading out 100 visitors over the course of 84,000 seconds during the day, that’s a big, awful spread there. So you might consider going to a real chron job to keep the chrons up-to-date, because one of the things that could happen is chron jobs can stack up in the WP config area and not be fired. When it comes time to fire them, they can slow a website down dramatically as it fires off all the chron jobs. So keep that in mind, and this is a great way to get in there and see what that chron is up to and tweak with it.
They do have a premium version which gives you a few more things you can deal with it on there. So go check this plugin out. It is the Advanced Chron Manager and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, listener feedback – looking forward to it. I’m waiting, folks. Give me some listener feedback. Contact page, SpeakPipe, email me directly – any of those places. They’re all good; take your pick.
Okay, 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. You can give value back by becoming a Producer and helping the show out. All you’ve got to do is donate something to the show. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/donate. You can submit artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. You can submit articles, news, information, submit plugin suggestions for reviews, anything I may not have thought of. You can send me suggestions via Twitter, Facebook – all kinds of places. I’m more than happy to take that information and share it with everyone out there.
Every week I like to acknowledge all the Producers who have supported the show in their various ways. This week the show’s artwork comes from Angel Lemux from koadigital.com. He has some great art and digital designs on his website. Go give him some love.
And the artwork that’s being submitted, there is a page on there to submit the artwork. What I’m looking for is a nice, big, square image. You can download my logos to throw them on the image and it gets used every week. I update and change the art at iTunes, Google Play, and of course, up on the Show Notes pages, so bringing up new art every week. I’m really enjoying that people are helping out in that area.
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For those below $50, they remain anonymous and I thank you very much. So a big thank you to all the Producers who came in under $50 and for those who have set up weekly subscriptions and the small subscriptions via Patreon. It’s much appreciated and much help to the show.
Thank you for everyone for donating your time and artwork to the show. And a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the show. That’s as good as listening to the show. Much appreciated.
All right, the next item I have up here is WP Optimize. Now, this plugin, I have reviewed this in the past, so I couldn’t figure out which episode it was, so it’s been quite some time. But I recently tripped across this plugin again and discovered that they have improved it dramatically. WP Optimize was a great plugin for cleaning up your database on your website, and it looks like they have stepped up their game and ventured into the caching business.
And WP Optimize not only cleans your database now, but you can use it to compress your images and to cache your website up. So aside from doing the database cleanup, you can do things such as compress images, all PNGs, JPGs, bitmaps, tips, etc. and packed with other useful features: bulk compression, intelligent multi-pass lossy compression, restore original function, auto-compress function, EXIF data keeping. If you really want to keep that data, I suggest you turf it because there’s really no point in it unless you’re a photographer. Compressing big files – you can also use it to cache your WordPress pages. Turn them into static pages, you know, much like any other caching plugin out there.
This one here has cache preloading, GZIP compression, device-specific caching, advanced excluded rules, browser caching – a whole lot of stuff, the usual great rigmarole of plugins, etc. So go check this out. They’ve seemed to have stepped up their game quite nicely, so go check out WP Optimize and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress Options. Okay, this week here, what have I got? I don’t have any new plugins yet for ClassicPress, but I am still hunting for them. And if you know of any plugins for ClassicPress, please send them my way. I’m more than happy to get them in here and get them reviewed. You can also still go out and listen to the interview with James Nyland and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress, two of the leads for the ClassicPress team. It’s a really great interview.
I’ve got an article this week. CodePotent was kind enough to send me information via Twitter to a couple of articles he has. I brought one forth this week; I’ll bring the other next week out. You know, kind of spread the information out over a couple. This week here, I’m featuring the article, “Streamlining ClassicPress User Profile Pages with CSS.” This is a very nice article detailed out with some code samples that you can use to streamline your profile sections on your ClassicPress website for all of your users that you have in there, and we’ll find out how that stuff works as time moves on.
All right, and another one thanks to CodePotent for this tip on “Creating a Free Sandbox Site for ClassicPress.” It seems wpsandbox.net, which is a place where you could always go create sandbox WordPress websites for practising on has added ClassicPress to their mix. So instead of having to go through all the hassle of setting it up on your own hosting provider, etc., you can go create these test sandbox sites over at wpsandbox.net, and this will allow you to get in there, test that ClassicPress, throw your plugins at it – a really great tool. I have used it in the past but because I have my own servers, I tend to do a lot right there because it’s easier. But I need some experiments that is off my own servers. I do go here, so go check them out. And if you’re experimenting with ClassicPress, give them a shot.
Now, a little bit of an update about my experiment with migrating a fully mature WordPress website over to ClassicPress. Now, I have done this, and I’ve recorded the results. The videos will start appearing on YouTube by the end of this week here. I’ve recorded the videos, I’ve had to do some stuff with the sound. For some reason the sound wasn’t cooperating, so I had to play with that. But what I did is WP Plugins A-Z is being redeveloped and I thought, “Well, let’s see what happens if I redevelop it as a ClassicPress website,” and so I created my development site, converted it over to ClassicPress. It actually went surprisingly well. All 47 plugins that run on my website work perfectly and function well under it. So basically, what I’m onto now is into development of the new theme of the website and see how it all goes together and pull it all up, so I’m going to try to record as much as I can during the course of this redevelopment process just to share it with everyone out there. Make sure you tune in. Go check out the YouTube channel and subscribe so you know when those notifications come up, so the video will be up there quite shortly.
And a little bit of other things ClassicPress. Check out the ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress.net forums, and you can still see what plugins are ClassicPress-specific. The links are in the Show Notes for all of this.
All right, so closing out this show, I covered up the plugin Tripetto, which I gave a 4 to; the Advanced Chron
Manager, which I gave a 4 to; and the WP Optimize, which I gave a 4 to.
A couple of final reminders. A new interview out with Russ Mate from Mate Media is up and running right now. The next WordPress Meetup for Victoria will be in September in Victoria, so make sure – if you want to know what the date and time of it, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for more information on that.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to the YouTube channel for WP Plugins A-Z, where you find training videos, screen casts, and of course the live show every week.
If you have any suggestions on plugins you’d like to have reviewed, please submit them to the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit. And for developers that would like to have a contest running, share a license, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest.
And be sure to subscribe to our Newsletter.
So that’s all I’ve got for you now. I’m gonna 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.