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 #520 here.
Run For The Hills It’s Episode 520 – We have plugins for Social Stickiness, Getting Back on Top, Custom Invoices, Changing Email, Speeding Up MySql… and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #520 – Run For The Hills
John: All right, ClassicPress options, just the usual stuff this week. We don’t have anything; we’re keeping this open. So anyone out there using ClassicPress, send us some stuff, and we will get it into the show.
WordPress plugins, we do have those this week. First one I’ve got for you, this one here is a really cool plugin, but it can be extremely deadly. So be aware if you use this. This is called Index WP MySQL For Speed. Before you use this plugin, make a backup of your database and all your files, and then make another backup of your database and all your files, and put them in two different folders so you know where they’re located. What this plugin does is it goes in and it makes a change in your database. It goes in and changes the keys in the database, adding some database keys to make indexing faster for your website, and it does work, and it is a permanent change. If even after you use this plugin and run the plugin, you could turn the plugin off, deactivate it and uninstall it completely; those fixes are permanent because it makes changes to the database itself. It adds new keys to the database for indexing. This could be a very useful thing if you’ve got a big website, lots of posts and pages, and content because the keys for WordPress aren’t all that effective for searching up information when a call is made to display the stuff on your website. This will help you out. Great plugin, I really like it, free plugin; it does things to your options, your post, your post Meta comments, user Meta, and more. So go check this one out. It is called Index WP MySQL For Speed, and I give it a five dragon rating
Amber: Maybe you might want to think about doing a wee bit of research before you try using this plugin to it.
John: Well, like I said, make a backup, and then you can just restore. That’s why you make backup before you use something like this, but it’s a really great plugin, and it can really help you out, but use it with care.
Amber: First one I’ve got is Contact and social sticky bar. I have to admit I was a little dubious when I first saw this one. It seemed like one of those plugins that would tell you how easy it was to use, and then you go to use it, and it’s actually a pain to use. But actually, it did turn out really easy to use, and it’s really pretty actually. I really like it. It’s a sticky bar for the top, and you can put any content you want into it. You can put content in just the left, just the right, in the center. You can put different content on either side and center. You can change it up the color of the font, of the bar. You can make the bar bigger or smaller. It’s a pretty amazing sticky bar actually. I really like it, very easy to use and totally free. So if you’re looking for an easy sticky bar plugin, give this one a go. I rate it five dragons.
John: All right, go check that one out. Okay, the next one I’ve got for you is called Custom Content for Invoices for WooCommerce. And this is a brand new plugin, but it’s one that could be very useful for you. What it does is it adds a new content blocks to your invoices that are generated for your WooCommerce site. So after someone’s ordered something and the invoice is sent out to them, it adds these two blocks that you can use to put promotions in, add discounts codes for people, add other promotions, promote other products, do all kinds of multiple things with it to help sell more after the sale has been made. Relatively easy and straightforward plugin to use, and sets up pretty easily, and then it puts things at the top bottom of your invoice that is sent off to people once they import it on your WooCommerce website. So go check this one out, really great little plugin, free plugin, Custom content for Invoices for WooCommerce. And I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: That sounds like it could be really useful.
John: Yeah, it’s going to make its way into the Rogues Tavern.
Amber: Nice. The next one I’ve got is Rotem Navigator. This seemed like a really interesting idea. What it’s meant to do is it’s supposed to add an anchoring to all of your H2 Headers. I thought that could be really useful. Unfortunately, they don’t work with Elementor or a few other different things. Specifically Elementor, I had an issue with. When I activated this, I could no longer open my posts that open in Elementor. It works fine as long as you’re not using anything except WordPress itself, so I think it will probably work fine with Gutenberg. But this is something I think the creators maybe should have mentioned, or if they’re not aware of it, then hopefully they’ll take note of the message I sent them, and they’ll put up a warning that it’s not for everyone. I wasn’t really able to try it out too much, but I’ll give it a rating of three dragons.
