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 – and today we have a special guest! Welcome to the show Charlie!
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #515 here.
Unconstrained Energy It’s Episode 515 – We have plugins for Blocks, Stopping Spam, Accessibility, Accounting, Showing Your Pride…, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #515
John: All right, for ClassicPress options, again, we don’t have any much this week. I’ve not had time for any ClassicPress stuff, and nobody submitted any. If they continue like this much longer, I may have to push ClassicPress further aside, but so be it, it is what it is. We do have the same standard links in here, some must-have links, the forum links, links to other bits and pieces for ClassicPress if you’re using it. Go check it out and see what’s there for you. But we do have WordPress plugins. And the first one I’ve got for you here right off the bat — and I will be having an interview with the developer of this. I scheduled an interview, but something came up for him and he missed the scheduled time, but I expect an interview real soon with him. This is a plugin called Finpose, and it was sent in by Oz Arslan, and it is – that’s static.
Amber: What’s going on? That’s strange, I hear static.
John: I do hear static.
Amber: Hello?
John: Yeah. That’s all right.
Amber: Oh, it’s gone.
John: Yeah, it’s gone (crosstalk). Okay, all right. So, anyway, this is an accounting plugin for WooCommerce, and it is a premium plugin. It’s available at CodeCanyon. Its $49. And it’s an excellent plugin. He sent me a demo to check it all out. I installed it up on my WooCommerce site to see how it would do, and it is actually quite good. I rather enjoyed it. It makes it easy to get in there and track your costs, create your reports for your taxes, and everything else you need. It also allows you to track bank accounts and spending accounts, so you can move money between the accounts. It’s an accounting program to allow you to track all your spending, your costs, how much money you’re making, your profits, your losses, all of those things, as you get them into your WooCommerce store. It’s a perfect kind of thing for me because my WooCommerce store is relatively new. It doesn’t have a lot of products. It might be a bit of work if you’re integrating it into a well-established store, but if it’s a new store, it’s a really great tool for you to work with and to get it moving forward. I found that to be fantastic, and look out for the interview with the developer of this coming soon. And go check this one out at finpose.com, link for CodeCanyon in the show notes, and it’s called Finpose – Accounting Plugin for WooCommerce. And I give it a five-dragon rating.
Charlie: This is on CodeCanyon because it seems they can’t give away free licenses for competitions. I’ve tried a few developers. They’re “Oh, no, we’re not allowed to give you a free license. It causes problems, but it looks like a really good piece of software there. .
Amber: Yeah, it does.
John: Yeah, they give away the software. I don’t know if I ever get a license for it. They give me the software on a regular basis though (crosstalk).
Amber: It looks like a brilliant plugin.
John: It is a brilliant plugin, and I’ve liked the way it works. And so far, it’s made it easy for me to create the reports for my taxes. I got to report to the government so I can be there, you know, annual tax collector. All right, next up. That’d be you, kiddo.
Amber: Next up is my plugin, and it’s A11y Kit if you prefer. This is actually a pretty cool plugin. It was designed for disabled people in mind like it was designed with them in mind, and it’s a CSS thing. So you have to be able to add the CSS class into your menu, and you do also need a menu in order for it to work because I didn’t have a menu on my testing one, and I turned it on, everything went really cool, purple and black, but there was no control. It’s pretty cool, though. See, you need a menu and you need to be able to add it into your CSS yourself in to your menu. It looks really nice. Yeah, so you got it up there and you’re testing it out. You have to like double-click them in order for him to work in .
John: You’re talking about it, kid.
Amber: Making the font — I’m trying, you keep talking, I get distracted. There’s making the font 30 times larger, change to dark mode, high contrast, low saturation. You can change the font to Comic Sans or Arial, and you can space out the letters for easier reading. It’s a really great setup. Each option can be turned on or off through the menu. And there is a normal setting as well so you can just not have it at all. Very useful. I think it’s a great idea. It’s also useful for people who spend a lot of time on the computer. I tend to put everything into dark mode because I have a headache issue if I’m on the computer for too long. I think a lot of people have that issue. So, totally free, works really well. I rate this at five Dragons.
