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 #434 here.
It’s Episode 434 and I’ve got plugins for Affiliate Commissions, Analytics in Your Dashboard, Image Sliders and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #434
John: It’s Episode 434 and I’ve got plugins for Affiliate Commissions, Analytics in Your Dashboard, Image Sliders 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 little, short greeting from one of our listeners out there…
Good morning, good afternoon, depending on which coast you reside.
Oh, thank you very much for that little, short snippet. I greatly appreciate it. Anything anyone wants to drop in and send me for playing, I’m more than happy to oblige unless it gets rude and crude, then I just won’t do it. What can I say? I have to draw the line somewhere.
All right, well we have the usual great show for you today but of course, don’t forget right off the top you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com and take a minute or two and subscribe to the Newsletter, and get out there and hit everyone in the mouth that you know. Spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z. Catch it live every
Thursday at noon on our YouTube channel and of course in your favorite podcast player app. Just go look up wppluginsatoz.com and it is there.
And all that being said, let’s dive right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, so first off what have we got for you today? It looks like I have a plugin that I haven’t used yet. This one was sent in by a listener – I’m starting with that tongue twisters thing early in the show today. Starting out, I have a plugin that I have yet to use but I felt you would like to know more about it. It was sent in by a listener. It was sent in by Steve Wingert and it is called CouponPanel and it’s from Feeds 4 and this is a plugin that if you do affiliate stuff and marketing coupons, etc., Feeds 4, this is a new plugin from them called CouponPanel which allows you WordPress owners to display relevant or targeted coupons and promotions to their visitors.
It appears that this is a third-party system. They have some free stuff and some paid premium versions of it. It sort of expands up and down depending on what you’re doing. The things you can do with the CouponPanel is content. It maintains coupon content, it means once activated and the shortcode is entered, it finds promotional current content for your site to help you get information in there to bring it in there. It allows for monetization of your site, curation to help pick predefined categories and get relevant merchants and promotions in those specific categories.
You can customize it up.
And cost, well, it says “free,” but it’s an API service and what they do with it is they have a shared commissions service with it where the commissions earned through the coupons are split 70/30 – 30 to you, 70 to them. So I don’t know how useful it is; it’s not something I personally would use but I thought, you know, who knows? Maybe some listeners out there do affiliate kind of work and this is something you might not know about and it could be something of interest. You may want to go check this out.
Based upon everything I read about it and how it looks, I give this a nice middle of the road 3-Dragon rating. It doesn’t look good; it doesn’t look bad. It looks like it could be very helpful and useful for those that are into the affiliate coupon marketing segment of the internet and it is a very large segment, so this might be something useful if you’re looking for a new niche market. This may be something to target yourself into, so go check it out. It’s called CouponPanel and I give it a 3-Dragon rating.
Okay, a little bit of WordPress news and we do have just a bit this week, a couple of things in and around security.
First off, what we’ve got for you is an article here from Techie Expert. It’s “WordPress Security Tricks to Keep Your Business Website Safe.” This is a good article on how to make sure that some of your basics are taken care of on your site, securing your WP config file, getting a backup solution, passwords, etc. It’s a good, basic article rundown on stuff you’ll want to do to your site. So just go read it; it can really help you out.
Now we do have a couple of interesting things and this one here is an interesting one for me, because I hadn’t heard about this as a problem. But see, it seems skimmers for Magento and WordPress exist. And if you don’t know what a skimmer is or if you think you know (which I thought I knew and I was kind of right), a skimmer is a program or a device that skims credit card numbers as someone is entering the data in your website and skims those numbers off.
It’s what happened to me several years ago when I actually got compromised on my credit card and it was through – it was back when WooCommerce was located in South Africa and you had to pay with a specific system. I got skimmed on that and they compromised my credit card. So this was some time back, but it seems like this is still a problem and credit card skimmers’ injected code have been found in WordPress Core, they’ve been injected into the WordPress Core through various formats. This is a malware campaign that is out there. You might want to read this if you run an e-commerce store. You need to be aware of this and you need to take appropriate precautions to protect your users’ data as it’s being transmitted, and this is the problem of letting them enter the credit card information on your website and then it being transmitted over somewhere else. It’s in that process is a transmission is where it can be skimmed out or in the process of them entering it on your website, it can be skimmed right there.
So this is something you’ll want to read. You’ll want to check this article out if you’re doing any of that sort of thing.
Now of course, the next one up we’ve got here is the malvertizing, and this is an ongoing problem. It’s been ongoing for several weeks and it still seems to be out there, and we can’t stress this enough. What this is is malware that people are installing themselves on their own website. How are they installing them? They’re downloading – what to say? Forked – not forked. What’s the word I’m looking for?
