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 #430 here.
It’s Episode 430 and I’ve got plugins for Content Organization, Searching Your Site, Remembering Loved Ones, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #430
John: It’s Episode 430 and I’ve got plugins for Content Organization, Searching Your Site, Remembering Loved Ones, 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 a great show for you today but remember right off the top, you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And if you’ve got a couple of minutes, please get out there, hit everyone in the mouth. Tell them about the show, spread the word about WP Plugins A to Z and catch it live every Thursday at noon here on our YouTube channel.
All right, with all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, so what do we got? Nothing – all right, show’s over. We’re done. No – okay, just kidding. All right, so what do I got for you today? The first plugin I have for you right out the gate is one called Extended Post Status. Now, this plugin here is a replacement plugin for – I forgot what it’s called. It’s a post organizer plugin and it’s going to be for a client of mine who’s been using the plugin that has been abandoned, starting to be problematic. But what they used it for – Post Archiving – that’s what it was, Post Archive.
This one here will work excellent for doing that job and what it will do for you, it will even do you one better than the Post Archiver plugin in that the archiver plugin created just an archive category and you could archive your posts into that category versus tossing them into the trash bin (which is what I often do because I don’t use it on my site.)
So it’s like I need to hold this, I toss it in the trash bin. But I don’t usually delete stuff from there.
But sometimes if you’ve got multiple administrators, you never know if some person decides to come along and clean up behind you and tosses out a bunch of stuff thinking, “Oh, we don’t need this,” and they’d had no idea what you had planned. So with this one here though, you can set up multiple categories of archives of statuses for your posts – multiple names for your status of your posts. You could set up an archive status, a to-edit status – pretty much anything you can think of and you can put those posts into those different statuses. That way, helping to organize your content if you’ve got a lot of content, maybe content that’s in development, not been developed, it’s content that’s no longer green but could still be relevant for use in a further article, you might want to move it from live to this – lots of good uses for it.
The plugin is great, it sets up easy, it’s a freebie, and it actually seems to work well. Go check it out, the Extended Post Status plugin, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
There you go, a nice good one right off the top.
We do have a little bit of news and information for you today. To start off here, I’ve got an article here from whatsaytheexperts.com and this is an article of “64 Different WordPress Experts Voted on the Best Caching Plugin.”
Of course the best piece in this of course is where I’m quoted, so make sure you scroll way down the article to find me in here, and there’s lots of other great people in here, too. But find out what I had to say about WP Fastest Cache and judging from the article, WP Fastest Cache is the big winner in this. I noticed a buddy of mine here, Shawn, and he was quoted as an expert, Shawn DeWolfe. Make sure you go check him out at shawndewolfe.com. He’s got some really great stuff; he’s a really excellent coder. So a really good article, one you’ll want to go check out. It’s got a lot of really good insights from different experts on the different caching plugins for your WordPress website.
And also, we’ve got coming our way, we’ve got WordPress 5.24 released with several security issues have been repaired and updated to it. And just around the corner we have WordPress 5.3, which was supposed to drop on the 15th, which was two days ago? Yeah, two days ago. Thinking of days ago, hey, today’s the day the Canadians can have infused stuff with THC, so we can have edibles legally. Hey, hey – maybe that’s my problem? No, not me.
But at any rate what we’ve got here, 5.3 has got some improved handling, it’s got larger image handling, a few other things coming in 5.3. I haven’t dug through it. Also, if you haven’t updated to 5.24 since they did some security fixes in it, you’re going to want to deal with that and get it up-to-date if you’re not up-to-date.
That was pretty much all the little bits of news I’ve got for you. For more information, follow the links in the Show Notes for that and for further information and news about me, Plugin Dynamics, it’s rolling. Be prepared for a full launch coming in January 2020, so that’s gonna be a good year.
Contests – we do have a contest right now, and the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. These guys here were kind enough to provide us with the premium version of the plugin to power our giveaways, and I can tell you it’s a really great plugin, so go check it out. The links are in the Show Notes – and no, that one’s not an affiliate link but it should be. I’m sure I’ve sold a few of them for them.
