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 #514 here.
No Sound Escapes from WordPress It’s Episode 514 – We have plugins for Showing Your Sales, Playing with Pinterest, Inserting code, Stock Control…, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #514
John: What do we got for plugins? ClassicPress options this week, nothing on ClassicPress this week here. We didn’t bring anything new. I had mentioned last week about Code Potent, leaving the ClassicPress system, and putting this plugin up for adoption ClassicPress directory update. Other than that, there’s really nothing else in ClassicPress. So go check that out what we’ve got there.
WordPress plugins, though, we do have some WordPress plugins this week. The first one I’ve got for you here is called Recently Purchased Products for WooCommerce. It’s a brand new plugin, and it was one that I thought was going to be really useful up on my site, and it will be — if I put a little bit of time into the CSS, basically, it just uses a shortcode that creates — a plugin creates a shortcode, and it creates a list of the most recently purchased products from your e-commerce store. One of the limitations in it as they mentioned here when you read the notes — and it’s not really crystal clear — but what it does — what I discovered, it does pulls just the first product from whatever recent orders have occurred. It doesn’t pull several products from each order, just pulls the first product from a recent order, and it goes back a few orders, and then it creates a list. It doesn’t create a very clean list, though. The new list requires — it’s going to need some CSS to clean it up and make it look a little bit better, but it does work, and it works really well, and it could be a really great tool for you to help your store out. So, at any rate, go check it out Recently Purchased Products for Woo, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: And the first one I have is PI Button. This is a totally free Pinterest button for your site. You can simply take the shortcode and place it in any content you want people to be able to pin, or you can get fancy and set up so you can make specific pages, some or all posts, even certain taxonomies are pinnable by enabling the Hover Pin option. If you want to get specific and a bit fancy, it can be a little bit of a pain to set up. But once you set it up, you just leave it alone, and when people hover over things, the little Pin It button appears, and they can add it to their Pinterest. I personally would just add the code where I want to have things pinned, but they teach their own. It’s a great plugin, very well-maintained. I rate this at five dragons.
John: Go check that one out. All right, the next one I’ve got for you here today is another WooCommerce one. It is the Out Of Stock Badge. Very simple badge that goes over your out-of-stock items. It stands out a little bit more than the standard little red warning that says out of stock. It puts this badge over the top of your image so that people know immediately that it’s out of stock. Nice and simple, straightforward to use. Go check it out, Out Of Stock Badge for WooCommerce, and I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: And the next one I have is the same one that you had for the first one, which is Recently Purchased Products for Woo.
John: Well, let’s hear your take on it.
Amber: Well, I think that this would be really fantastic, so I know that the few sites that I’ve been to, they give me my previously-purchased thing, and very useful. I love it. It’s brand new. So I figure they’ll probably be a few bugs they still have to work out. The way that I saw was, you put the shortcode in, you either get a grid or a list. When I checked it out, the grid actually looked really nice, and they do have a way to customize the amount in the shortcode so that you can have as many as 50 or more items that were previously bought. So when I was checking it out, it wasn’t just the first item from every list, it was the last like 50 items that they bought if you want it to be that money. They put it automatically at like six, and the list is default descending, but you can change it to ascending.
John: Yeah, well, I didn’t dig deep enough into it then because I couldn’t find a place where I could set it for the number of products to show because when I installed it and activated, it only brought in two products, and they were the first products on the last two orders that were made.
Amber: You have to change it in the shortcode that they give you. So you have to go into the code itself, and where it says a number — like there’s a number there and you change a number to whatever number you want to be, and then you change the DES to ASC.
John: All right, well, descending or ascending, but that doesn’t tell you how many it’s going to grab.
Amber: No, you tell it how many to grab. You can change it from the default number to whatever number you want.
John: Oh, okay. All right, well, I’ll have to dig into deeper. It still does need CSS to make it look pretty though.
Amber: Yeah, it’s a little old school, very blocky, but like I was saying, it probably saw some bugs that need to be worked out. The CSS is one of the issues, so I rate it at four dragons.
