Transcript of Episode 503 WP Plugins A to Z

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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 #503 here.

Episode #503

John:                The depths and depravity are plugins. Yeah, that didn’t come out right, did it? Oh, well, it’s two-way, it’s live. That’s what it is. It is what it is. Starting off with ClassicPress options, I don’t have any ClassicPress options this week. And, again, I’m not doing anything with ClassicPress right now, and so I’m not making the time to research it. I have my time cordoned off for my client work by Rogues Tavern work and all the other things I have to do in between, you know, there’s these things called eating, taking a shower, you know, all those things you have to do also to survive. That eats up time. It’s amazing how much time — even sleep, sleep eats up a large chunk of time. If I could stop sleeping, I could accomplish so much. At any rate, nothing there for ClassicPress this week, but I do have a couple of things for you for WordPress plugins.

So, first off this week, what I’ve got for you for WordPress plugins, it seems that booking plugins have become all the rage. I keep hearing about them. I’ve had a couple of clients inquire about booking plugins. And, of course, there’re reasons for that because so much stuff has gone online since the Rona took effect, and everyone was locked down to their houses, and many businesses still needed to book clients and get things done, and nobody’s walking in the door anymore, and they wanted to have it. Now, there’re lots of options out there for third-party services. I personally currently use a third-party service. I’m going to look seriously at these two new booking plugins that I’m reviewing here. These ones are brand new, hot off the press. And if one of them will do as good a job as the third-party service I’m using, I could save myself a small fee every month. And that small fee every month could go apply for something else I’d rather spend my money on. And this is part of the reason why. The other reason why I recommend doing things yourself is I am a big proponent of control your data. Always control your data. Having been around the Internet since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen companies come and go. I’ve seen big companies grow up and collect a bunch of data, and then that company either sell out to somebody or go under — well, you lose all your data or that data gets sold to somebody else and used in ways you didn’t intended to do. So you want to control your data. You have to go restock — how’s the bottle collection going? Okay.

All right, I have no idea what’s going on in my chat window. It’s beyond me. So anyway, booking plugin, so I’m talking to my chat window and I really have no idea what kind of conversation I’m carrying on there. All right, the first one for you is called WordPress Booking Plugin – TheBooking. This is a booking plugin here that has a pretty decent design. It’s got implements to a weekly planner to define working hours, reservation form, service locations if you’re in multiple locations. It also support Google Maps. TheBooking is a powerful plugin. It comes to the configuration as dynamic placeholders can be used to personalize messages with customer users data and service data. You know, services can be configured to be booked by registered users only, which is useful. And I haven’t installed these, but I’m going to dig deep into them. I just pulled them up today to cover for the show. So, at the moment, I’ll revisit it later. But the nice thing here is reservations and customers data can be exported in a CSV format. That’s useful if you’re a spreadsheet person. So you want to see what’s happening with your data. You can export it out, manipulate it in your Excel program or equivalent, and find out what’s up with it. Decent plugin, it’s got a decent-looking calendar. It’s decent for booking reservations, set the services, dates and time, closing dates, what kind of products and services you’re offering, collect information, name, email, phone number, and more — and create your own specific information you’re collecting for whatever services you’re after. All right. So this is what we’ve got going on here with this one. It’s a pretty decent one. I’m going to give it a middle of the road three-dragon rating until I’ve had time to test it out. So go check that one out. It is called the WordPress Booking Plugin – The Booking.

