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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 #507 here.
Into the Expanse It’s Episode 507 – We have plugins for Stats, Links, Photos, Privacy Chat, Plugin notes…., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #507
John: All right, ClassicPress options. I actually do have a couple of ClassicPress options and seem ClassicPress has woken up again. And they have a big post in their forum, and this post is talking about the things that have been happening in their — in ClassicPress for the last six months. They’ve got some updates in here, some updates to the plugin, a new version is about to be released of ClassicPress, some plugins stuff. It seems they’ve also got a forum now for ClassicPress plugins listing up all the plugins that are available in here. And I caught a little snippet in here, I didn’t manage to get an address port, but their plugin directory is on course to be released, and that will make a lot of difference to this system once their plugin directory is released, and might even make it easier to get more ClassicPress information in here. So that’s what we’ve got in here for ClassicPress this week. They’re alive and well and they’re moving forward again, and I’m sure we’ll start hearing information from them coming soon. So stay tuned for more ClassicPress stuff coming up soon. Outside of that, we’ve got the regular resources listed in the show notes. Let’s move it along to WordPress plugins.
Podcaster down! Podcaster down!
Amber: Yeah. So your Alter Ego is saying that the corner of the image says Greg’s Graphic.
John: Didn’t I say that? I said . Okay, yes I’m sorry. I changed it when I published it, or when I put it in here I forgot to change it in the actual show notes. It is correct. It is Greg’s Graphics. My bad, I’m sorry about that, Greg. Yeah, hopefully, you listen to this far, you don’t get so pissed off me. I give credit where credit is due, and sometimes I make a mistake. I am human after all, at least that’s what I keep being told. So it is Greg’s Graphics. Thank you very much. Sorry about that.
Amber: You deserve a beating.
John: Yes. Yes, I do. That’s all right, nobody big enough to give me though. All right, let’s move it along. Yeah, sorry about that. I forgot to change that in the show notes that I’m reading from. Not the show notes on the website, it will have the correct name. All right, let’s finish diving into the WordPress plugins. And the first one I’ve got this week for you is a re-review of Contest Gallery. And this, of course, is because I originally reviewed this plugin back in Episode 499, and I’ve been using it for a while since then. And I realized that it was well worth the money, and I decided to go ahead and upgrade to the premium version, the Pro version. And since I’ve upgraded — I think I did that upgrade last week — and so I’ve been checking it out. It’s working really well. It’s enhanced things. It’s what allowed me to correct giving out the wrong name today because my alter ego noticed in the thing where it said, Greg’s Graphics, instead. Now the artwork shows the author’s name — the creator’s name with it. Because you actually get a premium version for that to display, which is really silly, plus a whole lot of other little things in it that I’m still tweaking with, but I do enjoy it. Fantastic plugin. The Pro version is worth the money if you’re going to run this and bump up to it. So I had to come back, re-review it, and then raise its rating from the four I gave it, all the way back up to a five-dragon rating.
Amber: Hemdian has a pretty good question for us. Has anyone ported and updated the Gutenberg plugin to ClassicPress?
John: No, everyone went to ClassicPress to avoid Gutenberg completely. Gutenberg is hated over in ClassicPress area. It’s the reason I tried to go to ClassicPress was to avoid Gutenberg entirely. I really despise the way Gutenberg Works. I really do. It’s like I will adapt to, it but that doesn’t mean I’m going to like it anymore. It’s like eating peas. I still kind of hate them, but I do eat them because I know they’re good for me. So what can I say? You know, it’s one of those things.
Amber: The first plugin I have is Disable FLoC. This is an easy-to-use privacy edition plugin.
John: Go FLoC yourself.
Amber: By installing and activating it, it automatically adds an HTTP header to your WordPress website that disables Google’s federated learning of cohort tracking. You’ll find the header added permissions-policy, interest- cohort equals — and the parentheses. If an existing interest cohort value is found, the plugin will not change that value or add an additional one, which is good. And this plugins page also sets down five links that will tell you all about what FLoC is. So if you’re interested in learning on what that is, or reading up on it, go and check out the page of this plugin. I didn’t want to put them here because that’s what they have for you.
John: Yes, well, this — go flock yourself plugin — Disabling FLoC is — it’s like what is the FLoC? Do I give a FLoC? What the FLoC is?
Amber: It’s a type of tracking thing that happens with a bunch of different search engines and whatnot. So this disables their ability to actually track you when you go there and track your page from what I understand.
