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 #440 here.
It’s Episode 440 a new year and a decade is just a week away, and I’ve got plugins for Moon Phases, Elementor Addons and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #440
John: It’s Episode 440 a new year and a decade is just a week away, and I’ve got plugins for Moon Phases, Elementor Addons 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.
This is the WP Plugins A-Z podcast and we are headed into a brand new year. This is the last show of the decade and the last show for 2019. (I almost said 1919. Wow, that’s kind of a brain-out there.) I’m going to be looking at doing a lot of changes to the show in the coming year. Part of it is going to be the intro and other things in it, but we’ll get a couple of quick things out of the way.
It’s come to my attention recently because I’m a No Agenda fan and glanced at the Mueller Report once or twice. But according to the Mueller Report, this is the best WordPress podcast in the Universe, WP Plugins A-Z, and that is of course because they don’t mention it in the Mueller Report, it must be true.
All right, we’re going to see what we can do for changes. It is currently Boxing Day here in Candanavia and a Happy New Year to everyone and I hope you all had yourselves a good Merry Christmas. And since this is the last show before we move into the decade, and it’s going to be a little outside the box. I’m just going to see where it goes. This is going to be kind of indicative of the changes I’m looking at making to the show in the new year.
I mean, I’ve been doing this show now for about eight years – we’re talking about Episode 440; that’s one a week for a long time now. I’ve missed a couple of weeks here and there over the years but on the whole, I’ve not missed a week. I know in the last year my lovely office manager was grilling me and says, “Did you miss any shows this year?” and I said, “No, not this year.” I have put out a show every week for 2019. That’s 52 episodes that managed to get out and on the air.
So we’ve got a lot coming up there and well, that was nice of you to pop in there, Yannis, and pull back the messages. I didn’t quite read them. But hopefully you stick around and see what’s happening. At any rate, I’m looking to improve this show here. This show is a value-for-value show and I’m looking to improve the value that I give out on the show, trying to find ways to make it more valuable to you, my listeners, my Producers out there, and I’m looking forward to you Producers out there giving me more value back on this show. This is of course one that I’ve had a busy Christmas season, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time for research, and this time of year is generally quiet for most things anyway. I’ve got a couple of great plugins for you today that I’m going to pull out for you. I’m going to change up the way the show gets spit out a bit and see how it goes. But on the whole, I’m just generally looking forward to another great year with WP Plugins A-Z, hopefully improve the show dramatically. Hopefully we’re looking forward to getting more participation from you the listeners out there.
I know this show is downloaded approximately 1,000 to 1,500 times per week, so that tells me there must be 1,000, 1,500 people out there that listen to the show. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s more. I have no clue what it is. I don’t track my stats very often. I get them sent to me occasionally. I look at them. They come in because all my stats are tracked through Blubrry Podcast, which is where I first started out promoting the show, and all I can ever look at is the downloads because I host the show on my own servers. I don’t use a pod platform where they may disappear, and I may lose all of my archived stuff. I have it on my own servers with my own backups and other etc. on there, things that I’ve always promoted throughout the years – always control your data. No matter what you do, control your data.
Now, another quick note of course. All the Show Notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com and the notes often have a few other things that I don’t cover in the show, but they always have the links in them. I am going to try and bring forward a few more affiliate items this coming year. I’m going to see if I can improve on the referrals I do. I still have the spots in the show, etc., for doing my advertising, you know. I’ve gotten a couple of advertisers over this last year; a couple of them I’ve turned away because I didn’t like what they were wanting to do and it’s like, you know, I control my show. If I don’t make money on it, well so be it. I’ll continue to not make money on it because I’m not about to let advertisers tell me what to do and I’m not going to bend how I do my reviews for an advertiser. I know it may seem that way sometimes, but I never do. I’m always pretty straightforward and give my honest viewpoints and opinions on this show.
The show has been going a long time. I’ve been going at it solo now for a little better than a year and half to two years ever since Marcus left the show because he couldn’t follow along with the changes in my life that occurred back when my father died. But this is what’s going to happen, and I would also like to, you know, take a moment here, suggest to everyone you get out there. Hit them in the mouth and tell them about WP Plugins A-Z. Get out there and spread the word and subscribe to the show and the podcast itself.
Uh-oh, we just lost our connection on OBS Studio. Let’s see what happened here. Well that’s going to be an interesting kind of bit. oh, there it is. It’s reconnected back up. We’re having a rough day on our thing. It’s probably because I have three kids at home and they’re all using the streaming stuff at the same time, so that could make for a really tough livestream for me today.
