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 #433 here.
It’s Episode 433 and I’ve got plugins for Switching it Up, Header Effects for Elementor, Awesome Addons for Elementor, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #433
John: It’s Episode 433 and I’ve got plugins for Switching it Up, Header Effects for Elementor, Awesome Addons for Elementor, 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 if you’ve got a couple of minutes, get out there, hit people in the mouth. Tell them about the show, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and catch it live every Thursday at noon on our YouTube channel, and please subscribe to the Newsletter right off the front page of the website.
With all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
Okay, I do have a great set of plugins today and starting right off for you, I have the following: Post Type Switcher. This is a plugin that allows you to switch your post types and while I’ve covered many different ones of this plugin over the last few years, this is another one I needed. I couldn’t remember what I used to use, so I just went and saw what was available, and this one is fantastic. It’s better than some of the other ones I’ve tried in that one of the really great things that this one does for you is it allows you to switch post types, not only from page to post and post back to page, but it also works with custom post types.
And in particular, I’m working on a project right now where I needed to recover all the custom post types that were created using the theme that we’re leaving and getting that information from your theme is usually a pain in the neck. With this one here, you go into those custom post types with the old theme activated. Choose them, select them, edit them, change their post type over to a regular post type, and boom, you’ve got most of the information.
You will lose some of the custom fields that are in those custom post types, but the vast majority of the information comes straight across.
It was really great, saved me a lot of time with a whole bunch of post content I needed. I’ve just got to go in and correct a few things instead of recopying and recreating every single post for the new theme that we’re using. All in all, a fantastic plugin. It’s a freebie. It really helps you out and saves you just a world of time on this functionality. So go check it out, Post Type Switcher, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, a little bit of news, information, and what do I have for you today? Of course, we have WordCamp USA recently happened. I did not go in and do a recap of the State of the Word this year because, well, I just didn’t feel like doing it. And of course, Matt talked about a lot in there from what I understand of the block editor and where it’s going and what’s planned and the other things that are planned on what’s happening at WordPress. It’s usually worthwhile watching because you get an idea into what’s going to happen. Go check out the article; the link is in the
Show Notes or just go to the Tavern and check it out.
What else have I got for you? There’s a couple of other interesting pieces that have come up in the last week. One of them is there’s a discussion going around about Google and WordPress and the robots.txt file. And the robots.txt file is what you use to tell well-behaved robots what they can and can’t search, and this is a nice discussion about when Google can’t read your robots.txt file. It seems to be a WordPress issue is what I’m gathering and it’s something if you’re having any issues around this, you might want to go check this article out. Go follow some of the threads in it because it could give you some insights as to what you might be able to do if your own site if you’re having these information. A really great article to check out.
And right now there is a malware issue going on, and this is the worst kind of malware in that people are installing it themselves on their website. I know, as crazy as it seems, people are putting this malware on their own websites. And why, you ask, or how? Well, this is for all you cheapskates out there that are unwilling to pay for premium plugins, and you want to get nulled plugins and install those on your site. What is a nulled plugin? That’s where somebody buys a premium plugin. They go in, edit the code up, make it so it will activate without the license key, and then they inject that code with their own malware bits and pieces, and then they put them up on the website and say, “Hey, download these free premium plugins.”
Well, they’re not free. Remember, anytime it’s free, you are the product. Either your website, your data – something about you is the product when you get it for free. So at any rate, this is causing a lot of headache. There’s a massive spread of several different types of malware because of these plugins and because of the people doing it. So if you’re one of those people that have done that, get out there and change that and go pay the developers for all that hard work they did. I always do whenever I get a premium. I love their free plugins; I’ll use them whenever I can. I get them from really good, reliable sources, and the free plugins are not 100% free. They require effort, time on your part, plus they’re usually not 100% of the plugin – just enough to find out if the premium version will work for you.
So go check that out. It’s a really great article and this one here over the last week, I’ve seen about dozen articles talking about this issue, so you’ll find this all over the place.
And then a final bit of article of news I’ve got for you. This is an article about reasons you might want to use Gravity Forms on your website versus say Contact Forms 7 and see what it can do for you. I know since I’ve been using Gravity Forms now for seven years that it is far superior than Contact Forms 7 in many, many ways, so you will want to check this out and get it working on your site versus Contact Forms 7. You’ll be much happier in the end.
