Transcript of Episode 458 WP Plugins A to Z

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 #458 here.

Episode #458

Okay, so what do we got for this week here? ClassicPress Options. Okay, this week – extremely light on ClassicPress. In fact, there’s no new plugins for me, nothing except the usual stuff. I haven’t had time to do any research or work towards ClassicPress Options. If you are a ClassicPress user listening to the show, submit me stuff. Please help me out here. Because the vast majority of all my work is in WordPress, I’m stuck there. I don’t have time to always be in ClassicPress. I really wish I did, but none of my clients are ready to move off to ClassicPress yet. I imagine that’ll happen in another year or two and then there’s going to be a mass exodus from WordPress. By then, ClassicPress should be pretty stable, have its own plugin repository, and a few other things, and that’s when I believe the exodus will occur because people will have been fed up.

Okay, so what do I got for ClassicPress? Well, I have for you of course the usual: the ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress forums, the list of ClassicPress-specific plugins – all those links are in the Show Notes. So go check all that stuff out, folks and go find out a bit more about ClassicPress and see how it may be the platform for you to build on versus WordPress.

Okay, so what have I got for WordPress plugins? Starting, I have a couple of photo gallery plugins. These came about due to some research and some stuff I was doing for a project I had to work on this last week and finding a photo gallery to display a set of images in the sidebar and on the front page and also display only one image at a time and randomly display those images from a selection of images that were uploaded to the gallery. So first off, I went looking and the first one I found is called Responsive Photo Gallery.

Now, this is a pretty decent photo gallery plugin. I was really liking it. I was testing it out on one of my test sites. It does work in ClassicPress because my current test site is all ClassicPress, so I find out real quick if a plugin won’t work in ClassicPress. At any rate, it was working really well. It was doing everything I needed, providing all the settings I needed, uploading images, etc. – then I hit a snag. I needed to have it display one image or one column, as it’s often called in a photo gallery. And it turns out to display one column, you’ve got to buy the pro version of this plugin. You can display two or three columns, no problem. But if you want to display one, four, or five, you need to buy the plugin – you need to buy the pro version.

Well, because I was doing this for a nonprofit organization that has no money, we weren’t about to buy a plugin, so I had to go do some digging deeper. Other than that, this is a really great plugin. It does work very well for what it needs to do, so I gave it of course a 4-Dragon rating. Go check it out, Responsive Photo Gallery plugin, a pretty decent one.

Okay, next up I have for you another photo gallery. This one here is Photo Gallery by TinWeb Mobile Friendly Image Gallery. This one here is an absolute freebie. It gives you everything you need. If you’re looking for a gallery plugin to create multiple galleries that you can embed via shortcodes or embed via widgets and it creates these galleries either from your media library images or you upload them directly to the gallery itself, and it keeps the images outside the media library.

It’s a really great plugin. I was really thrilled to discover this one after I had been working with the first one. Once I got into it, I found this one here had some other fantastic settings in it in that when you first configure it up, you could configure it up for slightly larger size thumbnail you want and then you can set the height and width on it to create thumbnails that are properly proportioned for the types of images you’re using. You can do that on a per-gallery basis or you can set it as a universal setting across the whole site. You can set up how it displays the images. It allows you to go one row, all the way up to multiple rows – I can’t remember what the max was. It allows you to randomly select them, set them in ascending, descending order – all sorts of settings for this plugin, and they’re all included in the free version. No having to fork out extra bucks for this plugin.

Fantastic plugin, it did exactly what I needed to do, it allowed me to create the project, my client was happy about that – just the way I like it. Go check this one out, Photo Gallery by TinWeb – Mobile-friendly Image Gallery, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Okay, the next one I’ve got for you… this falls in line with the way our world is right now, keeping an eye on you, tracking you wherever you’re going. Let’s share that data and find out what is happening. (Not quite that serious, but pretty close.) It’s called Server Info WP.

Now, if you’re on a shared hosting with many companies, you get minimal information about your server and what you’re doing with it. This plugin here helps take the hassle out of understanding what you have on the server you’re on. Install this plugin; it pops three additional blocks onto your WordPress dashboard, and those three additional blocks give you information about your shared hosting environment. It tells you what the server info is, the server’s IP address is, what software it’s running, whether it’s running Apache Ingenix, it tells you what your PHP version is that you’re running, how much memory you’re allowed, how much memory is being currently used, what your uploads are. It gives you a whole lot of stuff that you may need for diagnosing or figuring out if you’re having problems. It even tells you if their server is configured for it. It even tells you what your CPU cycles are that you’re currently using for your website.

A really great little plugin, really simple. It just provides you with information and does nothing more, so basically if you need the information you turn it on, you don’t need it, you turn it off. No sense in leaving it running. At any rate, go check this plugin out. It is called the Server Info WP and that is a 5-Dragon rating for that one.

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Okay, our contests – we have not created a new contest yet. We’re still reaching out to get licenses, etc. They are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin and go check them out. And we do have a winner from the last contest. His name was Martin and he won the license and I realized today – he emailed me back finally after a few days right when I was busy, so I gotta email him out his license key. So it is coming, Martin. I do have it; I just hadn’t got to it because I saw your email, I was busy, and I meant to get to it later and of course – whoop – it gets buried in my inbox.

Okay – and so who knows what the next contest will be? We’ll let you know as soon as we have that one all wrapped up and ready to announce.

Okay, closing out this episode I covered up the following plugins: the Responsive Photo Gallery, which I gave a 4 to; the Photo Gallery by TinWeb – Mobile-Friendly Images Gallery I gave I 5 to; and the Server Info WP, which I gave a 5 to.

And of course a couple of reminders. We do have another WordPress Meetup coming up in May and I don’t know the date at the moment because I forgot to look it up to make sure of when it is, but it is towards the end of May, I believe. And it will most likely be – well, there’s a better than average shot that we could be in the meeting room again. If not, I will do it live from the Brewery Overlook once again. That seemed to be pretty successful. I had quite a few people show up for it. I was really quite pleased to see that many people on the online stream. So thank you very much folks for showing up for that.

I do have a new interview that is set to be released. It was supposed to be released on Tuesday, but my life got sidetracked and I didn’t finish the editing on it, so that is coming. Okay, if you would like to have an interview and be in an interview show that is separate and apart from the podcast, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/interview. And while you truly don’t even have to be a developer, you can actually just be a WordPress professional with a subject you want to discuss. I had somebody sign up that’s not a developer, but they’re a WordPress professional and they want to be interviewed, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to keep that guest name a secret and it would be quite exciting to have him on the show.

All right, if you want to find out a bit more about me, go check me out at theroguestavern.com, where I set up my adventures in the wild, hunting for gold, hiking, camping, and currently working on building myself a backyard forest garden, and I released the latest video on that yesterday, so you can go check that out.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you, so I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here.

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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.

Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.

John: God, I just love that laugh. It is tequila shooter time!