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 #435 here.
It’s Episode 435 and I’ve got plugins for Cleaning Your Assets, Adding Scripts, Creating a Table of Contents, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #435
John: It’s Episode 435 and I’ve got plugins for Cleaning Your Assets, Adding Scripts, Creating a Table of Contents, 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, don’t forget you can get all the Show Notes over at wppluginsatoz.com. And take a minute or two to 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 Pacific Time on our YouTube channel.
All right, with all that being said, let’s just jump right into the meat and potatoes of the show.
All right, I have a couple of great plugins for you today and some ClassicPress and news and other miscellaneous stuff. But right off the top, the first one out the gate – this one’s kind of a bit special and something I hope to see more of on the show, and this is a review for a plugin sent in by one of the Producers out there. It was sent in by Frintz Barnes from Bizpromedia.com. And Frintz is a full-time self-employed, building websites since ’99. Well, he’s been in the business as long as me, so welcome to it all, Frintz. I greatly appreciate you sending in this.
And so what did he send us in? Frintz sent us in a plugin called Asset Cleanup Plugin for Page Speed. Okay, it’s a really nice looking plugin. I haven’t had a chance to look at it myself yet, but here is what he has to say about it.
This plugin is written and maintained by Gabriel Livan, a UK-based WordPress full stack developer. Livan is a Certified Codeable WordPress Expert and a TopTal (top 3%) Developer. As of this writing (October 2019) the plugin is has over 40,000 active installations, and a solid 5-star rating with over 300 reviews.
The idea is to identify resources (css, javascript) that are loading on pages where they are not needed and disable them on those pages. This will have a number of benefits for your website. Faster page loads means happier visitors and a happier Google. It also means fewer HTTP requests, fewer conflicts, cleaner source code and server log files, and more. See the plugin’s page in the repository for a long list. The plugin has a number of other features, some of which overlap with what many caching plugins and CDN’s also offer. This is a plugin that does require some technical knowledge to use and will take some time to configure.
I have just started dabbling with this plugin and I love the concept. Overall, so far, I think this is a great plugin, and an important addition to your arsenal of tools for optimizing your sites.
And thanks a lot, I really appreciate that. And since you didn’t give me a rating for the plugin since it has a pro version, I realized that yeah, there’s a lot of 5-Star ratings for the plugin. But because it has a pro version, that automatically disclaims it from getting a 5-Dragon rating here, so I’m going to give it a 4-Dragon rating. It’s a plugin you might want to go and check out.
And folks, you want to send me reviews? I will happily put them into the show. I will love to have Producers giving me some stuff and lightening my workload. So thank you very much, Frintz. I greatly appreciate that, and I hope this one goes out to you and hear all about it.
All right, so let’s get on to a little bit of WordPress news.
Okay, first off, we have a big piece of news. This is relatively recent. As of yesterday it was announced millions of sites have been exposed by a flaw in Jetpack, so Jetpack has a flaw that has existed since Version 5.1, I believe is what I read here, and they’re on 7.9 now. So this flaw has been kicking around for some time. They supposedly say it has not yet been exploited in the wild but if it had, would they really know if someone was exploiting the flaw?
Unless of course they mistakenly exposed it too soon.
But at any rate, the big thing is if you’ve used Jetpack – and I highly recommend against using Jetpack. But if you are using Jetpack, get it updated as quick as you can because this flaw is a big one and it’s something that you’ll want to take a look at. This is an article from Bleeping Computer and go read the article. It lists up all the issues with it and tells you some of the things you’ll want to be aware of and make sure that you have gotten your update completed.
There’s a little bit of security news from WordPress 5.3, which dropped this last week. Of course if you’re updating, which I’ve started to after waiting to hear all the problems people had and seeing what was happening with it. I’m always slow to update to a major version, just to make sure that it hasn’t broken things (which is usually the problem). But they made a couple of security updates in it. They updated the CA root bundle of certificates. They updated and secured the oEmbeds, they did some PHP 7.4 compatibility and a few other things in here, so go read this article over. It’s from WPSec and it gives you a little bit of information about what you need to know about updates and security to WordPress 5.3. Not a major amount, but just a couple of things that you may want to be aware of.
And a nice article from Donkel Font and this is “Seven Essential WordPress Tips You Will Need to Know This Year,” and it’s a pretty decent article. You know, it talks about curating your WordPress media library, controlling the file sizes of stuff, pulling plugins that you don’t use. That’s something that’s really big is I recommend it highly if you’re not using a plugin or themes, get them all out of there. You don’t want anything but what’s active when you’re actually running your site live. Put keywords and images, get analytical, revise your permalinks. Maybe you might want to update them or take a look at them. You know, these are just a couple of little bits of information for you out there, so go check out this article and news.
