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Transcript of Episode 516 WP Plugins A to Z

It's Episode 516 - We have plugins for Hero's, Videos, Pride, Image management, Stop Spammers, Wasting time ... 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 #516 here.


It’s a Brave New Virtual World Episode 516 – We have plugins for Hero’s, Videos, Pride, Image management, Stop Spammers, Wasting time … and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #516

 

John:                All right, so off we go. ClassicPress options, this week, I don’t really have any ClassicPress options. We do have an interesting thing that I discovered today about ClassicPress. They do now have their own repository. And it’s about time they got up to it. You can go check it out. It is located — the link is in the show notes. They have 72 plugins available in their repository. This is their plugin repository and information on what plugins they have, and you can start searching through them. So if you’re using ClassicPress, you’ll want to check this out if you don’t already know about it.

Amber:            That’s really cool. They have their own repository now. That will make it easier.

John:                I knew it was coming. Now it’s a matter of them. I haven’t looked at ClassicPress in a little while, but I bet, you know, once they get it integrated into the CMS system itself where people can access it from the back-end like they do WordPress plugins, it’ll be a game-changer for them. I guess they’re pretty much on target the way WordPress grew over 2-3-4 years before they had a lot of things working the way they wanted them to. So they may be a contender in the coming years. It would take a lot longer than I thought it would take. I expected it to jump forward a little further, but, you know, sometimes you bet on the wrong horse, and that’s what happened here.

All right, WordPress plugins, we do have those. Now the first one I’ve got here was sent in to us by Angel Lemus, a listener out there on the show. So thank you Angel for this plugin. It’s called the Hero Maps Premium, and it’s a responsive Google Maps plugin. It allows you to aggregate all your markers on any map with simple drag-and-drop interface. The map pins are fully editable to your taste. You can embed as much information as you like into each pin. It’s a very easy program to work with, and it looks fantastic. It’s very affordable premium plugin sold through Envato market for 20 bucks. It is a pretty good-looking one. I’m kind of like it based upon what I’ve seen, how I used it. The rating that Angel gave us to give on it, he gives it a four dragon rating. So go check it out the Hero Maps Premium. The link is in the show notes for it.

Amber:            That’s really cool and really nice-looking. The first one I’ve got is Pride Codes, a very simple and easy-to-use plugin just to show your support on your site for Pride Month. You install it, go to settings, select whichever version you are wanting, and save the settings. I believe there are four versions that they offer you. You can have the triangle, the banner. It’s very simple. Oh, no, they have lot more than four — how many is that? Four, five, six, seven.

John:                Now, you have three settings; a triangle on the top left or right, triangle with words, a single banner with colors, and then a plain simple banner with some symbols on it.

Amber:            Okay, so seven pictures, three designs.

John:                Yeah, there you go.

Amber:            So it is pretty easy, very simple to use. I think that the way this was created was fantastic. It’s really great, but the selections they offered were not overly great in my opinion. They could have been a wee bit more imaginative. And the vote yes, in my opinion, is a little out-of-date at this point, but it certainly gets your support out there. So I rate this at four dragons.

John:                There you go, go check it out. Okay, the next one I’ve got for you, this one was sent in to us by Mark Wilson, and it is called Magnifi Video Widget. And this is another premium plugin here — and what it’s designed to do — and it’s a WordPress plugin for video widget — the concept is a video widget is that you’re able to embed video conferencing via iframe JavaScript SDK or WP shortcode at any point in your website or workflow, and there’s configurations for it. So it’s a third-party system that helps you with video conferencing, maybe you can use it for meeting rooms or communicating in your company, or maybe you need to communicate with your client while you’re working on the website, or some other things, lots of things this could be used from. It’s a rather interesting plugin and something that could be a value to you. Go check this out. I give it a four-dragon rating.

