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 #444 here.
It’s Episode 444 and I’ve got plugins for Stock Photography, Lazy Loading, Newsletters, and ClassicPress Options, all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #444
John: It’s Episode 444 and I’ve got plugins for Stock Photography, Lazy Loading, Newsletters, 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 of course according to the Mueller Report, you are listening to WP Plugins A-Z, the best ClassicPress/WordPress podcast in the Universe. And a big thank you out there to the No Agenda show for their contributions of ideas and the occasional sound clip!
Squirrel!
There we go. I like to acknowledge them from time to time because they have been a big inspiration and like them, this a value-for-value show, and I look forward to everyone providing some value and more on that coming up later.
Make sure you subscribe to the Newsletter for additional information. Get out there, hit everyone in the mouth, spread the word about WP Plugins A-Z and catch it live every Thursday at noon on my YouTube channel. The links are in the Show Notes. You just go to wppluginsatoz.com/live.
All right, so what do we got for you today? Well, this one here is going to be oh, another great show. It is Episode 444, half of the perfect 888, and well it is the rise of a new dawn and the monsoons have returned to Victoria for some wet coast weather. Time for some water walking, hunkering down in the Brewery Overlook, hoping I won’t float away.
We’re off and I’m hearing from folks out there again, and it seems that all is not lost. Let’s keep this going. Please keep contacting me, sending me information, sending me tidbits. This is Number 4 of 52 episodes for 2020, working to provide you with the best WordPress/ClassicPress podcast show on the interwebs. I am still looking for more participation from you, my Producers out there. All my listeners, please more participation – it’d be great. This year as the sword of Damocles is hanging over the show, your feedback is important and the feedback over this year will determine whether or not that sword thread breaks or not, so keep it coming.
So let’s dive right into what we have. What have I got for you? Well, a little bit of news and information coming up your way. Actually, before I jump into the news and information, I do have something that popped into my head.
There are some things that are going to be happening to the show. I am lining up to bring other people into the show with me so I can have another person. I’ve got one developer that I’ve known for years. I’ve worked with him, hired him, and him and I are working to build out a system. I’ve talked about it a few times, the Plugin Dynamics business, but we had to put it on hold due to some issues at the end of the year. But we still are working on the plugin – but he’s going to be on the show.
Any other developers or other people in the WordPress community, or even if you’re just wanting to be on a podcast, hey, reach out to me. I’ll happily include you in; you just gotta bring in one or two of your own favorite plugins to review. So that’s a little bit of information to bring in aside from hearing from me. I know it’s been over a year and a half now that I’ve been doing this show by myself, and it’d be nice to hear an occasional other voice.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into the WordPress news from this week. What have I got for you? Well first off, I’ve got an article here that talks about “WordPress Tweaks to Perform Right After WordPress Setup.” Now, I’ve got a training video out there on the YouTube channel that shows you everything you need to do, and this article pretty much goes into all of that and a couple of things that I might have missed, so you’ll want to check this article out. If you’ve got Yoast installed, check this article out and see if it helps suit you, helps you get your Yoast tuned and working a little bit better and more functionality for it. It’s a really good article; it has a lot of descriptive stuff in it, so go check this article out. It could help you out dramatically.
And of course we have another article here to help your WordPress website load faster by removing or reducing the TTFB. And for those that don’t know what TTFB, that is time to first bite, and that is the amount of time it takes for someone to hit your website and ask for information and how long it takes your server to go, “Oh, you asked for something,” and then start delivering information. That can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to I’ve seen some servers upwards of 15 seconds just to get time to first bite. Now this is a really great article that describes some of the things you might be able to do to help time to first bite. But one of the biggest things you could do to help time to first bite is get away from crappy hosting providers.
You could always move to JohnOverall.com Hosting, where my time to first bite averages milliseconds usually. So check this article out; it’s got a lot of great information and tips in it that would help you out.
