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Transcript of Episode 513 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 513 - We have plugins for Being a Tax Collector, Multiple Emails, Smacking Spammers, Stopping the Nagging, Github-Github ..., and ClassicPress Options. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-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 #513 here.


Double Double It’s Episode 513 – We have plugins for Being a Tax Collector, Multiple Emails, Smacking Spammers, Stopping the Nagging, Github-Github …, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #513

 

John:                All right, this is where we start off. We’ve got this week, some ClassicPress options, couple of them. One of them is a little bit of a sad thing here. It turns out that Code Potent is leaving the ClassicPress system. He’s going back to earn a living. He spent a couple of good hard years working on it. He put a note into the ClassicPress forums. He’s still going to be around. He’s still supporting the community, but he’s just backing off on all the effort he’s put in for the last couple of years, and he’s put his plugins up for adoption. So if anyone who’s developing in ClassicPress wants to pick up where Code Potent has left off with some of his plugins, he’s got a whole article in here at the Classic Press forums on how to adopt his plugins and what is needed to adopt his plugins. He’s not just going to give them off to anyone. Go check this out. If you’re using ClassicPress, it’s really sad that he’s backing up a little bit, but I can understand it. Everyone’s got to pay the bills, and if something’s not paying the bills, well, then you got to move on to something else. I know the feeling.

Amber:            I’ve never heard that phrase, “Adopt the plugin.” That’s kind of cool.

John:                Yeah, well, it’s been around for a while. WordPress uses it, you know, for old plugins that are not being developed anymore, and people are still using. So, you know, someone who wants to continue the development can adopt it from the old developer and continue using it. Problem is that adoption process has been misused over the last few years in WordPress. Now, they’ve gotten really strict on how they adopt out plugins because somebody would add a plugin with 300,000 or so installs, the developer would adopt it or sell it, the new owner would change it and insert it full spam ware, adware, or some other crap into it thereby destroying the value of that plugin. And it’s happened several times over the last couple of years.

Amber:            That would suck.

John:                Okay, now there is another good piece of ClassicPress news though. The Classic Directory is getting an update; this would be their plugin directory, I assume. It’s going to be coming soon. Once they get a plugin directory in there, things will change. And I was kind of looking over that timeline of WordPress today, and I realized they didn’t get a plugin directory till about the third-fourth year. And ClassicPress is now hitting it’s third-fourth year, and so, I guess it’s about time to get a plugin directory. A plugin directory for ClassicPress will start to make a difference in ClassicPress and its adoption — and also when they start getting more stuff developed for ClassicPress. They eventually will become a WordPress rival; I’m sure of it. It’s just going to take them time. And right now, I still got to pay bills, so I got to continue working in WordPress to pay bills. Maybe one day, we’ll come back around to it, and something will be different. At any rate, and then, of course, there’ll be an easy way to migrate all your data from WordPress to ClassicPress because they’re not going to be the same. You can’t just, you know, duplicate one or the other. All right. And that’s all we —

Amber:            What’s different from WordPress as ClassicPress?

John:                Right now, it’s almost no difference.

Amber:            Okay.

John:                It’s almost no difference. ClassicPress was developed as it was forked from WordPress 4.9 just before they inserted Gutenberg into the system. And it’s pretty much stayed compatible. Anything that works in WordPress 4.9 or below, works in ClassicPress.

Amber:            Okay.

John:                Problem is WordPress is now what 5.5, 6, 7, something like that we’re at.

Amber:            We’re at 5.7.

John:                5.7. So there have been a lot of advances in the last three years, and Gutenberg has been so integrated now. It’s — they’re on totally separate trajectories now — as ClassicPress is going to stay away from the Gutenberg crap. And that’s why ClassicPress was even created was because of the — that was the fallout of the cramming Gutenberg down the throat. They lost a good chunk of the WordPress community when that happened. Some people — like I left, but I couldn’t stay away because there were too many things I needed from WordPress to actually continue my business, so I had to stay with WordPress and sort of live with it. So, other people embrace Gutenberg entirely, and they love it, but that’s the way it works. I might have loved it if they hadn’t crammed it down my throat. That was my big problem.

Amber:            Probably. You know, that’s kind of personality.

