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 #422 here.
It’s Episode 422 and I’ve got plugins for Amazon Affiliates, PayPal Forms, Donations and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #422
John: It’s Episode 422 and I’ve got plugins for Amazon Affiliates, PayPal Forms, Donations 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 – brain just blanked right out . We’ve got a great show for you today, so 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, please take it and subscribe to the show. Get out there, hit everyone in the mouth, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and catch me live every Thursday at noon here on YouTube.
All right, well that’s all of that. Let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Yeah, I have the usual allotment of great plugins for you today and starting off, I have a plugin I have yet to use but felt you would want to know about it. This one, it was sent in by Jake Stanza and it’s called AMZ Image, and it is a premium plugin at $29. And what this one does for you, if you are an Amazon Affiliate and you put Amazon images into your website to promote their products and such, this is a plugin that makes that task a whole lot easier to do.
Using the API keys in the setup on it, it allows you to get in there, do a search for the particular products and the images, and you’re not stuck with just whatever the featured image is that is in that particular product. You can choose any of the images they have uploaded for their products to insert onto your website.
It’s a great little tool, it looks like. If I was still an Amazon affiliate, it’s probably something I would definitely look into putting into my website. All in all, it looks like a pretty decent plugin for Amazon affiliates to make it easy to get those products on those pages for you and help you make a little bit more money from your websites. Go check it all out. It is called AMZ Image and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, and we’ve got a little bit of news for you this week. Of course it looks like Big Daddy WordPress is still poised to get out there and tell you what you should do with your WordPress website, and this is going to happen. They are going to do the auto-upgrade of websites older than Version 4.7. Anyone running WordPress that’s older than WordPress 4.7, it’s either forgotten their website or they’re doing it for a reason, and they may not get in there often enough. Now, this has created all kinds of controversy in the WordPress community back and forth, but these people out there think they know what they’re doing and they’re going to cram it down everyone’s throat whether they want it or not. So you might want to consider that aspect.
The scary thing is about it is it’s – I wasn’t aware that they have that kind of power over WordPress previous to 3.7, forward. That was where they implemented the code that allows them to do auto-updates and you could’ve opted out for the updates for major versions and have just the security versions. But now they’re going to force the major version onto people and they’re going to update them along there.
Go read the article; it’s very interesting. I’ve been following the discussions off and on with it over the last couple of weeks and my viewpoint is it’s – they shouldn’t do it and yeah, okay, yeah, there’s insecure websites but that’s the person’s problem, not WordPress’s problem. So at any rate, go check that information out.
I’ve got another article here from BlogAid and this is a really good article where she did a comparison of the Scriptless Social Sharing plugin and how it works on your website, including some code, some details on how to set it up, so you can get the social sharing buttons that look really good on your site and they can be very lightweight without a whole bunch of added JavaScript to your website. So this is something to check out if you want to get social sharing buttons on your website that aren’t included in your theme or you want to not use the ones in your theme, etc. Go check this article out. It’s a pretty decent article on there.
And the final article I’ve got for you, and this is one you should go to the Show Notes, click the link on. This is from iThemes and this is their August roundup of WordPress vulnerabilities, and not just plugins, but any vulnerabilities in the core, themes, and breaches from around the web. Now, they do mention there’s no core vulnerabilities right now, but there are some plugin vulnerabilities such as WP Fastest Cash. And if you use that, that one is subject to a directory traversal attack, so you’ll want to get it updated.
They’ve got several other plugins listed here, including Ultimate Member – another one that I use. It’s subject to a cross-scripting site attack, so this is some information you’ll want to check out and see if any of your plugins might be in this list, and you might even check back. They have it going back for several months on these. Go look back on the other ones and see what might be listed in any plugins you might be using on your website. Very important to try and keep up-to-date with the vulnerabilities that are out there. All in all, basically just keep your plugins up-to-date as much as possible.
Okay, a little bit of news from me still. Plugin Dynamics is moving further and further down the pike and it will be a reality in the next couple of months. We still have the Plugin Dynamics’ Tabular Data Dynamics plugin, the Date Calculator, the Metric Conversions, and coming soon we are working on an Intranet Lockdown plugin – an intranet security plugin – so that you can lock down yours or your client’s website and make it accessible only by registered users or for those from specific IPs with a simple plugin. So these are the things that are coming, so stay tuned. Plugin Dynamics is moving forward.
All right, this show currently brought to you by…
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Okay, and we do have a contest going on right now. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who has kindly provided us with the premium version for our contests, and it is a really great plugin – one you will want to go check out. It looks like they’re having some website issues right now.
And we do have a contest currently running. We are giving away – and this contest is running until September 4th – and we are giving away a license for the Magic Conversation for Gravity Forms plugin from the makers of WP Pay Per View. This is a really interesting little plugin. It allows you to turn a Gravity Form into a conversation-type form, something to help walk your users through using and completing the form. A very interesting little plugin. I haven’t yet used it, but it does look like it has quite some benefits.
So hey, you want a free version for it? Go over to wppluginsatoz.com/contests and enter to win that license. All we need is your email and name. And hey, if you’ve entered before, we won’t even stick you on the email list twice.
All right, next up I have for you another plugin. This one here is called CP Contact Form with PayPal. Now, this is a plugin I came across while I was doing some work for a client site after I did a site audit on their site, and I didn’t recognize this plugin. It was kind of new and I was like, “Okay, well was is this? What’s it doing, and is it a decent plugin?” So I dug into it and checked it out.
