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 #526 here.
It’s Episode 526 – We have plugins for All The Currencies, Lightning Bitcoin, Admin Entry, Travelling the World, Disabled Forms, On Demand Weather… and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #526
John: All right, first thing we got here, ClassicPress. We don’t have anything this week. No news or anything else that I’m aware of. And so, we’ll just sort of mention that we have ClassicPress links to various places in ClassicPress section in the show notes. When we get more information and move forward, we’ll bring it here. For a while, we had tons of it, but then it’s dropped off, which I should have expected it. I was hoping it wasn’t going to happen. But ClassicPress is not going anywhere. It’s just going to hang in the low end for a long while, I think. Off we go into plugins. First thing I’ve got for you here in plugins, got one called All Currencies for WooCommerce. This is a plugin so that you can set up on your website and have an instant way. No, that’s not — it says all currencies forbidden. It says lightning payment gateway. Yeah, somehow I’ve got the link to the second plugin here.
Amber: Uh-oh, how did that happen?
John: Yeah, I couldn’t tell you. It must have been the person doing the show notes must have changed a couple of things here. There we go. All Currencies for WooCommerce. There it is.
Amber: I’ll make sure I fix that.
John: That looks like the right one. So what it allows you to do is for when people come to your website, they can choose what currency to display your prices in. And accordingly, they’ve even got a few cryptocurrencies in here, so people can find out what would cost with cryptocurrencies to buy your stuff if you’re accepting cryptocurrencies. This one’s kind of cool. It’s the first one I’ve seen with cryptocurrencies added into it. Now, they also got a Pro version that will allow you to add custom currencies and set custom currency names and symbols. So this one here can be quite useful for your WooCommerce website if you’ve got people purchasing from different countries or wanting to buy in Bitcoin or one of the other multitude of cryptocurrencies that are acceptable. Go check this one out. It looks like we’re giving this one a five-dragon rating.
Amber: Just a quick note on that one. Once you set it all up and you’re going through it, if you don’t see your country or whatever country you’re looking for in the immediate list, just search for it. It’s all you have to do, just search for your country. They give you a little search bar, and it’ll pop up.
John: There you go.
Amber: The first one I’ve got is Bitcoin/Lightning Payment Gateway – LNBits. All right, so this one — oh dear, my brain just decided to run away on me. Okay, so this one gives you the ability to accept Bitcoin as payment through WooCommerce, and it’s only designed for Bitcoin. So if you already have something for regular commerce site you’d like and it works well for you, just add this in, and then it will add in Bitcoin. It’s pretty awesome. I can’t say honestly how well or fast it works because I had no Bitcoin to test it, but it was easy to activate. I didn’t have to go and get an API in order to make it work, which I find is a common trait for these kinds of plugins. So it’s definitely worth it if you find yourself in need of accepting Bitcoin for payment. I rate it at five dragons.
John: Excellent. All right, the next one I’ve got here for you is Admin Allow by IP. Okay, so this one here is a way to help protect your administration area from hackers. What it allows you to do is set up and block or allow people to access your administration from an IP. Now, this is one of those ones that is pretty much only good if you’re a single user, and you don’t have multiple people coming in, and if you’re not using a VPN. If you’re using a VPN, you will never have the same IP twice. So you have to have your one fixed IP that you know isn’t going to change because the worst thing can happen — in fact, it happens — it happens off time too. Even if you’ve got a regular IP from your Internet provider, you turn off your modem for several days, or they decide to change things, you could have a new IP and you could find yourself not being able to get into your own website. So that’s one of the drawbacks I see of this is figuring it out. But other than that, it is really great tool to help increase security on your WordPress website. And reading over a couple of things, it does look like they will allow multiple IPS in there. So you might be able to have multiple administrators from different IPs getting in and getting access. Really good tool, could be useful. Some of you might want to check out. Go check it out. It’s the Admin Allow by IP. And we’ve rated it at a five-dragon rating.
Amber: Next one I’ve got is World Travel Information. So, for this, if you, your customers, or viewers have any need whatsoever for traveling information, and what is needed in order to travel to that country, this is the perfect plugin for you. It’s really easy, just activate it, and be sure to look for travel info on the right as the name is a little different from the actual plugins name. Once you’re there, look up whichever country it is that you are wanting the information for, copy the shortcode and paste it into whichever page you want. They provide everything, just copy and paste.
John: Cool.
Amber: And the information it presents does seem to be within the last 24-hours at least. So this covers things like the restrictions and what’s required, what documents, everything that you need in order to travel to any of those countries. I rate it at five dragons.
John: Excellent. For those of you who still want to travel in today’s current climate.
Amber: Yeah, some people don’t have any options.
John: Well, some people don’t have options but to travel, so yeah.
Amber: I just see it as being useful for like a flight attendant, actually.
John: Yeah, well, it could be. They don’t really have to deal with the restrictions. Maybe they sleep on the plane to fly back. I don’t know.
Amber: Maybe.