John:                That was my problem, you know. Let me check it out, get to like it, but if you cram it down my throat, I’m going to dislike it just on principle alone.  All right. First plugin I have for you today from WordPress. We’ve got some WordPress plugins, and the first one I’ve got for you is called Limit Login Attempts. This is from fastOrange or miniOrange, I’m sorry. And miniOrange produces some really great plugins. I’ve used a few of their security plugins. Their two-factor authentication plugin is on one of my client’s sites. It’s a really great plugin, kind of expensive, but great plugin. This one here is a freemium version. The free version that is here works very, very well. I do like it. I set it up for a big membership site that we’re having some troubles with, you know, IP attacks, and people trying to spoof and hack into, you know, accounts and such. So we set this up on their — to do some blocks, block the IPs, and other things. It’s even got a timer in there to set for when people walk away after 30 minutes and auto logs them out. It’s even got into it a built-in the setup for using the Google CAPTCHA — reCAPTCHA system on it. So all you do is get your keys and insert in this plugin, and it will certainly capture into your forms and email forms and comment forms and other forms, and the system does it automatically. You don’t have to get separate plugins to do that. Really cool tool, it worked out really well. They do have a few features in it that are premium only, which set this one back one notch. So instead of being set at five dragons, I’m going to call it at a four-dragon plugin. It does work really well. It does take some tweaking to get it working right for everything you need with your particular site. Once I got that working, it worked out great. Go check this one out. It’s called Limit Login Attempts from — and I’ve rated it at a four-dragon rating.

Amber:            Actually sounds pretty useful.

John:                It is.

Amber:            First one I’ve got is Embed Block for GitHub. This is for Gutenberg. So I know from experience like GitHub is actually pretty useful. You don’t actually need an account to go and find information, but I am also not great with Gutenberg. Yeah, I’m only just starting to play around with it. What this particular plugin does is once you activate it, it creates a block for Gutenberg so you can use that block to add it into whatever page or post that you’re making. It sounds really awesome. I know that GitHub — having a way to put GitHub link into your site is very useful in general. So, I think this is for the page and posts. I didn’t really get to play around with it very much, so I’m only really able to rate it at three dragons. If anybody out there who is more familiar with Gutenberg would like to give it a go, I do think it’s important to at least get this out into the world. It’s a new plugin, so getting it known would probably help someone out there who has a bunch of GitHub information or a GitHub account, help people get the information that they need. So I rate this currently at three dragons. I would love to hear back from someone out there who uses Gutenberg.

John:                Okay. All right, the next one I have for you. Now, this is a pretty old plugin, and it is called Allow Multiple Accounts, a really great plugin. I’ve now got it on two different membership sites. And the two different membership sites I work on for clients, they both have a large membership of married couples and et cetera who are sharing an account but have different email addresses. And, of course, we know in WordPress, WordPress by default does not allow you to have the same email address in the system. Once an email address is in, you can’t use that email address for another account. What this plugin allows you to do is to have multiple accounts with the same email address. This allows you when you have a membership site where there’s people who share an account, but have different emails and need to be contacted separately sometimes, to be able to set that up and allow it to work in this membership system. Really great plugin. It is kind of old. One of the caveats to it is you have to follow the link in the show notes and go download this plugin because you can’t find it in the WordPress repository from the backend of your WordPress website because it’s so old. WordPress doesn’t show you old plugins in the backend when you’re searching to add a new plugin, kind of an irritant that they done a few years ago. So it is a really great one, and something you’ll want to check out. Go check this one out, allow multiple accounts. And I give it a five-dragon rating.

Amber:            Nice. Actually sounds really useful too, but you can’t find it more easily. So next thing I have is No Update Nag. This is another awesome little plugin for removing the update nags. I know I’ve covered a couple of these already where you get to remove the notices, but this one is especially about the updates. So instead of getting like Blinky flashy bit at the top, you just have a little reminder at the bottom, or you know, it doesn’t remove it from the homepage or anything, but it makes it so you start getting flashes up at the top there. Very awesome for people who are well aware that they need to update their WordPress. They just aren’t ready yet, they want to wait for the next version, or they need to fix something before they upgrade. Whatever the reason, it’s a very easy-to-use simple plugin. You just plug it in, let it go. I rate this at five dragons.

John:                Very cool. What’s really interesting is both those two plugins came from the same developer.

Amber:            Hemdian mentioned that he thinks that the GitHub thing might actually be really useful. Hemdian, if you use it, get back to me about it. I’d love to hear what you think about the GitHub plugin.

