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 #427 here.
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It’s Episode 427 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chat Support, Check Abandoned Plugins, Code Development and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #427
John: It’s Episode 427 and I’ve got plugins for Live Chat Support, Check Abandoned Plugins, Code Development 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, you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com, and please take a minute or two, subscribe to the Newsletter. Get out there, hit everyone in the mouth, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and catch it live every Thursday at noon on our YouTube channel.
With all of that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, off we go. First plugin I’ve got for you here is one I have yet to use, but it was sent in to me and I thought you may want to know about it, and this one’s kind of interesting. It’s pretty decent for the most part. It was sent in by Alexandra Surzha and this plugin is called Support Live Chat, and this is a trialware plugin, and trialware being a little bit different than freeware in that with freeware, you get a plugin that keeps working for you. Trialware, you get a plugin that’s on a limited trial basis. Unless you buy their package, it quits working.
So at any rate, this one here is a third-party service. It is a chatbot – well, basically it’s a chatbot. It allows you to connect and chat with your clients out there. You set it up, install it, create an account on their service, and integrate the two into your site. Then you see when people arrive on your site, you communicate with them, help walk them through to your site, convince them to buy your products, etc. It does seem like a pretty decently built plugin, but I’m always – you know, I don’t like trialware. I kind of stay away from it myself for the most part, unless I really, really need that particular product.
But it does look pretty decent. It looks like it’s built pretty well. All in all, it’s something you may want to check out. It looks like a plugin that would be good if you’re looking to set up an online chat system on your website and you want to run it through a third-party service. There rates are pretty reasonable for the most part from what I could tell on it and I’ll go take a look at their rates real quick, and their rates on it was not too bad. You know, $25 a month for a single operator up to, you know, $33 for 10 operators, depending on how long you want to pay it out, you can get it discounted down. So it’s something you may want to do; the trial is 10 days.
At any rate, if you’re looking for a chatbot on your site, go check this plugin out. It is called Provide Support Live Chat, and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
All right, a little bit of WordPress news and information. We’ve got a little bit of breaking news over the last week, and this may or may not affect you. There is a defunct WordPress plugin that many people are still using called Rich Reviews, and if you are using it on your website, you need to remove it as soon as possible. Well, this one here is one that you want to get off your site as rapidly as you can, mainly because it’s being used to infect WordPress websites and there’s some 16,000 people still using it. So if you’re one of those, make sure you go in there and check that out and get it removed from your website.
A little bit of other piece of news, vulnerabilities – this is from the Threat Press Report and this lists out the most recent plugins with threats in it, such as Deluxe SEO, Ultimate FAQ, Advanced AJAX, the Rich Reviews is listed there, which is actively being exploited right now, and you’ll want to check this from time to time and find out if something’s been dealt with. It looks like Lifter LMS had a problem at the beginning of September; I imagine they’ve already cured that problem, because they’re pretty good about it. But you do want to check this from time to time, just to see what’s up and what’s happening.
Okay, and a little bit of news from myself. I know it was all over Twitter earlier this week, thanks to my dependable and glorious marketing manager. She does a wonderful job of getting news and information out about things that I do. But the WordPress Plugins A-Z, wppluginsatoz.com website, has been relaunched as a ClassicPress website, and more than happy to get some feedback from people, what you think of it and so far the changes, the layout, simplicity, ease of use, difficulty of use, being able to find the things that were there that you liked but you can’t find – anything along that line. I’ll be talking more about that later in the show.
And of course, some other news from myself. The Plugin Dynamics website is coming along. That business is getting closer to fruition and again, the plugins we’ve got if you want to be an alpha tester, we’ve got the Tabular Data Dynamics plugin, which is in alpha – getting really close to beta. I’m actively using it in a production site in alpha mode, but I haven’t completed the documentation for beta testing. Metric Conversions and a Date Calculator, these are two plugins we created specifically for a project and they’re going to be released free. The Tabular Dynamics will be a freemium plugin, meaning a large chunk will be free but some of the features will be premium features in it. So if you’re interested in testing all of it, send me an email to john@wppro.ca. I’ll happily send you a copy to test out.
Contests – we don’t have a contest set up this week. It will be coming next week. I just didn’t have the time this week to finish getting the contest in order, but it is coming up and as I said in the past, all our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. Thanks to them for providing the premium version of their plugin for us to run those contests.