John: Yeah, well, I actually didn’t know what the FLoC was, so I had to go look up what the FLoC it is. And it turns out the FLoC is a Google-specific type of tracking. It tracks you across browsers and tracks your visitors across browsers. So what happens is you help protect the privacy of your visitors to your website by blocking this kind of tracking on your website. It’s really a bizarre thing. And as I went down the flocking hole, it was really quite insane. So I was like, okay, I’m done. That’s all I really need to know. So, if you start looking into it, you’ll find that the flocking hole was very deep.
Amber: You’re having way too much fun with this.
John: It’s a given man. And it’s like how can you not take that and just run with it and play. You know, they call FLoC off.
Amber: Originally called FLoC off?
John: Yeah, there you go. Get the FLoC off my site. There you go. All right. So enough of that, let’s move it along to…
Amber: I still haven’t given it a rating. I rate this at five dragons.
John: Oh, okay, there you go. Good thing you said that. I forgot entirely. All right. Let’s move it along to my next plugin. I’ve got here for you is Better Usage Statistics for Elementor. Now, this one here wasn’t exactly what I had hoped it to be. I thought it was going to give me more information than it does, but it does give you a lot of information. If you’re using Elementor, you’ll know you’ve got all kinds of elements all over multiple pages and posts and everywhere else. And some things are used in some places, and some aren’t used in another. And I was hoping it would also tell me which elements weren’t being used at all across the site. And it doesn’t give you that piece of information. It only tells you about the elements that are being used. So if you don’t remember which elements you have, it’s like if you use Elementor, you start plugging in additional plugins that toss you more elements, and you can lose track of them pretty quick. It’s like you might install a plugin you may — you think you’re going to use an element, and then you’ll find a better element. You won’t use it, but did you use an element from that plugin? And if you turn that plugin off, will you break your site? So would it be useful to have that? But the one good thing it does tell you is what elements are used on what pages or posts on your site, and how many of those elements are used. And it gives you an overall count of all the elements that are being used across your site, so you can get an idea of how much resources you’re using. Very useful and all of that aspect. I’d hoped it has a little more info, but because it doesn’t quite have the full amount of info I was looking for, we’re going to have to knock this one down to a four-dragon rating. Check it out Better Use Statistics for Elementor.
Amber: And the next one I have has a nice long name for us, Floating Chat Widget: Contact Icons, Messages, Telegram, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty.
John: Wow! That’s a big mouthful.
Amber: It is a very interesting plugin for a pop-up chat window. Most of the pop-up chat windows that you can get will just be a little bubble that shows up and you can chat either with an automated chat, or it’ll connect you to someone who you can chat with and get help. This one doesn’t limit you to the one chat option. It actually gives you a whole bunch of options, things like WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Telegram — what was that really fancy one that the kids like? TikTok, that one too. You can also use TikTok as an interaction thing. It has quite a few options. And when you first sign up — like when you plug it in and you activate it, it’ll bring up the settings page. At first, it wants you to sign up for something, but I love this. They give you the option to skip that. A lot of these plugins don’t do that but they do. They don’t force you to sign up with them. They let you skip right past. It’s great and they give you the whole list of things that you can sign up for. They don’t give you the darkened options that you can only get if you go Pro. They only give you the options that you can get with the free version, which I found really cool. I like the way that they present. I like the way the options that they offer. It works really well. And even if you’re just testing it out like I did, you can just leave the settings as-is with their fake email and everything, and you go to save it and says, “Are you sure you want to save this? It won’t work like this?” You say, yes, and it doesn’t care. It just saves it for you. So you can use it for testing, you can use it for real. It’s a really fantastic plugin. I really like it. Unfortunately, it does have a Pro version, so I knocked it down to four-dragon.
John: All right. It sounds like one to go check out. I’m not going to try to fill my mouth full of all those words though.
Amber: Floating Chat Widget: Contact Icons, Messages, Telegram, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty. Although you can just search up Chaty, you can search that up, and it does come up, which is pretty cool.
