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 #517 here.
It’s Episode 517 – We have plugins for Email Management, Social media Publishing, Radio Player, Restrict Contact, Admin Colour Schemes … and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #517
John: All right, ClassicPress options. We really don’t have ClassicPress options this week that I’m aware of.
Amber: Not really — we talked about not really looking at even trying to do anything for ClassicPress other than just presenting information to our listeners in the show notes, just because we don’t really have the time to do ClassicPress, and it’s just kind of fallen to the wayside. So I think we’re just going to keep up the ClassicPress resources and leave it at that for everyone.
John: Yep, that’ll be pretty much it unless some of our listeners ClassicPress users send us information; we’ll happily get it in here and give you full credit for that work and effort.
Amber: Absolutely.
John: All right into WordPress plugins. And what I have this week, the first one I’ve got out the gate is called Mailroad Switch. This looks to be a pretty useful plugin. If you’re an administrator on a WordPress website, you know how many different emails you get. You know, some of them shouldn’t even come to you. There’s the Auto Update emails, there’s the Site Error emails, there’s New User Emails, there’s jQuery Migrate — somebody messed up my typing on that because I actually put jQuery in there. It now says jSquarey.
Amber: Jacuzzi.
John: Jacuzzi. That’s it. Somebody messed up my word there. At any rate, jQuery Migrate more — with this plugin, you can go in and set an email address for all of these different spots that the emails get sent to. So you might not even have to see those error emails anymore if you’re not the one to handle the errors, you know, or you might not handle the ones for users or any like that. You can get them sent to all the proper people without you having to see all the extra junk and crap. Really great little plugin is brand new, fresh off the boat. And I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: It’s like you become a post office box.
John: Yep.
Amber: That’s cool. The first thing I’ve got is RadioPlayer — Live Shoutcase, Icecase — I don’t think it is supposed to be Icecase. I think the Autocrat did on me.
John: Icecase.
Amber: Icecase, Audio Stream Player for WordPress. So it’s a long name, but it’s a pretty awesome little plugin. Fresh off the press as well. I think all the plugins I did today are all pretty brand new. And what this does is it gives you a sticky player for your page or pages that can be a pop-up, or you can even have multiple owners on the same page. All different things are all the same things if you want. You can play MP3, M3U8, which I’m not even sure what that is. You can do a stream, and there are many other main options as well for how you can make it look, size, color, where it goes et cetera. This uses a shortcode, or you can use an Elementor widget, Gutenberg widget, or a Sidebar widget, depending on what you’re using to create your pages. It’s definitely something on look into if you’re doing streams and/or mp3. If you’re doing those often, this could be very useful. I really like their Get Started thing they have when you download the plugin and activate it too. You click on that and it gives you a rundown of how you can do everything, it gives you the shortcode, all the options. It’s really, really useful. Definitely recommend checking this out. They are still new, so there may still be some issues as usually are, but I didn’t find any during my perusal of it. I rate this at five dragons.
John: Excellent. Those look like, oh, well, you put more than you on one or two on a page, I guess it’s for the real ADH people.
Amber: Or, you know, you have like an article, and then you can make — there’s also people who listen to stuff rather than read it, right? So if you have it recorded where people can just listen to each one, they did that when I was in school. They’d have like their textbook, and you can actually just click play and listen to every chapter on the textbook.
John: All right, well, the next one I have for you is Localhost to IP. This is a very simple little plugin, and this is good for those of you that might be doing local development. And periodically, you need to share that local development to your client or whatever. And while some of them have ways to do it, what this plugin allows you to do is on your local settings is to go in and change the URL from your local host to an IP address, so that you can easily share that out for people to look at the site over and have a good look at it. The one caveat is, you know, your Localhost depends on what your router does. You may or may not get through, but it is one way to help be able to share it out with you. A very simple plugin. I thought it was kind of cool. Something to bring to everyone’s attention that it might be something you could use. Go check it out. It’s Localhost to IP. And I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: There’s a reason every time you say local host, I keep hearing loco. It’s all here. Localhost.
John: Local host, yeah, absolutely.
