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 #529 here.
It’s Episode 529 – We have plugins forStats, Making it Rain, Killer Zombies, Retro Games, Related Posts, Getting Spicy …and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #529
John: Alrighty, let’s go dive right in. And we got ClassicPress options this week. It seems we have some ClassicPress news; let’s see what we got here. We got one from Gary Pendergast praises ClassicPress and extends an invitation for collaboration. Oh, that was on the tavern. All right, that means they might actually have been burying some hatches there between WordPress and ClassicPress. That’d be good, maybe help ClassicPress grow.
Amber: That’d be awesome.
John: Yeah. Well, let’s see what they can do with it. That’s an interesting article, so go check that one out. We’ve got some ClassicPress usage reports here from ClassicPress dotnet. See what the usage report is as of September, around 5000 active ClassicPress websites that makes it pretty small at the moment, but I’m sure it will grow again as soon as it gets more usable in what it’s doing. So anyway, a couple other quick articles in there. Go check those out in the show notes.
Let’s get in and talk about plugins, and what I’ve got for you this week. The first one I’ve got for you this week is WP Statistics. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve used the statistics plugin in WordPress, and I’m recently working on a client site that recently inherited site, and they have this plugin installed on there, and it doesn’t seem to impact their speed. One of the big problems with statistic site inside your WordPress site is still allowance for speed. The nice thing about a statistics plugin is that if it’s on your site, all the data is yours, you’re not sharing that data with Google or anyone else, it’s your data, and you can control it, you have a little better knowledge. Plus, it gives you little more realistic stats sometimes because, you know, Google stats and stuff are still dependent upon JavaScript, and surprisingly, there’s a lot of people that have JavaScript turned off when they browse the web. Or sometimes you fire or hit a website, and sometimes the JavaScript doesn’t fire, so it doesn’t always count stuff. So this is an interesting way to go. This one here, it does some nice things for you. It gets you some visitor data, graphics, country recognition, city recognition, visitors from the search engine, referrals from referring sites, common browsers used, statistics, and more. There’s just a whole bunch into this lot of statistics and graphs for those that really enjoy those. Anyways, when you might want to check out if you’re considering sticking a statistics of the plugin on your website, go check it out, and I give this one a four-dragon rating, that’s WP Statistics.
Amber: Just heads up, I think someone was vacuuming on your end? Okay.
John: Yeah.
Amber: It was heard.
John: Yeah, of course, it was. There’s not much I can do about that.
Amber: Fair enough.
John: The house cleaner is here to clean the house, you know, and I can’t do anything about that.
Amber: Fair enough. All right, so the first one I have is Retro Game Emulator. This thing is just so cool. I really like it. It’s been kept updated pretty well, and what you do is you find this under settings, once you’ve installed it, and then you upload your ROMs. You need to make sure that they have a dotnet extension though or it won’t work. The ROMs are stored in your public HTML. It creates its own thing, so you can go there and choose whichever one, and then it loads it up to your site in retro style. It is just so cool. Now, I don’t have any around, so I wasn’t able to check it out to see how it loads everything up and what it looks like if it’s like just your entire site that becomes this or what. But I do think this is just an awesome idea. So I give this five dragon rating.
John: Cool. All right, next one I have for you is a Related Posts Plugin. It’s been a while since I’ve brought a related post plugin. This one here again was on a site that I was working on. And I thought, well, you know, related posts are still usable. It’s they’re important, and it helps get people moving through your website to check out other articles, and this one here creates a little thumbnail for it and puts it down below the content of your post for you and then sets it up, so it’s got two or three or however many you want to set up across there. Kind of a cool little thing; it does help them all out and Related Posts Plugin that are just simply Related Posts Plugins are nice. Some of the ones I used to use the past got bought out and then repurposed and they added more stuff to them instead of doing just what you wanted it to do. This one looks like it’s going to do just what you want it to do, and it’s a pretty decent plugin. So go check it out. It’s Related Posts Thumbnails Plugin for WordPress, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: Very cool. The next one I have up, there’s a bit of a theme for my plugins today. It’s called Shoot the zombie. It’s kind of funny while I was checking this plugin out, the song zombie by bad wolves came on. So I didn’t find it but that was just perfect timing. Unfortunately, when I decided to try this one out, I did not think like at the age of it or its last update. It’s last update was seven years ago, so it doesn’t work anymore. What it was supposed to do is generate a shortcode for you to put onto your site creating a fun button, and when clicked generates zombies for you to shoot. I was hoping it might still work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, and you’d have to have a much older version of WordPress I think than what I have .