John: That’s its URL at WordPress. It’s just Chaty. That should have been just what they called it was, hey, this is Chaty, and then when there’s no explanations, but yeah, it sounds like a cool one. All right, the final one I’ve got for you here is an Internal Linking of Related Contents on your website. Now, Internal Linking is something you should do on every post linked to other posts within your website. It can be a bit of a pain, you can forget while you’re creating posts. This plugin here helps automate that process. Now, this is a free version of their premium version plugin. And I was a little disappointed in their free version in how much limitations it had in it. Once you install and activate it, it’s fully automatic. You can’t put it into specific spots. The shortcodes are only available with the premium version, and also what it also does, it does give you the information or the ability to control the colors and layout. And what I discovered with it is that it puts the internal links one article based upon terms in your — in your terms and words and categories. And it puts that link at the very top of your post. Now you can control the color and layout with three different templates that they give you for it, and that’s really all you can do with it. There’s not much more than that. I did see there was quite a few other plugins. And because I’m trying to do this more and more at the Rogues Tavern site, I think I’ll check out a few more plugins to see which one comes out better and see which one is more worthwhile. When I did look at their Pro version and what it offered, I didn’t see that it offered so much more advantage over the free version. As far as it is, maybe because it’s a young plugin, it hasn’t grown yet. I mean, it is relatively new. It gets time. I may come back and revisit this another time if I see it again, and it seems to have improved. But at the moment, all I can do is give it a base-level three-dragon rating plugin. It does work well, but it’s not super special or super bad in any way. So go check it out if you want an easy internal linking plugin. It’s internal linking of related contents. And it gets a three-dragon rating.
Amber: All right. So the next one that I have is Plugin Notes Label. I love this plugin. It is awesome. It’s one of the newer plugins, so it doesn’t have as many downloads as it could, but I don’t know about people out there but I personally am constantly forgetting what exactly every plugin is used for because their names don’t always explain what the plugin is used for. Or like when you’re working on a site with someone else and say that someone else has changed up the plugin somehow, then they could actually put a note in on the plugin with this and say, I change it up this way it does this as well as though. Very useful, you plug it in and immediately a little space under each and every plugin has a note space that you can add whatever note you need or want. If you click on that picture — in the plugin page, you’ve clicked on that picture shows you exactly how it shows up. It’s very cool, very useful. I love this thing. It is totally free. I have a feeling that it is not going to stay free though because of how useful I can see this becoming. It may end up getting turned into pay-for-it thing. So I would suggest that people get on this while it is still free. I rate this at five dragons.
John: No, most likely it’ll stay free because this is not the first notes plugin for putting notes on your plugins.
Amber: Oh, no? I’ve never seen it before.
John: Well, this is a different version of what I’ve been using off and on for years. When you build out a client site and you put a fair number of plugins in there, it’s always good to make notes of what that plugin is there for because you might come back to that site two years later and go why’d I put all these plugins in here? You know, what do they do? You know, and you have to figure out what they did. And you can put notes in there that are very helpful. I’ve done this with a couple of my clients in the past, and it has helped me when I go back into work on the site at a later date. So yeah, and there’s lots of free ones, they’ve been around for several years now, so I doubt they would go to a premium version unless they add some functionality that is more than just adding a note.
Amber: Oh, well, then I stand corrected. It just seemed like such a useful thing that it makes sense to try to make money from that.
John: Yeah, well, it would make sense to try and make money from it, but there’s — if you looked up plugins for putting a note, you will find that there’s dozens of them. So there’s quite a few of them to choose from.
Amber: I just tripped across this and I was searching for something else, and this popped up.
John: Yeah, that’s what happens. You search for something else and you always find interesting plugins. Do that all the time. All right. Well, that’s all the plugins we got. And this show is still brought to you by…
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John: Absolutely, high-quality web hosting. Was that me or somebody else? Did you hear an evil laugh right there in the middle of that track?
Amber: No, I did not.
John: It must be just maybe. Well, my computer laughing at me. All right. I heard something there. It sound like an evil laugh right in the middle of that track. All right, well, this is a point where we like to give our listener feedback, but as I said, we don’t have any right now. We haven’t had any for a while or listener questions. Hey, listener questions would be great too. We don’t have any of those. Let’s ask folks out there. Send us some feedback, and send us some questions. We also like to head into this little segment of the show.
Absolutely, some contest. Well, we have finally set a date to reactivate the contest. That’s going to happen the first show in June. We’re going to continue on right now. Giving Charlie a break. Thank you very much, Charlie, for everything you’ve done. And it looks like he’s going to get started again and help us out, so that would be really great. Thank you very much, Charlie. If you’re still listening to the show, you know — well, I know you’re listening to the show — but when you listen to the show, thank you, Charlie. Also, a big thank you to Steve Goodtime and Brant Matthews for that jingle. I really do enjoy it. And we’ll just keep plugging the contest segment of the show, but contests are coming back where we’re going to be giving away free licenses for everyone once again. All right. So we got to call us out a couple of things before we head into the Q&A segment because partway through the Q&A segment, we shutter down for the podcast and continue on for the YouTubers. All right. Plugins I covered up in this episode was Better Usage Statistics for Elementor, which I rated with a four dragons, Internal Linking of Related Contents, which I rated for three dragons. And Contest Gallery – Photo Contest Plugin for WordPress, Contest Gallery Pro, which I rated for five dragons.