John: Alrighty. All right, the final one I’ve got for you here today is probably one I’ve covered before, but it’s time to bring it back again. It’s the Insert Headers and Footers by WPBeginner. It’s a very nice simple headers and footers insert plugin. And what that’s for, is sooner or later, you’re building a website, you’re going to have to insert code into the header or the footer. Now, many themes have made that easier nowadays, but still, there’s some themes that don’t make it easy, or they don’t have an option at all, or you have to go insert it somewhere into – hard-coded into the template, which is a real pain in the neck, and if something changes, you could lose that code. This is a nice simple plugin. Once you install and activate it, it gives you a spot where you can go into the plugins settings, and it gives you a spot, a header, and a footer block. You pump your code into the header or the footer blocks, and then that code is inserted properly into your website when appropriate header or footer code. The most common use for this is Google tracking code and other bits and pieces of tracking codes that are used from all the various trackers that people set up. There are other things I’ve used it for. I can’t recall them right now. But it is a great plugin. It is free, and it works very very well, and it’s probably the one I use the most. I don’t even use the theme ones anymore because, again, if you change out the theme later and you’ve forgotten you’ve inserted header and footer code, you’ll wipe that code right out when you change theme. So you should always use a plugin separate from your theme for doing the things you need done. Go check this one out Insert Headers and Footers from WPBeginner, and I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: Lots of fives today.
John: Yeah, well, it happens.
Amber: So last one I’ve got is called Presets, and I could see this being brilliantly useful. This plugin was designed to allow you to fill out your WordPress preferred settings, and actually keep them so you can actually test things out like plugins and everything without having to change the settings every time manually. It was more designed for people who are like working on testing out plugins that require setting changes all the time rather than for production sites. So you can upload, and you can change things, and your preferred settings are already there as long as you have this plugin all set up. It’s a little tedious to set up, but once it’s set up, you just leave it alone, and it will keep those settings. You can fix your settings every time without having to go in and manually do it all. It’s totally free, seems to work fairly well. Go and check this out. I rate this at five dragons.
John: That can be very useful. All right, I’m still running an ad here.
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John: Absolutely, nothing but the best. All right, listener feedback. It seems we have some this week.
Amber: Yes, we do. This note was sent in by Angel Limoux, one of our most loyal artists. He said, “Keep up the good work, always love the show. And I have to say that Amber is really coming into her own as a co-host. She is getting better and better and is more knowledgeable each month. If she keeps us up, she will become a WordPress/ClassicPress consultant extraordinaire. Cheers, my friend.” Thanks, Angel. I really appreciate hearing that. Sometimes I feel like my brain leaks out more information than I’m able to shove into it. It seems like at least I’m going to stick around, so it’s always good.
John: Yeah, it’s always good. Thanks, Angel, greatly appreciate that. Really great to hear from some of our listeners out there. All right. And it is contest time.
John: Big thank you to Steve Goodtime and Brent Matthews for that jingle, and thank you to Charlie for coming to the aid of the show, helping us out, getting our contest rolling. We did take a hiatus there for a couple of months, and Charlie is back with — I don’t know — with a vengeance — there we go — with a vengeance — and we have contest again. Short thing about contest. Remember folks? Participation in contest, please just go click and register for the contest once they’re in. Now, our newest giveaway is one, where we’re giving away. Three, lifetime licenses for Blocksy. It’s a blazingly fast lightweight WordPress theme plugin. It’s built for the Gutenberg editor, has lots of options to make it customizable, you know, Elementor, Beaver — it works with Elementor and Beaver Builder and Visual Composer and Brizy. So this is a pretty good one. It’s for the Gutenberg editor, and it’s going to help you create blocks.