John: Okay, the final one I’ve got for you here — and this is a pretty useful one. I sort of — at first, I didn’t realize what it was, and so I looked at it and checked it out. But if you’ve been around WordPress for any length of time, once upon a time with WordPress, changing the admin email address was a breeze. You go in there, change the admin email address, save it and you’re done. Well, somewhere around five or so, they made it so — if someone changes the admin email address, a authentication email is sent out to the previous admin email. And while that can be a good thing, it’s also a pain in the neck, especially if you’ve got an inherited old site where it’s got an email address from some developer, and they put an email address in there that’s not even a valid email anymore, or they created some random email because this happens on these site, you need to get a proper email in there. Well, getting that validation to okay it and change it can be a bit of a pain sometimes. So what this does is this reverts it back, you can go in there, install this plugin, activate it, go change the email address to what you want, deactivate the plugin and you’re done. Really cool, useful tool, that could save you some grief and some headache down the road if you run into it. Go check it out, Admin Email Address Changer, and I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: That’s interesting. I wonder how that works.
John: Yeah, it just bypasses the stuff pretty that WordPress has — pretty much everything in WordPress can be turned off.
Amber: That is useful. Last one I’ve got is Sticky Back2Top Universal. These guys have just an awesome opening for their description. It’s honestly what caught me and why I ended up deciding to give it a go. And I was playing with the settings, and it’s just it’s amazing, so easy to use. And you can literally choose any color you want for your little Back2Top Sticky Button like — it has one of those color grids where you just move the little crop and you can have any color you want. I haven’t actually seen that many color options for plugins. They usually give you like a selection of colors and that’s it. There is also a little area just to the right when you are playing with the settings that give you a preview of what it will look like. There’s different arrows, different sizes, so many options. I love it when plugins give you the complete ability to totally personalize whatever it is that they’re giving you. This is a totally free, and pretty freaking awesome plugin. And if you’re in the market for Back2Top Sticky Button, check these guys out. I rate it at five dragons.
John: Pretty cool, but it’s nice because the Back2Top button I do use from time to time if I run into it on a website and it’s got a really long page.
Amber: Yeah.
John: Which many, many sites do a lot of them. All right, we do actually have some listener question this week. This is actually a question that got skipped for a couple of episodes because I forgot about it, and it relates to a question two or three episodes back that Amber had brought to the table on behalf of the listener. And it goes, “Hi, John, thank you, and Amber for reading my question regarding site’s portfolio on the air the other week. It was after I listened — and I wasn’t really asking the question the right way. so I thought I’d bounce them off you directly. What I mean to ask was question one, if you have a graphics business and you want to start doing websites WordPress for people, how have you gotten your clients? Number two, I realize it’s an open-ended question. Obviously, you’ve been doing this for a long time so you have a large number of sites showcase blah, blah, blah, — and side business and talus restoration, et cetera.” So anyway, the question here, we talked about, you know, starting getting the clients, well, I actually started getting my clients by going out in the community and giving WordPress training courses to people. That’s how I did it — and just going to meetups and meeting people because a lot of people that go to meetups and stuff are do it yourselfers. And after they get into it for a little while, they’ll hire you for small things, and as you prove your worth, eventually they hire you for everything. And that’s how I got started, was just doing that; getting out in the community, meeting people, talking to people, and then promoting online and getting referrals. Most of my business now is all referral. So hopefully, that answers your question, Greg. Thank you much. Oh, Question two, is there a big market out there for WordPress websites and therefore developers? Yes, there is a big market out there. The question is WordPress websites encompasses a lot of different things. You have specialized websites. You have specialized functions and websites. You actually got to figure out what little niche in WordPress you want to function on you want to focus on now. It’s not so much general. You need to be focused on things a little bit more sharply than it used to be.
Amber: Your Alter Ego mentions, also be an eye meeting.
John: I will be an eye meetings didn’t get me a hell of a lot of business for my web designing and hosting business. They got me a few clients that BNI is a thing that is great for consumer products more than anything else is what I found — which I remember what it was, but it didn’t help my web hosting. It helped my computer store. It was really good for my computer store, but it didn’t help in my web design business. All right, contests.
