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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 #504 here.
Time to Escape It’s Episode 504 – We have plugins for Crypto, Duplication, Donations, Cookies, Videos….., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #504
John: All right. First off, what do we got for you here? ClassicPress options, now, we always talk about those we haven’t had any for a little while, but I’m going to keep this here simply because I’m hoping that ClassicPress starts to pick up steam again. I realized it’s kind of stalled, but it got a lot of momentum in the beginning when everyone was pissed at WordPress, but now that they’re no longer pissed at WordPress now they are debating on what they are. Some of them like me, you know, entered down a path in WordPress development that the developer decided to abandon all hopes of using ClassicPress and without retooling myself and spending hundreds of dollars again. I had to stick down the path I wanted to go down. At any rate, I still want to keep promoting ClassicPress because I do believe it is a great product, and it will be a great product. So go check it out. All I have here is just the usual show notes for ClassicPress where you can find all the information over the ClassicPress forums. Go check that out.
What do we got for WordPress plugins? All right. For this week here, WordPress plugins, the first one I have out the gate for you is called Cryptocurrency Donation Box – Bitcoin & Crypto Donations. All right. So, if you’re looking to take some Cryptocurrency Donations, and you’ve got your wallets all set up, and you want an easy way to put this information onto your WordPress website, this is a nice easy free plugin. Then all you got to do is put your crypto address or wallet addresses into the plugin, add a shortcode to your website, and it displays a donation box where they can choose from multiple currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. They have over 30 coins already ready into the system and ready to go. Really nice plugin, easy to set up, works really well. Of course the Cryptocurrency goes direct to you because it’s going through your wallet and — hey, what better way to get money than having cash handed directly to you. If you want an easy way to do it, go check this one out; nice, simple, easy, free plugin for accepting Crypto Donations. It even produces the QR code for people to — you know, I haven’t quite figured this one out because the QR code — if you’re looking on a phone, the QR codes on your phone. I don’t know if you can use the QR code or not. Anyway, I haven’t figured it out, but you could probably print that QR code, display it somewhere, and people could scan it and send you money.
Amber: I can explain that to you though. When you’re looking at the QR code on your phone, the QR code app on your phone will actually recognize that the QR code is there and this little box comes up and targets it, and then reads it for you.
John: Oh cool, I didn’t know that. See, I’m trying my best to kill all my smartphones and go back to a pure flip phone, you know.
Amber: Yeah, but if — when you go to certain bars and pubs now, they don’t give you a menu, they give you a QR code on the bloody wall.
John: No, if they don’t give me a menu, I’ll walk out, or I’ll ask the waitress to read it to give me everything from her memory. If she can’t, I’ll walk out, like I’m sorry, I know I’m not important, but my money is just as good as everyone else. But if it’s not good enough to, you know, at least give me something I can read, forget it. Well, everybody has a smartphone. There are people — there are even younger people that don’t want smartphones because they realize they don’t want to be tracked. All right. Well, let’s not go down that path right now.
Amber: Okay.
John: All right. Well, that’s what I’ve got. And for this plugin here for the Cryptocurrency Donation Box – Bitcoin & Crypto Donations, I rate this one at a five-dragon rating.
Amber: And the first one I’ve got is Embed Plus for YouTube – Gallery, Channel, Playlist, Live Stream. It’s actually a pretty nifty little plugin. It’s a YouTube plugin and that kind of gave me pause when I was looking at it, that’s actually pretty good. It does have a premium version, but they do not skimp on the free version, which is very nice. It gives you the ability to play or stream your stuff, both playlists, and live streams on your site. There are a lot of options here. I was actually feeling a wee bit overwhelmed when I first looked at it. There are nine tabs full of options on the dashboard there for them, and there’s a 10th tab for your API key — and that’s 8th tab that are just a page full of options. It’s awesome actually. The initial setup has you set up the way you want this to show up on your site. So you can choose whether or not you show the YouTube logo, whether or not you want to show all videos that are related to your video, or just videos from your own channel, or if you want the screen to auto-fill your customer screen or display as a little tiny box in the corner. It’s actually really cool. It’s fairly easy to set up. And I do definitely recommend this. At least go and check it out if you have a YouTube channel, and you want your things to be up on your site. Because it has a premium though, I rate it at four dragons.
John: Very good, but I’m going to have to bump that one right up to a five.
Amber: Yeah.
John: Simply because you obviously haven’t looked at the plugins on WP plugins A to Z or John Overall. Because we’ve been using that plugin, the premium version I paid for a couple three years ago. And I use that plugin for managing all my videos across all my websites that I run videos on. It is an excellent plugin, and it’s great and — because I know the premium version, I’ve used it, I actually paid for it, so it’s well worth the five. It is the best of the plugins for bringing in and displaying YouTube videos on your website in multiple ways plus an automatic creation of galleries. That’s my favorite feature — is automatic creation of galleries. And you can have it — it’s like you can check it out on the Rogues Tavern — all the videos displayed on the Rogues Tavern, use this plugin.