Amber: Why should we be plugging in Localhost? be a really great plugin actually called Localhost, make everything all okay. All right, next one I have is NutsForPress Restricted Contents. This is an interesting plugin. What they do is they make it so that the option to restrict a page appears on the right hand side of the editing area instead of as an option in the settings area — like every plugin I’ve checked out so far, that’s a restriction plugin. They always have like a list of your pages and posts, and they have you choose which ones you want restricted. Here you do it right in the editing when you are creating the page as to whether or not you want to restrict it. And then, in the settings, you get to choose what page people will be sent to if they’re not logged in as a courtesy page. I think this is really cool. When you’re creating the page, you just copy and paste the link into the spot they give you for the courtesy page. If they’re not logged in, they get sent to the courtesy page.
John: Nice.
Amber: I thought it’s pretty cool, and its total freemium, also pretty new. And I rate it at five dragons.
John: Okay. And the final one I’ve got for you today is Social Media Publish. This is a plugin to help automate your social media publishing. That goes along with that news article we talked about a little while ago. And what this one does, this helps you auto-publish to Instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t do any other medias at the current time. It is a brand new plugin, so maybe they’ll add some stuff later. You just got to go create the client ID and secret code in Facebook. They may have instructions in it. I haven’t installed it because I already have automation on my sites set up. But I thought this might be an interesting one to bring to everyone’s attention. They set it up. And the nice thing about this one too is not only will it auto-publish your post once you create it, you can go back in at a later time and manually republish the post, thereby pushing it out a second time or third or 10th, or however many times you want to show it out to your social media, and annoy all your social media fans. At any rate, an interesting plugin. I thought it was one that would be great, you know, has a little bit of extra work you got to go and do to it when in other words getting set up with the Facebook client ID. So I give this one a four-dragon rating. Go check it out Social Media Publish.
Amber: I see it’s pretty neat. The last one I’ve got is Retro Color Scheme. This one is just cool. I mean if you want to pull a silly prank on someone, download and activate this plugin, go on to their profile, and select Retro Color Scheme. Oh, my god, the colors are terrible but hilarious. It’s great, honestly, like it’s not colors I could have no working in for very long, but it’s fun. It could also be just, you know — I mean, also I’m sure there are people who actually appreciate this color scheme, and who don’t think it’s horrible, and who think that like this would be great for them to have as everyday usage. Really easy and simple to use, could be a lot of fun, total freebie. I gave it a five-dragon rating.
John: Sounds kind of cool. Probably has the olive green retro from the 1970s kitchens.
Amber: Oh, yeah, and the bright orange. The bright orange is what you get for like your sidebar in the top there, and the way that they have the colors kind of wrapped around, it’s almost how the colors appear just in different order than the box they show.
John: Oh, okay. All right, well, you know, all these now shag carpeting and you’re good and set to go. All right, this show is still brought to you by…
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John: Absolutely. Very fast web hosting, and now my last server is filling up quick, folks. I still got a few spaces left. But once they’re gone, they’re gone. So when you hear this ad disappearing fairly, you’ll know that I’m all filled up on my servers. All right, it is time for our…
Thanks to Steve Goodtime and Brent Matthews for that jingle. And our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. These guys are kind enough to provide us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contest. And it’s a really great plugin, only occasionally has a glitch like we had this morning in the selection of our winners. But other than that, really great plugin and they’ve added so much to it. I hadn’t paid attention to it for six to eight months and their latest updates. They’ve added a lot of things you can do with the contest in here. It’s like I’ve been using this plugin since it was brand new and very straight and simple, and it just keeps getting better year after year. So go check it out.
All right, our contest for last week, we had a contest for three big premium licenses from Bloksy. There was an agency lifetime license. There was the professional lifetime license and a personal lifetime license. And we had three winners from that. So congratulations out to Luis Hermenegildo, who got the personal license, Martin Wedepohl who got the professional license, and then Elson Myer who got the agency license. So congratulations to you guys for winning that license. I was really happy to see how many people entered this contest. It was really quite cool to see that many people enter these contests. Now, I do have one quick note that came in from one of the winners here today. And the note, it goes, “Simply what a great way to start the day. I just received your notification. Thank you, john, for a marvelous podcast. I listened every week, but have never entered a giveaway. I will enter every time now. Kind regards.”