John: That’s going to be an interesting one as flight attendants. What do they do? Because they used to get off the plane, go to the hotel, spend the night, fly out the next day on another flight. So how do they deal with flight crews?
Amber: That’s a good question, have to look into that.
John: Yeah, that was kind of an interesting. I never really thought about it until you just mentioned flight because the flight crews don’t — they’re not there for vacation and they’re not there generally any longer than 24 hours, maybe 48 at the max because they rest up for their flight back to wherever they came from.
Amber: Interesting.
John: So, anyway, all right. Next one we got here is No Active for GravityForms. Having you’re no longer active gravity throughout — oh, okay, it is displayed — what’s this one do? I didn’t read this over.
Amber: Essentially what this does is for your forums that are no longer active, if you still have the link go on, and like say you have time-specific one, and the time has elapsed, and then once you click the link, it just takes you to a blank page, page not found, or link not found or something. Instead of having that and people getting crazy confused — because people get confused or things like that — it throws up a page and it says — I can’t remember what it says — but it actually makes it obvious that the link just isn’t any good anymore, and you haven’t been misdirected. You haven’t lost yourself. You’re still on the site where you need to be — just, yeah, it makes it more easy.
John: Oh, that can be useful if you’ve got tons of different forms that you need to turn on and off or manage or whatever, and instead of having to take down the pages.
Amber: Yeah.
John: All right. Now, it looks like pretty good and looks like we’ve rated that one at a five-dragon rating.
Amber: I didn’t realize how many five’s were in this show.
John: Yeah, well the last one you don’t have a link for called OWM Weather.
Amber: Yes, but it’s weird. the link was that.
John: Yeah, let’s go see if I can find it real quick. OWM Weather. All right.
Amber: So this is a plugin, so you can either have it just as a dashboard widget, or there’s also a shortcode that you can put on your page, or you can do both, and it tells you the weather for your area, or you can have it tell you the weather for different areas — many areas if you want. Unfortunately, though, unless you sign into the open weather map website and get yourself an account and API address, you will have call limits. So it’ll only update, like — I think it’s like once every couple of days or something is what it said?
John: Yes.
Amber: It’s not very useful unless you go and get the API. Also, while I was testing it out, it was really eager on telling me that I needed to go get an API. I kept dismissing the message. It kept popping up; it wouldn’t go away.
John: Yeah, well, you know.
Amber: Like one of those little hippie dogs.
John: Yeah, they do those some sorts sometimes with them.
Amber: So, I wasn’t able to fully get through setting it up without the API, and I don’t like the idea of having to go and get an API from a site that I had no interest in the first place. But if that is something that doesn’t bother you, go for it. This could be very useful. If needing to know the weather every day is something that’s important.
John: Well, it is useful, and I think I’ve used something similar to this for a client that has offices across the globe, and so they could find out what the weather was in any particular area of their Corporation. So we used it on their internal network site when I built that out, and they wanted to have a weather page, so everyone can know what the weather was in the different parts of the country in the world. So it is useful in some aspects. And if you’re running an information site, it’s useful. And the API keys aren’t generally that hard to get when they’re giving them away free. They just collect your email address and sometimes not sticky on the list.
Amber: So I rated this at four dragons.
John: Excellent. All right. Well, we don’t really have any listener feedback. We would love some listener feedback, folks. Please kick us some listener feedback. We haven’t had any in quite a while. It’s time to up the game folks and kick us some listener feedback. Let us know how we’re doing, what’s happening, all the stuff that’s happening. Now, we are at the point of dealing with our contest.
Absolutely. Simple contest this week here. We’ve had the contest running for a couple of weeks, but we didn’t get all that many entries to it. So we’re extending this out for another three weeks to the end of September. And the reason for this obviously, the last couple of weeks, we haven’t put much promotions out, and we were kind of scattered and sidelined. But we’re back in the game now, and we want to get everyone out there. So what we’re giving away this week is we’re giving away Codeixer Deposits for WooCommerce, and this is a Single Domain Lifetime License. This is a lifetime license, folks. You never ever have to renew it again. It’s valued at $179. So if you’re running a WooCommerce website, or you have a client that’s running a WooCommerce website, and they’ve considered the option of taking deposits on someone ordering something — and in today’s climate of purchasing stuff, taking a deposit might be very important to ensure that people actually pay for your goods before you give them — like sometimes you have something you got to make or you got to order and you got to do something that deposit can be helpful and useful. Well, just simply go to the link in the show notes. Just go to wppluginsatoz.com/giveaway to get to it and register for this license. It’s a really great tool and plugin. And who knows? If we don’t manage to give it away, I’ll keep it and stick it on my own WooCommerce store. So if you want to keep me from keeping this sucking thing, you know, I would really actually like to use something like this — and hey, a lifetime license? I’ll keep it if nobody wants to enter the contest. But come on, enter the contest, register for it. It’s free to enter the contest. We don’t even send that many emails to you, usually a weekly newsletter. And that’s really all I get, and you can unsubscribe afterward. So go check this one out. Go, register for this plugin whether you need it or you think you might need it, or you know someone who might need it, hey, you can get it and you can use it wherever you want to use it. Just register it for the site. All right, so with that being done, make sure you go enter the contest. It’s going to run till September 30th.