John: Okay, you’re up, Charlie. Which one you got?
Charlie: Let’s go with Flying Scripts. Okay, so Flying Scripts, thank you, everybody, who’s ever run a test on one of the test sites, the PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix sort of seen that Java scripts are one of the heaviest things that slow down the site. And there’s many different versions and many different plugins which will help you with this, but this I found to be one of the best ones. To me the speed matters is a website, and it’s actually a group on Facebook as well, and they give lots of advice about how to speed up, and one of the people created this amazing little plugin. It’s very lightweight. All you need to do is basically know approximately the name of the script and put it into the list. You set your defer time, and you have to defer for so many seconds and leave it to go, and then it does it very well. It stops the JavaScript running for a few seconds, which allows the rest of the page to load, and Google’s happy about that. If you run PageSpeed Insights without any form of differ on JavaScript, it will actually tell you when it is doing. So all you need to do is basically copy and paste the name of the JavaScript into the plugin, and away you go. I’ve used on a few web pages, and that really can slow down the site. And so all I do is basically — I keep a little log of all the different scripts and put them straight in, and you go from getting yellow to green very quickly.
John: Very nice.
Charlie: And I give this a five-dragon rating. Can I do the ?
John: Oh, you can. Feel free.
John: All right, the next one I’ve got for you, this is a very useful plugin, but you do have to do some coding for it. It’s called I Order Terms, and it is a bit of an older plugin, and it’s mostly for those that are developing and working out, but what it does is once it’s in there, it allows you to go into the taxonomies for any of your custom post types you might have, and then create one of those little sorting menus at the top of the archive page for that thing. I’ve got it on one of my client sites, my corporate client sites, and so what we’ve done is we’ve used it on there for creating archives or sorting for different archives sections for all of their different custom post types. Very nice plugin, it does take a bit of work to get in, get installed, and work with. But once you get it in there, it can save you a lot of grief when you’re wanting to be able to sort certain post types with the taxonomies that are included in, or the categories for those of you that are missing — not catching what I’m saying. You can use it for sorting out your categories. At any rate, a really great plugin. I want to one to go check out. It’s called I Order Terms, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: That sounds very useful.
John: It is. You just got to do some work to make it work for you, which is why it’s knocked down a little because there’s a lot of manual labor to that one.
Amber: Anything that’s worth installed is going to be harder. So next one I have is Royal Elementor Addons. This is a brand new plugin — and I think it’s really awesome. The widgets work really well, and the amount you get in the free version is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about it is that you can actually turn the widgets on and off individually. So you get a whole bunch of them, and when you get to the settings page, you can choose which ones you want. So if you only want one of those widgets from this package, you can turn the rest off, and just have that one. You can turn them off and on as you feel. It’s really useful. I’ve never seen that before. I don’t know. Is that normal or —
John: I’ve only seen it one or two other Elementor widget plugins, which does come in handy, and that it by shutting them off, you’re not sucking up resources, loading them all.
Amber: Really, really cool. And another thing it does which I’ve also never seen scene is it gives you the ability — the option to create your own templates, and then, it also gives you the ability to fill in all the information for things like MailChimp in the settings of the plugin, rather than putting the information in elsewhere. Not just MailChimp. There’s other things too, like, you can set designs, you can set preferences for certain widgets. It’s really cool. Lots of personalization capability, very awesome. Unfortunately, it does have a Pro version. So other than for the Pro, I’d give it five. I’m only rating it four dragons, though.
John: Very good. Alrighty, this .
Charlie: Okay, this is the big one. So I’m bringing now what we have as our giveaway for the next two weeks. It’s launched today. It will be the very first day that where you can enter the competition. It was mentioned last week. And this is for Bloksy Pro. The generous guys at Bloksy, I asked them just, “Could you give me one license?” And they said, “No, we’ll give you three.” So they’ve given us the agency, the professional, and the personal. So we’ve got three licenses to give away. And I was given a test license because I’ve never actually used the Pro. I’ve just used the free one, but the Pro one was actually much better than I thought, and I haven’t really given much time because I was a bit against Guttenberg for a while. I wasn’t really getting into Gutenberg, and I thought, I’m going to stay with one of the many base builders I own. I think I have most of them Bricks, Brizy, Elementor, Divi. I have them all. Yeah, unfortunately, I’m a shopaholic in those things. And it’s I’ve never used them often, but I own them. And I tried this one today, and really went deep into it, and I was like, wow, this is amazing.