So at any rate, we’re going to see what’s happening here and let’s see. This show, as I’ve said, a value-for-value. I like to give the value back. I’ve moved to giving Producer credits for those that support the show and I’ll be talking about them when I hit the donations segment of the show. I’ll move that to another area of the show and I’m going to be moving around how I cover the plugins. Once upon a time way back when I first started the show, I used to cover all the plugins in one get-go. I think I’m going to be moving that back to that point there, is covering all the plugins in one get-go, instead of spreading them out over everything. I’ll just give my good introduction here two or three minutes. If you want to skip it, you’ll have to figure out exactly where in the show I start covering the plugins. I’m not going to be doing that today because I haven’t completely revamped my show notes, but that will happen in the new year.
I’m going to revamp the way it’s done and get it back to where it’s more simple and I’m going to try to bring more entertaining, other interesting tidbits and information. I would just love it if you my listeners out there would send me stuff that I can use and help. I mean, I look forward to getting more support from you the listeners out there. It’s been a really rough year for listener support. I’ve had a bit here and there. I mean, I’d like to thank a couple of listeners out there in particular. We’ve got Jezweb at Jezweb Pty. Ltd. over in Australia. He’s been a great supporter, sending me donations. I’ve had a few other smaller donations. I’ve had Angel Lemus supporting me with artwork for the last six months. It’s been quite fantastic and, you know, he’s even sent me some work occasionally here and there. So it’s like I look forward to this kind of support.
I’ve gotten a couple of other pieces of work from listeners out there, which at the moment are unnamed because they’ve not – I don’t name people right off, but they hired me for small jobs simply because they were listening to my show or that they showed up to my WordPress monthly meetups that I do here in Victoria or they watch the monthly Meetup live on YouTube. So the stuff seems to resonate with people; it’s just sometimes I wonder if it’s actually resonating enough for me to continue the show. But I am going to commit to it for another year and if it seems like it’s not going anywhere, I may just let it die its natural death, so let’s see what we can do with it.
Those of you that are regular listeners to the show, encourage people to listen to it. Send notes of encouragement to me, send me feedback, tell me what you think. I’ve hardly heard from any listeners out there of the show at all this past year, and it’s been rather surprising to me. I used to get tons of feedback. I used to get tons of stuff from people. You know, lots of critiques, lots of good and bad critiques. It’s almost gone nonexistent. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed my show and seeing how it goes. So it’s a lot going on and this is the way it’s working right now.
Anyway, with all of that out of the way, I think I’ll dive into the meat and potatoes of the show and let’s head into dealing with some of the plugins.
Okay, first thing I’ve got here, this one here is starting off the plugins that I’ve got this week for you. This one is called WP Moon Phase Widget, and this is a brand new plugin. I like to go into the WordPress new plugins. You can go to a link called WordPress.org/browse/new. They used to have this located in the WordPress Repository on your dashboard. They had a link there that allowed you to see the latest in new plugins and it was quite lovely. It made it easy and they removed it for some reason a couple, three years back, and it was random. It’s like why did they do that? It’s almost like they didn’t want to promote new plugin developers anymore. It was really weird to me. So I am going to make more of an effort to look at the new plugins. I didn’t do a lot of that this year. I did a bit here and there when I needed a quick filler and see what kind of new plugins, but I’m going to try and pull more new plugins from this link here.
And before I go into this plugin here, we’ll pop into this link and give you a quick show if you’re looking on the live show and you’ll see what we’ve got here. It’s wordpress.org/plugins/browse/new, and when you go into that, what happens is you end up and you get nothing but the latest plugins that were released. It goes not very far – it covers back the last 50 pages of plugins, which they could be within hours or days. You see that in the last couple of hours since I’ve done this, it’s like the Moon Phase Widget one, this one here was a brand new plugin six hours ago from the time I’m the doing the show, so this was just released today.
So this is a really cool place if you’re looking for something new, strange, unusual. Sometimes there’s a lot of random stuff that comes in there and sometimes I can look for pages and not see a decent looking plugin. But I am going to try and bring more of them out.