Okay, next up I have for you an excellent plugin that you will want to use on your site if you caught the Meetup stream or came to the WordPress Meetup here in Victoria earlier this week, then you will have heard about this plugin already. But I thought I would bring it out to the show. This is called Vendi Abandoned Plugin Check, and my Meetup talk was discussing how to audit your WordPress website, and one of they things you’ll want to audit on your WordPress website is do I have any old or abandoned plugins?
If you’re running something such as WordFence on your site, it tells you if a plugin has been abandoned. But sometimes it doesn’t catch them in time, or many people don’t run that plugin. But this one here, if you install it onto your website, what it does for you is it goes in and adds a line on all of your plugins that tells you how long it has been since the author last updated that plugin. And if it’s been more than a year or two since it was last updated, that plugin then becomes suspect as to whether or not it is still reliable or dependable. If it’s four and five years old (as I’ve seen it on some plugins), then you’re definitely in rough territory, because it may not be compatible with the latest versions of WordPress or ClassicPress or with the latest versions of PHP.
A very simple plugin to install, it tells you if you’ve got some old plugins and then allows you to get in there, go contact the plugin developer, see if he’s abandoned it or not, or go find a new plugin to replace it with – replace that functionality. There is always a plugin for whatever functionality you’re doing. There is a plugin for that. A really great plugin, very simple, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and doesn’t cost you a dime. The best part about those, those always end up with a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, listener feedback – I love some listener feedback. I haven’t had any in quite some time. I’m assuming everybody out there loves me but hey, somehow, I doubt that. But if you do, send me some contact; if you don’t, send me some more information – good, bad, indifferent – I’d be happy to have some feedback, some questions. Send me a SpeakPipe – any of those things there. Just get me some contact and I will get you up on the show and get you some feedback. Any and all is welcome.
This show is also supported by you, our Producers, as a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, then please give some value back by becoming a Producer and helping the show out. You can do that by donating money to the show – a very simple thing to do. Just go there and donate some cash. Submit artwork to the show at the WP Plugins Art Generator. Your artwork will be featured every week in the show. Every week, I choose a different piece of art and just showcase it. It’s the art that goes out in the iTunes feed, it’s the art that’s used on the website for the Show Notes, etc. Submit articles, news, and information that I can use to promote and put in the show. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. You can also create a monthly donation over at Patreon. Those are the many ways to help the show out and every way is fully acknowledged and appreciated.
Any Producers that send in $50 or more, they get their note read out on the show and a link back to wherever they want it to go. This week here, I would like to recognize the artwork and it came from Angel Lemus of koadigital, and thank you, Angel. Go visit his website – really great art he’s been sending in to me. It makes my job a lot easier; one less thing I have to worry about when I’m producing out the Show Notes.
And this show of course, currently brought to you by…
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Okay, next up I’ve got for you a plugin here called WP Pusher. Now, this one is mostly for developers out there if you’re developing your own code or your own theme or your own plugin for a custom project. What this plugin does, this makes the job of pushing your code to your client’s website a whole lot easier. Many sites you work on will be on shared hosting environments that don’t have GIT or don’t have SSH, so basically you update your code, you push it up to your GitHub to save it, then you’ve got to FTP it over to your client’s website — you know, extra steps.
What this plugin does for you is it connects to your GitHub, your BitBucket, or GitLab repositories, allows you when you push the code up to your repository, it then auto-pushes it over to the website that you are working on, saving you a chunk of work. Now, it could be a problem if you’ve broken your code and you push it out to your website; you could break the site. But hopefully, you’ve tested your code on a local development site before pushing it up live.
So, very excellent plugin, something that saves you a whole chunk of time when you’re doing development for your own stuff and when you’re developing something for a client that’s unique and you’re not sharing out with the entire world. Go check this out. It is a free plugin for all public repositories; private repositories, they do have a fee for the plugin, so it depends on how you do things as to what you’re going to do with it. Go check it out. It’s called WP Pusher and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, ClassicPress Options. What do we got for ClassicPress this week? ClassicPress, of course, the fast-growing fork of WordPress, and ClassicPress is starting to come into its own. They just released Version 1.1.0 and it has a couple of new features including a security page, and I found a little bit of information as I was finishing my Show Notes, but I’ll bring it out next week about a fork of a plugin to be featured on that security page, so we’ll just leave it at that and you’ll have more information on that next week when it comes in. But what it tells me is ClassicPress is going to be moving forward. The team is working on it and keeping it going.
A couple of other bits of information, don’t forget to go check out Omukiguy’s ClassicPress training videos over on his YouTube channel. He’s got some really great videos there and he puts them up on a semiregular basis, so make sure you go check him out and subscribe to his channel and help him out there.