All right, and a couple of plugins I covered this show, All Currencies for WooCommerce, which was rated at a five, the Admin Allow by IP, which was rated at a five, and the No Active for GravityForms, which was rated at five. I should say no active forums. That will make more sense.
Amber: I agree, but you know, also Gravity Forms is who they are specifically for.
John: No it was a non-active forms for Gravity Forms. At any rate, we’ll give that one a five too.
Amber: And I covered Bitcoin/Lightning Payment Gateway – LNBits, which I rated at five, World Traveler Information, which I rated at five, and OWM Weather, which I rated at four.
John: Okay, and of course, we had actually sort of planned to have a meet-up, but that got sidelined too along with a lot of other plans. So we’ll see what the fall brings, and maybe in the winter, things can change, plans change. The world changes. It’s constantly changing so fast, nobody can keep up at the moment. So we’ll let you all know when we finally get around to doing that. And also, if you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, make sure you go check out our Shooting the Shit at the Rogues Tavern podcast every Tuesday evening at eight, or you can just subscribe to it over at the roguestavern.com. All right, and it is time for…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: First off, if anyone out there has any questions, you would like to have asked on the show, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them answered to the best of my ability or my dad’s ability really. So question one, what does it mean when you have failed transfers in FTP, and what do you do about them?
John: Okay, there are multiple reasons it happens. They happen all the time. Sometimes it’s just a glitch in the transfer. The data breaks up or whatever. It’s a common thing when you’re FTP and files. It fails transfers. The nice thing about FileZilla is it creates another list for failed transfers, and what you can do about them is you take it, you select them all, right-click, and you put them back in the queue list, and you tell it to run the queue again, and then it goes and refetches the files, and now it gets the files. A 9.9 times out of 10, it download the files because it was a glitch. It tried to overwrite a file. I thought it was overwriting a file or some other thing happened, and it just, I can’t do this one and tosses it over to the side. Now every once in a blue moon, it’s a file that is so corrupt, it can’t be transferred, or on some servers, there’s files that cannot be downloaded from the server because they’re protected in some way or another. Those things happen too. So it’s kind of a hit and miss, but for the most part, I get those virtually every time I do uploads or downloads. I get a bunch of files that end up in the failed transfer. I just move them back to the queue, process the queue again, and then they either upload or download with no problem. It’s just a simple thing to deal with, and it is one of the things that I’ve just learned to live with FTP.
Amber: Okay, the next question is, what does it mean when FTP takes six hours to backup files for you? Is that your computer being slow or the files being many?
John: It’s probably files. How many files are you downloading or how big are the files?
Amber: Oh, okay.
John: So are you talking about here, you’ve gone into your WordPress site, you selected all the files and folders and you download it, right?
Amber: Yeah.
John: And that takes six hours to download the entire set of files and folders?
Amber: Yeah.
John: Okay. Well, the problem is the number of files, and also the number of files being allowed to download at a time. Most systems out there — most hosting providers will let you make two, maybe three connections, you can download one or two or three files at a time. Anything more than that, most hosting providers will block you from their server for what they feel like is attempted hacking because there’s too many files going at one time, basically sucking up their bandwidth. But if it’s taking that long, it’s generally all the files and the amount of time because you can only squeeze the files through. If you got 10,000 files, they got to come down one at a time. If each one takes 10 seconds to go, do the math, 10 seconds times 10,000. That could easily push you up there towards six hours because they’re only going to come down as fast as they come down.
Amber: Okay, but the site that I’m thinking about — I’ve seen you do a backup of the site that I’m thinking about, and only took like half-hour to 45 minutes.
John: Okay, well, now you’re dealing with your computer and its ability to write the data to your hard drive, and also your Internet connection and its ability to transfer the data.
Amber: Okay, so it can be either or them?
John: Yeah, it can be either-or.
Amber: Sometimes both.
John: Sometimes both, sometimes everything. Sometimes it’s easier to say okay, well, I don’t want to grab them all a million. You go into the backup in cPanel and then just download that one massive backup file.
Amber: Okay, so I’ve only got one more question here. I’ll read out and then do the end?
John: Yep, you can read the question out, and we’ll split it off right here for everyone.
Amber: All right, so how do you get your mind wrapped around something like a new theme when you just don’t get it, like you get other themes and tools? Is there a trick or a way to help push you over that initial hurdle other than slamming your head against the brick wall a whole bunch?
John: Well, that one will be interesting to deal with. And for those of you listening to the podcast, you want to hear the answer to that question, you’re going to have to jump on over to the YouTube channel, scroll to somewhere near the end. I don’t know — somewhere around the — whatever, 30-minute time frame, and you’ll get the answer for that. That being said, we’re going to let our girl take us on out of here, come back and answer this question, and then call it a show.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
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