Transcript of Episode 480 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 #480 here.

Episode #480

John: All right. So first off, we go diving into the depths of plugin depravity. ClassicPress options, again, I still haven’t had time to do anything. If I’ve got any ClassicPress listeners out there, please give me some information on ClassicPress, send me plug-ins, send me new resources, send me information. I just don’t have time to do it at the moment. I’m so tied up with all my regular work. The only time I see ClassicPress is when it comes across my table another way. Everything I’m doing right now is in WordPress, and I want to keep supporting ClassicPress as much as I possibly can. It is really quite good, and I do feel that in a few years’ time it’s going to take a sizeable chunk of WordPress’ chunk of the Internet. So usual stuff there, ClassicPress Club, the ClassicPress forums, the code potence website, et cetera, lots of really great stuff there. Let’s move on into WordPress plugins.

So what have I got from WordPress plugins this week? The first one I’ve got for you right out the gate is called WPFront Notification Bar. Now, this is a plugin from one of the projects I’m working on one of my clients, one of my clients has a website I’m doing lots of work on. And when I get clients, I go through their plugins and see if they’ve got, and then, basically what I’m doing is looking for ideas on plugins I haven’t seen or variations on plugins I use, and I found this one here in their list. And it’s a really great bar. It’s what they use for a notification bar at the top of their website.

It’s relatively easy to set up straightforward. It’s a free plugin. It allows you to even put short codes in there, adjust colors. You can delay the appearance of the bar, auto-close the bar, and you can put the bar at the top or the bottom. It kind of reminds me of the old Hello bar except this one’s free and it is simple. Now, one caveat with it, you only get one bar, you can have multiple bars across different pages, you get one bar site-wide, but that’s the price you pay for free. I don’t know if the developers moved it up to the point where they’re got a premium version or not. I didn’t find that so I’m going to play this one as if it’s a completely free version, and we’re going to call this a five-dragon rating.

John: Go check it out WPFront Notification Bar.

Amber: And the first one I’ve got for you is Supreme Modules Lite – Divi Theme, Extra Theme, and Divi Builder. I really don’t like working with Divi.

John: Divi, Divi, Divi, yeah, Divi sucks.

Amber: But for Divi, this one actually is pretty cool. I found this when I was searching for automatic upload feature image style plugin for the site of one of our clients. It didn’t quite give me what I was looking for, but it does have some amazing options in it. Now, this does have a pro option, but in the free version, it offers quite a few useful things, such as interactive flipbooks, Facebook feed, Price List, Icon List, and 16 other items. You get 20 in total, and it works fairly well. It didn’t have the Auto Upload featured item that I was hoping for, but it does have Price List, which gives you the option to put in multiple items, but you have to put in manually. If you go pro, it does offer 40 more, actually, more than 40 — more options, and I wouldn’t go pro on this, but that’s just me. I found it to work really well. I got Divis like plug it in, and it shows up in your widgets. It’s pretty awesome for what it is. I rate it a four-dragon.

John: Very nice, but yeah, this is the website that we got. We inherited with a Divi Theme and we just got to make it work. So that’s the way life goes. I would never build in Divi. I tried Divi years ago, and I went, yeah, Divi, no work. And they really haven’t gotten any better over the years, but I do know people that like Divi for some reason. It works with their brain.  That’s the best way I can describe it. Everyone’s brain works a little different, and those that work with Divi have a really different brain.

Amber: Whatever floats your boat?

John: Yeah. Okay. The next one I have for you here today is called Contextual Related Posts. Now, this is a plugin, I may have covered this plugin way back in the distant past on webs on my — on this show a couple of years, four years, I don’t know somewhere. I remember this plugin once I started playing with it. And looking again, I found this one on one of my clients’ sites. It’s currently in use there, and he’s got an older theme that doesn’t have the built-in contextual posts, like many types of themes have the built-in stuff where you can just bring in a widget or it’s got a built-in, we can turn it on to show related posts on a post. He’s got an older theme that doesn’t have that.

It’s a really good quality theme. It has been kept up to date, but this is something that’s never been added to it. At any rate, this one here does a really great job of bringing in those custom posts or contextual posts or related posts to the bottom of your post. It’s very easy to set up. It’s got different layouts in it, built into it, that simple to set up.  It does have some premium stuff in it that you need to make it work at its best. So in that vein there, this is a really good plugin, and we’re going to give this one a four-dragon rating. Go check it out Contextual Related Posts.

Amber: And the next one I have is Halloween WooCommerce.

John: Woo-hoo, Halloween!

Amber: So for everyone using WooCommerce, this is a nifty little plugin. It’s a total freebie and has a really awesome Halloween style. With this, what it’s for is creating coupons, and what you do is you go in there and you create the coupons, and what it does is it hides them around your site. And whenever someone finds it, they get a pop-up that you can either make vibrate or not. And once the customer has found them all, or you can just put one if you want, you can put — it seems like you can put as many as you want. There are — but once they find them all, they get the coupon.