Amber:            That seems really useful. The next one I have is Bulk image resizer. This is a brand new out-of-the-box plugin that will resize images in bulk, very useful. It also has an option where you can have any new image you upload resized immediately for you. And a bonus, it does not create that grainy issue I’ve seen in some bulk image resizers. I don’t even know what that’s caused by, but it does a really good job. It’s a pretty awesome premium plugin, very easy to use, and simple to set up. Just make sure to look for image resizer in your plugins list, because for some reason, once it’s in there, it adds up to the name of your list, even though it’s not in the official name. That confused me. But this is optimized for speed to keep you from being slowed down. It allows you to monitor status of images on your server, allows additional information to the column on the image, and you even have the ability to code and filters. One major drawback though, you cannot go back to the original size once you have resized it. So make sure that you want to resize it before you do it. Backups are a major thing as most of you already know I’m sure. Really nifty though, definitely recommend you go and check this out. I rate it at five dragons.

John:                Alrighty, another image resizer plugin. Hopefully, it does better than some of the other ones out there. All right, and the final one I’ve got for you here today is called Disable WP Registration Page. And what this one does for you is it goes in and it helps you stop the spam or fake registrations in WordPress. One of the things it does for it, it disables the default WordPress registration page which people use to register for it. It removes the registration link from the login page. It can also remove the register link from the Forgot Password page, so it basically removes all the links that the bots use to register on your site. It helps to slow down eliminate the spam. It doesn’t stop it completely, but it does help stop it quite a bit. And it’s something that you’ll want to check into because virtually anyone — once you allow registrations on your site for a membership or other thing, you’re constantly finding ways to keep the spammers from showing up. And most of those spammers are just bots that are trying to get in there and then take advantage of any flaws in your system that may or may not exist. So anyway, go check this one out. Pretty good-looking plugin. It’s Disable WP Registration Page Spam, which the title makes no sense. It confuses me, but anyway, other than that, it’s a really great plugin. Go check it out. I give it a four-dragon rating.

Amber:            Very nice. I could see that being really nice to use — less spammers equals good.

John:                Yes, it does.

Amber:            So the last one I’ve got is Spider Solitaire Card Game – Embed Spider Solitaire for Free – Ad-free Spider Solitaire Puzzle game, kind of a long name. But I was so excited, been trying to get this to work for four months now. And even though, it was updated three months ago, and I made sure everything on my site was updated, and I did everything I could, I can’t get to work. I’ve tried to get it to work. I’ve tried multiple ways of embedding it. I’ve tried multiple ways of doing it. It’s not working. I don’t know if it’s just me. But if it is just me, then I would love for someone to reach out to me and tell me what vital stuff I’m missing, or what I’m doing wrong, because I really want to add this to my sandbox. I’m growing this list of beautifully distracting games on my sandbox site, because, you know, distraction is never a bad thing when you’re working. So, unfortunately, because of my disappointment over not being able to get to work, I’m only rating it at two dragons. Sorry, online solitaire card games beats.

John:                Well, I saw it come up. I went, hey, I reviewed this many, many months back, and I had the same problem. So I think I gave it the same rating.

Amber:            Yeah, if anyone can help me understand how to get it working, I will happily bring it up to five. I just need it to work.

John:                Yeah, I was hoping — I was thinking, cool, I can put it in here and I can sit here and waste time playing solitaire on my website. Yeah, unfortunately, not so much. Yeah, maybe they’ll eventually get it fixed and sorted out. At any rate, this show is still brought to you by…

 

Are you tired of the same old web hosting, not having the resources you need to run your website properly, having a lack of control, then you need johnoverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, johnoverall.com provides high-quality fast server performance. Visit johnoverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.

John:                Absolutely nothing, but the best there. All right, it is time for…

Absolutely, enter our contests. Our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. They kindly provide us with the premium version of their plugin for our contest. This is a really fantastic plugin. I’ve been using this plugin since it was brand new, so that’s probably a couple three years now. And it has made such improvements over the years; it keeps getting better and better. So if you want to run contests on your site, go check out the simple giveaways plugin. I also want to thank Charlie for coming to the aid of the show, getting all our contests organized, and making them work the way they do. And for this week here, he brought us a great one. He brought us Bloksy. And if you want to hear all about Bloksy, go check out our episode 515 where Charlie actually appeared as a guest host on the show, and he gave it a live review of five dragons, fantastic plugin important to him. And what are we doing giving away for this plugin. We are giving away three major licenses of this plugin. We’re giving away an agency lifetime license valued at 299 bucks, a professional lifetime license valued at 199 bucks, or a personal lifetime license valued at 149 bucks. So what you’re getting there is you’re getting a license that’s either for unlimited sites, five sites, or one site. But this is a lifetime license. This isn’t just an annual. This is something you’ll never have to buy again. Fantastic plugin, it’s got lots of blocks for building. If you’re building in Gutenberg, the blocks also work. If you’re working in Elementor, other page builders, it is a block portfolio of blocks to build out your web pages. And it’s really quite great; you get the Pro version and it does a whole lot for you. We’ve seen as we’ve had some excitement. I’ve seen lots of entries into the contest so far, but hey, we’re running it still for another week or so, and make sure you get those entries in for your chance to win at the contest. So go enter wppluginsatoz.com/contests. All right, enter the contest.