And from me, well, we’re still pushing towards the end of the year and Plugin Dynamics is chugging along, so expect to hear something in January from Plugin Dynamics as we finalize that.
And contests – we do not have a contest currently. I’m still in the process of arranging it. You’ve got to remember, I’m a one-man show here for the most part. I get the help I get to build out sites and stuff, but I still have a lot of other work I have to get accomplished. And this show, while I really enjoy doing it, it takes up a fair chunk of time. But it is secondary to me having to make a living. It seems that my landlord wants the rent, the grocery store wants money for groceries. (I can’t understand that.) They should just give it all to me and let me do what I want.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work that way, so I have to get out there and earn a living.
So at any rate, our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin who have provided us with the premium version to run our contests. And the winner of the last contest for the Social Rabbit plugin was Sherry, and so congratulations. And Episode 428 is when I reviewed that plugin, so you can go tune in to that to find out more about that plugin there.
If you want to find out more about contests and stay current, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to keep up-to-date and find out more about what’s happening.
Okay, so next up I have for you another plugin. This one here is called SOGO Add Script to Individual Page Headers and Footers. And what this one is for; this one came out because I was working on a site that I needed to do a specific script for a specific page. And while there’s lots of ways to do it, most of it requires going in and doing some coding or adding custom fields, and if you don’t already have those things in place, this was a really great plugin for a site that didn’t have anything in place to make it easy.
You just take this plugin, install it, activate it, and now on a per-page or post basis you can add header or footer scripts to that page or post that apply only when that page or post is loaded. And this is a really great thing to do because it saves you tons of time, saves you some grief, and maybe you don’t want that script running sitewide. I know you can go add those in header and footer scripts or in the customizer areas. There’s lots of other places to add header and footer scripts, but they’re sitewide through everything. You want something that’s maybe specific to a page so you’re not chewing up resources, adding extra HTTP calls that are unnecessary to your site.
It’s a really simple plugin, a really great plugin, and of course a freebie that works like it’s supposed to, and you don’t have to pay anything else for it, well it jumps right up to a 5-Dragon rating.
Okay, so go check it out, SOGO Add Script to Individual Pages, Headers, and Footers – although their title doesn’t quite read like that. It says, “Add Script to Individual Pages Header Footer”. It needs a little help.
All right, listener feedback. Well, I kind of skipped over something last week and we made a joke of it with the new thing, Pugs No More. You know, WP Pugs No More, and well I didn’t clarify it up. A couple of people got it when I made an overly half-handed comment. But let’s clear that up. I want a thanks out to G, who pointed out the misspelling that I had going on for many episodes of the show art, and that was going back probably a good couple of dozen episodes and nobody caught it.
Everybody just kept glossing over it. It said, “WP Pugins A-Z” and so what we did was we fixed it and we went back to being “Plugins” as of last episode. So thanks a lot to G, who also pointed out a couple of other minor issues that he noticed that I’ve fixed up on the site, so thank you very much. You want to give him a shout-out and a thank you, I’ve left a link to his website in the Show Notes, so go check out his website and go give him some love. So thanks a lot; I greatly appreciate it. Always glad to hear some feedback, especially things that help me out when I’ve overlooked something and just not noticed.
All right, show supporters. This show is supported by you, our Producers as a value-for-value model, meaning if you get any value out of it, please give some value back. And that value can become a Producer. Help out with the show. That value can be anything. You can donate money to the show – that always helps out. Donations of $50 more and over are credited with Executive Producer credit in the Show Notes and their note is read out on the air.
You can submit artwork at the WP Plugins A-Z Art Generator. Submit articles, news, information. Submit plugin suggestions for reviews or even submit a whole review. You can also create monthly donations at Patreon or anything I may not have thought about. Maybe you just catch some of my errors that I’ve overlooked and help me get them straightened. So anything you can do, greatly appreciated it. So thank you very much out there and thanks to all the producers who came in under $50 and who have set up weekly or monthly donations. They really do help the show out, so thank you very much.
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Okay, next up I have for you another plugin. This one is called Table of Contents Reloaded, and this one here is one that I’ve only sort of used and it’s a great one. It was for an older kind of site and it’s a great plugin if you’re looking to create a table of contents, a site map, or something similar from all of your posts, pages, get them organized into different methods. It does alphabetizing and it sets up relatively easy. It’s a really great looking plugin that allows you to create all the different ways. It’s got several shortcodes in here.