Amber: Nice.
John: So thanks a lot, greatly appreciate it. Don’t worry, those licenses we’ll get to you as soon as we can get them to you guys. I gotten two of the notifications back when I get them all, then everybody gets their licenses. So they will arrive. And again, thank you, Charlie, for organizing and arranging this. And if you want to find out more about the Bloksy license, Charlie gave a great review as a guest on our show back in Episode 515. So it’s a really great review. So go check out Episode 515 and hear what Charlie had to say about this plugin and what it can do for you. All right, our new contest, we do have a new contest up and running now. You can find it over at the contest page; it should be live now. Hopefully, it went live like it was supposed to. I’m not sure. Yep, there it is, I lost the Bloksy one. We got to fix the link, got the wrong link in here. Wrong link in the show notes.
Amber: That’s easily fixable though.
John: Yeah, let’s see if this one here. Yeah, it’s still going to the Bloksy one. Okay, we got to fix the link in the show notes. All right, let’s fix the link in the show notes, but you can go directly to the contest page itself to get to the contest that are up and running in live. And hopefully, this one here is fixed too, otherwise, I’m still — yeah, all the links in the show notes are messed up. All right, so go find it at wppluginsatoz.com/contest to get to the contest and enter the contest. We are giving away a single site lifetime license valued at 599 bucks for Orderable. Orderable is a plugin to make online ordering a breeze, and very profitable. And I haven’t dug into this plugin just yet, but I will be getting more information on it, but it does look like a really great plugin. But to get one that’s a lifetime license and you don’t have to pay for it, hey, what a deal folks. Make sure you get out there and enter the contest, and then go check out Orderable. They do have a demo site that shows you how it all works and what it does. It can be used for ordering online, ordering food products, miscellaneous things. They’ve got a whole lot of stuff, you know, except pickup and delivery orders. So it’s something that could help you if this is part of your business, or if you’re building out something for a client. You know, you could win the license you need to deal with it.
Amber: That’d be cool.
John: All right. And we are going to cover out a couple of things, closing out the show bits before we head into the Q&A segment. Because, of course, we split, so we got to play the show — the closing credits. I covered up in this episode, The Mailroad Switch, which I gave a five to, the Localhost IP, which I gave a five to, and the Social Media Publish, which I gave a four to.
Amber: Oh, It’s almost an all-five show.
John: Almost.
Amber: I covered radio player live showcase. I don’t think Icecase and Audio Stream Player for WordPress, which I gave a five, NutsForPress Restricted Contents, which I gave five, and Retro Color Scheme. which I gave a five.
John: Very good. All right, couple of quick reminders. One reminder and we need to let everyone know this, and it didn’t make it into the show notes, but it’s a good thing it’s still in my head. Next week, It’s Canada Day. Thursday, July 1 is Canada Day. We are not going to do a live show. I’m going to disappear into the Hinterlands of Central Vancouver Island. But there will be a show. It won’t be a full-blown show of everything we do like today, but it’ll be a shorter show, but it will go live at noon on Canada Day. So we won’t be here live, but we still will have the show, and I — with a little luck, we’ll not only have one that goes out on YouTube, but also the podcast that drops as normal at precisely noon on Canada Day. I just want to get away. The weather next week is forecast for 35 to 40 degrees. It’s like I’m all game for that, more heat the better. So we want to get away and just let everyone know that we won’t be live next week. We just will be a regular-dropped podcast.
Amber: I think I put it under the wrong reminder. There’s another reminder closer to the end of the show notes.
John: Okay, well, I kind of expected here. That’s okay. All right, there is a meetup that sort of planned. This is not an official I’ve published it in our calendar meetup. It’s going to happen on July 10th, and it’s going to happen up in central Cowichan Valley area of Vancouver Island. And anyone that’s interested, send an email to me, john@wppro.ca, and I will give you instructions on how to find the Oasis. Because it’s going to be at the Oasis, it’s going to start at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, go for however many hours. It’s going to be up on the brand new deck that’s being finished right now around the fire pit, the grassy area, wandering the garden. You know, it basically a nice, enjoyable afternoon. I’m hoping that it doesn’t rain. But if it does rain well, so be it. We got a covering on the deck too. So we’ll stay dry and enjoy ourselves, one way or another.