So anyway, the contests we’ve got going right now is for Social Rabbit, and Social Rabbit is an excellent plugin here that allows you to share your content to social media accounts. It’s really easy to set this plugin up. It is a premium plugin, $69. I reviewed it back in Episode 428 and it connects you up to all your major social networks to add Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest and allows you to automatically post your content out.
One of the great things it does that I’ve noticed in how I’ve set it up is I’m using it to post out to Facebook and Twitter and I’m posting on my back catalogue of content. I’ve been mixing it up and testing it and seeing how it works and so far, so good. It’s driving some decent traffic. So go check this plugin out but if you’d like to win a free license, go to wppluginsatoz.com/plugin-contest, enter your name, email address, and once you’ve done that, share out on social media that you’ve done it with the special link. Get additional entries to win. Really worthwhile; it’s a $69 value, so go check it out and enter the contest.
Okay, next up here – we need some liquid down our throat. All right – next up the plugin I’ve got for you, this is called Ivory Search. This is a WordPress search plugin and it does work very well. I didn’t use it myself because of the search feature. What I was doing and what I was working on was on a site where they had a kind of a halfhearted theme. They didn’t want to do a whole lot of upgrading or changing, but they really wanted a search bar up in their menu, and this was a simple way to do that.
This has a function built into the plugin, you turn it on, and it inserts a search bar right up in the menu for it. But it does have a whole lot of other features and it allows you to create multiple search forms to search for specific content and those forms are inserted into your site via a shortcode at different points, so you can use it in many ways. It also allows you to search WooCommerce products, search images, files, attachments, customize the search form using the customizer, search using AJAX, configure each search form separately. You know, there’s a lot that this plugin does.
Now, it is a freemium plugin, so some of the stuff is only on the premium version of it. I don’t remember the price of it. I sort of looked it up, but it didn’t register because I just needed this one free component. So on the bits that I used it on, quite fantastic, but it’s something that might be of more value to you if you go to the premium version, so go check this plugin out. A really great plugin, and because I only worked with the free version, it gets a 4-Dragon rating. But go check it out, the Ivory Search WordPress Search Plugin.
Okay, and where do we go now? Ah, this show here is supported by you, the Producers, as a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, give some value back. And that value can pretty much be anything. If what I do for this show saves you five minutes, consider donating five minutes of what you get paid. You know, if it saves you five minutes, well donate some of that back. You know, anything that helps. You can also support the show by contributing artwork at the WP Plugins Art Generator. You can submit articles, news, and information that I can use on the website. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. They can be your plugins or someone else’s plugins. I love those because it means I don’t have to hunt for plugins if I haven’t been using a lot of plugins. You can also go create a monthly donation at our Patreon account or anything I might not have thought about.
And I like to acknowledge the Producers that have supported the show at assorted levels, being that the artwork that is used in the show and the artwork is the artwork that is used for the weekly artwork for the podcast, it’s used on the website, it’s used in the podcast players that play the podcast out, and it’s really cool to have different artwork each week.
This week’s artwork comes from Angel Lemus of koadigital.com, and thanks a lot, Angel. You supplied me with a whole bunch of images, but I am starting to run out, so if you want to supply some more, I’m more than happy to take them. But I do love the artwork that’s being created, and I’d really like to see some more from assorted people.
Executive Producers, those are for donations $50 and over and below that amount, everything remains anonymous. So thank you very much to everyone who’s donated. There is no Executive Producer this week. So a big thank you to everyone out there; much appreciated.
Okay, and this week this show is brought to you by…
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There you go. Thank you to CMS Commander. Go check that out and the link’s in the Show Notes and the links are affiliate links, so just to be sure everyone knows that, so I appreciate you using them.
Okay, the next plugin I have for you today – now this one here I discovered while looking for something else, which is how I often find plugins. I’m looking for one thing, find another. It’s kind of like going into the house to look for your keys and you find that spatula you lost three weeks ago. You go, “Now, why is the spatula on top of my shoe box?”