Amber: Oh, well, then no, I didn’t realize that you already had that one, my bad.
John: That’s alright. It is good to hear another viewpoint on it from someone who didn’t know it existed. So, yeah, I reviewed this one good couple three years ago, so it’s good to bring them back every once in a while. All right. The next one I’ve got for you is called Philantro – Donations and Donor Management Plugin. Yeah, you’ll hear a lot of donor plugins for me over the next couple of weeks because I’m doing some research for a client out there and trying to find some good donation plugins for them to set up on their website and be able to accept donations and tips and other things. So I’ve got a lot of plugins to go through, and these are the first two I’ve gone through so far. We need Crypto ones. We need regular ones. We need to accept all kinds of payment processors et cetera. This one here is sounded really cool when I first looked into it, and as I was going through it, it seemed really cool until I suddenly realized it’s a third-party service, which is not bad unto itself because you’re collecting money, you got to use a third-party service such as credit card processors, Stripe, PayPal, Square. You know, you’re using a third-party service to process your funds anyway. That’s basically what these guys are. They’re third-party servers. They collect the funds, give them to you, but they’ve got a really nice setup in here that allows you to go in and collect multiple types of donations, set up projects, set up things such as I’m going to be raising money and this is the goal what we’re going to do, you can set up campaigns with goals on it, and how much you’ve reached towards your goal et cetera. There’s a whole lot that this can do, and it can accept reoccurring payments, and more. So there’s a whole lot that it can do, and it does look fairly worthwhile, like just as I said, it requires going through and setting yourself up an accountant to the third party service to process and collect the funds. Not a bad thing unto itself simply because collecting money in many ways, most ways, you’re going to have to use a third-party service of some sort unless you’re collecting pure Cryptocurrency, which can be sent directly to you. So anyway, go check this one out. If you’re looking for donations and donor management plugin, it’s called Philantro – Donations and Donor Management Plugin, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: The name keeps making me think of philanthropy.
John: Well, that’s what it is. It’s philanthropy. People are being philanthropists towards you. You know, they’re giving you money. They’re being a Philanthropist by giving you money because that’s what Philanthropist does. They give out money to everyone.
Amber: So the next one that I have is Switch Video Quality. These guys seem to have taken the idea or a lesson from Vimeo and YouTube. Once this is activated, you will automatically have an option for which quality you want to upload your video in. You can only use this once per post. So once this is up on your posts, you have to put everything you want in this into the playlist, but you can put an endless amount into your playlist, a little video that’ll pop-up on your page or post. So that’s good. The only limitation there is how big of a size of a file your host will allow you to upload at a time. It’s actually quite good. It works well. There’s also an iframe available as well — as an option. I wasn’t quite able to really figure out how to get the iframe working though because I’m still kind of stranger to iframes.
John: Yeah, iframes are slowly disappearing as they work towards new ways of embedding.
Amber: Well, the option is there. It’s a pretty neat and free plugin. It works pretty well, and is totally worth checking out if you find that the quality you currently have is not quite what you were needing. I rate this at five dragons.
John: Cool. Yeah, one of the other problems with iframes is iframes really — they became abused by the hackers and scammers because, you know, you could embed — iframe was originally used to embed other websites into your website, and then it was used for embedding multiple other things, but what can happen as you’re embedding a website, which allows that code from that website to be run on your website, and it created problems — one of the problems with iframes.
All right. The last one I have for you today. Now this is one that I reviewed many years ago, and I used it for quite a while, and I recently saw it again. I went, oh, that thing still exists. Hey, they’ve done some updates to it. Let’s see how it is. It is called WPSiteSync for Content. Now this plugin here I used it for several years way back about three, four, maybe five years ago. I used it a lot, and I used it mainly for — for those who don’t know, the podcast gets placed on two websites. And I have to put all the notes on both websites. So the Site Sync was a really great tool to place it all on the primary website which is johnoverall.com, which is where the RSS feed for the podcast is located. And that’s simply because when I started the contest, I didn’t have wppluginsatoz.com. And so I have to create the show notes there and then I have to duplicate it over at WP plugins A to Z.