Our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. They kindly provide us with a premium version for our contest. Go check out this plugin, it’s really great. Thanks to Steve Goodtime, Brant Matthews, for the jingle. I greatly appreciate it, another talent that supports the show. And one more thank you to Charlie for getting all this organized. Now, we do have a contest that starts today, and when I did the notes, I wasn’t sure it was going to be there because we were a bit behind in getting the write-up done on it. But first off, last week’s contest for Bloksy. Congratulations to David Y., the winner of the lifetime license for Orderable. Thank you, David, and thank you everyone who participated in the contest. There was quite a few people who’ve registered for the contest, so make sure you go check it out.
Now, we do have a new contest up, and it is called Perfmatters. Okay, this we’re given a one-year unlimited license, valued at 149 bucks to Perfmatters. Really great plugin. I haven’t had a chance to fully test it yet. I’ll be bringing a review to the show next week for it. I didn’t get the time this week to install it and test it. And it is a premium plugin. You got to go check it out at Perfmatters.io. And if you want to hear everything about this plugin, I did an interview with one of the developers from it. Brian Jackson from forgemedia, the interview is now live on the website and in the podcast feed. So make sure you listen to the interview with Brian Jackson from forgemedia talking about the Perfmatters plugin. It was a really great nice — no, not too long interview, about 20 minutes or so, but we did get an understanding of what this plugin does, how it helps speed up your site, and how it’s different from all of the other plugins out there and how it works well together with caching plugins. This one does some things a little different. It’s not a caching plugin, but it enhances and enhances caching plugin. So go check this plugin out. Really great one. Or you want the license, make sure you go enter the contest, which is now live on the show, and all we need is your name and email address. The giveaway starts out real soon. It supposed to have already started but better check the settings on that. So we’ll make sure the settings on that are functioning, and the contest is running July 22nd — oh, well I started it this week instead of July 22nd. All right, I’ve had a rough day today getting everything fully organized; things were a little off keter.
Amber: Kilter?
John: Kilter, thank you. I Like keter very much. It’s a pretty cool new word. All right, so that’s our contest we’ve got going here, and that wraps all that part up. We’re going to talk. We’re going to be jumping into the Q&A segment here in a second. Let’s wrap up a couple of quick things. Plugins I covered this show is Admin Email Address Changer, which I gave a five to, the Custom Content for Invoices for WooCommerce, which I gave a five to, and then the WP MySQL For Speed, which I gave a five to.
Amber: And I covered Contact and Social Sticky Bar, which I rated at five, Rotem Navigator, which I rated at three, and Sticky Back2Top Universal, which I rated at five.
John: All right, now reminders, there are no meetups. There was a sort of a meetup last week, but nobody showed up, so well, too bad for you. I may try and plan a meetup actually in August of some sorts. It’ll be an outdoor meeting because I like to be outdoors on the weekends because it’ll be a weekend social kind of thing. So that may come down the pike, keep aware of it. If you don’t get enough of Amber and me, make sure you go check us out on the Rogues Tavern. Every Tuesday evening at eight o’clock, we go live on YouTube, and you can pick up the podcast at the roguestavern.com. You can check out the podcast too. All right, it is time for…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: So if anybody out there has any questions that you’d like me ask, send them to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them into the segment. So my first question for you is, do you know anything about working on sites offline?
John: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. Okay, so how does that work?
John: Okay. Sites offline means you’re developing locally on your computer — is offline means not accessible to the web? Okay.
Amber: Okay, let me rephrase how do you do the offline work? Like, do you have to download into your computer, into the hard drive, or what do you do to do .
John: It’s downloaded into your computer, your hard drive, and what you need is a program called desktop server. Desktop server is something you put on your computer, which installs a local version of a server, and installs a local version of MySQL, which you need to run WordPress, and it sets up all the parameters you need for running a local WordPress website. And desktop server is a very useful tool. It’s not cheap. It costs about 190 bucks a year or something, but if you’re developing offline, you’re developing locally — desktop server is literally the best way to go. It works very, very well. I’ve used a lot. I haven’t done it in quite some time.