Amber:            A very exciting contest that we’re having right now.

John:                Yeah, this is one of the bigger ones that we’ve had, and this is one of the bigger licenses and everything we’ve had for it, so a lot going on with it. All right, got to close out a couple of things. So we can move on to the Q&A segment with Amber. So closing out this show here I covered up the following plugins, Hero Maps Premium which I gave a four to, the Magnifi Video Widget, which I gave a four to, and the Disable WP Registration Page Spam, which I gave a four to.

Amber:            And I covered Pride Codes, which I rated at four, Bulk Image Resizer, which I rated at five, and Spider Solitaire Card Game – Embed Spider Solitaire for Free – Ad-free Spider Solitaire Puzzle game, which I rated an unfortunate two.

John:                Say that three times fast.

Amber:            No, evil, so long.

John:                All right, couple other quick reminders. We do have a sort of a meetup plan, but you have to reach out to me at john@wppro.ca to find out where it’s at. It’s happening July 10th, and I do have a limited number of people that can attend, and it’s not because of COVID or anything else, it’s because there’s just not a lot of space in the Oasis. I can only handle about a dozen people there. After that, it gets a little crowded. So if you want to show up and join us there, you got to reach out to me at john@wppro, and I’ll get you directions on how to get there and join us for the party. It’s happening on July 10th, a nice Saturday afternoon. All right. And also, if you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, you want to hear us in a whole different environment, check out our show Shooting The Shit At The Rogues Tavern Tuesday evenings at 8:00 live on YouTube. Just go to the roguestavern.com/live for all of that. All right, it is time we move on to…

It’s question and answer time.

John:                With Amber.

Amber:            Last week, both you and Charlie said that in almost the exact same tone. It was great. I think we should record that just that little bit and add it.

John:                No we got to cut it. We’ve already record it. We just got to cut it because it’s in last week show.

Amber:            No, that’s what I meant to cut it and add it.

John:                Yeah, that requires work though.

Amber:            Yeah, it does. All right, so first off — oh, great, first, if you have any questions you’d like to have asked, please send them in to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them into the segment. And first off, we have a question from a listener from Greg Holdsworth from Greg’s Graphics. He sent this in. “Hi, Amber, my main business is print production and design, but I am considering doing websites for clients, obviously, in WordPress, similar to what john has been doing for many years. How would you recommend building a portfolio of sites to showcase your experience? And is there a big market for WordPress websites? I’m not a developer, but I have a few years experience in WordPress already. Thanks in advance and keep up the great work with the show. Greg Holdsworth, Greg’s Graphics.” I love hearing from listeners. Thanks for sending in this question, Greg.

John:                All right, well, that’s a great thing to do, Greg. What I would suggest is you want to build out portfolio websites for others — okay, you’re building out your own portfolio — first off, you’ll build your own website, build it in WordPress, of course, use Elementor. What’s nice about Elementor is there’s actually some really nice plugins in there. I haven’t rebuilt my website, my primary website johnoverall.com. I haven’t rebuilt it now in about five years. It’s one of those things, you know, the plumbers’ plumbing always leaks, the mechanics’ car always needs brakes, you know. It’s what happens when you start doing the work. You spend a lot of time building out your site initially, and then it slowly degrades because you never have time to get back to your own site. But the new developments in Elementor or Page Builder, or if you’re already using Gutenberg, even Gutenberg, like the Bloksy plugin has things for it. They have portfolio blocks that can be used for showcasing the websites you’ve built, and to also make it easy to remove websites as they age — like I’ve done hundreds of websites over the years, and I’ll have to go through the portfolio, remove the sites that the clients are no longer clients or the clients after I gave them the website made so many changes in, it was no longer my work, you know, that sort of thing happens. So you have to keep your portfolio up-to-date. But he said — when you’re building your website, your website is part of your portfolio, as Amber mentioned in the article earlier in the show, is you got to remember your website is part of the portfolio. The portfolio of the websites you’ve done is just the display of your talents and how you can do variations on work and create work that is different and not always the same as what you do. And when you build your website, I  know you want it to be different than a lot of the websites you build, but not so far different that people think you’re nutbar. So it is basically just sitting down, building it, mapping out your site, and using a lot of the tools that are available now that make it a whole lot easier than it used to be.