It’s really is a super-fast app. So I’m taking a couple of sites, and I’m starting to copy them now. And just the one site that I started to take from — I won’t mention which are the builders — but — and copied it to this Bloksy. Immediately I was struggling to get it higher. I was using every technique on that site to try and to build up speed. It had a lot of pictures. It was quite heavy, and went straight into –just duplicating it to Bloksy, and I was getting basically across the board. There’s the green everywhere. And I’ve never seen so much green in my whole life without having to tweak. It was like a forest out there. It was incredible. I was amazed. And there’s so many it’s — because Gutenberg is now becoming so much more accessible. It was becoming so much easy to work with, and now outside themes like this, like Bloksy and maybe Kadence, and Astra starting to take over. But this has been absolutely brilliant and — you know, I was thinking of entering the competition myself under a pseudonym because I was really thinking I’ve got to win this, but then I thought, no, morally, I can’t do this. So I’ve written to them saying, you know, is there any discount vouchers that we could offer the guests off of the listeners. So maybe I’ll be able to persuade them, but people who don’t win the competition, we might be able to get like a discount voucher to get 10% or 20% of that. I’ll see where we go, but it really is worth having a look at this — and whether if you use Bloksy — sorry, you’ve used Brizy, or use Elementor, or you use the Beaver Builder, you can just use this as the base, and then you can use your builder on top of it. But if you want the true speed and the real power of it, then it’s good just to work with Gutenberg. So I’ll give this definitely a five-dragon rating.
John: Excellent. Sorry, I’m so used to snack in the button after that.
Charlie: I’m really excited about the competition. So if they go to basically, wppluginsatoz.com/giveaways, and then click the button there that’ll leave them to the page where you can enter the competition. Though it is going to be going over to two weeks now, so we were announcing today. John, repeat it next week, and then we’ll have the draw on the second week. And like I said before, you could win one of the prizes. The value of the agency one is 299, and this gives you unlimited sites for lifetime. So basically even if you haven’t had a agency before, you can actually start producing it such – well, let it be an investment, or if you’re lucky enough to win, it’s really quite something. Unlike Elementor, which you have to pay every year. And I’m guessing a lot of these themes because we’re seeing now prices creep up. I’m guessing these lifetime deals might not be as you might have seen them as often.
John: No, you won’t. And what I’ve discovered, like I have a couple of lifetime licenses, because I’ve been a shopaholic for years, and even the ones I’m grandfathered in on some of them. And some companies, almost all those companies eventually have to do away with their lifetime licenses because they need to have continuous income coming in. One lifetime license is only good for, you know, one sale, but they got to keep getting sales to stay in business.
Charlie: Yeah, I remember one of the few groups on face crack, as you call it. And a lot of people basically — they feel ripped off, you know, and you do when you bought it because companies literally can’t continue. I mean, I’ve bought things on a few websites and received the email saying, “Sorry, it doesn’t exist anymore. so cool. It’s got to be a little bit careful.
John: They got to be careful on how they do it. I’ve had companies I quit dealing with because they pulled my lifetime license. And they had other stuff I bought, but I didn’t mind them charging stuff. The problem comes in is like, you know, I was your early supporter. I got your lifetime license. You should at least honor that. And there’s been a lot of companies that have honored it, like, I have a license with Gravity Forms that goes back 12 years. I’m not going to say how much I paid for it, but it’s dirt cheap, and I still get everything that is offered that they now charge 400 bucks a year for.
Charlie: So that’s good. Yeah, it’s good to get rid of it individually.
John: But they were one of the companies that honored their early licenses provided you never let your subscription expire.
Amber: Yeah, that’s the important bit.