Amber: And I covered Disable FLoC or FLoC off, which I rated at five, Floating Chat Widget: Contact Icons, Messages, Telegram, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty, which I rated at four, and Plugin Notes Label, which I rated at five.
John: Very nice, very nice. I’m just — the two plugins, the Gallery, you know, go FLoC off and SMS, you know. All right. Let’s move it along. External events, we don’t have any plans at the moment, but they will be coming down the pike. Don’t forget, if you don’t get enough of Amber and I, you can check us out on Tuesday nights at 8 pm at the Rogues Tavern, and we go live on our YouTube channel for that. Completely different show than this, but not too much I think sometimes. All right. And if you’d like to be interviewed on WPPlugins-A-to-Z, reach out to us at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. Alright, this is where we move into…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber. All right.
Amber: So, just first off, if anyone has any questions that they’d like to have asked, send them into me @amber@wppro.ca. I will get them into this segment, I’ll read them out, get your answers, and that would be awesome. If someone would send in some questions, I’d be pretty cool. Thinking of all the questions on my own is kind of getting a little hard, running out of questions.
John: Well, you’ve only been doing it now for about 35 episodes.
Amber: So my first question is how does General Security for servers work?
John: All right. Well, now, we’re going to dive into something that’s not normally discussed on this show, but it may as well, we may as well get into it because as everyone knows, I have a hosting business. I have, well, five servers. I just brought another server online for a special client who wants a complete server to themselves, and I’m in the process of configuring and securing that server down. And General Security works in the way of, you know, securing up the ports on the site, blocking certain ports, opening certain ports that you need, setting up a firewall for the site, setting up an antivirus for this site, you know, testing it and making sure the speed is still there for the stuff that is public for everyone to access, which is the website themselves, but you don’t want them to access the other components of the server. It’s a hell of a lot of work. Just in the first 24 hours, a server was online. It had over 800 attempts from various sources, most of them from China — and where was the other country? I can’t remember. I think it was about 30% of the attempted hacks came from China, but General Security works in trying to keep all the evil people out of your website or out of your server, you know, which in turn protects the website. So without going into details about what it does because everybody has their own ways of configuring and securing their servers. And I won’t go into details about how mine’s done. It’s just done. And it’s done to the best ability that we can get it done between me and the guys I hired to help me deal with this stuff.
Amber: So is that like every server out there, they generally just have firewalls and ports that they have to close off?
John: Yep, firewalls, and ports. As a general rule, it’s firewalls — firewalls to prevent unwanted traffic, and certain ports are left open while other ports — on your server, there is — oh god, was there 10,000 ports or more? I can’t remember the number of ports that are available.
Amber: When you say ports, what I’m thinking is things like the portholes on a ship kind of deal, and you have to lock them down.
John: Yeah, that’s basically a good analogy to it because a port is a hole. It’s the access port into the server. And there’s 10s of 1000s of access ports into a server. And some of those ports are for very specific services of the server, and some of them are — like for your website — when you go to a website, you’re actually going to Port 80. When you go to a website and server, that’s Port 80 on the server. And then, Port 8080, which is the HTTPS I think, I can’t remember. I know this stuff, but its Port 80 is the one that sticks in mind — but you go into the one port. And that’s how it works. But locking them down takes a lot of stuff. It takes a lot of time to get them all fully locked down before they’re ready to go, and then configuring the software and everything else that goes into the server. So General Security is what you need. And what we’ll do is, since you’ve only got three questions instead of four, read out the other two, and then we’ll move out to closing the show and let people come to the YouTube for the rest of it.
Amber: All right. Next question is, do you have to go out and buy security for your servers? And the third question is, how do you go about setting up security for your home-based server yourself?
John: Okay, those are going to be quite an interesting time. So those of you on the podcast, you got to go over to YouTube and watch the rest of this. So I’m going to let my girl take us out of here, and I’m going to enjoy my shot of liquid butterscotch.
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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.