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 #421 here.
It’s Episode 421 and I’ve got plugins for Migrating WordPress, Garbage Collection, Database Cleaning, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #421
John: It’s Episode 421 and I’ve got plugins for Migrating WordPress, Garbage Collection, Database Cleaning, 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 get out there, subscribe, and get out there and hit everyone in the mouth. Spread the word about the WP Plugins A-Z show and catch me live every Thursday at noon Pacific Time here on YouTube. For those of you that don’t, I thank you very much for downloading the show.
All right, off we go! Let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, I have the usual great set of plugins for you today. But of course starting right out, I have a plugin that I have yet to use but feel you would like to know that it exists. Keep in mind, ratings are based off of the descriptions in their site and using their demo if available. Today’s plugin was sent in by Angel Lemus and this is All-in-One WP Migration for Google Drive Extension.
So if you use WP Migration Tool for migrating WordPress websites, this is something you might want to have a look at and see. What they say about it, you export/import to and from Google Drive, they give you a lifetime license, you can use it on any number of websites, it has a backup scheduler, unlimited extensions included, and it’s got WP CLI Command and premium support for it.
Now, their license is pretty pricey. It’s a $99 license but considering its lifetime, maybe it’s worthwhile to them. This Google Drive extension does extend the functionality of the All-in-One WP Migration plugin. It connects it to your Google Drive account and while Google gives you 15G of storage space, if you’re not using it, this might be a pretty decent tool for backing up your WordPress websites, and even backing up a few of your clients if need be. It makes it easy to import and export your website to network sites. It does have support for multisites from what I’ve read.
It’s a pretty decent tool all around from what I can see. There was this thing I found with it is, you know, there’s not a lot of information off their website for it. They do have some pretty good documentation that helps you with the installation of it; it’s pretty straightforward. They described installing it, a bit about how to go get your Google API and connect it all up. All in all, not a bad looking plugin. You may want to go check it out, the All-in-One WP Migration Google Drive Extension, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
A little bit of news this week. Starting off with, we’ve got unauthenticated option changes in WordPress Simple 301 Redirects Addon Bulk Uploader plugin. The interesting thing about this is I discovered this problem with the plugin before I found out about this the same day that this bug was released. One of my clients’ sites was hacked using this bug, so it does exist, it does happen. And if you use Simple 301 Redirects and you use the addon for Bulk Uploader, you need to get that updated ASAP, because it has a flaw in there that the hackers can inject URLs into your WP 301 Redirect and redirect your entire website – everything – pictures and all – everything to their spam site.
This is what happened to one of my clients. I got a call on a Sunday evening and it’s like, “Okay, what is this?” So this is something you do want to take a look at. Go read this article, get in there, and repairing it is not that big of a deal. Once you get it updated, you go in and you remove the links that they added in there that doesn’t seem to be any other damage to the site aside from this, so it’s basically an SQL injection type of issue. But it’s easily removed and cleaned up, so get in there and check that out.
And we do have fresh WP drama – WordPress drama. (Well, I’m pretty sure it’s never gonna end.) And this was due – if you were asleep or not paying attention the last week, this came out last week. I almost did a special show just on this, but I went, “Eh, it could wait for the next show.” The developers at WordPress have proposed that they forcefully update all versions from 4.6 down to 3.7, forcefully update them to 4.7.
Now, this has created all kinds – there was people on both sides –
“Yes, it should be done for security,”
“No, you don’t want to screw with somebody’s site.”
This is almost – it’s scary to think that WordPress actually has that kind of power to go in and forcefully upgrade any website.
What else could they forcefully do to your site?
This is a lot to think about when we find out this kind of power actually exists in the code from their end; they can inject. It’s a scary thing to think about. You should go read the article, read all the stuff that’s coming with it if you want to find out a bit about it. It’s another thing from WordPress saying, “Hey, we’re your Daddy and we’re gonna tell you what to do. And if you’re not gonna listen, go grab the strap and take it out to the woodshed.”
All right, the next piece of news we’ve got for you is “How to Test Your WordPress Website Backup.” (Tongue-twister) “How to Test WordPress Site Backups” – let’s read that a little slower and I get it right. This is a good article from WP Explorer, and they talk about why you want to test your WordPress site backups – the backups you make.
It’s all well and good to make backups, but if you never test them, how do you know they’re actually good? And they’ve got a good description on what to do, why to do it, and how you want to do it, and how to set them up on your local machine using Desktop Server, which is a really great tool. I use it for local development and for testing backups occasionally when I’ve got to do some of that testing, so it’s a really great tool. So go read this article. It’s got some pretty decent uses in it.