Amber: I’m excited to see this deck.
John: Yeah, well, it’s been a lot of work. It’s been a lot of work getting the deck done. I’ve still got another week’s worth of work on it. So, at any rate, it will be ready by July 10.
Amber: Awesome.
John: All right, that takes us off to…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: So, if anybody out there has any questions that I’d like to have asked on here, send them in to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them into the segment. We’ll see if we can either get an answer or stump my dad, one of the two.
John: One of the two. And if all else fails, I’ll just, you know, create something out of nothing. I’ll just make up an answer.
Amber: That works. So first one I’ve got is — it’s got like three questions attached to it.
John: Okay.
Amber: So when you’re working on a new client site, one of the things done is looking over the plugins. So what are you looking for when looking at whether or not your client’s plugins need replacing? Should I read them all for you?
John: Read them all.
Amber: All right. How do you know whether or not the plugins are still working? Do you need to test them beforehand? How do you know that the plugins you are thinking of replacing what they have with work better than the ones that are already there?
John: A simple answer is I’ve been looking at so many plugins for so many years, I tend to know which ones are which. But the reality is, yeah, when you get a new client site, you’re going to revamp it, redesign it, or whatever. You got to look and see what plugins they’ve got, which ones need to go. You got to look at the theme, see if the theme or the theme builder needs to go. And basically, it boils down to when you get it you look at it, you just — first you go through all the plugins and look to see if any of them are old. Now that unfortunately has to be done on a manual basis. You go through and you click on the view details for each plugin, and it pops up and tells you how old the plugin is there in those details. You’ll find out real quick how old it is. If it’s 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, it’s one that you want to consider for replacements. You know, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years old plugins don’t mean bad. It just means old. You’ll have to check to see is this plugin got security issues that nobody’s talked about, anything along that line. Not only that, I’m looking for plugins that I’ve known over the years, and I don’t have a manual list. I should probably start a list of known plugins that just need to be turfed out because they’re no longer functioning the way they do. I used to have a semi-list, but most of those are just in my head now.
How do you know if the plugins are still working? Well, you can pretty much safely assume, make an asset of you and me, but you can — if the website is still functioning, all the plugins should be working. Because if they weren’t working, the website wouldn’t function or it would be broken, but there are times when a plugin doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to and is still turned on inactive. So you’re also looking to see how many inactive plugins they’ve got on their site, and you want to get rid of all the inactive plugins. It’s not uncommon for me to get into a client site. They have 40 plugins installed, only 15 are active. So they’ve got shitloads of inactive plugins, which is a security risk to have that inactive plugins. It’s a security risk. You got to take them out. If you’re not using them, get rid of them. The plugins I’m thinking of replacing work better than the ones that are already there. Again, that’s mostly just experience of working with so many different plugins over the years and knowing, okay, well, form plugins — I’ve got form plugins I know work better than others. And I always try to recommend them if the person is so used to their form plugin. They don’t want to change it, no problem. It’s just — you try to get in their hands the best plugins that will do the job. And when you get old plugins is finding a new plugin that provides the same function as the plugin that’s too old and hasn’t been updated. You want one that’s been updated, and working with the more current code bases. It is just a matter of going through them and checking them and checking them and reading and checking and, you know — the big problem is now is a lot of that’s just in my head from having done this for 10 years, 11 years, 12 years — 12 years now. My youngest turns 12 this year. I’ve been doing it since the year he was born. That’s how I keep track of how long I’ve been doing this.
Amber: All right, well, the next question is, when looking over a site to see what needs doing, what are the first things do you look at? What grabs your attention the most?
John: Okay, and grab the next question, and then we’ll split it right here.
Amber: All right. Have you ever come across a site that cannot be fixed? If so, what was wrong with it that it couldn’t be fixed? If not, what would have to be wrong with this site where it would be to the point of no return and you just wouldn’t be able to fix it?
John: Okay, well, that’ll be lots of fun. All right, well, we’ll come back to those after these closing credits.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.