Anyway, let’s pop back to the Moon Phase Widget. The Moon Phase Widget, this is a plugin which is really kind of ironic to me, because I’m working on a plugin converting out some old (kind of) Java, but it’s from the 1990s. It’s a script that I use on one of my websites that’s a moon phase and it’s not quite as elaborate as this one is. This is actually a pretty elaborate moon phase widget plugin in that one of the things it does for you is once you go check it out, it shows you what it does.
It loads up on a page and it gives you your latest moon phase and of course it uses geotracking, grabs your IP address, figures out where you are, and it tells you what the moon phase for the day is. You notice this one here tags me at being in Victoria, British Columbia, which of course I am. Everyone knows that if you listen to my show for any length of time. You know I’m in the prettiest little city on the West Coast of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
It’s kind of a cool plugin. It shows you the moon, it’s going to give you a phase, tells you that it’s currently a new moon, it’s in Capricorn, etc. For those of you that just want to know a little bit more, it’s a pretty decent plugin. It sets up pretty cool. I set it up on what’s currently becoming my new sandbox page at 2030countdown.com, just a website counting down to the end of the world, because you hear all the things at the end of the world in 2030 is when it’s gonna die. We’re almost 10 years, 11 hours, and 45 minutes from that.
You can see the plugin sets up here really quickly and easily with the widget. So this is something you’ll want to check out if you’re interested in this or it can enhance – maybe you’re building out a metaphysical website or something. You can enhance that up by adding this plugin in here. Now it does toss in a link back to these guys here, but that’s the price you pay for a free plugin. You often have something that gets tossed in there.
At any rate, go check this out. It’s a really cool looking plugin and I currently give it just because of some of the little quirks in it, I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
All right, so where else do we go here today? What else is next on our list here? Oh, I’ve still got to cover into news and information. Well, I’m going to have this segment. I’m going to move it around. This will be in a different spot in here. We’re looking at a whole new format. This week here, there’s not a whole lot of WordPress news aside from the usual promotion pieces, X has been released. You know, nothing new. I’ve seen no major security issues and as you’ve noticed if you listen to my show long enough, I try to bring out security issues as soon as I know about them. I try to get that information out as quickly as possible because security has always been a major forefront for me through all the years, I’ve done stuff, and I try to get that information to you.
This is a quiet week. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I think even the hackers and spammers take the time off. I know the spammers take the time off, because my spam load on my emails since Christmas Eve has dropped by 60%. I’ve gone from 250 emails a day to about 50, and it’s like okay, so the spammers take holidays, too.
That’s good to know that the spammers take holidays also. It’s really kind of a bizarre thing.
I’ve made note of that over the years is that on major US holidays, so it kind of indicates to me I think most of the spamming comes from the US, not from other countries. Major US holidays, spammers just seem to vanish from the either and I know this because I have – well, I can’t count the number of email addresses I have. I have email addresses spanning 20 years. Because I own the domains, I’ve never terminated, so what I use them for is spam trams. When I see an email in one of those things I go, “Oh, that’s definitely spam.” But it’s been lightened up. So anyway, there’s no real WordPress news this week.
My contests – I’m going to continue the contests. The contests will continue. I’ll move that one around, too. I’ve had a tough time getting my act together in the last few months. I won’t go into the details of it; there’s a lot that goes on in a person’s life that no one ever hears about, and that has prevented me from getting a lot of things done in about the last four, five, six months. I’ve had a lot going on that’s made things difficult to keep up with. At any rate, I will be bringing forth some new contests in the year. There might even be just some personal contests launched by me with caveats to them, so we’ll see. Something will come with those to improve this. As I’ve said, the new decade is going to bring improved changes to the show and try to improve the value of this show to the point back.
Ha-ha – beard looks great. Thanks! Believe it or not, CodePotent, the beard you see here, this is the very first beard I’ve ever grown in my life. I’ve never had a beard in my entire life, and for some reason I decided that – well, we won’t go into that. Again, that leads to personal issues and changes. So at any rate, thanks a lot, CodePotent. I really appreciate it.
And well, let’s move it on here, so back to the contests. Well, they will be coming, and they will be there. If you would like to support the contests, you happen to know premium developers or you are a premium developer, send me an email to john@wppro.ca and I will make a contest around your thing. You’ll get a crapload of promotions for your plugin and we’ll give out a premium license. What’s it cost you for a premium license? The cost of an email and chewing out a ticket. It costs you nothing, really in the whole scheme of things. You get a ton of free promotions out of it. I thought about charging for this, I tried to charge for it, and something in my conscience wouldn’t let me do it.
Don’t ask me why; I’m a strange person.
