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 #423 here.
It’s Episode 423 and I’ve got plugins for Memberships, Content Submissions, Post Auditing and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #423
John: It’s Episode 423 and I’ve got plugins for Memberships, Content Submissions, Post Auditing 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 this is the WP Plugins A-Z podcast, and of course right off the top man, get out there, tell everyone about the show, hit ‘em in the mouth. Tell ‘em you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com, subscribe, and check out our Newsletter and the other tidbits.
With all of that little bit out of the way (sooner or later I’ll get that nicely done), let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, I have the usual great set of plugins for you today, and of course starting off I have plugins that are submitted in to me. I don’t often get to use these and like to let you know that they exist, and a lot of times the ratings are based on what I read on their website, their descriptions, and demos if they’ve got them available.
So the first one I’ve got for you here was sent in by Ahmed Fouad and it is called Member Chimp – User Profile and Community Plugin, and this is a freemium plugin that you can get the free version over at wordpress.org. You can go check that out. Links are in the Show Notes for it. And this is a membership plugin and it’s a really nice-looking membership plugin from what I could tell from going through, checking it all out.
It lets you create beautiful, high-customizable user profiles. You can use it to build an online community. It features custom front end registration, login, password resets. It’s a pretty complete solution for an online. It’s got a whole slew of things that are good for it, a front end user profiles, custom email notifications, custom fields, SEO friendly, conditional nav menus, and more in it.
Now, a little bit about what I have to say after checking this plugin out, and it was scheduled to be reviewed today when I also saw Ahmed’s name pop up on Twitter via CodePotent. I read the Twitter and it’s like that name was familiar. Why? Then when I looked in my notes, oh, of course, I actually scheduled to get this into my show and check it out. So, you know, it’s kind of interesting how things fall together sometimes.
To let you know a little bit about this, this is a really nice, interesting, newer membership plugin and while I might have chosen this plugin had I discovered it a few months back when I was building out a membership site, I didn’t get a chance to go through and do a good testing of this. It’s simply because I don’t have a membership site in the queue right now and they take time to build out, and I’m not about to rip down a membership site and rebuild one up that’s already fully functioning. But it is one I’m going to keep in mind when I build out the next one that comes down the pike.
It does look pretty interesting and it’s something you will want to go check out. It does have a couple of pro addons that look to be of benefit for an active community, such as the notifications. You will want to have a look at this plugin if you are building out a membership site or upgrading a current one and you’re tired of the membership plugin you’re currently using. So make sure you go check this plugin out. It is called Member Chimp, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out.
Okay, a little bit of news and information from the WordPress world. What do we have right now? Of course, I’m trying to keep as much information as I can about security issues and other bits and pieces. This is an article from Threat Post, talking about several plugins that need updating and they’re vulnerable. Make sure you go check out these links in the Show Notes for these articles and find out which plugins are susceptible and whether or not you’re using them. So keep up to date with your plugins.
Article from WP Tavern, this one here in case you don’t read the Tavern, which I’m pretty much sure everyone does, but it’s always good to be refreshed. This is “The Top 50 WordPress Plugins Ranking” from a new website who ranks the plugins by download per day, and it’s kind of an interesting mix of plugins that have showed up in this list when I was reading the article and reading the list on it. There’s a few that show up in this list that you really wouldn’t quite expect, because it’s not just the popular, it’s the downloads per day is how it ranks them, and that can vary from day to day depending on what people are doing. So go check this article out – a very interesting one to have a little bit more info on.
Another article from WPMU Dev, this is an article about what they call “The Definitive Free WordPress Plugins List of 2019.” Now, their ‘definitive free’ is not always my ‘definitive free’ plugins, you know. They have a few like the ones I’m scrolling through now, such as Yoast SEO, the Google XML Site Maps is kind of not needed if you use Yoast. But if you don’t use Yoast, it’s good. The speed and optimization plugins, you know, they’ve got a couple there that are okay and then of course the – I can’t believe W3 Total Cache is still in the running for that stuff. Smush, which is a great plugin for smooshing your images – I use that all over the place. Smart Sliders, SVG Support, Defender – so it’s a pretty good list of plugins. You’ll want to go check this out. Some of them are useful; some of them so-so. But on the whole, not a bad deal.