Well, this plugin here is excellent for doing that basic sort of duplication. Instead of having to create two posts, all I have to do is create one post, then I click a button up in the top right corner of the post that says, “Push this over to the other website.” And it pushes all the content over including the featured image and everything in it all the way over to the site. You just go over to the other site, make any minor tweaks to it, and you’re done. It saves me a good 15 or 20 minutes of time. And they broke the plugin a couple three years ago. They broke it bad, and it just wouldn’t work. No update would work, wouldn’t fix it. And finally, I said, I screw it, and I abandoned it. And I realized kind of why they might have broken it back then, is they brought it back — I don’t know when they brought it back, but now that I’m using it, it has multiple add-ons to it now. Features which used to be part of the plugin before are now premium add-on support. Not a bad thing unto itself, they got to make money, I understand it. Saddened that a couple of the features that I really liked as add-on features such as the ability to push out content from custom post types, and a few other things to it — I can’t remember all the features to it now, but there’s quite a few, but on the whole, it still works very, very well. I do like the way it works now.
It works just as well as it’s used to for doing the basic thing I needed the most. And another use for this tool I also discovered over time, and I may have to buy a premium version that I can use on development sites that have custom post types, is when I’m developing a custom post — a custom website for someone that’s got a live site, they’ll keep posting content sometimes. And I got to get all that content over to the development site before I push the development site live. You could use this tool to push over a single post or a couple of single posts, and in that way you can get just the content that’s missing, which is another thing unto itself. All in all, a really great tool for helping you manage content from your development site, or your staging site, or from one live site to another live site. Great tool, works really, really well. I would love to give it a full five dragons but because it has so many premium content to it now. I’m just going to have to mark it off at a four-dragon rating, but still a great plugin. Go check it out WPSiteSync for Content.
Amber: That does sound really useful.
John: It is, just like I used to use a lot years ago, and it saved me lots of time. And I was saddened when it broke. And when they didn’t fix it for quite a while — and finally I just had to abandon it. And I was happy to see that it’s come back. I don’t know when it came back, but I know all I did was I discovered it last week, and I went, oh, wow, this is back — well, just test it. And I used it this morning for creating all my show notes on the two sites and getting this I can’t work perfectly okay, does what it’s supposed to do once again.
Amber: Awesome. So the last one I have is Cookielay. This plugin is to easily manage your cookies for your site. With it, you can do the following; disable cookie hint for bots and crawlers, which I can see being useful. Reload the page after the user has saved his cookie settings, add exceptions for the Cookie Overlay, different overlay layouts to choose from, free customization of the overlay, easy management of cookies setting via shortcodes. You can even change the text that customers will see for the cookies. I always have so much fun with these when you get to write your own messages to your customers. It’s so much fun. These guys also have a really fancy and rather nifty dashboard. There’re lots of options even in the free version. They do have a premium version, but they also don’t skimp on the free version. So if cookies are something that you have an interest in controlling to the best of your ability, then go and check this plugin out. I currently rate it at four-dragons.
John: Very cool. Cookies are such a pain in the neck. We all got to manage them. We’re going to tell people they exist. All right. Well, this show currently still brought to you by
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John: Absolutely, high-quality web hosting. And there’s a little bit of buzz out there that’s starting to go around from people as they’re starting to realize that a lot of hosting companies are not providing them what they need. So if you want hosting that provides you everything you need, come check out mine. And as I said, it’s getting limited, starting to run out of space on the servers because I do have a limit on how many clients I will take. All right.
Amber: I’m loving these jingles we’re getting.
John: Yeah, I got to keep playing even though right now, we don’t have any contests. We are on hiatus for our contest right now. We will stay on hiatus for another month or so just to allow the buzz to wear down and for people to regain their sanity, and we’ll be bringing them back soon. And we’re — lots of reasons why, go listen to the last shows, last couple of shows have more of an explanation. Also, this is a segment here where we usually have listener feedback, listener questions. We haven’t had any for a while. For those of you listening time to submit some questions or feedback. Let us know good, bad, indifferent. What do you think of the show? You want to read out on the show? If it’s really good, hey, we’ll give you lots of credit. If you’re given us a hard time, hey, we’ll happily mock you just because it’s fun. So if you want to be mocked, send us something horrendous. All right. And covering up this show, we want to cover out a couple of quick things before we dive into the Q&A segment. The plugins I covered in this show was the WPSiteSync for Content, which I rated at a four dragons, the Philantro – Donations and Donor Management Plugin, which I rated at four dragons, and the Cryptocurrency Donation Box – Bitcoin & Crypto Donations, which I rated at a five dragons.
Amber: And I covered Cookielay, which I rated four, Switch Video Quality, which I rated five, and Embed Plus for YouTube – Gallery, Channel, Playlist, Live stream, which I rated four, but was bumped up to five by my dad.