Basically, they’re taking premium version plugins and themes for free through these freebie sites and they’re installing them, thinking they’re getting premium plugins for free. Well they are, but they’re getting a whole bunch of extra code to go with it, and this is one of the problems of not getting your premium plugins from the source or from known, good-quality suppliers. This is something you’ll want to be aware of and check out. Go read this article up. It’s a pretty good article; it talks about it. And if you are getting the noobed – nerfed – what’s the word? For some reason it is escaping my head. I give up. If you’re not using appropriate professional plugins, then you’ll want start doing that. Pay up, pay for the plugins. Quit stealing ‘em.
All right, what do we got next up here? Contests. Well, right now we don’t have a contest going. The winner of our last contest – and of course our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin who has kindly provided us with the premium version for all our contests. The winner of the last contest for Social Rabbit was Sherry.
Congratulations, that was a couple of weeks ago. This is an excellent plugin I reviewed in Episode 428. Connect all your social networks and share out you content. So go check out the review in Episode 428 and go check out the plugin at Social Rabbit.
And the next contest will be coming soon just as soon as I find the time to finish getting it all arranged. Time – that’s the one thing we have a finite amount of, so we’re always trying to find that extra time.
Okay, next up I have for you Google has released a plugin for WordPress. This is Site Kit by Google. Now, this seems to be replacing – I know a few months back you lost the ability in Yoast to access the Google dashboard, they dropped their API. Many other SEO plugins have suddenly lost all the access to it. Well, it turns out obviously the reason why is Google has now released their own official plugin to tap into your WordPress website.
Now, of course since Google does no evil – hm, yeah – they’re going to get into your website and you’re going to give them all kinds of additional information that they might not have had before. So it could be good, it could be bad. If you’re really digging into your stats, this is something you’ll want to look into. It does look like a pretty great plugin.
I haven’t installed it yet and I’ll install it just like every other drone out there on the planet and let Google come through and they’ll clean through my underwear and see what I’m wearing today. It’s a really good one. It brings into your dashboard the search console information, Google Analytics. If you do Google AdSense, it brings the AdSense information into your WordPress dashboard. It gives you page speed insights. It’s got a tag manager to help you manage tags on your website. It’s got an optimizer to help you set up and optimize on your site.
A really nice plugin. It seems like it’s going to work quite nicely. I’m not sure of the setup; it should be relatively straightforward, the setup – usually probably just go out and get the API needed, connect it up, or who knows?
Maybe they make it as simple as many others: click these buttons here, log into Google, accept this, accept that, boom, you’re done.
So all in all, not too bad. Interesting thing, this plugin was released on October 31st and as of today, November 14th, it has over 50,000 installs, so people are installing it at a very rapid pace. So go check it out, the Site Kit by Google, and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, listener feedback. I would love some listener feedback, folks. Please send me some listener feedback. I haven’t had that in so long, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone’s even listening to the show anymore. So send me some listener feedback. SpeakPipe is a really great way to send me feedback. You can also send me emails, messages – there’s lots of ways to send me content, tell me what you think of the show, whether the show is going good, whether it’s horrible, whether I need to expand something, contract something – anything. You know, I’m beginning to think there’s nobody out there listening to me aside from Joey, who’s listening online right now, so thanks, Joey. I appreciate you coming in today.
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This week, I would like to acknowledge the artwork for this week’s show which comes from Angel Lemus of Koa Digital – really great art. He likes to produce some interesting stuff and of course this week’s show title, Pugs No More, well, nobody noticed for the longest time. It seems that I had in my logo “WP Pugins A-Z” going back probably about 30 or 40 episodes, and I finally got an email from a listener that says, “Hey, did you know you got a typo here?” and it’s like oh, really? Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. So that’s been fixed so we are WP Pugins no more. We are back to being WP Plugins A-Z. And Angel has supplied the really great pug artwork for this week, so check out the artwork when it comes through.
So thank you again to all the Producers out there who come in below $50.
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Absolutely. CMS Commander is a great system. I’ve been using it myself for oh, going on nine years now, so something that works very well for managing lots of multiple websites and it has lots of additions in it. And if you could, try to use the link in the show notes. That is an affiliate link for me. I greatly appreciate it.
All right, the next plugin I have for you here is Master Slider, a Responsive Touch Slider. Now, last week I’m working on a project that I needed a good gallery slider, and of course Elementor has lots of ways to manage images in it. But it doesn’t have a good gallery slider built into it, nor the addon tools that I purchased that displays one image and a nice bunch of images across the bottom, you can slide them across the bottom. There was just nothing there that worked, so I had to go dig around a little bit and go check it out.
I tripped across Master Slider and I thought that’s looks like what I want, so we’ll give it a try. And sure enough, it works really quite well. It sets up relatively easy. You have to manually enter all the images one at a time but unless you’re doing hundreds (and unfortunately, I was doing more than 25), but it sets them all up and gives you multiple ways to display your sliders. It does have a premium version which can be used for it, but it’s lots of ways and lots of configurations for using this particular plugin and I found it to be quite excellent for setting up and something that went very well.