A little bit of news still from me, Plugin Dynamics is getting closer and closer to fruition. The website is about 50% complete. Our primary plugin tabular data manager Data Dynamics is going to be beta released probably in the next two weeks, so keep a tab on that. If you want to play with the alpha version we’ve got going, please send me an email. I’ll happily send it to you.
We do have a Date Calculator, Metric Conversions, and a Clock de Resistance that are ready to rock-n-roll already, so make sure you go check those out. Well, you can’t check them out yet, but send me an email. I’ll be happy to forward you those plugins. But Plugin Dynamics is coming to life and it will be at plugindynamics.com.
Okay, and this show currently brought to you by…
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All right, and we do have a contest running right now. Our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provided us with the premium plugin for all our contests – and their website still needs some help. Oh, well.
At any rate, it is a plugin right now – our current contest is running until September 4th and we are giving away a license for the Magic Conversation for Gravity Forms plugin, and this plugin is from the makers of WP Pay Per View. It’s a really excellent looking plugin. I haven’t had a chance to give it a good check myself, but it is a one-year license for one site.
You know, all you’ve got to do is enter your name, email address, and you’re entered into the contest. And if you share it out and people use your share link to share, you get even more additional entries into the contest, so make sure you go check that out.
All right, and also if you want to hear more about it, I did a great interview with Russ Mate from WP Pay Per View, taking about this plugin and the others that they make, so go check out the interview. The link is in the Show Notes.
Okay, next up – what do I have for you here? All right, the next plugin I’ve got for you is called User Submitted Posts, and this is another freemium plugin, which I’m pretty sure about 95% of plugins are now freemium versions, and I have no problem with that. If I get the premium version to examine and I actually get in digging into it, they can max out at a 5. If I’m playing with the free version of a freemium plugin, they’re max rating will ever be a 4.
So, User Submitted Posts freemium, this one here, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to allow your site visitors or members to add content to your site, this plugin may be something you’re looking for. It is easier to use than Gravity Forms. I use Gravity Forms for that, but only because I have a premium license for Gravity Forms, and it is a little bit more limited in some ways with what you can do.
The free version has a couple more limitations and one of the limitations in the free version of this plugin is you get one form, one shortcode that you can place all over your site. The form is modifiable; you can go into the settings, change it up, adjust it, and change the layout and look. A little bit of it you’d have to do some extra CSS. Their premium version offers up the ability to use multiple forms, different types of forms, with different shortcodes. What you do with it is you take the shortcode, you put it on a site. It allows people to upload images, posts, content that you are then created and held as drafts, or if you’re crazy you can have them publish automatically. (I wouldn’t do that because the spammers will find you and they’ll inundate your site with all kinds of crap.)
But at any rate, it’s a really nice, interesting, simple way to accept the content if you don’t have something such as Gravity Forms for doing that work. Go check this one out. It’s called User Submitted Posts and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
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A big thank you to all the Producers who have those small amounts coming in regularly under $50. Thank you very much. Those subscriptions really help out the show a little bit. And for all the other Producers, thank you for donating time and artwork, and a big thank you to those who have hired me because of the show. Thank you, that is as good as donating to the show.
Okay, next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Content Audit. Now, this is an interesting plugin. I was at first really super excited about it, because I thought it was a little more automated than it is. But it still works fairly decently, because of course I mentioned it a few times, WP Plugins A-Z website is undergoing renovations. It’s about 80% complete. It’s been converted over to a ClassicPress website and it’s running quite beautifully, and there’s more to come with it.
But I wanted to audit my content. I’ve got content on the website going back for six, seven, eight years now, and I was looking for something a little more automated, but this one here will still allow me to do a site audit on things and mark things that are older than X amount of time. But it allows you also to go in and run a manual audit of your content. Every time you hit a page, you get a link in the menu, the admin menu at the top. You can make the content outdated and review it for SEO, redundancies, style, you can add your own categories to make it more granular if you need to. As you visit pages, you just mark them for further action and then you manage them yourself, or if you’ve got people that help you out, you can delegate those tasks to them or to their login for your website, so that they log in and they get notification. “Hey, this needs review for this particular purpose.”