John: Yeah, got to have an older version of WordPress. It works on the older versions of WordPress.
Amber: Yeah, I would love to see this brought back, like if anyone out there develops plugins and this is like a cool thing to them too, maybe you could fix it up and bring it back for New Age. That’d be really cool. It gets an extra point for total awesomeness, so they get a two-dragon.
John: Sad song.
Amber: Yeah, not quite a one joke.
John: Yeah, it rolls right into, you know, it’s got the asteroids game and other things like that. They’re kind of cool to do. I had one on one of my test sites for Space Invaders. So, yeah, they definitely, you know, you’d need a developer to bring them back up to date, and then redeploy them with new names and maybe try to improve the graphics in them a little bit if you can. All right, the last one I’ve got for you. This is one of my kid kicked over to me, which I’m really happy for. It’s called WooHeat. Add some spice to your WooCommerce. And this is one that I will definitely be implementing on the Rogues Tavern store mainly because — if you heard the pre-stream, I was talking about making my chipotle peppers while I’ve been growing lots of hot peppers this summer, and I’ll be selling hot sauces and varying heats from mild to blisteringly hot with the world record pepper holder of the Carolina Reaper. So I going to need something like this when I start selling my hot sauces, my salsa’s, my chili powders, and all of those things there to allow people to determine do I want it hot, mild, medium — and this one here has a couple of really cool features. One, it has the standard hot, medium, mild, etc, but it also allows you to set the Scoville units for your peppers in there, which I thought was really cool, because, you know, pepper geeks love the Scoville units. They don’t care about hot, medium, and mild. They’re after — what are the Scoville units for, you know, because hot, medium, mild doesn’t tell you much. Scoville units tell you everything. So, anyway, this is a really cool one here. I thought it was one you really want to go check out, and it’s called WooHeat, and I give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: And the last one I’ve got is, Let it Rain, which is another one that I was pretty stoked for. The idea of this is that you put in whatever emoji or HTML code or the emoji, and this plugin is supposed to rain it down all of your site. I thought this would be so awesome, you know, put in anything you want, make it for any time of the year, but unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated for a while. And when I tried it out, it kind of creates this line where it’s kind of raining in one line on the left-hand side, and then it’s done. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. So not sure if they’re going to be coming back to it and updating it all. But it was a cool idea. So they also get an extra point for cool. I gave it a two-dragon rating.
John: Sad puppy. No, well, it happens as plugins age, you know, you got some of these plugins, you know, a lot of them are built by people who are going to college and just learning to code, and you know, they build on learning the code, and then they go through the process of releasing it. Then they graduate college, get a real job, and they just like, yeah, I can’t be bothered with that anymore.
Amber: Yes, really sad though, because like I was trying to do a fun theme, and well, I got this.
John: Yeah.
Amber: There’s nothing really all that fun in WordPress I’m noticing. All the plugins that are fun, they’re done and gone.
John: Oh, that’s because everyone graduated college, grew up, and got a real job. We don’t have all the newbies in there anymore.
Amber: I think we need to go diving for everyone’s sense of humor it seems to be drowning.
John: Yeah, that could be possible too. Alrighty, well, we don’t have any other things in our listener feedback right now or listener questions. Let’s roll right into our contest.
John: All right, we do have a contest. Thanks again to Steve Goodtime and Brant Matthews for that jingle. Man, that’s another talent that provided to us. We would greatly appreciate that. And, of course, again, thanks to Charlie for keeping the contest rolling for us, and he’s been taking a short leave of absence right now, but they’ll be coming back again soon. We’re probably going to take a leave of absence through the month of October for the contest. Our current contest is running through till the end of this month, which is, you know, show day next week. It’s running through till the 30th. We’ll announce it the following week. At any rate, what we have this week is Codeixer Deposits for WooCommerce Single Domain Lifetime License. This is a plugin that will help you collect deposits on all of your products or your final sale bill in WooCommerce. Really interesting plugin, one that, you know, if you’re selling things that you got to build for people, you need to take a deposit for it or you want to let people pay a deposit and pay for later when shipped or whatever. However you want to work it, this allows you to take those deposits and leave their invoice open to collect the rest of the money. So it can be a very useful plugin for you. License we’re giving away here is a lifetime license valued at 179 bucks probably more than that because once the company gets rolling, their license fees will go up like everyone else’s do. So, well, worthwhile, enter the contest, get a license that you never ever have to update again, and those licenses are nice when you can get them. Anyway, go check it out. It’s very simple to enter, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contest to enter the contest. All right, this is where we cover off a couple other quick things before we head into the Q&A segment of the show. I covered up in this show the following plugins, WooHeat, which I gave a five to, The Related Posts Thumbnails Plugin for WordPress, which I gave a four to, and then the WP Statistics, which I gave a four to.