Okay, next plugin I’ve got for you. I do have another plugin for you. This one here is called Post Kits for Elementor.
And Post Kits for Elementor, well, this one here is a really interesting plugin and for those of you that are late to the party, you might want to check out this plugin here. And of course what I meant by late to the party is I moved to Elementor development in the spring of this year. I started using Elementor for all of my developments. I’m really hoping they pick up the ball to start to support ClassicPress, because I am moving more of my things in that direction. And especially after some of the latest things I’ve heard about what WordPress is doing and working hard to make Gutenberg a full-on page developer. And if you don’t believe me, go do some research. I’ll bring up the information for that as I get it this next year. You’re going to see more and more of that in the coming year.
But what this one here, Post Kits for Elementor, this is a really cool one in that it gives you a whole bunch of options to creating blog layouts for your site. They’ve got a nice live demo here – site – that you can go to and check out. It’s a relatively new plugin. Again, I pulled this one from the latest plugins from the WordPress Repository. As you can see, they give you a whole bunch of different ways of laying out your blog listing page or your archive page. They make it relatively easy; they’ve got multi-post grid layouts, etc. in here. They’ve even got some sidebar layouts.
So this is something if you’re using Elementor and you’re setting up for a website that has posts in it, come check this out. It’s a really decent-looking plugin. I think it’s one I’ll look at incorporating in the next site I’m developing that has posts in it. I’m trying to find ways to improve the WP Plugins A-Z site; this one will help also.
Yeah, well the beard definitely helps with panning for gold when you go out there in the wintertime, panning for gold. Believe it or not, it actually gets pretty cold here on the island. I went out a few weeks ago with my daughter and we spent the night out on the claim, and it dropped down to -15 Celsius (for those of you who keep track, which puts you well below zero for those of you who live in Fahrenheit Land, and I can’t do the conversion on that.) But thanks a lot, CodePotent. The beard is definitely for gold panning. Gotta make me look like someone out there, you know – what do they call those guys? I don’t have the term for it.
At any rate, back to this. Go check out Elementor Post Kits and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay now I had mentioned listener feedback in my opener of the show, and I’m really looking forward to more listener feedback this year. It would really be great if people can tell me what’s good, what’s bad, what’s working, what’s not working, how I can improve. Send me information, tidbits, just stuff that will help make the show better for you. I do this show partly for myself, but I do this mostly for you, the Producers out there, who can really help the show grow. Without you, I have no show. Basically, I’m talking in the wind without you the listeners, and then all it does is allows me to, you know, express my difficulties or issues or whatever. And if I’m just talking in the wind, I may as well look in the mirror and not waste all the time that goes into this show.
This show requires approximately eight hours a week of time, and that’s a lot of time that goes into it. I mean, the show is going to be longer than half an hour today, but in general it’s about a half an hour long. A half hour podcast for those of you who think podcasts are easy, go do one. After you’ve done it for a couple of weeks, you suddenly realize it’s actually work to get a podcast out week after week. So think about that.
So this week, my show Producers – this show is supported by you as a value-for-value model, meaning that you get some back, send some value back my way. That value can be anything. That value can be money, cash. While money and cash definitely help, they help offset the costs that this show has. Not just my time, but server space, bandwidth, etc. We’ve got those costs on it. You can also submit artwork as Angel does for the show, and you can submit that by going to the WP Plugins A-Z Art Generator. The link is in the Show Notes for that. You can submit me articles, news, and information. You can do that off the links in the Show Notes or you can send an email direct to john@wppro.ca, and I will use them when I can and get them in here. You can also send in plugin suggestions for reviews. If you’ve got a plugin that you think is worthy of being on this show and you’d like to hear my viewpoint and opinion, send it to me. I will get it in and review it.
You can also create a monthly donation at Patreon. Patreon is going to be changing a bit because I’m going to use my Patreon not only for the WP Plugins A-Z show; I’m also going to use the Patreon to support my Rogues Tavern website and my Rogues Tavern stuff YouTube videos. So that’s what’s going to happen there.
Now with all of that, I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways, and one of the ways I do that is if you donate $50 or more or over in one lump sum, you get an Executive Producer credit. You can use those credits wherever credits are accepted and I’m more than happy to vouch for you viability and the fact that you are supporting the show. So I don’t have any of those this week, but I do have the artwork.