The contest, we’re not going to start it until June 10. That’s the official start date of the contest. We are — for this contest to creative themes HQ; the creators of Blocksy have generously donated three-lifetime versions of Blocksy for you to enter to win. There’s an agency lifetime license, valued at 299 bucks, a professional lifetime license at $199. It’s a five-site license. And then the personal lifetime license at 149 bucks; it’s a one-site license. So this is going to be a big one. This one is going to be very worthwhile to those of you out there building sites, everything from an unlimited license to a single-site license. The Pro version has lots of added features in it, no custom code snippets font options, header and footer functions, WooCommerce features, and more. We’ll be opening this contest up on June 10. Make sure you check our contest page for all the details to enter for your chance to win. All right, so we do have a really excellent contest to launch us back into the contest sphere. So make sure you check that out, folks, and we’ll be promoting it all over the place.
Amber: That sounds brilliant.
John: Yeah. It makes me want to say, well, I don’t want to give those away. Why don’t we just keep them for ourselves?
Amber: Well, can we enter into the contest?
John: We’re not allowed to enter. We’re given away, so, you know, it’s really sad, because that actually looks like a usable item, very easy for developers, or even someone just building out their own personal site. All right, we’re going to cover up a couple of quick things before we hit the close-out credits because we do the close-out credits partway through the Q&A segment. So covering up in this episode, the following plugins I covered up was Insert Headers and Footers by WPBeginner, which I gave a five to, the Out Of Stock Badge, which I gave a five to, and the Recently Purchased Products for Woo, which I gave a three to.
Amber: And I covered Presets, which I rated at five, Recently Purchased Products for Woo, which I rate it at four, and PI Button, which I rated at five.
John: Okay, and meetup, so I don’t have it officially put out there yet, but there is going to be a bit of a locally WordPress kind of meetup on July 10. It’s a bit of a meetup barbecue. It’s a social event and it’s going to be held at the Oasis, so folks out there that might be interested reach out to me, and we’ll get you hooked up with how to get there — to the Oasis. Remember, if you’re not getting enough of us, you can join us for our other podcasts, the live stream of the Rogues Tavern shooting the shit at the tavern, Tuesday evenings at eight o’clock pacific time — 8 pm pacific time. All right, this is where we move along to…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber. We got to get that re-recorded and have that added in there.
Amber: We do. I mean we could just record you and throw you in there.
John: Well, that means I have to go in and edit the file. We’ve already recorded me. All I have to do is snip that out and turn it into a new cut, a new piece.
Amber: Well, there you go.
John: I mean I hit it pretty good every week.
Amber: You do actually, right on time and everything. So my first question for you — oh, wait, before we start with the questions, if anyone out there listening has any questions that you’d like to have asked, send them to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I’ll throw them up here and see if we can stump my dad. My first question for you is, when I first started working with you, I asked you what kind of computer I would need? You said to look at gamer computers. So, one, why are gamer computers good for this kind of work? And there’s a second one which is, is there another kind of computer that would work as well or better than gaming computers. Why or why not?
John: Okay, gaming computers are your high-end computers. They’ve got a very good video card, lots of memory, fast hard drives. Why do you want to use them for this kind of work, because what happens when you start working, and especially if you’re doing desktop — if you’re a laptop user, you’re already doing things slowly anyway. But if you want to get them done faster, you need a desktop computer with 2, 3, 4 monitors, minimum of two monitors. Two to three and four monitors makes it even easier because you can put stuff on different monitors, and you can switch back and forth. But you need a gaming computer because you need the speed, you need the high-end video cards, you need the processing power. Because what happens inevitably, is that you’ll open up video editing software — well, maybe not video, you open up — not even audio, but you open up photo editing software, you’ll open up browsers, and you open up — you know, every time you open up a new tab in your browser, it sucks more memory from your system, and processing time — every tab you have in your browser, it sucks up resources. When you start opening your email and all the other programs, you start opening, you get your FTP up and running, you start transferring files, you get all these things happening at once. You need a computer that has the power to keep running without slowing you down. And that’s why a gaming computer is so good for this because if you got a computer that’s designed for the latest games, it’s designed with high-end power. It’s designed for speed for all of that, transfer of data, and everything else you need.