So go check this out. It’s called Master Slider – Responsive Touch Slider and I give it a 4-Dragon rating, so go check that one out.
All right, ClassicPress Options. What do we have for ClassicPress this week? Unfortunately, not a whole heck of a lot. It’s been a slow week for ClassicPress as far as I could tell. It could also be me; I’ve had a very busy week with other projects in that I wasn’t as able to do much research this week. And there is a couple of bit of information rolling over from last week and this is good until November 20th is ClassicPress is accepting self-nominations for the 2020 ClassicPress Management Committee Elections. So if you’re interested in doing something on the ClassicPress Board and you’ve been involved in the community a bit, get in there, get yourself nominated to get elected to that board, and help them out.
For other bits and pieces, you can go in there and check out the listing of the Committee Candidates that are up now and they’ve increased it by a couple since the last time I looked at it. It’s like they’ve increased it by two, three, four since I was last in there, so it is getting a fair number of people in there. There’s more information around that. Drop into the ClassicPress forums if you can help people there, help them out.
ClassicPress is growing quite nicely and I really feel over the next year it’s going to make some sudden jumps forward with some of the projects that are ongoing. And one of the big projects that’s ongoing right now is that the WooCommerce plugin has been forked. It will be ClassicCommerce and there’s a page in here, a link in the Show Notes that takes you to information about what ClassicPress Commerce is and what they’re doing with it. Personally, I think once this gets launched out for ClassicPress, it’s going to make a world of difference for ClassicPress.
As more and more ClassicPress plugins are released and more and more developers start to put a little more focus into it, I believe it’s going to even make more of a run for its money. I mean, after all ClassicPress is literally just over one year old now and they’ve come a long ways and I’ve really been impressed with the community, the way the community acts, and the way that they have helped others, and my interactions with the community have been fantastic. So go check out ClassicPress. There’s a lot there that could be of benefit. I’ve even moved my WP Plugins A-Z website and it now runs on ClassicPress and all the plugins I use from WordPress are working beautifully under it, and they’ll probably stay that way for a while. When the time comes that I have to change, hopefully there’s new plugins developed for it. Even if they are premiums, probably half the plugins I use right now are premium anyway, so I don’t mind paying for plugins and you shouldn’t either. The price is usually more than reasonable for the plugin.
ClassicPress resources – the usual resources for ClassicPress, ClassicPress Club – go check them out. They’re another resource where you can go find out more information about ClassicPress in a less formal atmosphere.
There’s the list of ClassicPress must-have plugins. These are the plugins that people feel need to be sourced out and it’s a list that’s slowly changing and showing what people are doing to change out and create the plugins that are really needed to make a site work.
And then there’s the list over at ClassicPress that CodePotent is running, and currently it doesn’t look like it’s grown any. It’s still got only 42 in there, so a lot of good, basic plugins in there and there’s a couple of specialized ones, so go check out this list if you’re running ClassicPress if you want to keep with ClassicPress-specific plugins.
That’s pretty much all I have here today on everything, and I guess we’ll just call it a wrap at that. Anyone who wants to chat after the show, feel free. I’ll stick around for a little bit.
And one quick question from Joey:
Do WP Plugin developers provide support for ClassicPress?
Some do, some don’t. You have to email them directly. There’s been a few out there and I don’t have the list, but there’s been a few out there that have said they will support ClassicPress. And what’s going to happen is of course their main money comes from WordPress and of course they can’t abandon WordPress en masse until they have enough people over at ClassicPress to abandon WordPress, so they’ve got to kind of do what I’m doing right now, which is living in both worlds.
Eventually, I’m going to have to choose one or the other, and that is a given for anyone who is in the WordPress/ClassicPress world. Right now, those worlds are still sliding side-by-side. But in another year or two, they’re going to split dramatically and that dramatic split I believe is going to happen in 2021 when WordPress stops supporting the Classic Editor. As soon as WordPress stops supporting the Classic Editor, that’s where the major split is going to occur, so that’s my belief. So we’ve got about two years and then it’s going to split – it has to. It has no option at that point.
At any rate, stick around after the show and I covered up in this episode the CouponPanel, which I gave a 3 to; the Site Kit by Google, which I gave a 4 to; the Master Slider – Response Touch Slider, which I gave a 4 to.
And a couple of quick reminders… the latest interview is now out, and it is with Kim Gjerstad from Mail Poet. You can get it; there’s a link in the Show Notes to it or just go to wppluginsatoz.com and it’s right there on the right-hand side of the page. It’s a really great interview talking about Mail Poet and where it came from and what it’s doing now.
It’s actually quite impressive.
And of course, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be November 28th at 6:30 p.m. It will be broadcast live here on the YouTube channel. For more information, just go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup for everything – all that information.
That pretty much wraps it up. I’m gonna let my girl take us out here, but I will stick around for a couple of minutes after the show.
Reminders for the show: All 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 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.