Transcript of Episode 472 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 John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #472 here.

Episode #472

John:    All right, off the top, ClassicPress Options. You know, I still don’t have much for ClassicPress yet. It’s still pretty slow for me in the ClassicPress world of work, and I haven’t had time to do any research. But any of you ClassicPress users out there that are listening, provide me that information. I will get it into the show; you’ll get the credit. Hey, it’s all that great.

Aside from the usual roundup for ClassicPress, such as the ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress forums, CodePotent’s website – all those links are in the Show Notes. Go check it out. ClassicPress is very good for the most part and if you’re building from brand new scratch, it’s probably a great way to go. I just can’t flip my sights to it right now because I have too many things that are WordPress-dependent. Many plugins that I use are making themselves solely in the WordPress environment, so this is a problem for me.

All right, let’s dive into the world of WordPress then and see what we got. Real quickly to remind everyone, I have a link in the Show Notes that if you’re looking for the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins, the most newest ones that have been published at wordpress.org, check out the link in the Show Notes for the Plugins Browse New and check out plugins that have been uploaded within the last week. Oftentimes, you’ll find some really cool plugins in here that nobody knows about yet. They usually have less than 10 active installs; they’re brand new right off the starting line, so go check those out.

Okay, the first plugin I’ve got for you this week here is called Enable Media Replace. This is a free lightweight plugin that does one great thing in two amazing ways. It is a plugin that allows you to upload media to your website and replace an old file. Now, if you work on a well-established WordPress website, sooner or later you’re going to have to replace a graphic or replace a PDF file or replace something that needs to be updated multiple places across the website if you change the file name.

But what this plugin does is it allows you to upload a new graphic and keep the same filename, thereby not breaking any of your links to that file. The other thing it does, it has another option where you can upload the new file with the new filename, and it will upload all the links wherever it’s linked in WordPress. A really cool tool that can really help you out of a jam and make it easy to upload that content on your WordPress website.

Go check this one out. It’s Enable Media Replace, and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Amber: So I’d like to start my reviews off with a note that someone sent in. It goes:

Hello, John and Amber. I’m a new WordPress developer and I’ve had the opportunity to listen to one of your recent podcasts, Going to the Dogs. A great show between the two of you.

            Thank you.

And what I did like was that you were reviewing the plugins as good and crap, which makes it like an independent review authority on the plugins.

Along with being a recent WordPress developer, I am also an Android developer with an app on the Google Play Store. I would appreciate it if you know and can suggest a plugin that can get the review ratings and review comments for a given app from the Google Play Store to display on the WordPress website. It is like testimonials for the app. And I am also going to request a carousel plugin to display the above information since the above info is text-based and not an image.

Regards,

Vineet

Hopefully, I’m pronouncing the name right. So thank you, Vineet. Unfortunately, we didn’t really know of any plugins right away, so I went on a giant search. I searched and found a few plugins that will either grab up reviews made on apps and stick them into your site, or present them in a carousel, or there’s one or two that I found that do both for you.

And I did come across quite a few that are similar but not really exactly what you’re looking for. So I have a theme going with my plugins today; they’re all kind of this general idea. I reviewed the three best ones that I could find and then I have a list of them at the end, so that the other ones – I didn’t really check them out. I didn’t have the time. But if anybody out there would be willing to check them out and tell me what you think, I’ll happily put up your review, as well as make a review of my own if you’d like. So yeah, here we are.

So, the first one – I had initially thought this was for Android. It’s called App Reviews LITE. So I thought it was for Androids but once I plugged it in and everything, it turned out it’s only for Apple users. That was a little frustrating. It turns out that when you put in “app review,” whether you have Android or Google first or not, it’s mostly Apple stuff that pops up right away. Strange, eh?

So this one is a free version. You install it and it does it all. It grabs the reviews, sticks them into your site in a carousel that shows up on your site for you. The only problem is that it does it however it’s designed to, with no ability to make changes to the way it looks or anything. It’s all how it’s just made to be.