Amber:            I did also throw in a couple of links in the extra news area that will also help with figuring out your site to make it look more like a portfolio just so that you’re aware, Greg.

John:                All right, you got a couple other questions here?

Amber:            Yep. So far, I have found it a lot easier to help other people build what they want for their sites. How do you get started on your own sites? What are the first steps that need to be taken to get your own ideas out other than just knowing what kind of site you are wanting?

John:                Well, you want to know how are you using your site. It’s like for a long time, I use my website for marketing for building websites, and I didn’t market for my web hosting. And then I switched it to marketing for the web hosting, and then I tried to emphasize the web hosting. When you’re building out your website, you know, for a long time, I also specialized in fixing hacked websites. It doesn’t seem to be as big a problem as it used to be. I guess the security’s gotten tighter and not as many WordPress sites get hacked the way they used to. They get hacked in different ways now. I mean, a long time, not even seven years or so ago, defacing used to be a major problem on WordPress websites. And so basically, what is your main focus going to be, you know, do you have a specific market your website is going to be in?

Amber:            Before you get too far down that path, say you are wanting to build out a site — we’ll say wanting to build out a site that is like a market site where people can come and buy things, but also make their own account. And that’s the only thing you know. You just know you want to make like a shop online pretty much. What do you need in order to really get started on that? Like, how are you going to figure out what you want to do with it? That’s all you know. How do you go from there to actually building out the site — because I find that when I’m doing sites for other people, they have all these ideas, and they have these colors, and they have a logo, and they have all these things, and I can build anything when they give me those things, but if you don’t have any of that yourself, how do you get there?

John:                Then you got to create it yourself. You got to start with — as I’ve always started with people that are brand new, and they’d have no idea where they’re going. It’s like, what’s your logo? You know, does your business have a logo? Because that’s usually — Ground Zero is a logo of some sort to me. Ground Zero is a logo. And then from the logo, you get the site colors. From the site colors, you get the initial layout. From there, you add in contact page, about page. Then you start adding in what is your marketing about, what are you promoting? And then from your promotions, you build out your pages one at a time. One at a time you build out your pages. It depends on where you’re going, but to me, square one is starting with your identity, what is your identity for your site, or for who you are. Now your identity will change as you evolve, but you need at least a spot to start. I mean the Rogues tavern, my most recent project for myself, initially, that started out — that website went through five iterations before I finally settled on what it is. The biggest problem I had was coming up with an identity, which the identity started with my logo. And the logo didn’t occur until I built my garden, which I put up my thing for — with my skull and crossbones from there, I was able to create that, and then it’s been evolving. But you got to start somewhere. You start somewhere and you let it evolve.

Amber:            Hemdian added something.

John:                Oh, welcome back, Hemdian.

Amber:            So for new Dev business, maybe familiarize yourself with various global legal requirements GDPR et cetera and accessibility, and what plugins help with those?

John:                Yes, that’s a problem nowadays. But GDPR, if you’re not marketing to Europe, you don’t have to worry about GDPR. But the global — oh god, I had a good thing for the acronym, but I forget what it is now.

