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 #425 here.
It’s Episode 425 and I’ve got plugins for Product Backgrounds, Event Calendar Layouts, Form Integration for Elementor and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #425
John: It’s Episode 425 and I’ve got plugins for Product Backgrounds, Event Calendar Layouts, Form Integration for Elementor and ClassicPress Options. It’s 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, take a minute and you can get all the show notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. Take a minute out of your day and subscribe to the Newsletter and get out there and hit everyone in the mouth, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and you can catch it live every Thursday at noon here on our YouTube channel. Links are in the Show Notes.
All right, with all of that, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, first off, I’ve got for you here a plugin that was sent in to me. These are plugins I have yet to use. I may not be able to use due to what they are, but I thought you would like to know that they exist. The ratings are based off descriptions of their site and their demos if available.
Today’s plugin was sent in by Alexi Serdyuk and it is the WooCommerce Remove Backgrounds. It’s just a pretty simple word but it’s kind of confusing to what you might think it is. When I saw that, I thought okay, remove background, replace background. What are they talking about on a per-product basis? Well, what it turns out, this is a really nice plugin if you’re taking photos of your products and you don’t have a little studio set up to take an all-white background or something, so you go wipe the background and just make it clear. Sometimes people take products on their tables and other places, stuff gets in the background.
Well, this product here – plugin here – uses an API service, goes in, grabs your image, removes the background from your products, returns you back a clear image. Now, it is a premium plugin, but they do have 50-image testing ports, so you can do up to 50 images with it to see if it’s going to work for you. And if you have less than 50 products in your store, well that’s a good deal. But if you have more than 50 products, it’s not bad priced. It ranges from about eight cents an image to $1.99 image, depending on how many images you buy and package in bulk.
All in all, it looks like a pretty decent product to help you out when cleaning up your WooCommerce store images, something that could be of quite a use if you’ve got a WooCommerce store that’s got quite a few products and images in there, and images just aren’t as clean and pretty as you would like them to be. Something to go check out; very interesting little plugin, and it is called WooCommerce Remove Background, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, a little bit of news from the WordPress world. Of course for you those of you out there that know, the WordPress 5.23 security release was sent out last week, so if you haven’t updated, you will want to. It repaired a bunch of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and a few other issues. The nice thing about it is shortly thereafter if you’re using ClassicPress (and I know a few of you are), ClassicPress released their update the following day, fixing up the same holes that were there. So, it’s a good thing that they’re both working hand-in-hand at the moment, so get out there and get that updated.
And a little bit of other news we have for you here, this is the latest in vulnerabilities for WordPress Plugins, and you’ll want to check this. This a nice link in the Show Notes that takes you to the ThreatPress.com website and this gives the latest issue of plugins that have vulnerabilities in them. You might want to skim it once in a while to see if any of your plugins are in here to find out if maybe your plugin developer hasn’t released an update and you really need to get them to do that.
There were a couple in here that – one of them surprised me. I don’t know if it’s been updated or not, but NextGen Gallery, a very popular plugin – hopefully they’ve already plugged it, but that’s been a – it’s only been a week and a half since the vulnerability was disclosed. So this is something you’ll want to check into from time to time on your WordPress website to make sure you are secured in your website, because the plugin developers may not get the patch done before the vulnerabilities are released to the wild, so something to keep in mind – go check out.
Other than that, the only other bit of piece of news is Plugin Dynamics is still moving forward – almost ready for the beta version of Tabular Data Dynamics and I’ve been testing it out. We’ve released a little – not released, but we’ve created a little bit more new code on it, so that’ll be coming down the pike real soon, along with our Date Calculator, our Metric Conversions, our Clock de Resistance, and the new Tarot Reading plugin – and the Intranet Lockdown.
The Intranet Lockdown is going to be a big one.
Okay, contests – we still have a contest here. Our contests on the WordPress Plugins A-Z site are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who’ve kindly provided us with the premium version for our contests. Currently, we have a contest running through to the 18th, and it is for the Magic Conversation for Gravity Forms, and this is a plugin to turn your Gravity Forms into a conversation – a magic conversation. You type in a bunch of commands and stuff and it feels like they’re having a conversation as they fill out the form with information, so it’s one you’ll want to check out if you’re using Gravity Forms in an extensive mode. This could be something useful for you, and you can get a free one-year license just by going and entering your email address and name into the contest over at wppluginsatoz.com/contests.
And for more information about the plugin, check out the interview I did with Russ Mate from WP Pay Per View, the creators of this plugin.
Okay, next up here I have for you a plugin for your events calendar. So if you are a user of the Events Calendar from Modern Tribe (and it is one of the most popular events calendars out there – I use it myself, I have the premium versions of it), a very nice plugin. But its layouts are – well, frankly, they’re lacking, and they require some effort and work to tweak them out. You want a nice, simple way to do it? Go check out this plugin here.
This is a freemium plugin, so the free version of the plugin gives you some really cool-looking layouts for your event calendar, and this one here allows you to do some nice layouts for listings and monthlies, etc. The free version gives you two different types of layouts; the lists or a timeline layout. For the premium version, you get a grid, carousel, a slider, or a masonry layout, and it’s a very nice-looking plugin. It’s only $29, so it’s something you may want to go check out if you’re using the events calendar.