Okay, the next one I have for you — and my final plugin for today, because as I said, it’s a short show — short, short. Here we go; I need another beer. Beer Me! All right. The next one I’ve got for you here is Booking X. It’s another one brand new, hot off the presses. And this one here — it looks to be a lot similar to the one I just covered. Flexible plugin that allows you to create, accept, and manage bookings for your business. Everything gets put in your schedule. The nice thing this one points out is you can remind your customers through email, which is a very useful and important thing. I find it useful for me with businesses that I booked to do things, like my chiropractor, I get a reminder email because — oh yeah, it’s in my calendar, but I’m busy. I don’t look at my calendar. I see it in the morning. So yeah, I got to chiro, and then my brain goes south. So, this one here — it’s got personalized dashboards to manage stuff in, and it’s also developer-friendly with custom post types and extensive documentation. So if you’re a developer and you want to extend it out to do stuff, this might be one for you to look at. It could be a decent one coming down the pike. And looking at theirs, they’ve got a little better layout than the last one because it uses custom post types. It allows you to do more stuff, set up more things, services, where those services are going to be, what’s going to happen with them. It’s also got, for those of you, well, for all of us who are going to be forced into Gutenberg eventually. It’s got Gutenberg blocks built into it and more. So this might be one to check out. I know I’m going to load up both of these into my dev site, testing site, and see if I can make it work. And if it does, I’m going to drop the third-party service I’ve been using for quite some time simply to save myself some money. Because everything — right now it’s important. If you can save money in anything you need to save your money. If you want to know more about the reasons why, go check out the Rogues Tavern. We cover some of that stuff there. That’s all the plugins I’ve got for you today. And because I need a bit of a break from my voice — this is where we pop off and go — this show currently supported by me.

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All right. So let’s — before we pounce off towards other things, let’s see we’ve got a couple of things here. Hemdian’s got — okay, he’s collecting bottles, so I’m talking about him collecting bottles to raise money to have Amber on the screen. All right. I know you’re not a fan of Yoast, but the latest version has changed. If you pay for the premium version instead of one plugin, you now have Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Primo. Now that’s been around for a while. I’ve got a client that has that. He has Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium. Actually got two clients that use it, they like it. I mean, I have not been a fan of — I like Yoast, the plugin. I don’t like the company, and because I’m not overly a fan of the company, I found a better plugin, is basically what it boiled down to. They were the best in my opinion for the longest time, and I use them, continue to use them grudgingly because I will use the best even if I don’t agree with the company, I still use the best. But what happened was Rank Math came along, and I started comparing them, and I started seeing. In fact, I’ve still got Yoast running on one website, Rank Math running on the other, and I’m still comparing them. And my Rank Math site is starting to do much better than my Yoast site, and they’re both my busy sites. One of them is my primary site, johnoverall.com, the other is WP plugins A to Z. And I’m not going to tell you which site is which. You know, you can figure it out if you will look at the printed code. But there is a difference, so it’s important to me. And I do know that. The thing is they’re not the final — they’re not the first plugin to go to this double plugin structure. What’s the purpose, and is this a trend, and will others do this in the future?

Oh, this is — okay, now I only read the first sentence. So I should have read the entire thing. If everyone does this, I’ll double my plugin count. Okay, not actually as I have some non-premium plugins, but — okay, well, what you’re looking at there, this is continuous, and I can tell you this component here, if they’ve changed it, then they stripped out — if they’d stripped out some of the stuff — and that’s what they’ve been doing is stripping out some of the stuff that used to be in the free version, moved to the premium version. So if you want that stuff, you got to buy the premium version. Well, that exists with, say for instance, Elementor. You can get the free version of Elementor and you get it most of this stuff, but you got to buy the premium version. And the premium version is a separate plugin that is activated alongside the free version. It builds on top of it. And there’s many plugins to do that. It’s basically a way for well-established companies that have been giving away free stuff for a very long time to go. You know what, it’s time to strip away that free stuff. And I’ve seen this over the last several years. They strip out one small free thing at a time, and most people don’t know it because they’re not using those free items. They’re kind of premium, but then when they go to use them, “Hey, didn’t that used to be free?” And then they go back and they go, “It did used to be free and now it’s a premium piece.” And they moved it as a premium plugin. It’s a way for them to make more money. And I don’t begrudge them what they’re doing. I do find it kind of sneaky and backhanded, but I don’t begrudge them, and it’s a good business model. But to me, it’s kind of sneaking in the back door and sneaking the pies off the counter, you know, kind of thing. And that is what is happening there. And it’s been happening for years.