My artwork for the last few months has been supported by Angel Lemus from Koa Digital. He’s been sending me regular bunches of artwork that can be used, and this artwork is artwork I use on the website, it’s artwork I use in the Show Notes that are displayed in the podcast players from iTunes to the Google Play, to every other podcast player out there, no matter what the podcast player is. This artwork gets embedded with the show and is sent out on a show basis. So that’s one of the really cool things about it. It gives someone something different to look at.
I’ve changed a lot about how the artwork is over the last couple of years in particular. It used to be really busy and have a lot; now it’s quite simple, so I’m looking forward to more and more people doing that. You can download my logos off of the Art Generator page, where you can incorporate those logos into your artwork. And if you incorporate the logos, I will use it the way you want it displayed, versus popping them in myself to what I think looks good. I like to think I know graphic arts and to some extent I do. I’ve made money over the years doing graphic work, but I’m nowhere near as good as many graphic designers out there are, so I try not to overindulge or hit myself in the wrong places.
So a big thank you to all the Producers out there who come in under $50. I still get an occasional small donation via PayPal and I’ve still got a couple of donors over at Patreon, so a real big thank you to the ones that are still on Patreon and have been donating that small amount month after month. It’s still appreciated. It doesn’t help cover much, but it covers, and every little bit helps.
All right, so before I head much into it, I’ve got another comment here from Yannis. I will pop to that in a moment. But of course this is where I have a bit of a promotion piece, and this is a prerecorded commercial that I recorded for myself. It’s for CMS Commander and this is a spot that anyone who wants to actually spend some money on, they can take this one out. You can reach out to me; I do have the amount on my website, but I am negotiable on it. So let’s take it away.
This show is currently sponsored by…
Save time and money managing multiple WordPress websites. If you have several WordPress websites to manage, either for your clients or for yourself, then you know how much time it can take managing them all – time that is spent on mundane administrative tasks and then losing that time for your important business tasks. CMS Commander is an online service that solves this problem and makes managing multiple WordPress websites fast and easy, as simple as controlling a single site.
By placing all your websites in one powerful dashboard, CMS Commander makes it possible to update, backup, and manage them all at the same time in one place. Features of CMS Commander include one-click updates of plugins, themes, and WordPress Core for all sites, automatic scheduled website backups, website cloning and restoration, uptime monitoring and analytics integration, bulk posting, and automatic content.
Sign up now for your 14-day trial at CMScommander.com and access all the features that will allow you to manage more websites and save time.
Excellent, and as I said, I’ve been using CMS Commander myself for about seven years. It works very, very well. It’s worth the money if you have to manage multiple websites and it does so much more than doing auto-updates. It has some content; it has stats tracking – a lot in it. It’s really a great tool.
All right, and if you want a 14-day free trial, go use the link in the Show Notes. It is my affiliate link and I would greatly appreciate it. You could also go to wppluginsatoz.com/CMScommander and help me out. Every little bit helps.
Okay, and let’s take on a couple of comments here real quick just to follow up on CodePotent’s mention of my beard.
Yeah, mine will probably stay a lot longer than winter. What you see on this face now, this is actually four months of growth. I don’t grow a beard very fast. It’s taken forever to get it this long. I’m one of those guys that other men hate when I was actually shaving. I only had to shave once a week. If I waited a full week, it looked like a 5 o’clock shadow, which some of my buddies, man, they hate me, because they’ll shave in the morning and by noon, they have a 5 o’clock shadow.
All right, Yannis – your comment – “It would be nice if you could try the plugin you presented on a local installation and showing us the result in real time.”
I’ve done that; I can’t do that for the podcast, meaning because the podcast itself aside from what I do on the live show and demonstrate some brief things on the live show, it is the exact same show that gets packaged up and sent out to the podcast stream such as iTunes. Because of that aspect there, anyone listening on the podcast in their players, they won’t understand the context if I’m referring to something on the screen, and I try not to do that. It does happen from time to time, but what I would like to do again – I used to produce training videos doing exactly what you talk about. My training videos still exist. I still have like six or seven training videos that are now five and six years old that I still get people sending me questions on. “I really like this plugin. You did this and this. I can’t get it to do this anymore,” and I have to get in there and say, “Well, they may have updated or changed the plugin. I haven’t been back to that plugin in a long time.” It’s the problem of creating these training videos is they’re only good for about a year or two until the developer changes something or until WordPress changes something.
I enjoy doing them. The problem that comes with doing those training videos is one of those videos requires time.