John:                All right, the final one I have for you today is for when you become a sales tax collector. In other words, you started your own eCommerce store and you’re starting to sell items. Well, many places, you got to collect taxes too, and you got to remit them to the government. In some places in the States, I know this from one of my clients is that we had to set up a specific sales tax for a specific county in town, and that was different from the state level, so the persons there were getting charged three levels of taxes, and, you know, you got to submit all this stuff. Well, now you need reports on all that. Well, how much tax did I collect for all these different places, and then I got to submit it all, that’s what this plugin is for. This plugin is so you can get the multiple sales tax reports separated out by date, time, and types of taxes you’re collecting, so that it’s easy enough to determine what tax you got to remit to which government agency. Kind of a cool plugin, very useful if you’re running your own eCommerce store and you’re collecting multiple types of taxes, which I, unfortunately, I’m doing now because, you know, in Canada, we collect two levels of taxes. At any rate, go check this one out. It’s Sales Tax Reports for WooCommerce. And I give it a four-dragon rating.

Amber:            So apparently, I put Embed Block for GitHub Plugin thing again twice. I’m going to send you the link real quick.

John:                I thought you were doing a double-double. That’s what the double-double title was all about. It was — that’s why at the beginning, it said GitHub-GitHub.

Amber:            Oh, geez. No, I didn’t realize, I put it in twice. I actually have a third plugin.

John:                You actually have a third plugin. Oh, my god.

Amber:            Yes, I do.

John:                I thought you loved it so much you were trying to explain it twice to people. And you even gave me two different links for it. Yeah, the first one you gave me a really long link, which took me deeper in the spot, I had to scroll up. The second one, you gave me the right link. So, you know, you went double-double on this.

Amber:            Oops! That’s what happens when you end up doing work when you’re tired.

John:                All right, send me a link. We’ll bring your plugin up for you.

Amber:            I just sent it to you through the discord. So this is called Open Links In New Tab. I could see this being a very handy plugin. What this does for you is it will make a set both internal and external links of your site open up in a new tab. You have the option of setting it up, so it’ll just open the internal links or the external links, or you can make is that they open both into a new tab. I know, for me, it’s a small irritation, but it’s still — I find it irritating when I click on a link, and then I’m brought to a new page within the same tab. And in order to get back to the page, I have to click back. I find it irritating having a new tab open for me is always preferable because then I can go back to the original page of information without having to wait for extra loading and all that fun stuff. Unfortunately, this is not compatible with WooCommerce though. So it’s great so long as you aren’t using WooCommerce. And I rate it at four dragons.

John:                Very nice. Problem is with the Open Links In New Tabs is that it does impact SEO sometimes.

Amber:            Oh, it does say as a bonus, the code this produces is completely SEO-friendly.

John:                Oh, well, I don’t know because — that the search engines do something to offer new tabs. I don’t really care about it myself. I usually set it up just the way I do, but I do have read stuff about that the new tabs being a problem. At any rate, all right, well, make sure you update the show notes later when you finish them off.

Amber:            Yeah, I definitely will. I cannot believe I —

John:                Yeah, well, I thought it was funny considering how much you worked with the show notes today and still didn’t even notice it.

Amber:            Yeah, it’s special.

John:                All right, this show brought to you by…

 

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John:                All right, absolutely, good quality web hosting. And the last of my servers is filling up fast, folks. So if you want good high-quality hosting, you can better get on it quick. All right, this is where we’d like to talk about our contest — and we have a really cool jingle to go with that.

Yes, they are still on hiatus. And hopefully, I haven’t heard from my marketing manager yet, but hopefully, they’re supposed to be ready starting next month, next episode in the first week of June, maybe the second week of June at the rate things have been going these days. But hopefully, they’re all ready to go, and once they’re ready to go, we will have some great contests up and powered up and running for you giving away great licenses once again. So stay tuned for the contest. And I do want to say thank you to Charlie out there for all the hard work he does pulling those contests together. Thank you very much, Charlie, for all your great work. We really appreciate it. And this is another one of those spots, folks when we say time, talent, and treasure. Charlie’s kicking in time to help this show out by taking care of this one aspect of the show that we would never get to or we sort of got to half-acidly before because we got other things we have to do. And that’s where anyone wants to help the show out, see something that you can help improve the show with, let us know, man, we’ll happily get you hooked up and start improving this show.