There are a few options you can pay for. There’s the Personal, which gives you the basics at $9.99. Business, which gives you a few more options but not much at $19.99, and Agency at $29.99. From what I can tell, you can’t really start chaining things up and having more control over it until you get to the Agency level, but I wasn’t about to pay for it just to test it out – sorry.

If you do end up going with this, I would say to plug in the free version, test it with the one that sets the limit of the free version, see if it works. If it works out great for you, then I would say go for the paid version. Anyhow, it’s a simple, easy one but you have no real control, no settings page or anything. You just plug it in and let it go, kind of like a rat race. This will get the job done for you as long as you are using Apple, but it doesn’t give you any personalization or control. I really don’t like that about this, so I rated it kind of low due to that. My rate is at 3 Dragons.

John:    There we go. All right, now I have no feedback on this one, so I’ll dive right into my next plugin here. The next one I have for you here is Site Kit by Google. Now, this is Google’s official plugin that allows you to bring in all the Google tools into your WordPress dashboard. It brings in the search console, analytics, AdSense, page speed insights, tag manager, optimize – all of those things are brought in to your WordPress dashboard, so you can see all of that when you’re in your WordPress website and you don’t have to login to all the different spots on Google to see what’s up.

This is their own production of a plugin, so it seems to work okay. I’ve not given it a 100% test drive, but I have checked it out a little bit, but it is something that you might want to consider if you’re real big into seeing what’s going on from Google for your WordPress website. And of course like everyone else out there in the world, we’ve connected ourselves up to Google so that they can track us all over the planet.

So go check this one out. I give this one a 4-Dragon rating.

Amber: And the next one I have is called Social Testimonials and Reviews by Repuso.

John:   Close enough.

Amber: So this one is a little better than the last one. Actually, it’s a lot better. This plugin will actually grab from 23 different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (which apparently doesn’t exist anymore), and the Apple App Store, Google Play Store – there’s 23 of them. This is pretty versatile that way. You get a lot more out of this one than anything else I managed to find.

This one allows you place the reviews that are collected into a prefab form on your website. You get to choose from six different forms: floating grid, inline slider, photo slider badge, or flash – all of the widgets that will make up your carousel for you. You also get to select your favorite reviews. You actually get a settings page to set everything up to your preference, which I, as you may guess, really appreciate. It’s very straightforward – great options – and I really liked what I saw in this.

Unfortunately, all good things come with a price. With this one, you get a free trial and then you need to choose from one of the price plans. However, these guys aren’t ridiculous with their prices like a lot of other ones that I’ve seen that want you to pay for them. For the starter, you get a pretty decent amount. It’s one business, so you can do it with one company. Unlimited reviews, one integration – really, everything you need for a person who’s just getting off the ground, and it’s only $9 a month (or $6/month if you decide to bill annually). And then it goes up to more steps to Professional and Agency. With each one you get more integrations and more of everything. Until the highest at Agency, you actually have unlimited everything. It’s essentially at Corporation level and it’s only $49/month or $39/month if billed annually.

It sucks that you have to pay, but like I said, the prices aren’t totally out there. And one of the reasons why I am so firm about wanting to control something like this is because if you were to say use the other plugin I mentioned, you piss off a couple of trolls, that first one is just going to grab all of the troll comments as well as the all the good comments and throw it into your carousel for you. That could be bad. I rate this one at 4 Dragons only because you have to pay for the better stuff.

John:    There you go. Sounds like a good way to look at it and another one to look at if you’re looking for all of that tracking stuff.

All right, the final one I’ve got for you here today is called Temporary Login Without Password. Now, this is an especially useful tool if you’re a developer. It becomes useful though if you’re a site owner. And what it allows you to do is if you need to send out a temporary login for somebody, I mean the only real way in WordPress without something like this is if you have to create them an account or give them your account, which I recommend against. You create them an account, they can log into your website, you give them the access they need, and then you have to remember to remove that account. I can’t count the number of times I’ve taken over a project or taken over a website that’s been established four and five years, and it still has the original developer from five years ago that they no longer talk to is part of that website’s administrative field, so we’ve got to clean up that mess.