Just doing a video, it doesn’t require what people see as the final video, which is the perfected edition. It’s usually anywhere from two, to five, to seven hours of work because first I have to do a complete run-through and see what it has and make sure I understand it fully. Then I have to do a practice setup to make sure I don’t miss any steps along the way. Then I have to remove it all and then I have to reinstall it while recording every step, and if I make a misstep along the way, I have to pause recording, back up, go do a couple of things, and it takes time. That’s the problem of a training video. People don’t really seem to grasp the concept of how much time it takes to do things, and that’s where the problem lies.
I still have to make a living. I have to pay my rent. I have to put food on the table. I’ve got two young kids at home that are age 10 and 12 years old, so they require unfortunate things. I’ve got to feed them, or they whine too much.
I’ve got to keep clothes on them, otherwise the RCMP will be after me for child abuse if I try to send them outdoors in the cold with no clothes on. It’s lots of things like that. So I will try to do more of those in the new year, but the problem is I have to have the income to do that, and there are times when my income gets really good and I get stacked on income and allows me the time to do these things. Then there’s times where I don’t have all the jobs and I’m scrambling to get work just to make and pay the bills – the hazards of being self-employed. You get these highs and lows. While I mostly even that out by having savings and backup, I still – you’re always in fear of eating through your backup in savings.
So yeah, I really will look and try to get that done over the next year. But at this moment, I just don’t have guarantees on it until I see changes in my income. So thanks a lot though and I will be trying to do that.
Okay, I don’t have a third plugin this week and ClassicPress, I don’t have a lot on ClassicPress this week, either. I’m going to do more on ClassicPress in the coming year. ClassicPress has proved itself out. Last year at this point, I pretty much added ClassicPress because I saw it as an up-and-comer, and I was watching it. I stood on the sidelines and watched it for it bit and seeing how it was going to go. But the last four months, I’ve seen some tremendous leaps forward in ClassicPress.
It’s been a fantastic option for WordPress. I started to move more of my clients to it. There’s still a few that I’m not quite ready to move them away from WordPress yet, because I’m just not quite ready for the change in what they’ll have to deal with, but I will get them moved there over the next year. You know, so these are the things that I’m going to be doing and I do like ClassicPress. I enjoy its speed; I really enjoy the speed of ClassicPress over WordPress. I’ve still got to get myself set up with a good set of plugins for ClassicPress that are recommended that I can recommend at every install, and plugins that I know are going to continue to work.
You know, the big fear is coming, like we’re hitting 2020, so we’re now two years away from the end and demise of the Classic Editor in WordPress. They say they’re going to support it, but my bet is they’re going to be pushing it out as fast as they can over this next year. They’re going to try and push people away from the Classic Editor in this next year. So these are changes that are coming along the line and I look forward to how everything is going to work out. I could end up in 2021 as doing just ClassicPress stuff – who knows?
I’ve already got the cppluginsatoz.com domain, which points to wppluginsatoz.com. Who knows? I could end up changing the show title over the next year. We’ll see. But one of the biggest things that’ll take that is we need to have in ClassicPress, it’ll need to have its own repository and will need to have more developers on par for creating plugins specifically designed for ClassicPress. I personally see that as a couple of years away at best.
Yes, they’ve already – I’ve actually caught an article or two about – oh, they’re going to lose some theme devs. Yeah, I’ve got an article or two about theme devs heading out and a couple of theme sites that are experimenting on supporting ClassicPress. There’s going to end up being a mass exodus, and that’s going to happen when they force Gutenberg 100% and they stop supporting the Classic Editor. Yeah sure, the Classic Editor will exist as a plugin that other people produce, because I noticed about a month or two ago there was a sudden surge in Classic Editor plugins to the WordPress Repository. I saw like five of them – five additional make your website shutdown Gutenberg and use the Classic Editor, and it’s like well, one already exists. Why are other developers creating them? Maybe they’ve come at it from a different angle.
But that’s just indicative of what’s happening in the field and it’s slow moving. It’s kind of like a snowflake coming downhill. It starts as a very small snowball and it’s like WordPress. I myself have been around WordPress now – my youngest is turning 11 this year, so I’ve been working with WordPress for just over 11 years. I started the year he was born – no, the year he was still in utero, so that’s when I started with WordPress. That’s when I discovered it. And when I discovered WordPress, nobody liked it, it wasn’t enjoyed, it had a lot of troubles, and I actually created tons of training around it.