It is an extension on an older plugin. It’s built off of the Table of Contents Plus and what this guy did was he obviously forked it and extended it because the previous developer abandoned it four years ago, so it’s nice to have a newer one out there. This is relatively new; it’s actually brand new out there. I found it in the WordPress Repository of new plugins and go give them some love out there for Yeduah Hassin and it is Table of Contents Reloaded, a great little plugin, nice, simple, and free, and of course those one there always end up at the top with a 5-Dragon rating.
All right, ClassicPress Options. ClassicPress, that fast-growing, new CMS system out there that is going to overtake and conquer the world, I think. ClassicPress focused on business websites runs quite fast. If you want to find out, go check out wppluginsatoz.com. It’s running on ClassicPress.
And this week here, what do we got? Well, the nominations for the 2020 management committee, the ClassicPress Management Committee, have closed but I do have links in the Show Notes to the list of nominees and who they are, so make sure you go check ‘em out and go see their individual pages and why they’re running and what they have to say about themselves, so it’s all locked down. I’m not sure when the elections are, but I’m sure they’re coming up soon.
And what else do we got this week? We do have a new one from CodePotent, and it seems CodePotent has released a new plugin out here. It’s Release Candidate One for his Update Manager plugin. And I caught something else earlier that CodePotent is looking for people to do beta testing of plugins. So if you’re interested in doing that and you have the time, please reach out to him and find out what he’s got that he needs beta tested. I wish I could, but I’m so packed full of stuff right now, I don’t think I could add another thing to my plate.
So at any rate, go check out this plugin here at the Release Candidate. It is an update manager and what it does is it creates a simple client-server relationship for the serving data, not the files, and the client which consumes the date.
And it is a single PHP file added to your plugins. When the user checks for updates, the client file queries the server for the update data and if found, makes the update available to the user. So go check out this plugin.
It’s something that I think I’m going to get my developer to look at for the plugins that are being created for Plugin Dynamics, because we want to make sure we have a good way of keeping our plugins up-to-date because most of them will not end up in a repository. Some of them may end up in the WordPress Repository, but most of them will be coming from our own websites. So go check that out, so thanks a lot, CodePotent. It’s great to see you’re continuing to pump out stuff for everyone.
All right, and the other big news out there is of course I mentioned it a couple of weeks in a row is that the WooCommerce has been forked for ClassicPress. So in case you haven’t heard me talk about the fork for WooCommerce or the ClassicCommerce that’s coming up and in development. It looks like they have something in the development repository so you can experiment with it. I probably wouldn’t put it on a live site just yet, but I’m pretty sure this is going to develop out quite nicely. They’ve even listed up a place in the ClassicPress forums where they talk about the plugins that are necessary for ClassicCommerce to make sure you’re getting the bare essentials that you need to run your e-commerce website. So go check this out and if you’re moving to ClassicPress, go check this plugin out and see if it’s going to work for you for an e-commerce site. And if you’ve got the ability, get out there and help them develop this, because this is really going to make a big difference in the community, I believe – having something like this.
And of course, the usual ClassicPress resources out there at ClassicPress Club, the must-have plugins list for ClassicPress itself, find a list of ClassicPress-specific plugins that we have here, and currently that list is still sitting at 42, so we need some more, folks. Get out there and develop some plugins for ClassicPress and them submit them off to CodePotent so he can get it listed up there.
All right, so that pretty much wraps up everything I’ve got for this show. And closing out in this episode here, I covered up the Asset Cleanup Plugin for Page Speed, which I gave a 4 to; the SOGO Add Script to Individual Pages Header Footer, which I gave a 5 to; the Table of Contents Reloaded, which I gave a 5 to.
And a couple of quick reminders… the latest interview is out with Kim Gjerstad from Mail Poet. Go check it out at wppluginsatoz.com. It’s right there off the front page of the site or follow the link in the Show Notes for Interview 47.
The next WordPress Meetup in Victoria is going to be November 28th in Victoria. The topic, well, I’m still batting around topics. I’m really horrible with this this time for some reason, but we will have a good topic and we will have a good presentation as usual. So make sure you check it out. It’ll all be announced at wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
And of course, this show here titled Finding Golden Plugins. Speaking of finding gold, check out my new venture at theroguestavern.com and follow my adventures into the wild searching for gold and out on the range and more. This is where I’m starting to share some of my pastime adventures and what I’m doing with my life aside from sitting in front of a computer screen. I realize I’ve been sitting there way too much and you can also go check out my latest videos over on YouTube. Just look for The Rogue’s Tavern in YouTube or go to theroguestavern.com.
So that pretty much wraps up everything I’ve got here today and anyone who wants to stick around for a short chat afterwards, feel free. But I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here.
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 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.