John: That’s the important bit, not let these subscriptions expire. If let the subscription expire, that means you have to buy back in at the current price, which is fair enough. That’s a fair enough deal. Alrighty, well, thanks a lot for that. And this show is still currently brought to you by…
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Charlie: Next year — you’re talking about England.
John: I’m talking about Britain — talking about the British Isle.
Charlie: like what’s he talking about? Say there is, oh, yeah, yeah, it was —
John: I actually have a client. I don’t think he lives in Manchester. He lives a little south of you. So at least I think my geography is correct on where Manchester’s at. I can’t remember.
Charlie: Up a middle bit.
John: Yeah, so he’s down further south. Manchester is north of London, right?
Charlie: Yes.
John: He’s now near London. So, at any rate, but I’ve got a client still over in Australia, a lot of my clients in North America. I used to have clients in France and in Africa, but those ones there have left a long time ago. All right, well, this is the part here where we usually talk about the contest, but Charlie did such a great job of talking about it already, but I do want to play the contest bumper, the jingle because I just love it.
for folks, this was given to us by Steve Goodtime, Brant Matthews, real jingle creators. They actually do this sort of thing professionally — and great couple of people. And thank you very much to Steve Goodtime and Brant Matthews. I really appreciate your time on that. And I do like to say thank you again. This time I get to say thanks in person, Charlie, for all the hard work you do bringing the contest to the show. It’s a lot of work. I know it is. I did it for a long time, and I didn’t do it very well, and you do it so well. Thank you very much for all that input you’re doing for that.
Charlie: Well, we have a lot more in the future, so keep your eyes open.
John: And the links are in the show notes folks. Go click the links for Bloksy or just go, as Charlie said, wppluginsatoz.com contest giveaways or giveaways. I got to create a good proper short link for that. I do have pretty links installs. That’s another plugin I bought way back in the beginning, and I got a lifetime license for it. And another company did honor the lifetime license when they changed. All right, well, this is where we cover up and close out a couple of things in here simply because it’s — we need to close out the plugins and couple of tidy ends because we’re going to go into the Q&A segment with Amber. And partway through that, we play the closing credits for the show. Come back from those. And for those still on the YouTube channel, you get to hear all the questions. And the questions today are rather entertaining. You rather enjoy them. So, I covered up this episode the Finpose – Accounting Plugin for WooCommerce, which I gave a five to, and the I Order Terms, which I gave a four to.
Amber: And I covered Royal Elementor Addons, which I gave a four rating, and A11y Kit, which I gave a five rating.
Charlie: I spoke about Flying Scripts, which I definitely gave a five-dragon rating for, and also the amazing Bloksy Pro, which is obviously a five as well.
John: Okay. And couple of quick reminders. I do have a bit of a meetup. I haven’t put it into the calendar anything for those of you listening. If you want to join us at the Oasis for a WordPress Rogues Tavern, big birthday party meetup, reach out to me via email john@wppro.ca, I’ll get you the address. It’s going to be on July 10 out at the Oasis, and it’s going to be a good time out in the garden up on the newly completed deck and the fire pit, and grill up some food, have some beers, nice wonderful afternoon at the oasis. So reach out to me, I’ll get you the info on how you can get there. I’m not going to put it into our calendar. And, of course, if you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, you can join us on our new show, our live stream, Shooting The Shit At The Rogues Tavern every Tuesday evening at eight o’clock where we talk about all the things we can’t talk about here. And that pretty much it. It is time for…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Charlie: .
Amber: If anyone out there has any questions that you’d like to have answered on the show, feel free to send them in to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them up here. Today I’m going to be asking your opinions about some things. So the first thing I have here is, what do you think is going on with the uptake in cybersecurity — the issues that we’ve been seeing?
John: You want to take a first there, Charlie?
Charlie: Oh, am I in the question? I’m sorry.
John: Oh, yeah, you’re in this, man. Go, go, I’m not going to waste having you be able to get in here and tell her what for.
Charlie: What — sorry, I just . So what is the — with all the cybersecurity attacks you mean?