It is actually a pretty decent little form plugin. If you’ve not settled on a form plugin like Gravity Forms and use the addon for PayPal, this is a really great solution. It’s a nice, free solution for creating forms with a PayPal payment built into the form to allow you to create forms such as booking forms, order forms, consultation services, and more. Set it all up, integrate it with your PayPal. It works with PayPal Premium, PayPal Express, or PayPal Standard, and you can get in there and start collecting with this simple form off of your website for the services or products you might offer.
It’s a really great one for someone who has simple classes that they offer or simple seminars that they offer, and they want to collect some funds. This is a nice, little form for doing that. So go check this one out. It’s called CP Contact Form with PayPal and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
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 by becoming a Producer and helping the show out. You can do that by first, getting out there and hitting everyone in the mouth and telling them that WP Plugins A-Z exists. You can also do it by donating money to help the show out or submit some artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Submit articles, news, and information through the Contact forms. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. Anything I might not have thought of – hey, let me know.
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And a big thank you to all the Producers this week who came in under $50. Those who’ve set up weekly subscriptions, thank you very much. Those are really helpful to help defray the costs of running the show. And a big thank you to those who have hired me because of listening to the podcast. Thank you – that is as good as donating to the show.
All right, next up I have for you another plugin. This one is called Seamless Donations, and this one is kind of in line with the last one, but this one is for donations specifically. I’ve had this one across one of the nonprofit organizations I’ve helped out with. We’ve set this for up there. It makes it easy to collect donations from your supporters, and you’ll probably see this appear on the new WP Plugins A-Z site that is about 25% complete, and this is a nice, simple form that allows you to set some prechosen donations or they can click “other” and set their own donation in there. It is a form to collect information. They do have some addons to this form if you want to showcase donors on your website. They have additional items that can help you customize the thank you notes. There’s a lot of things to this plugin.
All in all, it’s a pretty decent little plugin. It integrates with PayPal, so you can collect your donations via PayPal. You can set up repeating donations where people can choose, “Hey, I want to donate $5 per week.” Just click the button and make it an automatic $5 per week or $5 per month. It’s pretty decent; it’s a nice little plugin, so go check this one out. It is called Seamless Donations and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, ClassicPress Options. ClassicPress of course is that fast-growing fork of WordPress that is starting to come into its own, and this is one here where hopefully they won’t become like Big Daddy WordPress and telling you what you have to do eventually. So we’ll see. But as of right now, there is a really great interview I did a while back with James Nyland and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress. Go check out that interview.
ClassicPress itself, I’ve got a little bit of an update from CodePotent, what’s been happening with ClassicPress.
ClassicPress turned one year old this month and they’ve come a long way in that one year, and they are still moving forward and I’m still seeing more and more stories of people converting to ClassicPress from WordPress.
CodePotent has also released his plugin directory. It’s been soft launched, and it’s got a really couple of decent plugins right now as utility plugin and an PHP Error Log plugin, and eventually you’ll see more and more of his plugins. He’s got quite a few plugins that he has written specifically for ClassicPress, so they’ll probably start to appear in this directory pretty soon.
And he has this new one here which is the PHP Error Log Viewer for ClassicPress. This one here, I went to test it out but of course the website I’m running right now on ClassicPress, my major one, is not having any errors in the error log, so I didn’t get to see the pretty display. I’ll have to wait for some errors to appear.
But what it does for you is instead of – if you’re doing development, you know the error log is of major benefit to you. And sometimes if your site is creating mass amounts of errors, that log can rapidly one, two, three, five, ten – whatever – above 1MB in size. Once it gets up above 1MB in size, it gets very hard to open in a text editor or if you go through the C-panel to open it up directly there. In fact, C-panel, if it’s more than 1MB in size, it won’t even open it in C-panel, so you have a tough time reading it.
According to his descriptions, it actually – you can get in there and read it in that backend. It’ll take a little bit to render it, but you will be able to read it, even if it’s larger than 1MB in size. It colour codes some of the errors in there for you also. So all in all, this looks like it’d be a pretty useful plugin for helping you out and helping you to debug a website in development. So go check this plugin out. If you’re working in ClassicPress, add it to your website while you’re developing. Make it easy to check out that error log on there. And currently, I’ll give this plugin a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out, the PHP Error Log Viewer for ClassicPress.
If you’re looking for more information on ClassicPress, make sure you go to the forums at classicpress.net and they have a couple of other places you can go, the classicpress.club website and for a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins, check out their forums at the classicpress.net forums. It is a list of ClassicPress-specific plugins that have been produced – and the list is up to 39. Hey, there’s two new ones in there, so I’ll have to make sure I go check that out, because it was 37 for the longest time.
All right, well that’s pretty much all I have here for the show today. It’s probably – it’s a light show and well, it happens from time to time. I covered up in this episode the AMZ Image, which I gave a 4 to; the Contact Form with PayPal, which I gave a 4 to; and the Seamless Donations, which I gave a 4 to; and the PHP Error Log Viewer for ClassicPress, which I gave a 4 to.
A couple of other quick reminders though. I do have a new interview coming out with Doug Broten from Vendable. Keep an eye out for it. It is a couple of days past-due, so I will get it out. The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on September 24th and it will be here in Victoria and will be broadcast live on YouTube. For the location and more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup to go get all that information and sign up for it.
And remember, if you’ve got suggestions for plugins you want to have reviewed, please submit them on the website at wppluginsatoz.com/submit-plugin-review.
All right, and that’s all I’ve got for you, so I’m going to 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 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.
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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.