And there are all kinds of shapes for this. There are 51 different shapes you can choose for the coupon pop-up thing. There’s a tombstone, skulls, pumpkins, like, there’s all kinds of things. And if you want to choose more than one shape, to say, you want to put in 10 — to 10 different shapes, you just use the CTRL button to choose multiple. I think it’s just awesome. How much better can it get than hiding little Halloween things all over your site, so someone gets a coupon?

It’s very easy to get going to, you plug it in, go to the settings, and the settings are very straightforward, very easy to manipulate. And if you have a few Halloween themes, or going for like your sales and whatnot, then you can connect it to that specifically as well.  It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you like Halloween. So go check it out. I rate this at five dragons.

John: Oh, there we go.

John: Dragon stumbling, getting out of his lair.

Amber: Or he just didn’t agree with me.

John: Yeah, well, he might not have. I really don’t know. Anyway, it does sound like a cool idea to have. If you’ve got a shop that sets up and sells stuff at Halloween, this might be a cool way to get your customers excited about what you’re doing. Okay. The final one I have for you today, this was a plugin that was sent in to us. It was sent in to us by Ekin Tertemiz, the developer of the plugin, and it’s called WP Dispatcher – Secure Download Links.

Now, this is an interesting plugin. I didn’t get time to set it up, but I did check out everything on how it seems to work, and what it does is it allows you to upload files to a secure directory. Once you set up, it creates a secured folder on your WordPress website. You can upload files to that, and then, you can create a link to that with a short code.  Now, every time you issue out that short code, it creates a unique link to be able to download that file that expires. It’s a unique leak that expires just to download that file. The great way this could be used, to say you’re giving away a PDF document on people who register for your email list, they get that — they get the return email from you with the short code. They only get one link out of that that they can download, and they can’t download it multiple times. So that’s one way it can be used. There’s multiple other ways that it could be used.

But it’s a really cool little tool. I kind of like what it’s doing. It allows you to upload the file, set the expiry time limit, use the short code to generate the download link on the fly, and it just works really well. So it’s something you might want to look into if you’re doing that kind of marketing, or if you’re allowing downloads from your site and you needing to secure the file that’s being downloaded. This might be something to look into. Go check it out. At the moment, I give it a four-dragon rating, and it’s WP Dispatcher.

Amber: That sounds like a really cool idea. All right. And the last one I’ve got is Keep Emoticons as Text. So I’m known by everyone else out there, but I personally am getting a little irritated by this new fad of people using emoticons as the language for comments and whatnot. Luckily, the Geek Goddess, I love her handle, she has created this, and you download it, plug it in, and off it goes. It just stops everybody from being able to use as ridiculous emoticons, and it keeps it as text. It’s like a little smiley face, doesn’t become the bright yellow thing with it, big smile, whatever. Instead, it’s just a colon and a parenthesis. So when people try to use emoticons, it’s just kind of like gobbledygook, so they actually have to start using words.

John: Oh my god, they can’t do that. Heaven forbid, you make people use words. It would be like making them make a phone call.

Amber: Oh, wow. A home phone call, man, that’s just terrible, especially it’s got cord.

John: Oh, I know.

Amber: So this is a total freebie, and it’s nicely kept up. I would definitely recommend this for people who are just sick of emoticons everywhere. I know I sure am. I rate this at five dragons.

John: Absolutely.

John: All right. Okay. This show currently brought to you by — where to go? There it is.

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John: Absolutely finest quality web hosting, and I’m cleaning up a server right now getting it brought back online. So I’ve got space available, but it won’t last. So make sure you check into me for quality web hosting. Okay.  Contests, we don’t have contests this week, but we will have them soon. I would like to thank Charlie for stepping up and helping out the show and taking over managing our contests and getting them organized. So they will be coming along shortly, and I am thrilled, and I thank you very much, Charlie, for everything you’re going to be doing going forward to help the show out. And as I said, folks, there’s lots of ways to help the show out aside from giving us cash, things that need to get done that we just don’t have time to do ourselves.

Amber: Yes, thank you, Charlie.

John: All right. And let’s see here, now, the plugins I covered up in this episode here was WPFront Notification Bar, which I gave a five to. The Contextual Related Posts, which I gave a four to, and the WP Dispatcher, which I gave a four to.

Amber: And I covered Supreme Modules Lite Divi Theme, Extra theme, and Divi Builder. Holy cow! I gave that a four to. Halloween WooCommerce, I gave a five, and Keep Emoticons as Text, which I also gave a five to.

John: Woo-hoo, lots of fives! Okay. Now, we’re going to give out a couple of quick reminders that need to be done, and then, Amber and I are going to dump into the new show segment which will start at about that point. And what we’re going to do is, approximately halfway through it, give or take, we’ll cut it off. For those that are listening to the podcast download, if you want to hear the rest of it, you’re going to have to tune in to the YouTube channel to have the rest of it.