And of course we have some security issues this week to talk about. There has been some critical issues, a critical WordPress bug that has left, you know, over 320,000 sites open to attack, and this was due to the Infinite WP Client plugin, the WP Time Capsule plugin. They had a critical issue that left them open to hacking and there was a lot going on around it last week. If you are a user of any of those two systems – and Infinite WP Client is a lot like the sponsor I’ve got in the show right now, which is the CMS Commander – and they had a problem with their system, so this is something you’ll want to take a look at if you’re using it.
Another article on the same issue – this one is the same, WP Time Capsule and Infinite WP plugins, they were affected, so there’s a couple of different articles talking about the same issue and giving you a little bit more information about what was going on.
We’ve got another article here that’s talking about another flaw in WP Database Reset. This is a plugin that I think I’ve used once or twice. I don’t use it anymore, but it is a plugin that if you’re working on a development site or you’ve got a sandbox site and from time to time you want to refresh it, this one here goes in and helps clean out and resets that database for you. It’s usually a one-off plugin. You install it, activate it, use it, and then uninstall it, deactivate it, and delete it. But read this article and if you have that plugin and it’s still on one of your sites, make sure you’ve updated it or delete the plugin from your site.
Okay, and we’ve got another one about Google’s plan to drop cookies. Now, this is an interesting thing. I’ve just recently tripped across this and it’s information that I’m going to have to dig a little deeper into. It seems they are looking to remove cookies from browsers. You know cookies – the ones that everyone has, the cookies that WordPress depends on, the cookies that have been around the internet since basically its creation. They want to get rid of them finally to help protect third-party privacy, and this is going to be an interesting one. You’ll want to read this article, start finding out about this. This is something that is coming by about 2022. I know it’s a couple of years away, but you’d be surprised how you’ll wake up one morning and go, “My God, is it 2022 already?” I mean after all, I’m looking at it and going, “It’s 2020?” I can remember when it was 1999 and we were partying like the end of the world. So this is something you have to be aware of. You’ll want to catch up with this information. Go check this article out and go check out the information that is there.
All right, we’ll that pretty much covers up what I have for the WordPress news and information for this week and you’ll want to keep up. I’m going to be bringing in some other news and information types. I’ve started paying attention to more of the other WordPress podcasts and WordPress streams on YouTube, etc. So what I’m going to be doing with that is I’m going to try to bring in clips and other information. I’m going to expand the show out a little bit from plugins to see if that gains anymore attention from people, just to try and give you more information and get me more information. The hardest problem I’ve got is my limited time and if anyone has information, points me in the right direction for that information and says, “Hey, this is a great podcast. Listen to it. They mention some great stuff in this episode,” or, “Hey, this YouTube video,” point it to me. Please, reach out to me and send me the information. It saves me hunting for it. Maybe it’s something you tripped across. It could help me dramatically to produce a better show for you, and that’s what I’m after. I’m trying to produce a better show for you but to do that, I need your participation.
All right, this show supported and in that vein there, this show is supported by you, the 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 be donating money to help the show. Donations of $50 and over, you get a Show Note read out on the air with links in the Show Notes to wherever you want them to go. You can submit artwork. You can submit articles, news, and information.
You can submit plugin suggestions for reviews. Submit me videos, podcasts, and other things I can do to listen to it – something to help create you a better show. You can also create a monthly donation over at Patreon or anything I might have missed.
All right, and I like to acknowledge the Producers who have supported the show in various ways over the last week.
This week, I would like to acknowledge Daniele Pais for the artwork that is being used in this week’s show, and it’s a fantastic piece of artwork that inspired the title. It’s called “Dawn” – “WordPress Dawn” or “Dawn of WP.” Let me bring that piece of artwork up for you guys, so you guys can take a look at it. That’s what I’ll do is I’ll bring it up and get you a sneak peek here on the livestream – there you go, a sneak peek of this week’s artwork.
It’s called “WP at Dawn,” so this is a really cool piece of artwork and this is what I’m looking for, is some really good, inspiring artwork for the show. So make sure you check it out. Send me some artwork if that’s what you want to do, but thank you very much Daniele Pais, and that’s over at danielpais.com journal and so thank you very much.