At least give the free version a checkout. I know I’ve already started to use it in one of the sites I’ve been working on for the calendar, just to give it something better looking than the simple layout that’s provided by Events Calendar. Go check it out, and of course, you know, being a freemium plugin, I haven’t tested the premium version. I’m going to give the freemium plugin a 4-Dragon rating, so go check it out: The Events Calendar Shortcode & Template Freemium.
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 donating money to help the show, submitting artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator, submit articles, news, information through the Contact form, submit plugin suggestions for reviews. You know, you can also create a monthly donation over at Patreon. (Yeah, I’ve still got that going.) Not a whole lot there, but it’s still happening.
I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways. This week here, I would like to acknowledge the show’s artwork comes from Angel Lemus of koadigital.com, and you might want to go check out his website. He’s got a really lot of great stuff here. He does some really great graphic artwork in various areas, including advertising, magazine logo, book design, and video work, so go check out his stuff. He’s a really great guy at the same time.
Okay, and donations $50 and over are credited with Executive Producer credits in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the show. 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 small weekly subscriptions. All those small subscriptions help the show out. Currently, none of the money actually makes it to my pocket; it just goes to pay the show expenses such as the transcripts (which are behind right now, but they will be caught up soon) and other areas.
Okay, this show currently brought to you by…
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Okay, next up I have for you a Contact Form Integration for Elementor All-in-One. Now, this one I tripped across it. I was working to set up and put Gravity Forms in through Elementor, and if you’ve done that, you know it sometimes doesn’t work exactly the way you want it to. It takes a little effort, so I was looking for an easier way to do it. So I saw this one and I thought well, maybe I can get in there and I can tweak the form a little bit better, have it looking well.
Well, it turns out not so much. There’s limited with it – I was rather disappointed in what this plugin did for me and how it functioned on the site. It was a bit of a meh, so-so. What can I say? It allowed for some adjustments, but it didn’t allow for the adjustments I was looking for in here, and I really don’t have a whole lot to say about it. It was a bit disappointing in far as it works. I just want to basically warn you off this plugin and so this one here gets a 2-star rating.
Wow, that’s two weeks in a row. Holy smokes. That doesn’t happen too often. I don’t get too many of those. But something you’ll want to be aware of, you may not want to waste your time with it. I found it just wasn’t what I needed or wanted or did anything that it promised. Even their documents, you go to their documents page, they’re blank – nothing – so they didn’t finish out all their documentation. Documentation is important. That’s why before I release our plugins from Plugin Dynamics, they will be documented.
Okay, ClassicPress Options – everyone’s waiting for this. Okay, ClassicPress of course, the fork of WordPress, which is going tremendously, a very great system. I’m using ClassicPress across several sites now. I like its speed and performance. It seems to run quite well with virtually all the plugins I throw at it, which is good until those plugins quit supporting 4.9. Hopefully by then, plugin developers well have caught up with it. I’m looking forward to more plugins coming for it.
This week here, I’ve got a little bit of news. Of course I mentioned earlier ClassicPress 1.02, the security release, is out. So if you’re using ClassicPress, make sure you get in there, get that updated, so that you help keep your site secure.
A little bit of information, there’s a ClassicPress Forums at the classicpress.net blog, they’ve got the first in their series of tutorials for ClassicPress, and this one comes from CodePotent, and it’s “Tutorial on How to Convert a Code Snippet into a ClassicPress Utility Plugin.” So this is one you’ll might want to go check out. I may have mentioned this one before, but it’s worth mentioning again – something that’s really useful to help you get your code snippets out of the functions file into someplace where you have better control over them.
ClassicPress also was recently listed in the Top 12 Best CMSs for 2019, so good on them, man! Nice work for them to get listed in the Top 12 CMSs for 2019, so this is a really good article; it’s an interesting read. Go check it out.
Another little bit of information here for you, ClassicPress training videos from Omukiguy. All right, he’s got a lot of tutorial videos here for ClassicPress and a few other useful things here, such as setting up a GitHub repository and cloning and etc. There’s some really great tutorials in these videos, so go check him out. He’s got some really great stuff for folks out there.
Let’s see what else we’ve got here. Up-to-date Classic News, go check out the ClassicPress Club. Check out the must-have lists for plugins and to find a listing of ClassicPress-specific plugins that we know of so far. You can go check out the list in the ClassicPress Forums. They are added to as they are submitted for review and get placed in there where you can link down to their GitHub Repository so you can download them and upload them to your site.
And that’s pretty much all we’ve got here for you. My experiment with the WordPress website over to ClassicPress for WP Plugins is coming along. Every time I think I’ve got time to work on it, something else gets in the way. It seems life is just slowing me down there.
Okay, closing out this episode, I covered up the following plugins: WooCommerce Remove Background, which I gave a 4 to; the Events Calendar Shortcode and Templates, which I gave a 4 to; and the Contact Form Integration for Elementor All-in-One, which I gave a 2 to.
And a reminder, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on September 24th and will be broadcast live on the YouTube channel for those who cannot make it out. So if you can make it out, please come on out to the Meetup. It’d be great to have you all out here. For information on it, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup and get all the information and details for that.
That’s pretty much everything I’ve got for you, so I’ll take it on out of here and if anyone wants to hang out after and ask me a couple of questions, feel free, but I’m gonna let my girl take us out and then we’ll do the after show.
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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.