Is there another kind of computer that works as well? Not as well, it works, it’s like I’ve done this with my laptop, when I have to, and the laptop I have now is like seven years old. It’s just really slow. It just takes a lot more time, and I can’t open as many programs at the same time. I have to close a program to open a program, and then close a program to open a program because otherwise, everything slows down to too slow. So it’s really kind of hard to say there’s not another computer that will work as well as a gaming computer. And, you know, it depends on what you’re looking for in gaming computers like I’ve got my last computer, I could probably still be using my last computer, which I built seven years ago, which was really high-end when I built it. But two years ago, I decided I wanted a newer computer, so I built the newer gaming computer even bigger and faster. And that’s basically all I’ve done with it. And you could take an older computer that runs really well at a high-end video card, and that might give you what you need as far as the power you need. Because a lot of times, most of what happen — goes on is the video card does most of the heavy lifting.
Amber: Okay, so here’s a question that’s related to that. When I was talking to someone about the kind of computer I was going to need, they asked me why do I need a gaming computer because the only real huge thing about gaming computer is the graphics card. Why is the graphics card the thing that you really — why does that one do the heavy lifting?
John: Every monitor you use, your graphics card is drawing that monitor. Your graphics card is drawing that monitor for you, and every window you open, every program you open, every tab your graphics card is doing all that processing for all the graphics. When you’re doing video or photo editing, your graphics card is doing all the processing. That’s why you need the graphics card. They seem to forget then that they think it’s only the video card. It’s not only the video card in a gaming computer; it’s the processor and the amount of RAM that the computer has. Like my computer now has 64 gigs of RAM. And I can’t remember, I’ve got like a six-gig video card now. So it’s fairly high-end. And I can’t remember the process, so I couldn’t afford the latest and greatest processor. I ended up with a medium high-end processor. And even my video card was a medium high-end card, although my video card now, I could probably sell it for four times as much as I paid for it now considering the shortage of video cards out there.
Amber: Yeah, cousin of mine is having trouble finding the different parts of his computer that he’s wanting to build right now.
John: Yeah, it’s really hard right now. There’s a shortage of chips everywhere. And the shortage of chips means a shortage of chips for everything.
Amber: My next question is how different would it be using and working with WordPress off of an OS like Linux do you think?
John: Not any difference at all. There’d be no difference. It just you’re in Linux and you’re in Linux versus Windows. Windows is just your computer’s operating system. Linux is just your computer’s operating system. That’s your interface to the Internet and your interface to whatever programs you want. If you’re using Linux, you would have to learn the software that runs on Linux, because most of the software I use doesn’t run on Linux. That’s the problem like I use a lot of Adobe software, I don’t believe it runs on Linux. So you’d have to learn the options for it.
Amber: And I think that’s more so along the lines of what I was thinking is how different would it be trying to do this with a different OS because I know that a lot of things don’t work on something like Linux that work on Windows?
John: Yeah, well, Windows doesn’t — you got to remember that WordPress is actually running on Linux.
Amber: Oh, is it? I didn’t know that.
John: The servers — my servers in particular — mostly everybody’s servers is a version of Linux. I can’t remember what my thing is called. Anyway, I can’t remember what it’s called right now, but it’s a version of Linux that runs my servers. And almost all the servers that run websites run a version or a type of Linux, and that’s — so WordPress doesn’t care, like, WordPress will run on a Windows machine. You can set it up. What WordPress needs to run, it needs a HTML server, and it needs PHP, and it needs MySQL. It needs those three things to run. So your computer is just the interface to access your WordPress website.
Amber: Oh, yeah, well, that makes sense. For some reason, I thought I would just behave differently. I guess that doesn’t make sense. I thought I had done. My next question is, using another OS — like I don’t know if you have or if you haven’t, but if you use a different OS, is it harder or easier to keep your information secure?
John: Okay, this sounds like this is where we’re going to close the show out, and we’ll come back to this afterward. So let’s let my girl take us out of here and enjoy my shot.
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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.
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