There’s a link in the Show Notes to his website, so go check him out for all the information. (Yes, you use cookies like everyone else out there on the internet.) All right, just what we just discussed. Those cookies are gonna go away. All right, so thank you very much for that.
And this week we have no Executive Producers, but a big thank you to all the Producers who came in under $50 and those who have set up small weekly subscriptions. They remain anonymous and I thank you very much. They do really help the show out and a thank you to those who hire me because of this podcast. That’s as good as donating to the show.
All right, so let’s dive into the meat and potatoes section of the show.
All right, so what have we got for you this week here? ClassicPress options. We’ve got ClassicPress at the front of the line here – and I want to bring in more ClassicPress, but sometimes it’s hard for me to find out the ClassicPress stuff. It’s a little client this week for ClassicPress, unfortunately. I hadn’t had much time to do any research and there was nothing that jumped right out in front of me this week from all the places I do follow, so I don’t have a lot – any news, information, or a ClassicPress-specific plugin this week.
Just another usual note to say those of you that like ClassicPress, use ClassicPress, devoted to ClassicPress that are listening to the show, send me some information. Keep me apprised of everything. It’s hard for me to keep my hands in everything in it. I don’t know if I talked about it yet; I think there’s one thing I needed to talk about and that was – yes, I’m kind of stuck in the WordPress universe more than I expected to be, and this is due to multiple reasons. The biggest one is that I got myself thoroughly into the Elementor system and Elementor abandoned WordPress 4X down and I have no support at that point forward with them and I’ve got to get out of there. I started to see about getting out via Beaver Builder, but as I started to use Beaver Builder to build up a test website, I started running into conflicts in ClassicPress with some of the things I needed to do, and this was creating me problems.
Plus, the other problem with Beaver Builder is to get the same functionality I get from Elementor at about $150 a year, Beaver Builder is going to cost me about $300 a year, so it’s a big jump. The initial investment to jump to Beaver Builder for all the same functionality was $360 and while I’m not cheap, it’s just – I don’t have that kind of capital at the moment to invest. I know it’s an investment and it’s a worthy investment, but it’s also a massive learning curve for me to relearn another builder system, so I’m going to be stuck in the WordPress system for a while until I eventually get myself worked out of it. So it is something to keep aware of and something to pay attention to, and I really do believe ClassicPress is going to take over a good 25-30% of WordPress’s market, and ClassicPress and WordPress are going to be the dominant CMS systems out there. So please, provide me the information.
All I’ve really got for you this week is the usual stuff, the ClassicPress resources over at ClassicPress Club, who often puts up articles and news and information that are of value to people, and he’s the one that tipped me off to the Elementor dropping support which is his latest article still there. The must-have ClassicPress plugin list over at the ClassicPress forums, and then of course CodePotent’s plugin directory, and CodePotent’s plugin directory is a nice place to get started and if you really want some information and tips to help you with ClassicPress, reach out to CodePotent. He’s like a dream. I did an interview with him last year and you can find that in my Show Notes, so go check out that interview. So thank you very much and ClassicPress, I really want to give you more, but I’ve got to go where I’ve got information at the moment.
All right with that, let’s move on here and talk about some WordPress plugins. What do I have for WordPress plugins this week? The first one I’ve got for you here is called StockPack, and StockPack is a plugin for WordPress that will allow you if you are using stock photography websites such as Adobe Stock, Unsplash, Deposit Photos, you know, this one here allows you to connect directly to those accounts in your WordPress site and then to download those images directly from your account to your WordPress site, thereby avoiding the hassle of logging into your Adobe account, downloading it to your computer, modifying and changing it, uploading it to your WordPress website.
You can download it directly from the stock photography site to your WordPress website, saving you a step, saving you some time. A very nice little system; it’s a great little plugin. It is a freemium plugin and on their free version they give you what they call 50 requests per hour. I’m not sure if this means downloading 50 images or if it means you can load up the 50 images or request up to 50 different images to look at in your dashboard. Once I know that, it would be a little bit more – I’d be able to figure it out more. I mean, if it’s 50 images per hour, I don’t think anyone would ever reach that amount. I’m leaning more toward the 50 requests per hour. After that, you’ve got to buy a license for it.