Well, what this plugin does for you is it allows you to create a temporary login that you can then give the proper access to the website administrator, editor, whatever it’s going to be. You can set up this login so it has an expiry time, maybe a week, two weeks, or a month. Then you send the person you want to log in, you send them an email with a special link that logs them into the site without having to give them a username and password, and they gain access to the site through that link for as long as that link stays active. As soon as that link expires, they can no longer gain access to your site.

It keeps them from doing a lot of things in there, keeps them from doing things they shouldn’t do, and it gives you more control over who has access to your site and how long they have access to your site. It’s a great free plugin, really can help you out if you’re doing some development or inviting someone in for a short-term access to your site, go check this one out. It’s called Temporary Login Without Password and I give it a 5-Dragon rating.

Amber: That one I like the sound of.

John:    Yeah.

Amber: Too bad they only have it for WordPress and not other things.

John:    Yeah, well. WordPress is all we’re worried about here. The rest of the other things out there, irrelevant.

Amber: Still, that’d be awesome if one of those went all across the board type stuff.

John:   (inaudible)

Amber: So the last one I’ve got is Testimonial Customer Feedback Client Testimonial and Review. Kind of a mouthful for the name. So for this one, it’s not much about grabbing the reviews off the sites as it is about putting their testimonials that clients have made about your work onto your site. Kind of like a mobile portfolio that lives on your site. I find these testimonials to be rather helpful at times when I’m looking at sites. It gives me an idea of what other people think about your website, and this plugin offers the ability to place testimonials into a sidebar as a widget or in a page or post via shortcode.

It has a lot of options you can choose from and you have complete control over what testimonials go into this. Now, from what I saw when I plugged this in, you have to enter in all of the testimonials yourself, so a lot of copy and pasting goes on here. It’s a bit of manual labor to get it going. You also get a lot of different featured plugins within this. I’m not really sure why those are there; it’s entire page in the settings area where it’s featured plugins, I suppose these are just the plugins that this one works best with.

I do like the options it has for setting it up the way it looks and it’s a decent option if what you’re looking for is this for testimonials about your work on your website. I did need to go to the directions page a few times because it was a little confusing for me, but it worked out. And I would rate this a bit higher if it wasn’t for the confusion that I initially had in setting it up, but I rate this at 4 Dragons.

John:    Absolutely. Yeah, it sounds like it’s a bit more work. I have used plugins similar to that for my own website in the past. It’s nice when you can get things automated though.

All right, do you want to make mention about this list you’ve got here at the bottom, too?

Amber: Oh, yes. I mentioned it before. This list I have at the bottom here, these are the other plugins that I was able to find that do the same kind of idea, grab the reviews off other sites, put them into your site, or they are specifically to create a carousel to showcase all of your – I’ve lost the word –

John:   Testimonials.

Amber: That’s the word. I think I’ve said it too many times. My brain is trying to get rid of it now. So these are the ones that I found that are a similar idea, but I didn’t check them out. If anyone out there is willing to check them out or if somebody already has one in place and you’d like to let me know how it’s working for you, that would be awesome.

John:    Absolutely. Go check them out. Links are all in the Show Notes for that.

Okay, this show is now currently brought to you by…

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John:    Absolutely. If you’re looking for fantastic web hosting, reach out to me. I can provide you with the quality and the best, and I’ve recently brought a new server online, so I have opened up a whole bunch of new accounts that are available. You can be assured you won’t end up slowed down.

All right, contests. We do have a contest – and real quickly – our contests are powered by the Simple Giveaways plugin, who the guys there were kind enough to provide us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contests. This is a great plugin. I’ve been using it since it was probably about a month old, and I’ve watched the improvements over the last three years – a really great job they’ve done with it. Go check it out.