And finally a little piece of news from – Automatic has acquired Tumblr. I heard that and it’s only half registered when I first heard it. I’m thinking, Tumbr – why do I know Tumblr? Oh yeah, the ex-porn site. Well, Matt has said he’s not going to allow porn back on Tumblr, so I’m not sure it’s gonna work all that great. But he is going to upgrade Tumblr to use WordPress as its backend while he’s supposed to be keeping the same frontend look and appeal to it.
This is going to be an interesting experiment.
Now of course, he acquired Tumblr for a pittance considering, you know, a few years ago Tumblr was sold for $1.1 Billion. Matt picked it up for the chilling discounted price of about $10 Million. Nobody knows for sure, but that’s the number that’s been bandied around, between $10 and $20 Million. That means Tumblr really had a fall from grace. I hope the guys that sold it for $1.1 Billion are living on an island somewhere just laughing.
So that’s all we’ve really got for the bit of news. Still the same news from me, Plugin Dynamics is coming to life. We have made some major jumps in our Tabular plugin this last week and it is working really well with its widgets and its sorting, and we’ve gotten – we’re working on a few other things in it right now, the import/export function. So if you’re interested in checking it out, feel free to email me at john@wppro.ca, and I’ll happily get you a copy of it.
We’ve got a couple other plugins that are just about ready for public consumption, the Date Calculator, Metric Conversion, and the Clock de Resistance, so – and the Tarot reading is still way into the queue, so I’m really hoping to get that one bumped up in the queue, because I like that thing.
All right, this show currently brought to you by…
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Okay, contests – our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin who kindly provides us with the premium version for our contests. The last contest that just ended this week, we have a winner! The winner of the Magic Tool Tips for Gravity Forms is Ken. Thank you very much to everyone who entered into the contest. And we do have another contest currently running until September 4th, and we are giving away a license for the Magic Conversation for Gravity Forms plugin from the makers of the WP Pay Per View and the Magic Tool Tips plugin.
The Magic Conversation for Gravity Forms is a conversational form WordPress plugin that lets you convert a Gravity Form into a conversational web form. The plugin provides a chat-style conversation interface that provides a more user-friendly alternative to the standard form. Check out the form at magicconversation.net. It’s a really great plugin and if you want to find out more about that, check out the links in the Show Notes where I have a link to the interview I did with Russ Mate from WP Pay Per View, where we talk about this plugin and the others that they have set up and used.
All right, next up I have one for you: Plugins Garbage Collection is what this plugin is. The name itself sort of helps you describe what it does. What it does for you is of course if you’ve installed any number of plugins into your website and you’ve removed them, and anyone who’s had a website over the years has installed a plugin, the author abandons it, or you find it no longer useful, you pull it out and you replace it with something better. It just goes that way over time.
Well, what happens is not every plugin cleans up after itself – kind of like dealing with toddlers, you know. They make a mess and then they walk out of the room, leaving you piles of toys everywhere. Well, the same thing happens with many plugins. They just leave junk all over your database. What this plugin does for you is it helps you locate that junk so you can delete it.
You install the plugin, it goes through, it scans your database. It gives you a list of all the tables in your database and then tells you what plugins it belongs to, and then it tells you if that plugin is there or not, if it’s active or inactive. It tells you if there’s tables there it can’t find any plugins to match to. So this is a really great tool for helping clean up a database. I’m using it right now to clean up a website that is about eight years old and it’s had a lot of junk installed and removed.
Fantastic plugin – this one’s free. It makes it easy to go in there and delete the stuff. Now, with the caveat: if you’re going to delete your database, ensure that you make a backup of your database, because if you don’t make a backup, you’re bound to have something go wrong and then just smack yourself in the head. So always make a backup before you start doing something like this. Fantastic plugin, it works great, freebee – hey, this one here pretty much hits it out of the park, so we give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Go check it out: Plugins Garbage Collector.
Okay, this show is supported by you, our Producers. As a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of the show, please give some value back. You know, if it’s worth anything to you, it’s worth five minutes, even if you listen to just the first 10 minutes of the show, hey, some value back would be fantastic. You can become a Producer by helping the show out. You could do that by donating money to the show. Money is always helpful. Submit artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Submit articles, news, information, submit plugin suggestions for reviews, anything I might not have thought of, even suggestions on how the show could be improved. I’ll take those, too.