And make sure you go check out the ClassicPress Forums from time to time to see what’s up there or if you want to get involved in the ClassicPress community. You can do that by going there.
And for this week, I have a ClassicPress plugin. Well, it’s not specifically ClassicPress, but it does work well in ClassicPress, and this one here, what it’s for is of course because I’ve switched my primary website over to ClassicPress, I want to start looking at how I can get rid of the WordPress-specific plugins in there. In particular, there’s a few that I’ve always wanted to get rid of, so I’ve been looking for a way to replace my SEO plugin, which of course has been Yoast.
And when I was doing some asking around about it, it had been recommended to check out Rank Math SEO and I thought okay, well I’ll check that one out. Well, this is a pretty nice SEO plugin and it is more than compatible – more than comparable – to the Yoast SEO plugin in that you can use this to replace it. The interface is similar, so it doesn’t feel too odd. The setup of it is pretty straightforward; it’s got a walkthrough that helps you set it up.
It imports all your data from the Yoast SEO plugin into this plugin as you go. They do have the ability to create an account at their site and log on for additional information and stuff; I haven’t done that yet. I’ve only set it up so far on my testing site and my testing development site to make sure I understood it. When I go to fully set it up on the WP Plugins site (which will happen this week), I’m actually going to do a recording on it as a training video that I’ll release out to let folks know what I find along the way on setting this up.
All in all, a pretty fantastic SEO plugin for ClassicPress. I imagine it will work well in WordPress 2 for those of you that are really tired of using the Yoast plugin and the constant changes in it. This one here might be an excellent option for you to look at. Go check it out. It’s called Rank Math SEO and a very excellent plugin, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, and of course the ClassicPress resources. Make sure you go check out the ClassicPress resources that are out there. Go check out ClassicPress Club and – where you can get – it’s an alternative to the ClassicPress Forums for those that are looking for lighter fare or less technical stuff that’s happening. The must-have plugin list for ClassicPress, which is in their forums, which are a set of plugins that are quite nice. It gives you some alternatives or things that you might want to do or plugins that are specifically ClassicPress. And of course, the ClassicPress-specific plugins that we know of so far, this is a list maintained by CodePotent and currently there is 41, 42? There’s 41 plugins on that list, so hopefully we’ll get some more and see more of them arriving soon.
And there is a little bit more information you can go dig around. ClassicPress, as I said, coming into its own and going to be a force I believe over the next couple of years.
That pretty much wraps everything up and what I covered up this week as far as plugins go – oh, no – I didn’t wrap it. Up I wanted to give a little bit more information about my experiment with migrating over WP Plugins from WordPress to ClassicPress. WP Plugins was a full-blown WordPress site and it was an aged WordPress website. It wasn’t young; it was eight years old – nine years old. It had hundreds of posts in it, lots of content, lots of plugins had been installed and uninstalled over the years. Everything was functioning; I needed it to function exactly the same as much as possible once I converted it over, though I wanted a completely different look, which is what I’ve got.
The conversion process, there is a link in the Show Notes that will link you to the video I did of the conversion process. The conversion process was really straightforward. What took time was the fine-tuned tweaking and of course the rebuilding of the layout of the site. So it’s very nice; the process is smooth. For those looking to migrate away from WordPress to ClassicPress so that they don’t have to deal with Gutenberg or any of the other issues and drama that come with WordPress, it’s not a hard process, folks. You can get out there and get it done and your hardest part will be redesigning your site and keeping your content current between your dev site and your live site.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the process. I like the site’s speed now; I’ve actually got a faster website even though I’m using Elementor. It’s faster, it performs nicer, so all in all, not bad things to have.
That wraps up the show, and I covered up in this episode the Provide Support Live Chat plugin, which I gave a 3 to; the Vendi Abandoned Plugin Check, which I gave a 5 to; the WP Pusher, which I gave a 4 to; and Rank Math SEO, which I gave a 5 to.
A couple of quick reminders, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be October 28th. If you missed the last one, you can go catch it on the YouTube channel. It is recorded and up there on the YouTube channel now so you can see what it is – and it is in Victoria and the next one will again be broadcast live on YouTube for those of you who can’t make it live. I would appreciate seeing you down there but if you can’t be there, hey, check out the YouTube. And if you want more information on that, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
And that’s it for me. I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here. And if you want to stick around after the show, ask me questions, feel free. I’ll hang around for as long as people are talking – and that’s it.
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 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.