John: Yep. All right. So, a couple of quick reminders, meetups. We don’t have any. I’ve got to really get back on top of that. Contact the people that we had rented rooms from and haven’t gotten refunds on, so we need to see about setting that up. May have to do something with that soon as soon as we find out what’s going on in the world, and what our illustrious governments are going to do to us. And there’s going to be a meetup this summer for certain. Let you note more on that as we get closer to it. If you’re not getting enough of hearing me and Amber, you can go check us out on Tuesday nights at 9:00 where we do the tavern talk at the Rogues Tavern. And it’s Tuesday’s 9 pm pacific time, live on YouTube where you can just get the podcast direct from theroguestavern.com. All right. Interview shows, I haven’t done one for a while. I did get a email from someone requesting information on how to do one, so I’ll be responding to that. And we’ll be bringing interviews back as I can get them scheduled with developers. All right. So that being said, it is time.
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: So as per usual, if anyone out there has questions that they’d like to have ask, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them in here and read them out, get them answered. The first question I have for today is what part of the site is counted in space given to a site by a host on the server, the content only or the site as a whole?
John: Okay, well, it’s everything. It’s all the images, all the files, the database, all of it. The database is part of the storage space of the website. So it’s —
Amber: Sorry.
John: Go ahead.
Amber: It includes everything is like one thing.
John: Yeah, it includes everything. It includes all the files and everything. That is the storage space that is used up on it. Now, this varies also from hosting provider to hosting provider. Because one of the interesting things — and it used to be a big selling point on hosting — I remember doing it back in the early days and the early 2000s, unlimited hosting space. But at that time there, nobody had mass amounts of audio or video, or anything else to store on a site. So that’s pretty much been eliminated. But one thing that’s happened is they still have websites out there that say unlimited hosting space available, but they don’t give the caveat. The caveat they don’t give as they call — if you go read their fine print, there’s a limited number of in nodes you can have on the site. That’s not exactly the same as your storage space because WordPress itself — when you upload in WordPress — I can’t remember if it’s something like 35,000 files for a basic WordPress install, but those 35,000 files are also — I’m trying to remember — and that’s also 35,000 in nodes. So every file is an in node, but not every file is equal in the amount of space, like you can have 10,000 files, and you could still only be one kilobyte of space because every file could be a minuscule amount. Or you can have 35,000 files and it can be 35 gigabytes of data, you know, have each file one gigabyte in size.
Amber: Hang on a second.
John: Yeah, all right. We’re stuck. We’re stuck in holding space. I should probably edit this out for the podcast, but no one me I won’t because I’m not really good at editing the show when I put it up. All right. So, well, I’ll chat along here. I’ll finish that out. So it is the content for the site as a whole, everything that is the site for the storage space.
Amber: Sorry about that.
John: Covid cases in Victoria just spikes, so maybe we hold off on closing up or chasing up meeting venues? Yeah, I’m not even going to go down that one right now. I’ll leave that comment be. All right. So what’s the next question? Did I answer that question adequately?
Amber: Yes. Unfortunately, because I had to bail for the last little bit there. I am wondering, does this mean that the more plugins the site has, the less space that has to work with?
John: Yes and No.
Amber: Yes and no?
John: Yeah, it depends. Again, you know, like plugins don’t take up much space. They’re minuscule amounts of space. Yeah, there goes my phone, but see, I’ll just put them on — I’ll send them the voicemail.
Amber: Yeah, well, that’s what I did. Only when somebody calls three times in a row, it usually means there’s something important.
John: Yes if they call three times in a row, it’s usually important. All right. So, yes, there’s less space, but there’s not less space. I mean, most website host providers provide more than adequate space for a website to be completely built, and for you to store lots of files on there. The biggest problem with web hosting now is like, I have a limited amount of storage space people can use on my hosting, but it’s so big that building out the website is fine. The big problem they come into is like if they want to store audio files on there — audio files that would be fine, but video files, not so fun because video files take up mass amounts of space. So, not to mention, they don’t get delivered very well. And I tell people, if you want to deliver video, then you can do it, but it won’t deliver very well from the server because that’s one thing that is not easily delivered. You want good delivery of your video, go host it on YouTube or somewhere else. They have the infrastructure for delivering video cleanly and smoothly. So, yeah, it doesn’t mean that the more plugins, less space. That’s like, yes, there’s less space, but not so much that you have to worry. All right. You’ve got one, two, three questions left, okay. Well, let’s flip these three questions here. I’m just reading them ahead, and let’s split them off here. Let’s read off the questions, and then, we’ll split the show here, and we’ll finish them off for the YouTube people.
Amber: All right. So, I believe that most hosts limit their client space for their sites, what is limiting the space do for them? Like, what do they get out of it?
John: Okay, what’s next?
Amber: And how does limiting their space affect the site itself? And when the space is not limited, what does that do for/to the site and every other site hosts on that server? Does it run slower on that server as a whole or faster? What does it do?
John: Okay, well, those are good valid questions. So we will come back to those after we close out with the credits, and I 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.