For those of you that are on YouTube, when we cut that off, and don’t go away, wait until after the closing credits, we’ll come back, and then, we will finish our discussion. The reason for the closing credits is that’s the recording on the show that gets put out on to the podcast download channels. So just so everyone knows, don’t run off on us. All right. So quick reminders are as meetups, we’re still working on those. We’re trying to get that pulled back together. If you’d like to be interviewed, reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. If you want to find out more about my insanity, go check out theroguestavern.com.  Remember if you’ve got any suggestions, just go to wppluginsatoz.com and submit plugin to submit any plugins you’ve got. Okay. So we needed a little jingle for this little segment of the show. We really don’t have one here, and let’s see.

Amber: No. not yet. I’m sure we’ll get one.

John: There you go. Oh, that’s not the one I want.

Amber: That’s definitely not the right one. Come on now.

John: Coincidence? I think not. Okay, we’ll go with that.

Amber: Yeah, that will do.

John: All right. This is a question and answer segment, and Amber gets to start this off.

Amber: So I started thinking — I’ve thought this up initially because, well, I’m just full of questions, and I thought maybe some of my questions could be used to help other people who are just starting like me and who found this podcast because, you know, it’s connected to our WordPress and all that jazz. Now, once I actually sat down, start thinking about questions, I couldn’t think about many, but I did think about breadcrumbs, and I have a lot of questions about breadcrumbs. So that’s basically what we’re going to be talking about today, is just breadcrumbs.

John: Okay.

Amber: First of all, what are breadcrumbs?

John: Okay. What are breadcrumbs? Now, I should probably had you learned — had you bring up something so you could see what I’d show you. Can you start off breadcrumbs are a bit old-fashioned, and they’re still kind of used in some areas of the Internet. And what we’ve got here for breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs, you can look at, say on johnoverall.com, in the upper right area, just below the header, any page you go on, you’ll see something that says you are here, and you’ll see that on new sites and other places still.  And what the breadcrumbs do is allow you to get too deep in a website.

It’s a quick way to find out what level you’re at, what category you’re at, and it’s a navigation tool. And they were very useful when they were first introduced on the Internet. But then what happened is they started to become abused because what happened was, the SEO people realized that the bots were using those for internal linking. So they started bringing in breadcrumbs all over the place to get bots to do internal linking and to help with SEO rankings. And then, what happened is, I’ve noticed it in the last year or two, the breadcrumbs have fallen out of favor, like, if you go into the wppluginsatoz.com website when I redesigned it, I didn’t put the breadcrumbs back. It used to have breadcrumbs, but I took them out. So the breadcrumbs are basically a trail to where you’re at on the website, following down the trail of the website.

Amber: Okay, so do you see them when you’re navigating, or –

John: Yeah.

Amber: Okay.

John: Yeah, you can see them. It’s like if you navigated to say johnoverall.com, that’s a good web page to go to. Go to johnoverall.com web page, and then, go click on the WordPress tips up at the top, and then, you’ll see the list, the active category for WordPress tips. And then, over to the right-hand side of that green bar, you’ll see the, You Are Here blog post WordPress tips.

Amber: Okay. I’m sorry. So click on what? The tips?

John: Yeah, click on WordPress tips in the menu.

Amber: Okay.

John: And once you click on that, you’ll see — it brings up my old articles, really old articles, WordPress tips, but over to the right in that green bar across the top.

Amber: Oh, I see.

John: You’ll see the breadcrumbs. It says, Home Blog Post WordPress tips. It tells you where you are. Now, if you move your mouse over Blog Post, it takes you to the Master Blog Post category, which has all of the posts for the show in it currently, because that’s all I really been putting on the website. And if you clicked on one of those posts, you’ll notice that now it changes your category, now you’re in blog post podcast, we’re not lost, or whatever one you picked on.

Amber: Out of the abyss. But yeah, that’s really nice.

John: And that’s what breadcrumbs are, and they’re used a lot on newspaper sites. They’re still used on many newspaper sites because it’s a quick way to navigate your way through the site once you get moving in it.

Amber: Okay.

John: And they’re still valuable. They’re still abused, but they’ve kind of fallen out of favor I’ve noticed in design in the last couple of years because there’s just — you got to put them in in a way that’s appealing and useful to your visitors.

Amber: So how do you create them?

John: It depends on your theme. Most of the time, they’re created automatically.

Amber: Really?

John: Yeah, there is in the Yoast SEO plugin. The Yoast SEO plugin has some settings in there, and if your theme doesn’t create them automatically, it will create them and put them just below your header. So it can be done automatically with that. Putting them in manually, you have to go in and manually edit the code in your theme if you want it manually, and the Yoast plugin couldn’t do it automatically, but there’s also probably still –there were WordPress plugins for breadcrumbs. So there’s probably still breadcrumb plugins.

Amber: Okay. You kind of answered my next two questions. So do you want to call it right now?

John: Okay. Well, let’s call it here for the end of the people that are listening to this on the download segment. If you want to catch the rest of this discussion, you’ll have to go them over to our YouTube channel and pop-in and check it out. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to close this all out, and we’ll play the end credits, and then, Amber and I’ll pick up after that. So let’s let my girl takes us on out of here, and we’ll be back in a minute.

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 delivered 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.