Okay, contests, we do have contests. And I’m not going to play — well, let’s play the contest jingle. It gives me a chance to get a drink. All right. Yeah, we don’t have contests right now. We’ve taken a hiatus from the contests for at least a month, and the reason being is we were getting less and less submissions to the contest from people. And so we realized that maybe we burn people out on the number of contests we were running. So we’re reevaluating it. We’re going to bring the contest back. We’re still collecting license keys from developers who are willing to give them up. And most of them are, it doesn’t cost them anything. They get a lot of free advertising and promotion out of it, so it’s a win-win for them. It’s a win-win from us because we get to give away a license and support you, our producers out there with a license for a premium plugin. We’re going to be bringing them back. Probably — we’re in March now — probably in April, it might just — I might just push it to May to give us some time to pull this together. Charlie, who has been fantastic in getting this off the ground force, he’s been busy over there. He lives over the pond, and over the pond, it’s been rather stressful for him. So he’s had quite a few things to get taken care of and dealt with. So he hasn’t been able to put as much focus as he did. So we’re going to let this lie and help bring back things a little bit later in the year. So they are coming and they will be coming back soon.

All right, so that brings me right up towards the end of the show. And plugins I covered in this episode here was simply two of them, Booking X, which I rated at a three dragons, and then WordPress Booking Plugin – TheBooking, which I rated down at a three-dragon rating. Yes, see, I’m trying to pay attention to that recommendation from one of our producers out there who said maybe I should be a little clearer in what it is. I’m working on it. I’m working on it. It takes a little while to put something new into the system. You know, I’m an old dog. I can learn new tricks. I just got to practice some more than a young dog has to, to get them learn. All right, so a couple of wrap-up things here, no meetups are planned specifically. There is one that is coming for certain in July. I haven’t set the date for it, but you can put it right on the calendar around July 7^th — very important day in the date of histories for the last 50 some plus years. It’s been one of the most important days in my life. So, we’re going to have something happen in there. If you really like it when Amber and I are on the show together, and you want to hear more of us, and you want to hear us be a little bit more freewheeling, go check out the roguestavern.com. And there’s a link in the show notes that takes you directly to the roguestavern.com/live for when we have a live show. And right now there’s no live from the tavern, but hey, it’s a really good time, go check that out.

If you are a developer, or somewhere along that line, and you would like to be on an interview show — I haven’t done an interview show in a couple of months now. So it’s probably about time I should be getting the interviews now. I realize it’s like January till about April-May, things slowed down dramatically for me for some reason, but then they start picking up speed all the way up to the end of the year. So I think it’s starting to get there again. A lot of things are coming ahead for me. A lot of plans, a lot irons I had in the fire getting hot now, and I got to pull them out and start branding some cattle. And you don’t have long to start branding. When those irons are hot, you got to strike, man. And that’s coming down. I hope that doesn’t impact the show, and I will make sure it doesn’t, but I do know that a lot of brands that I had in the fire are starting to come to ahead.

All right. And the Q&A segment, like I said, no Q&A segment this week. I’m just going to close out the show with the extra credits, and I’ll hang around for a couple of minutes and just chat. And let’s wrap up before I hit the Q&A stuff. Let’s see what we got — Hemdian’s got another bit here. I get moving free stuff to paid, but I’ve been paying premium for a while and it used to be just one plugin. I guess with some features only activated if you pay, now it’s too physical. Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly what it is. July is when I should get waxed if supply – oh, well, enjoy that. I’m never going to get that. Well, we’ll leave that. That’s something for another show. All right, I’ll stick around after the show and chat. So if you want to hear what I’m going to say after the show, you got to come tune in on the YouTube channel.  I’ll be out there in a few, but I’m going to let my girl take us out of here. I’m going to enjoy my shot, and it’s the only shot I’m going to be taking. And let my girl take us on out of here. So, to enjoy my shot.

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John can also 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.