Amber:            Well, what is it, like just different —

John:                It’s privacy regulations. Global Digital Privacy Regulations is what it stands for, but it only applies to Europe. It doesn’t apply to North America, because we have our own privacy regulations. And California actually has a whole different set of regulations from everyone else, because they like to be different. So there is no consistency. The biggest thing you have to know is where — your website can be seen everywhere in the world, but where your market and your customers are, is what’s most important. If your customers are solely located in, say, British Columbia, then you only have to worry about British Columbia. The rest of the people who visit your site are peripheral to your problems. You have to focus on where you are because you’re only responsible for your area if your customers are not outside your area. So there’s a whole lot of stuff that goes into it. And the accessibility, that one’s a US problem. I’m not certain what Canada’s laws are on accessibility for the web yet, but the Disabilities Act in the United States applies to websites. And, of course, there’s a big scam there of lawyers who sue everyone under the Disabilities Act just to get a payout. And they go after small businesses because small business can’t afford lawyers, but they’ll pay 1000 bucks to make the lawyer to make them go away. And there’s a whole lot of it — so many scams that go around it, but, you know, you do want to try and be as accessible as possible, but some of the accessibility stuff in my opinion is unreasonable. It’s an unreasonable expectation of what you can do for the Internet. To me, some of it’s unreasonable. I do the best I can, but that’s just what it boils down to. And we actually reviewed a really great plugin. I interviewed a developer or their marketing person for a really great plugin that helps with accessibility. I can’t remember the plugins name now. You’d have to go back and research.

Amber:            Yeah, I can’t remember the name of the plugin, but I do remember. It was fantastic.

John:                So there’s a lot of things you can do if you’re going to go down that path. And they’re so many things that go into it. To me, it’s like build a website and do the best you can with it and figure out where your market is, and work within the market you’ve got unless you —

Amber:            But step one, Ground Zero is get a logo.

John:                Get an identity. Logo is basically a name for — a term for identity. You need the identity. You need to identify what your website and business is all about, and it will evolve as you move forward with it. It will evolve. They always do until it actually lands on something. I mean, even Amazon, when it first came out, they started with their logo. They have the same logo they created in the beginning but look at how they evolved — because initially, Amazon only sold used books. That’s all they did.

Amber:            Really?

John:                Yeah, Amazon started out as a used bookstore — a used online bookstore. And they made most of their money selling used college books, used textbooks to college universities, students, who, of course, you know, when I went to college, the textbooks were 80 bucks apiece, and you’ve tried to buy them used for 40 bucks or 30 bucks if you get somebody to really sell it to you cheap. But that’s what Amazon did. They would buy up all the used textbooks and they sold them. That’s how they made their name. And then they kept evolving and stepping up and adding stuff, and then buying up businesses.

Amber:            Hey, Hemdian said something interesting. He said, “If someone from Europe can sign up to something on your website, you are legally responsible to GDPR compliance even if you’re not in Europe.”  He had to do this in his day job for a US customer. That’s definitely a good thing to know.

John:                Yeah, we’ll see. They’d have a tough time. From my perspective — I’m not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination — but from my perspective, how are they going to enforce it when I live in Canada.  I live in Canada. My business is in Canada. I’m focused in Canada. I don’t really give two flocks if someone in Europe signs up. If they sign up, they sign up. That’s their problem. But in reality, as I do kind of try to respect the GDPR, I’ve put the cookie things up there. , It comes from the fact that I do have — for John Overall, I do have European clients. So for that, I do have GDPR stuff, but the reality is the Internet is worldwide, but law enforcement is local. It’s really hard to — and unless you’re a major corporation that does business internationally, most of the time they won’t chase you because it’s like squeezing blood out of a rock. It can’t be done. You can’t squeeze blood out the rock. So almost all of this enforcement of these things, it involves fines. That’s all the enforcement’s are. They’re fines. And to find a small business, what happens, is you force the business in the bankruptcy, they can’t pay the fine, they get no money. A lot of these things were created to extort money out of the big boys, Facebook, Google, Twitter, all the other big companies. A lot of these regulations were created to extort money out of the big major corporations. And that’s exactly what they’ve been used for. They’ve only been used against major corporations from the stuff I’ve read so far.

Amber:            Okay, the next two questions I have are both connected, so I’ll read them out and then you can do the closeout.

John:                And then, we’ll close it out, and I can enjoy my shot.

Amber:            Yep, so I’ve been reading up on cybersecurity, and I am honestly amazed at the enormity of the available companies or homes and business security. Is there a particular, or even a few particular programs that you would recommend people look at when looking into security for their home computers? And why that or those, in particular, what sets them apart for you?

John:                Alrighty, well, we’ll come back to those after our girl takes us on out of here.

 

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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