Really a nice little plugin here, and all in all, something you will want to check out. It does work great in ClassicPress, because I’ve loaded it into my WP Plugins A-Z revamp and have started marking content for revamping. Check this one out: Content Audit and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, and I missed a comment from earlier, so I’ll double-back to that real quick before I head on to ClassicPress Options. We got a comment here from DélaeyE, and that was, “Can Member Chimp be integrated with BbPress?” I don’t know, and that was a question I had myself, because I’m actually getting ready to work on a major BbPress project. So we’ll have to ask the developer of it and Fahad there and see what he has to say. Hopefully, he’s checking out the show because he knows he’s being reviewed today. So there’s a question for you, Fahad. You get me the answer, I’ll get it back out onto the show for everyone. Ahmad, sorry. Ah, me and my names.
Okay, so ClassicPress Options… let’s talk about ClassicPress Options, and ClassicPress is a growing concern. I like it; it’s a fantastic community, lots of great people, and I notice more things are starting to grow again on them.
ClassicPress itself, you can find out a little bit more about ClassicPress. I did an interview with James Nyland and Michelle Coe from ClassicPress, two of the leads for the ClassicPress team, and it’s a really great interview. The link is in the Show Notes to it, so go check that out.
ClassicPress is now one year old and still moving forward and people are developing more and more stuff from it. So, what do I have this week for it? I’ve got an article here from CodePotent, and this is an article that he wrote out about resolving plugin contents without deactivating all of your ClassicPress plugins, and it’s a really great article.
It’s got some really great tips about how you deal with plugin conflicts or issues without having to deactivate the entire mess. Some of the stuff that he mentions in there is things I already do when I’m debugging, but you’ll want to go read this article over and check it out. And for ClassicPress information, make sure you follow CodePotent. He’s got a lot of stuff and he’s continually churning out new stuff.
Another article I have out this week is one from Shawn DeWolfe and this one here is an article here on WordPress to ClassicPress conversions, a do-it-yourself conversion process, and he goes through the conversion process, so go check out his article there.
Okay, a couple of tips on ClassicPress… CodePotent’s plugin directory has soft launched. There’s a link in my Show Notes to it, so you’ll want to go check that one out. And I do have a ClassicPress plugin this week, and that is because I noticed that the dedicated list over at the ClassicPress Forums has grown, and we’ll come back around to that one in a minute.
So what do I have this week? I have one called CP Compatibility, and this is a really nice one. I loaded it up into my WP Plugins site for checking out and this one here adds onto the Tools menu. It adds a listing that marks the plugins compatible with WordPress version . It’s a list of the known plugins from the Top 200 that are available for WordPress. It tells you whether or not they are compatible with ClassicPress, so make sure you go check this out. It’s a really great plugin. If you’re converting to ClassicPress, you’ll want to toss this in there just to have a good look at it.
It’s a really simple, easy plugin – straightforward. You’ve got to download it from GitHub and then upload it manually (unfortunately). But I’m looking forward to the day when ClassicPress releases their own repository, which I’m sure they will do. So at any rate, I give this plugin, CP Compatibility, I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, and a couple other resources. So if you’re looking for ClassicPress-specific plugins, follow the link in the Show Notes. It takes you to the forums. There was 37 in there; there is now 42, so the plugin list is starting to grow, even if it is just a few plugins at a time. This is pretty much the same way WordPress started, so hey, stay tuned.
ClassicPress is going to suddenly jump by leaps and bounds. All it takes is the right people to adopt it. Anyway, go check that out. For other areas, go check out their forums. If you’re looking for other news and information, you can check out the ClassicPress Club. And that’s pretty much all I’ve got in that area there.
Okay, well that wraps everything up this week. Closing out this episode, the plugins I covered was Member Chimp, which I gave a 4 to; the User Submitted Posts, which I gave a 4 to; Content Audit, which I gave a 4 to; and then the CP Compatibility, which I gave a 4 to. Make sure you go check out those plugins and that’s pretty much everything I’ve got here except for a couple of quick reminders.
The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be September 24th and it is in Victoria. It’ll be broadcast live on YouTube for those of you who can’t make the show. Location information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
If you have suggestions on plugins you want to be reviewed, please submit them to the show at wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-review.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so we’re going to let my girl take us on out of here. And if you want to hang out after the show, feel free to ask me questions starting now.
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John can also 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.