So I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways, and for donations $50 and over, they are credited with an Executive Producer 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, I’d like to thank all of the Producers who came in under $50. Thank you very much. Your small donations really do help the show out and it really helps defray the costs of managing and running the show. And thank you for those who donate time and artwork to the show. It’s much appreciated. And a big thank you for those who hired me because you’ve been listening to the show. Thank you – that is as good as donating to the show. That really helps me out. You can find all the links for that in the Show Notes.
Okay, the last plugin I’ve got here for you before we move on to ClassicPress is Advanced Database Cleaner. This is a freemium plugin. The premium plugin cost is $29. And this one here is again, similar to the Plugins Garbage Collector, but it goes a little bit deeper for you. Now, the free version does quite a bit for you but the – you need the premium version if you’re going to get into choosing orphans and other things in there.
But what it does for you is it allows you to get in there and clean up old revisions of posts and pages, old drafts, old auto-drafts, pending comments, spam comments, trash comments, orphaned post metadata, orphaned comment metadata, orphaned relationships – there’s a lot of junk that gets in your database that this plugin can help you get cleaned up and sorted out.
Again, before you use this, make a backup of your database, because if you make a mistake, you need to be able to revert back because it’s real easy to damage your database when you’re playing with plugins like this and working on your database. A really great plugin, it works very well for the stuff it does do. It does need the premium version if you want to move on to some of the advanced features in it. But all in all, a great plugin. It should’ve got a 5, but because it’s a freemium plugin, we’re going to give it a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out: the Advanced Database Cleaning plugin.
All right, ClassicPress Options. Now, we know ClassicPress is actually starting to give WordPress a run for its money.
We’re hearing more and more about it. They’ve got a fantastic team of people who are working on it on a regular and diligent basis. I check in regularly on their milestone place over on GitHub and they’ve knocked down quite a few of the items that were due to be done in there. The first time I looked in there, it was like 20. When I looked in there today, it was like 9, so they’re getting closer and closer to their next milestone release of Version 1.1. It was targeted for late in July, but it is late and that’s not unusual when you’re dealing with a project of this size. I imagine it won’t be too long before they get it out and about and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it works.
What else do we got in ClassicPress? I don’t have any new plugins yet. I’m still looking for plugins. If you know anyone developing plugins for ClassicPress, send them my way. I will happy share their information out there.
We do have an article from CodePotent this week at codepotent.com, and he’s got a couple of articles actually, because they’re related to each other. The first one is “The Custom Utility Plugin for Your ClassicPress Site.” Now if you’re still working in WordPress, you could do this for your WordPress website. But it is building out a custom plugin like – and I’ve started to build one out little by little, because there’s some things that I always add code to a lot of client websites and it always goes in the functions. But if they update that file or update that site later or change the theme or – well, I always use a child theme. But if you don’t use a child theme, you could have your code overwritten in the functions file, etc.
You’ll want to have a plugin that will have these things in there, and you can set it up so you can tick boxes to turn things on and off, activate different things inside this utility plugin. So it’s something you should do if you’re developing lots of sites and you’re doing a lot of the same things.
Now, what he did after he wrote this article here was he wrote another one for you in where he gives you some boilerplates to start building the utility plugins. He’s got one that’s in prefix procedural PHP, namespace procedural PHP, object-oriented PHP, object-oriented namespace PHP, so he’s made it a little bit easier for you to get started on using this. So go check this out. It’s a really great article. CodePotent has a lot of really great information and he’s really doing a lot to support the ClassicPress community, so make sure you go check out his stuff.
Other than that, we still have the same basic stuff for ClassicPress out there in that go check out the ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress forums, the list of ClassicPress-specific built plugins that are there. I hadn’t seen any new ones added into it. There’s a lot of must-have plugins in the ClassicPress forums, so go check out the links in the Show Notes for all of that stuff. All ready to rock-and-roll for you.
All right, well that closes out this episode of the show and I covered up in this episode the All-in-One WP Migration Google Drive Extension, which I gave a 4 to; the Plugins Garbage Collector, which I gave a 5 to; and the Advanced Database Cleaner, which I gave a 4 to.
A couple of quick reminders… I have a new interview that’s coming up next week with Doug Broutin from Vendable. Keep an eye out for it. The latest interview out there is the one from Kathy Zant; that was released earlier this week, and that was Kathy Zant from Wordfence, so make sure you go check the latest interview out and look forward to the next interview coming out next week.
We have scheduled the WordPress Meetups for Victoria. The next one will be September 24, 2019 in Victoria and will be broadcast live on YouTube. For the location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
And if you have suggestions for plugins you’d like to have reviewed, please submit them on the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit.
All right, and that’s all I’ve got for you. Be sure to take a moment, subscribe to our Newsletter, and I’m going to 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.