We are currently having a contest giveaway. We have a free for life ShoutWorks standard account that we’re giving away. The contest is running from now until sometime in August. I can’t remember the exact date. It expires in 18 days, 11 hours, 24 minutes, and 15 seconds. How’s that?

Amber: That’s oddly specific.

John:    Yeah, well that’s because I’m looking at the website for the contest.

Amber: Ah.

John:    Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests to enter the contest. The ShoutWorks is the one-click way to engage and grow your audience by giving you your WordPress site, taking on over 200,000,000 Amazon Alexa voice device and 4,000,000,000 Alexa-ready devices worldwide. The user-friendly ShoutWorks WordPress plugin allows anyone to create a voice app or a skill for Alexa for their WordPress website in less than five minutes.

Now this one here, you want to listen to the interview I did with Christian about ShoutWorks, where he goes in and explains pretty good detail about what this means. What it means is somebody – if you like JohnOverall.com or WP Plugins A to Z, you can holler into Alexa and say, “Alexa, play WP Plugins A to Z,” and it will automatically go find and play that. It’s basically teaching Alexa to recognize certain keywords that people can use on their Alexa to call up your information and use it to buy stuff. There’s really a whole lot to what this thing does. Go listen to the interview. It was really a great thing. The link is in the Show Notes to the interview with Christian from ShoutWorks.

Amber: Another thing I’d like to quickly point out about that is one of the major bonuses to it is that by having it linking it capable to Alexa, you also end up getting little advertisements on Amazon because of the connection there.

John:   There you go. I forgot about that one there. He – I think Christian mentions that in his interview, too. So yeah, go check that out. It’s really well worthwhile and we’re giving away a free for life ShoutWorks standard account, which is worth a fair chunk of money. I don’t have the full value available to me, but I know it’s worth a pretty penny. And you can go enter the contest running for the next 18 days.

All right, well that wraps up everything we’ve got for you. So closing out this episode, the plugins we covered – I covered up the Enable Media Replace, which I gave a 5 to, the Site Kit by Google, which I gave a 4 to, and the Temporary Login Without Password, which I gave a 5 to.

Amber: And I covered App Reviews Lite, which I gave a 3 to, Social Testimonials and Reviews by Reposo –

John:   “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair!”

Amber: I gave that one a 4. And Testimonial Customer Feedback Client Testimonial Review, which I gave a 4 to.

John:   You’re right, that is a mouthful. I think we need to open up the Amber and John Plugin Naming System, the WP Plugins naming business again. Create names for these plugins and these guys are just extending them out way too large.

All right, that’s all I’ve got. A couple of quick reminders. Remember, hey, Amber’s still new to the show. Send some feedback, let us know how she’s doing, man. I’m sure she would appreciate it.

And it does look like right now the meetup I thought I might do in August isn’t gonna happen. It’s not going to happen, meaning we’re gonna push the meetup into September because I’ve just got too much on my plate right now. I’ve got a deck to finish building, I’ve got other essential things in my life that gotta get done. You know, we’re dropping a show for this month because of some personal things in my life. It’s just way too many things happening, so we’re going to skip the August meetup this year and we’re going to move it to September. Hopefully, life will be a bit better in September than it is right now.

And again, a reminder. The interview with Christian from ShoutWorks, go check that out. And if you would like to be on an interview, just reach out at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. I’ll be happy to interview you for a interview show.

If you want to find out more about me and my craziness? Just go check me out at theroguestavern.com. It’s got a lot of stuff, my latest videos (although I’m a week or two behind on my videos). I’m trying to get them up as fast as I can to keep everyone apprized to what I’m up to.

That’s pretty much it. I am going to first off have my tequila shot before I let my girl take us on out of here. You know, this is the new tradition since the ‘Rona and I couldn’t go for my afternoon beer. My little tequila’s got his own little hat, you know. Gotta check out his little hat – when I can get it into focus on the camera. All right, tequila shot down and 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.