So, at any rate, the plugin I found for you is called WP Mourning, and that’s ‘mourning’ as in mourning for a lost one. And what this plugin is is this is a really neat plugin. I actually set it up on one of my test sites and it’s something that will probably end up on my live site, and that is you can set this plugin up if you’ve lost someone close to you or you want to mourn for someone else or something. You can set this up and it puts a black ribbon – a gray ribbon – up in the corner of your website and you can put a note that pops in a dropdown to say what the ribbon is for and who it’s in honor of. And you can set this plugin to have it up all the time or you can set it up to be just once on a specific date, or the feature I liked about it is the feature of you can set it to repeat every year at the same time.
Say you want to honor the anniversary of a loved one’s death. You can set this up so that it does that and it appears up in the top corner, a nice big gray thing, and it’s pretty noticeable on the site and it’s a way to honor someone. A very simple plugin, works very, very, well, and of course it is a freebie. I give it a 5-Dragon rating. As soon as I —
There we go. So go check this plugin out. It’s really kinda cool and I kinda like it, so that’s WP Mourning.
ClassicPress Options – what do we got for ClassicPress this week? Not a lot for ClassicPress; it has been a quiet week for them, and I’ve got one item here. It’s a really good article that comes in from CodePotent and its an article – something I’ve been wanting to do myself for quite some time, and it’s an article about resolving conflicts without deactivating all ClassicPress plugins. Now, this one’s tailored specifically to ClassicPress, but if you’re a WordPress user, you can use this article and still get valuable information out of it because the information still kind of applies.
But as far as ClassicPress goes, a really great article and it’s a really good tips on how to resolve the conflict resolution and it’s much of what I’ve already been doing over time. I hate that function of everyone going, “Hey, you got a problem? Just deactivate all your plugins and themes and activate the default theme.” It’s like no, that’s not going to solve my problem. That’s going to make it all work again maybe, but then how do I find it again? Oh, just turn them all on one by one. Sometimes there are plugins out there, believe it or not, when you deactivate them it wipes out their settings and it’s really quite annoying, so I try never to do that. So at any rate, a really great article, something you’ll want to go read and check out.
Make sure you check in at the ClassicPress forums from time to time to see what they’re talking about and discussing there to see how everything is going. And then you can go to other ClassicPress areas on the website. There’s the ClassicPress Club – that’s really got a lot of information and slowly adding more stuff to it. If you’re moving everything to ClassicPress and you want to know what plugins you need or that are working with
ClassicPress now or a specific ClassicPress, there’s the two links that have been constantly in the Show Notes for the built specifically for ClassicPress plugins and the must-have plugins listed there.
Other than that, I don’t have a whole lot so with a little luck, hopefully next week I will have even more stuff for ClassicPress. ClassicPress is a bit up and down right now but that’s the way it works with a project that is slowly gaining its momentum. Pretty soon it’ll be like a snowball that is hit three-quarters of the way down a big mountain; it’s so big that nothing’s gonna stop it.
All right, so that wraps everything up. What did I cover up this week? I covered up the Extended Post Status plugin, which I gave a 5 to; the Ivory Search WordPress Search plugin, which I gave a 5 to – no, I gave that a 4. What am I talking about? That one gave a 4. Silly, silly thing. And the WP Mourning, which I gave a 5 to. The WordPress Search is probably is worth a 5 if I tested the premium version, but no. So I’ll give those one more time. The Extended Post Status, which I gave a 5 to; the Ivory Search WordPress Search plugin, which I gave a 4 to; and the WP Mourning, which I gave a 5 to.
All right, and a couple of quick reminders. The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be on October 28th, so that is like two weeks from now – not that much. It’s actually getting pretty close, so make sure you come down. I’ll be discussing website security and how you can improve your security, not only for WordPress but for ClassicPress, and it will be broadcast live on the YouTube channel. For all the location and information, check it out at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
And that’s pretty much all I’ve got for you. Yep, the WP Mourning plugin hasn’t been updated in a while and you may or may not – follow the link in the Show Notes when they go up later, Hemdian. And while it is out of date, I did notice it was out of date – is 1,082 days three years? Maybe. So it did say it was three years old, but I still found it to be a good, solid plugin, so – you’d be amazed at how many plugins are still good after three years of not being updated. I also tested it on ClassicPress, so I’ve got to keep that one in mind.
All right, so that’s everything I’ve got for you. I’m going to let my girl take us out of here. If you want to hang out after the show and ask questions, feel free.
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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.