Your next question on that is what do you think the kinks would be in getting the work you have done offline to online? Well, it’s actually not that hard. It’s like moving a website from one server to another. You copy the files from your local computer to your website. There’s also programs that you can set up to where you can just push the data from your local computer to your live website, you know, much like the program we use for pushing the post from one website to another every week. There’s programs that allow you to do that from your local development and push everything. I actually have a full license for that and it’s DB database management pro or something like that. I can’t remember the exact name of the program, but I have a license for that program, because I use it a lot, and it allows you to push all the content from one WordPress website to another. So there’s lots of ways to deal with that and lots of ways to manage all of that. So it’s not that big a deal. It’s just a matter of, you know, some people like developing offline and then pushing it live. I just found it just didn’t work for me. I’d rather work in the live environment, because sometimes what works on your computer doesn’t work on the server, and sometimes what works on the server doesn’t want to work on your local computer. It’s the same problem of, you know, website from one server to another, what works on one server sometimes doesn’t work on another server for whatever variable reason is set up in the individual servers.
Amber: That makes sense.
John: No, if they used to be — everything used to work once upon a time, but in the last five years, there’s been more incompatibilities inserted into the Internet, I think.
Amber: All right, that’s really good to know. My next question is — so faster Internet would be good, but how fast is fast enough? I’ve noticed that all the big tech companies are kind of in a race to get better broadband and satellite Internet. Do you think more satellites will accomplish their goal or is there something else that has to be done in order to speed up the Internet or get it reaching further and whatnot?
John: Well, the Internet has a major bottleneck. No matter how fast they push the data over the lines, it’s still limited by the routers. You’ve got — between your computer and any given website, that data may pass between — well, it’ll pass between four to maybe upwards of 30 routers or more on the Internet. And some of the routers on the internet are old, some of them are new. It’s like that’s one of the biggest bottlenecks. I mean, the fastest Internet they can do is fiber optic, that’s literally the fastest they can go. Satellites are slow because it’s, you know — they’re slow because it has to go through the air. More satellites isn’t going to help that, you know, except by splitting the data streams and transmitting the data over multiple streams. They’ve done a lot to the Internet like I remember the Internet back when it had 300 baud. And for those of you that don’t know what that means, that means really super slow.
Amber: Oh, like taking two or three days to download 24 songs.
John: Yeah, no more like taking a week to download a one Meg JPEG.
Amber: Oh, okay.
John: You know, it’s like you were talking slow, you know, data was — but they’re just trying to make it faster and faster because they want people more and more on the Internet, but they often make it faster because we’re pushing more data on the Internet. They want everything connected to the Internet. They want your toilet flushing connected to the Internet. They want everything connected to the Internet.
Amber: That sounds ominous. I can only imagine the toilet deciding whether or not needed to flush for you.
John: Yeah, well, that’s where it’s going sometimes. It’s really sad. All right, so, you know, there’s just — accomplishing their goal is just matter of technology, and they’ll find ways to get it faster and faster. Eventually, they’ll hit a wall because they can only push it so fast. It’s like the speed of light. The speed of light will only go so fast. They can’t make it go any faster. And the same will happen with the Internet.
Amber: I have two more questions.
John: Read them out and we’ll split it off right here.
Amber: Okay, the first one is a bit longer because it’s actually something listener mentioned to me. Listener said, “Even if you have the gigabit Internet, it really depends on your devices, whether or not you are able to grab more than 300 megabits per second. And then there’s also the matter of how many devices you have pulling from your Internet at the same time as to whether or not you are able to use much of that gigabit Internet. So my question for you is, is there a way to help your lower-end computer in grabbing more Internet basically upgrading without having to spend nearly an arm and a leg or your firstborn child in actual tech upgrading? And then, my next question is, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of jobs for coders lately. I can’t help but wonder if we’re starting to lose people for creating computers like we did with radios and VHS. What’s your take on that?”
John: All right, good questions, and we will get to those after this.
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.
Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also leave us a review on our Facebook page using wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
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.