Amber: Yeah, what do you think is going on with, like, what do you think the issues are that have been causing all the uptake and cybersecurity attacks like?
Charlie: Well, I mean, (crosstalk) you mean not the hackers. Oh, you mean, the foreign governments, you mean? Are we getting into conspiracy theories now? I’ve got a few. I said, well, I think the hackers have — I mean, the people, there’s so much easy money to be made out of sites with this. You’ve got ransomware. You’ve got DDoS attacks on websites. And nowadays, there’s just so few — there’s so many people doing these things and so few people investigating, you know, the chance of being caught, especially if you use the right tools, you can get away with murder. Now with Bitcoin and various currencies, you can get paid for doing it anonymously. So I think it’s quite easy to do.
John: Now, what I think about the uptake in cybersecurity issues, what the reality is, from my perspective, is there’s no uptake in the issues. The issues have always been there. What’s happening is there’s more people taking advantage of the issues. And it’s easier than ever to take advantage of the issues. If you’re half-intelligent and you can connect a computer to the dark web, which, of course, isn’t that hard, you can find tons and tons of scripts there. And the scripts can be deployed, and just go out there and wreak havoc. And a lot of that is occurring. The other problem occurs is, you know, I’ve seen an uptake in attacks on my servers. And most of the time, they’re not even attacking existing accounts. They’re attacking non-existing accounts on the server. They’re just running massive dictionary attacks at it. And they’re coming from so many hundreds of IP addresses at a time, I end up having to deploy DDoS stuff constantly. And even the data centers, I have my servers — and the data centers have a layer of protection in front of my servers, which they deploy on a regular basis. And it’s just insane, but from my perspective, what’s going on is it’s just — they’re looking for ways to make money. I mean, when they hack into a server, nowadays, most of the time, they’re not even looking for anything in there except for whatever private information they can get, user names, email addresses, or if they can get into a website, turn it into a spam machine. There’s really no other value in it. And personal data is not as valuable as it used to be on the Internet so they have to collect more of it.
Charlie: As now, WordPress, they say about 41 percent of the Internet, you know, when you set up a program to attack one particular service, one particular script, then, you know, you’re hitting such a vaster majority of the Internet. Then it’s — you know, you’re either be open to attack all the time, I think.
Amber: I didn’t even think about that.
John: So, yeah, it’s surprising that people don’t realize this. It’s kind of like, you know, the constant attacks on Windows machines. The only reason they attacked Windows machines so much over Apple machines for the longest time is because windows was the dominant operating system. And it’s just there’s an uptake in it right now, and then there’s lots of — when we go down to conspiracy theories, bring this question to the tavern and we’ll have fun going down the massive conspiracy theories that go with the cybersecurity issues.
Amber: We’ll do.
John: There is a lot in the conspiracy realm that we can go into, but not here.
Amber: I have been said too many people with too much time on their hands and needing a side hustle to pay the rent. So either hacking or only fans. And it’s easier than ever to buy hacking tools, so you don’t need much skill anymore.
Charlie: Yeah, and, of course, people have been off work a lot because you say a lot of free time because of the pandemic, so what better than people in honing their skills, I guess and developing more tools to take it on them.
John: Oh, absolutely. Okay, the next two questions. It looks like they’re kind of tied together, so read those ones out. We’ll close out the show for those listening on the podcast to hear the next two questions’ answers. You guys have to come back to YouTube to watch them.
Amber: Okay, so, on Tuesday, we lost a lot of the Internet. This was due to the CDN supported by . It appears to have been a malfunction within their own system, and they solved within an hour. Do you think this was due to the amount of people trying to access these sites nowadays with everyone being at home? Do you think that has anything to do with the issue? Next one is, I’ve noticed a lot of problems over the past few months with things on net, things like data machines, my own Internet at home. What’s on my mind here is a mixture of too many people trying to use the Internet at the same time, hackers attacking providers and causing the bandwidth to be taken up with fighting them, rather than allowing it to supply to the customers. Am I trapped with these thoughts?
John: Okay, well, I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here, enjoy my shot, and we’ll come back and answer those two questions.
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