Not a bad deal if you’re just looking for a few images, you know exactly what you’re looking for. You type in the exact keyword, you get them up, you hit your 50 requests per hour, not a problem. So anyway, this is a really great one.
The plugin was sent in to me by Calara Lonut – I’m butchering the name and I’m really sorry about that – and that’s who sent me in the plugin to talk about it, so thank you very much for the tip. I believe that’s the developer of the plugin, so it’s something you will want to check out. A really great-looking plugin and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, so what do we got next for you? I’m getting a little something to drink here. All right, so we have Lazy Load for GMaps and this is a plugin here that if you use GMaps – Google Maps, that is – you can use this plugin here to have the maps load lazily. Now of course the oddball thing about Google is that Google’s page speed is one of the biggest things out there and many people are trying to get to 100%. This may help you. The odd thing about Google is they’re so all about speed but yet most of the products they deliver to you to be integrated into a website are not very speedy at all. They actually slow your site down ironically enough.
But this plugin here, while it’s really great, it’s not as simple as many other Google Map plugins. It looks from what I can tell is that you have to go in and manually create the shortcode to create your map. It doesn’t have a simple thing that I could see in their testing on it. I didn’t actually load and install it, but I just went through the testing of it.
You have to manually create the shortcode, meaning you’ve got to put in your latitude, longitude, and other little bits and pieces for it, and then copy and paste the shortcode. And of course once you do it once, you don’t have to do it anymore because you generally only use one or two maps on your site, your contact page, maybe another spot, and it’ll lazy load the Google Map, helping to speed up your website load time. Something you may want to check out; it could be a useful plugin for you if you’re doing a lot of building out there and it’s called Lazy Load for GMaps and I give it a 4-Dragon rating.
Okay, so this next little bit is a little bit more than just a single plugin. What I’m going to be doing here is I’m going to talk to you a little bit about – we’ve got mailing list plugins and services. There are quite a few of them out there.
And to start it off, I’ve got an article here from Delicious Brains, and they did an article comparing Mail Poet and WordPress Newsletter plugins versus MailChimp and Drip. So they’ve compared a couple of plugins versus a couple of services. It’s a really good, in-depth article about what the different plugins do and what the different services do, and this is something I would love to do if I had time. But because they’ve already done it, let me just bring it forward for you to go check out. The link is in the Show Notes for the article and read it through. It gives you a good idea on what’s happening here.
You know, the way they talk about it is that it’s got – you’ve got both pro and cons, depending on how you’re going to deal with newsletters for your website. I mean, MailChimp is good; I still use it for my newsletter. I’m slowly looking at moving away from it. Mail Poet is my preferred source because I keep everything on my WordPress website and Mail Poet now has a mail server that you can send your email through, unless you have your own service for it. So there’s lots of really good things in there and it’s a good article, well worth the time to take and read, and find out a little bit more.
On that vein there, I was also recommended to a new plugin here today. It was sent to me – and I forgot to write down who sent it to me. It’s called Boldermail and it was recommended to me, and it was probably recommended – I’m pretty sure it came from the developer, as they recommended a plugin to have a good look at. Give me a second here and I will take a look to see where that one went, because I remember having someone send it to me.
Yep, it was sent in to me by Hernan Villanueva, so Hernan sent me in the plugin, so thank you very much, Hernan. It looks like to be a very interesting plugin. Now, this is a third-party service that plugins into your website. It looks to be similar to Mail Poet, except they don’t have a free section; it’s automatically you start paying for the service. So it’s something you may want to check out. It looks to be a pretty decent premium service for you to check out and for sending out your newsletter subscriptions.
And from their backstory on it, they’ve been working on it for quite some time before they brought it out to the public. So go check this one out, Boldermail.