Okay, contests. We don’t have a contest this week, but we do have a winner! And real briefly, the contests we have a powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin. They were kind enough to provide us with the premium version for our contests. Go check them out.
So the winner of the last contest is for the Social Rabbit plugin is Sherry. Congratulations out to Sherry! You have won that license. And Social Rabbit was a plugin I reviewed in Episode 428, an excellent plugin to connect you to your social networks and keep pumping out content to your social networks. It is a premium plugin worth $69, well worth the money, so go check it out.
And we will have a new contest up next week. I hope to have that prepared for you by then.
Next up I have for you the following plugin: Sticky Header Effects for Elementor. Now, this is a really cool plugin and if you are developing in Elementor, I’m sure by now you’ve used the Sticky Header in your theme development. It’s a really cool feature; it sticks the header up to the top when people scroll down the page and it’s useful. But it lacks some certain pizzazz that’s really nice in Sticky Headers, such as shrinking that header down a little bit. Such as you might have something in the background you might want to clear the background header to sit over the top of an image, but you need it to darken up when they start scrolling down the page so they can read the text. You might want to have different sized logos and other miscellaneous things in there.
Well, that’s not built into Elementor or built into Elementor Pro, and this plugin here is a freebie. What it does is it adds all those effects to your Elementor that you can do to your site. It’s really easy to use. It was really sweet. It helped me achieve something I was trying to do on a project I’m working on without a whole lot of extra CSS coding. And anytime I can do that, I am ecstatic because well, let’s face it, us humans are lazy bums and we will take the shortest route possible to water.
So go check this one out. It’s called Sticky Header Effects for Elementor and again, I give this one a 5-Dragon rating. Uh-oh.
There he is. I thought the dragon ran away on me. Yeah, I’ve got to feed him more. He keeps escaping when I’m not looking.
All right, next we’ve got – okay, feedback – listener feedback. I still haven’t had any in a while. Please send some feedback; that’s all I’m going to say there. That’s about it. If you’re not giving me feedback, I think I’m doing a fantastic job and my ego just gets bigger and bigger. It gets hard to get in and out of my house with the head so swelled up.
All right… show supporters. This show is supported by you, the Producers a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, then give some value back. Does it save you $5? Send me $5. Does it save you five minutes?
Well, contribute five minutes. Donate some time to help the show. Donate some money to the show. If you’re an artist and you like to send stuff out, donate some artwork to the show. I mean, come on, anything. Anything to help me out. I’m trying to lighten my workload here, you know. This is a lone-wolf sort of a venture here.
You know, you can submit art via the WP Plugins Art Generator. You can download the show logos right there, insert it into the artwork. Submit articles, news, and information. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews. You can also create a monthly donation at Patreon – all these places I have set up and ready for you, so please give it some love. If you like the show, give it some love.
And this week here, I would like to acknowledge and thank for all of those who came in below $50. Anyone $50 and over gets their note read out on the show and thanked and a link back. Below $50 remain anonymous, so a big thank you to all the Producers who came in under $50 and those who have set up weekly subscriptions. Thank you very much and a big thank you to those who have hired me because of listening to the podcast. Thank you as well. That’s as good as donating to the show.
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So thank you very much and the next plugin I’ve got for you here is called Awesome Addons for Elementor. And if you’re using Elementor, you will appreciate this plugin also. This one here – sometimes when you’re working in
Elementor, you need a little bit more than the standard addons or the pro addons that come with it, or even I have an additional pro addon plugin for it.
But this one offers up even more addons and blocks for Elementor to allow you to do a few more unique things. It helps fill the void with some additions for various widgets such as Gravity Forms, some social widgets, and some great, unique widgets to use in your site build. This is a really expansive plugin and considering it’s free and gives you all these different things such as pricing tables, testimonial cards – you know, promo box – just a whole bunch of things you can use to enhance or tweak out your website a little bit.