Amber: And I covered Let it Rain, which I rated at two, Shoot the zombie another rating at two, and Retro Game Emulator, which got a five rating.
John: All right. And I don’t know if meetups are get planned again. They will happen again. I just don’t know when. If you’re not getting enough of Amber and I, make sure you check out the roguestavern.com live. We do a show every Tuesday evening at eight o’clock live on YouTube, and it is a podcast that can be downloaded too, although, they often get behind and being pushed up. This is the only show that gets out properly on-time regular schedule. All right, if you got any questions about plugins, suggestions, anything, please submit them to the website. Just go to the contact page and contact us at the website, or send some direct to me at john@wppro.ca, or send it to amber@wppro.ca. All right, this is where we head off into Q&A time.
It’s question and answer time.
Amber: And if anybody has questions that they specifically want up on the show, send them to me at amber@wppro.ca.
John: Yep, absolutely.
Amber: Okay, so I kind of have two sets of questions today. My first two are for both you and our listeners out there. I would love to hear feedback on these two questions. First one is, how often do coders/computer techs need to change their keyboards due to the CTRL button or random letter keys failing?
John: Okay, well, I don’t know. I replace my keyboard about once every couple of years. Coders, I imagine, probably a year or two years, and they pound their keyboards. Unless they’re smart and they spend money on an expensive keyboard and good mechanical keyboards — like the last keyboard, I bought mechanical keyboard, and it came with five spare keys.
Amber: Nice.
John: Yeah, that because you can pop the keys out and put a new key in.
Amber: Well, that was the other part I forgot to write down. Is it better to replace them or is it better to fix them? .
John: It depends on the keyboard because some keyboards — most new keyboards can’t be fixed. They’re just cheap plastic with a push-button thing underneath a membrane. They really can’t be fixed. Old keyboards used to be fixable, but they are high-end, what they call mechanical keyboards. I don’t want to make the nice good clickety-clack noise. And they have good pressure. They kind of remind me of the old IBM Selectric typewriter with their key pressure and that’s — but they stand up a lot better under the stress of constant typing. So I would think that most key coders replace their keyboard unless they’re smart, and they spend money on a good keyboard and they have to replace it somewhere around six months to a year or two.
Amber: Yeah, I’ve noticed that my keyboard is dying a lot faster, and I never had a keyboard die before. All right, so my second question is, do coders actually remember all this coding the same way you remember in order to write things like this, or do they just have like cheat sheets or —
John: Both.
Amber: Both?
John: Even writers don’t always remember the right word and they have to look it up. It’s like coding is just writing in another language, literally. It’s writing in another language, so there are very specific things that happen in that language. There’s the syntax to it. There’s formations the way it’s all formed together, paragraphs, sort of stuff that goes together, chunks of code. A lot of coders what they do is, you know, even when I was doing it, I still have in all my notes. In other places, I have chunks of code that are written, and I know I need this chunk of code, so I go there, I used to go there, grab that code and just throw it in. And there’s actually programs that are used for that coders used to write in now that have that shortcuts in there and it automatically fills in for the set chunk of code that belongs there — because there are reusable chunks that are used all the time over and over again.
Amber: Cool.
John: So I do know that. It’s been a while since I’ve done any writing. All I do now is edit code and hack code. I don’t write it anymore. Yeah, they remember some of it, some of it’s in their memory, and some of it they have to look up, some of it they put in specific spots to just copy and paste. They know I need this junk. I don’t want to rewrite, you know, all that code again; I copy and paste it, boom, done.
Amber: That makes me feel a little bit better.
John: No, it’s like English man, even English professors sometimes have to look things up because they can’t quite remember what to do or how something goes.
Amber: All right, so my last two questions here are mainly pointed at you, but, you know, I’m always happy to hear anybody’s responses. I’ll read them out and then we can close them. What does your PHP being out of day actually do to your site plugins and theme, and what would updating your PHP before you update your site do?
John: Okay, I’ll be able to answer those. We’re going to let my girl take us on out of here, and we’ll come back after this over on the YouTube channel for those of you listening to the show.
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