And also don’t forget, as it was mentioned before, Mail Poet – and if you want a little bit of information on that, I did a great interview with Kim Gjerstad from Mail Poet and the link is in the Show Notes for that. It was the last interview previous to the one that’s out right now – is Interview 47, where you can learn a little bit more about Kim and Mail Poet and what they do, so it was a really great interview, so it was well worthwhile. So go check that information out.
Okay, so that covers up the plugins and stuff. We’re gonna go with this show is currently sponsored by…
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Okay, listener feedback – I do love the listener feedback and I’m really happy to see it coming in and more recommendations for plugins, and I’ve got another piece of listener feedback this week. And it’s simply:
“Hi John. I’m a few weeks behind on listening, but just heard your wrap-up in 2019 and just wanted to let you know that we’re still out there listening and appreciate all the work and effort that goes into the podcast and I’m not developing a lot of new sites at the moment but appreciate what’s knowing out there when I do. Keep up the great work and I hope you have a super 2020.
-Tim”
So thanks Tim and I really greatly appreciate it. And I remember Tim; I have actually helped him out. He’s hired me out a couple of times in the past few years to do some work for him, so thank you very much, Tim. I greatly appreciate all your support you’ve given me over the years for the show and my business.
So anyone else want to send me information, please don’t forget you can reach out to me through various methods.
You can hit the Contact page, send me an email direct to john@wppro.ca, there’s also the Facebook page, Twitter, and pretty much – yeah, that’s pretty much it. That pretty much covers everything.
Okay, so let’s pull us up to what we’ve got next. We’ve got a contest. I do have a contest up this week and the contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who kindly provide me with the premium version for the contests. So thank you very much to them and it is a fantastic plugin and I’ve been using it since pretty much it was brand new, and they’ve done nothing but improve this plugin over the last couple of years. I believe it’s like two or three years old now and it just keeps getting better. They release regular updates to it and improvements and expansions, and it does more and more, so it’s a great plugin so go check it out.
So with contents I’ve got for you this week is sponsored by me at JohnOverall.com and it is of course a simple Amazon $25 gift certificate – gotta love when your brain does…
Squirrel!
One more time – all right, the contest going right now is a simple $25 Amazon gift certificate and all you’ve got to do is go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter your name, email address to be entered into the contest to win the gift card. We’ll pick a winner and I will send you via email however it does through Amazon. I’ve never actually done one, but I’m pretty sure it’s relatively straightforward to send a $25 gift card. So at any rate, sign up for it and save $25 on one of your next upcoming purchases from Amazon.
All right, so that pretty much closes out everything in this episode here and what did I cover up? I covered up StockPack, which I gave a 4 to; Lazy Load for GMaps, which I gave a 4 to; and Boldermail, which I gave a 4 to, with a couple of kudos out to a couple of other plugins that weren’t reviewed.
The last couple of tips and reminders, the next WordPress Meetup in Victoria will be February 25, 2020 in Victoria, and it will be on assessing your website host. You’ll learn how to assess your website host. Is your hosting company and hosting package really meeting your needs? Learn how to compare hosting companies and their packages, decide what services you need, what you don’t need, and how to know how much space you need, etc. It’ll all be broadcast live on this YouTube channel. So for more information, go check out wppluginsatoz.com/meetup.
And the new interview is up with Kenny Lundbäck – I’m not pronouncing it correctly; it’s a really tough one – so from WP Hydra Code about his order and inventory managing plugin for WooCommerce. A very interesting plugin – there will be a review coming up for it pretty soon. I should be getting the time the rest of this week to get in there and finish testing it. He was kind enough to set me up with a dev site and I’ll get it all checked out.
If you want to find out a bit more about me, go check me out at theroguestavern.com, where I’ve been videotaping my adventures into the wild, searching for gold, hiking, camping, and out on the gun range and more.
And that’s pretty much everything I have for you, so thank you very much. Anyone who wants to stick around after the credits, ask me credits – boy, my brain is just losing it now. Anyone who wants to stick around after the credits, all you’ve got to do is enter some chats in the chat box for YouTube and I’ll be happy to chat with you.
Other than that, thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to listen to the show. I’m gonna 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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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.