All right, a couple of quick reminders before we head into the Q&A segment. Meetups, there’s going to be a meetup on July 10. I haven’t put the dates and everything yet, but it is a Saturday. It’s going to be a bit of a combined meetup, several things are going to be happening at one time on that. It’s going to be a tavern meetup; it’s going to be a great big birthday party for me and a WP plugins meetup. It’s going to be a limited amount of people will be allowed to show up at it. That’s irrelevant of the COVID crap space. We don’t have a lot of space in the Oasis because it’s going to happen in the Oasis, and you’ll have to contact me to get the address for the Oasis. But it is going to be a great time, wonderful party on the brand new deck, and the brand new fire pit, and all kinds of cool stuff. So it’ll be a good barbecue, nice afternoon. Hopefully, the sun will shine, we won’t have rain. More information on that is coming soon. Further to that, if you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, make sure you go check out shooting the shit at the Rogues Tavern Tuesday evenings at 8 pm over at the roguestavern.com/live. All right, this is where we dive into — oh, we got to need to cover up the plugins we covered this show before we move on because we’re going to close out the show halfway through the Q&A. I covered up this show Sales Tax Reports for WooCommerce, which I rated at a four, Allow Multiple Accounts, which I rated at a five, and then, Limit Login Attempts, which I rated at a five.

Amber:            And I covered Embed Block for GitHub, which I rated at a three, No Update Nag, which I rated at five, and Open Link In New Tab, which I rated at four, and I’ll make sure I fix that before the notes go up.

John:                Alrighty, it is time.

 

It’s question and answer time.

John:                With Amber.

Amber:            If anyone out there has any questions they’d like to have asked, send them into me at Amber at wppro.ca. I’ll get them into this segment, and we’ll see if we can stump my dad. So my first question is what is a directory tree? You mentioned that on a recent show when we were talking about mapping out domains, I think.

John:                Okay, well if I mentioned it, it was mentioned improperly. A directory tree is what you’re looking at when you’re looking through your directories of files in your website or on your computer. , When you go several layers deep into a bunch of folders to find the file you need, all those folder names above, that’s your directory tree. Websites have the same thing of directory tree on where the files are located in relation to where they are in the directory. Now, the root of the tree, like WordPress, the root is that the public HTML unless you put it in a subdirectory, and even then the subdirectory is one level down from the route. The route is always public HTML for websites. And then you go down through all your directories, like all your important files for WordPress are located under the WP content folder. And then under that, your WP uploads folder or your WP plugins folder, or all the other stuff in there, but that’s your directory tree. Mapping out a domain, domains have trees too, and I would have referred to it as a domain tree. Because your domain, like, you know, the roguestavern.com is a root domain. Actually, it’s a subdomain. The actual root domain is com. The Rogues Tavern is a subdomain of the com domain. That’s why it’s dot com. And then, under the Rogues Tavern, you can put another subdomain such as contests dot theroguestavern.com. That’s a subdomain. And you can even subdomain that went out and have big dot contest dot the roguestavern.com. That’s a domain tree. And each domain name has its own tree with the master route for all domains being like dot com, dot biz, dot net, dot org. Those were the big primary ones. And now, we have them such as dot story, dot blog, you know, they finally got around to creating all the primary domains for everything out there now. I mean you can go out there and get dot sex, dot xxx too. Buy domains for those. So that would be what your directory tree and your domain tree really are.

Amber:            All right. My next question is what is Internet Control Message Protocol ICMP? I read about it a little bit, but all I could find on it was, it’s a lack of error control or lack of assistance mechanism.

John:                All right, I’m not sure. Let’s see what it has to say. Let’s see what we have. Internet control is a network layer protocol used by network devices to diagnose network communication issues. Okay, that’s about all I can tell you about it. This one here is for the dude’s name, Ben, that manage networks, something well above my pay grade. And it’s something that I don’t worry too much about because I pay people to handle shit like this.

Amber:            All right, well, I have one more question, so I’ll read it out before you close everything off. My last question for you is what would you say are the top most important three things a developer should do, know, or practice to keep things running as smoothly as possible?

John:                This is actually a good question. Now, that’s a good question. Actually, the question is very relevant if you’re just starting out and developing, or you’ve been there a little while and realized that things aren’t running as smoothly as possible. So we will come back to this one after I let my girl close this out, and I enjoy my shot.

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 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.

 

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