Go check this one out, another great freebie that actually just works. And of course with that, we end of with a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress. We’ve got a fair bit to talk about ClassicPress this week. ClassicPress is coming back to life. (Well, they never went down. They just got quiet for a little while.) And of course, ClassicPress, that fast-growing fork from WordPress is starting to come into its own again. Now that they are one year old, they are looking to elect themselves a new management committee and they are having elections. They are accepting self-nominations to that right now, so you can self-nominate yourself to the committee. And by self-nominating… wrap the tongue up and put it around the head and stuff it back in. You can self-nominate yourself to the committee and then you get to give yourself a little promo piece as to why you should be on the committee. I’m not sure how the voting works but it will be a voting that occurs for the committee. It’s probably community-run and community-led as the whole project has been. Go check this out if you’re interested, if you’ve been involved in the community, and how you can help out.
And with that, we’re going to toss out there that CodePotent, also known as John Alacron, has tossed his hat into the ring. Check out his pitch here. There’s a link in the Show Notes to his pitch. There is also a link in the Show Notes for the full set of nominees who are nominated to the committee here. You’ve got Patrick Klein, Michelle Coe, John Alacron, Wade Striebel, and there’s a few more in here. There’s a couple of links in the Show Notes to take you to all this information. The committee members that want to return in 2020 and the new community members who want to join the committee and a list of responsibilities and other bits and pieces, so go check out the links I’ve got in the Show Notes that take you to all that information. Get in there and get active on the committee.
I would love to consider it, but I am packed so full of my volunteer stuff now I couldn’t do it if I wanted to.
Okay, and we’ve got another bit of general information. This is for those of you that want to get some posts into the ClassicPress blog. There is a forum thread here that talks about how you can do that, how you can help out, what you can write about – all that little bits of information. Go check out this link and become more active in the ClassicPress community and helping them grow into their own.
And there is some big news from the ClassicPress community. This is news that is going to be a game-changer for ClassicPress, I believe. WooCommerce has been forked, and with the fork of WooCommerce means that there is active development now for an e-commerce solution for ClassicPress that will be called ClassicCommerce. They’ve got a list of what their roadmap is for Version 1 and 2, what they’re working on for it, how you can get involved, where some of the code is located, and you can get down and test it, what they’ve done. So far, it’s a really great thing to have.
I know I was discussing this with somebody a couple of weeks ago and I said, “I’m pretty sure someone’s doing this”, and they’re saying, “Well, if they actually manage that, that’s going to be a game changer because that will make it much easier for people who want to move away from WordPress to ClassicPress and take advantage of the speed, the less code, the no bloat, the no Gutenberg, etc., and then be able to still bring their e-commerce stuff over.” So this is going to be big, and I’m going to do my best to follow this information here and see what’s happening in this community with it. So go check this information out. It’s really quite a big deal.
And of course, the usual ClassicPress resources are out there. ClassicPress Club, the must-have list of ClassicPress plugins, the forums for ClassicPress for the list of specifically coded plugins for ClassicPress. All of that information, those links are still in the show notes and they can help you out a long way with what you’re trying to do for ClassicPress. So go check that out and if anyone knows any ClassicPress plugin developers who I haven’t covered yet on the show, please send them my way so I can get their plugins here on the show, because I would love to have more specific ClassicPress plugins for the show.
All right, well that pretty much wraps everything up on this episode. I covered up in this show the Post Type Switcher, which I gave a 5 to; the Sticky Header Effects for Elementor, which I gave a 5 to; and the Awesome Addons for Elementor, which I gave a 5 to.
And a couple of quick reminders… the interview that I had promised last week has simply got forgotten due to me being busy. The interview is done, it’s edited, the Show Notes are almost complete. I will make sure it’s up for this week. I try not to post it the same day as my show goes up, so I want to give it a couple of days and I will get it up.
And it’s a great interview and it’s with Kim Gjerstad Mail Poet, talking about Mail Poet, which is a plugin I covered in a previous episode.
And the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is on November 28, and the topic of that has yet to be completely determined. But it’s in Victoria – if you happen to be in Victoria, please come out to the Meetup. I’d be happy to see you there, say hi. If not, you can catch it live here on the YouTube channel. It will be broadcast live. For more information, go to wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
All right, and that’s it. I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here.
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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.