I had a course I used to teach – I had several courses. I made good money in the first few years just teaching night classes at the local college and what-not on how to use WordPress. So I have the knowledge and the capabilities; it was the time. At that time there, I was also brand new in my business and I was doing it partly to train people and partly to build my business. So it’s going to be – ClassicPress is like that to me. I’ve watched it, it’s growing. The snowball got a little bigger this past year. Next year, it’s going to get even bigger and it’s just going to happen.
Oh, the theme review queue is six months long. Yeah, and that’s telling. Well, sometimes I – a low priority for themes if Gutenberg has its way. Well yes, they’re going to keep it a low priority for themes and because I caught an article and it’s a note from BlogAid. If you follow BlogAid, she’s got some really good info. I really like Mayana. I’ve worked with her on and off over the years and I’ve interviewed her, she’s interviewed me back in the early years of WordPress, and she’s sold. She 100% sold on Gutenberg and she’s already telling everyone that you don’t need a theme anymore; you can do everything in Gutenberg. She’s created Gutenberg courses for it and power to her.
That’s the path she chose. And of course her client base is more in that path, because her client base is self-bloggers, you know, bloggers and small people who create blogs and crafts and craft websites and stuff that don’t need a whole lot of stuff. And so yeah – yeah, the industry is fragmenting is what’s happening.
Yeah, you’ve pretty much got that one, CodePotent. Theme developers will be reduced to CSS tweakers.
No, there’s not much living in tweaking CSS, no, and most of my living is around creating a whole website and a look. The vast majority of my living is still in security and fixing hacked websites and preventing hacks on websites and improving site performance, and of course, getting them off of crappy website hosting to my own servers.
I know people I’ve mentioned it, I do run my own hosting business and my hosting business is pretty much what’s done really well over the last couple of years in that I have a small hosting business. It’s not big and I’m very picky about the clients I take to my servers. I will not take crap clients on my servers and that allows me to maintain the highest standards on my servers and allow people the resources they actually need to run their website without nickel and diming them to death. But yeah, that’s where – there’s more living in that than there is in that.
But as theme development, website development, and building out full-blown websites, yeah, the theme developers are going to be looking for a new place. And once they start looking at ClassicPress as it is, they’ll start moving there and they’ll start encouraging their client base to move there, and that’s where the ball will get rolling the biggest one will be bring the plugins online.
At any rate, this has been a longer than usual show and longer than usual episode. I’ve hit 43 minutes on it now – actually 40 minutes, because I forget about the five minute intro of stuff that I record.
What have I got this week? Just a follow-up on ClassicPress, the bits and pieces there, is of course I’ve got the usual links to their forums, the ClassicPress Club, the must-have plugin list, the forum list that’s maintained by CodePotent – and congratulations to CodePotent who’s on the board there now, who is going to help steer that for the next year. So a direct congratulations to you, CodePotent. Sometime in the new year let me know if you’d like to get in on doing an interview and put some more information out. I’m going to be working hard to get my interviews back online. I only managed to do about 20 interviews with developers over this last year; I would like to do more.
The interviews are set out as a separate show from this one.
Okay, that pretty much covers it up. I covered up just a couple of plugins this episode. I covered up the plugin for the WP Moon Phase, which I gave a 4 to and I covered up the Post Kits for Elementor, which I gave a 4 to.
I’m going to wrap this show up and this will be what goes out to my listeners. But if you want to hang around for a few minutes after and chat with me, for those of you listening live, please do.
A couple of quick reminders, the WordPress Meetup in Victoria for January I think is going to be cancelled. It was supposed to be next week or on January 7th, and I just haven’t had the time to prepare for that one at all, so I’m going to push that one off until February and we’ll just let it go at that.
You can also follow my journey of everything I’ve been going through and you want to hear more personal about me, go check out theroguestavern.com. You can go check out The Rogue’s Tavern on YouTube and you will see. You’ve got to go find the early videos and my Fireside Chat videos, which will be coming up more. These are the videos I do on the weekends when I’m getting away out to the range or when I’m going out gold panning or when I’m just going camping somewhere. These are outdoor videos to show that there’s more to life than sitting in front of a computer.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got. I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here. But if you do want to stick around and chat with me after, please do. I’ll happily do that because it is just a Boxing Day here in Canada, so out we go with her.
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.
Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing to the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also leave us a review on our Facebook page using wppluginsatoz.com/facebook.
You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
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.