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 #537 here.
It’s Episode 537 Form Sliders, Multi-Vender WooCommerce, Deliveries, Social Sharing in a Snap, Media Auto-up, Socially Auto Posting… and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #537
John: Alright, first off, ClassicPress options, there’s nothing new in the ClassicPress world right now. We’re keeping this hanging around just for when stuff does kick out from ClassicPress, and news and information pops up for those that do continue to use it.
Alright, WordPress plugins, what I have first up this week in WordPress, I have WCFM Membership – WooCommerce Memberships for Multivendor Marketplace. This is a full-blown Multivendor Marketplace for WooCommerce. The plugin here is the free version of the plugin to get you started on it, get you warmed up, start setting you up for multi-vendors. And what we’re talking about multi vendors and WooCommerce, of course, is you set up a WooCommerce store. Let’s say you want to sell garage sale items, you know, trinkets, and you want to offer other people the ability to come into your store, sell from your store, get their price for their products, and you take a cut just for hosting a website. Basically, it’s like an Etsy site and eBay or others. You’re basically running a site like that. And it’s a really great one if you have a tight-knit community of artists or something else, and nobody there is technically inclined than you are — build out this website, start with this plugin here, set it up, and they can set up all their own stores. You get a cut for the difficulties of creating the website, managing the website, paying for the domain, paying for the hosting, all of that stuff along the way. So it’s a really great plugin. So far, I’ve just started digging into this one, and I may come back with more stuff on it. I get to work with the full premium version because it’s a client of ours who’s having us go through this, but so far, it’s a really good one. There’s another one out there, but this one here is more robust, but it is a little more complicated to use. At any rate, free version so far. Go check it out. I give it a rating of four dragons, and it’s the WCFM Membership – WooCommerce Memberships for Multivendor Marketplace.
Amber: Yeah, really fond of that when I checked it out. Alright, so the first one I have is Social Share Buttons, Social Sharing Icons, Click to Tweet – Social Media Plugin by Social Snap. So this is actually a pretty awesome plugin. It is a social media plugin offering auto-updates for multiple platforms. You’re able to choose what your updates look like as well. So you can personalize them, which is really useful. And you also get some beautiful share buttons that you can put up on your site that you are also able to at least personalize a little bit, which is nice. This is one of those, like long name amazing results kind of plugins I found. They have pretty well every option you could possibly need to get started for the free version. And then a heck of a lot more options in the Pro version. Worth giving the free version a good look to see how it works and how it goes for you. I rate it at four dragons.
John: Very nice. Alright, the next one I have up here for you is called Delivery Area. And what this is, this is a new plugin out there — not very many people using it yet. It’s one that I’m going to see if I can get set up because the Rogues Tavern store, I have products that I can deliver to my local areas. But I’d like to define the areas for delivery because I’m in two areas of this island at different times of the week, and I can define the areas in here and also define the times and dates that the deliveries are available in this area. So when they’re checking out, they can choose to have a delivery, click the area they want to deliver, and see what dates and times are available, and choose those dates and times. So this looks to be a really good plugin. I haven’t got it fully set up yet, but I do like the concepts, and I like the way it’s organized up at the moment. So it’s one that I’m going to dig into a lot deeper. I’ll probably bring it back to the show at a later date after I’ve gotten through it. And maybe because it’s brand new after it evolves a bit, it may get even better. But it is one that could be very useful if you’re running an e-commerce store that delivers locally into your area. And maybe you only deliver into one section of the city Monday and Tuesday, and another section of the city Wednesday and Thursday, et cetera. This could be very useful tool for improving your sales because people go, hey, they’ll deliver it to me here at this time. So something to check out. Really great little plugin. It’s called Delivery Area, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: Alright. I was just saying these really long ones are a bit of a tongue twister.
John: Yeah.
Amber: Social Web Suite – Social Media Auto Post, Social Media Auto Publish and Schedule now with Gutenberg and WooCommerce support.
John: Yep, that was a mouthful.
Amber: Yeah, so this one was the same kind of auto-post idea for social media platforms, or it’s a bit different approach as they’re aiming for more specific target of scheduling for the auto-updates, including Gutenberg and WooCommerce. So if you don’t mind using a third-party platform to do everything, then this may be a great option for you. I don’t like using third-party platforms to . And this plugin does work fairly well, and it could be a great asset. So definitely worth checking out. I rate it at four dragons.
John: Yeah, I looked at this one over too, and I actually liked it. I’m not — as everyone’s been listening to me long enough, they know I’m not fond of third-party services, but sometimes you just want to go with them. And the reason I would use this one, even one on your website, is the hassles of using this to auto-publish to Twitter, Facebook, and you can also use it to auto-publish to LinkedIn and many of the other social platforms. You can also use it to schedule those platforms. And while I have used plugins in the past on my website — we have one that runs on WP plugins A to Z, and by some miracle, it still works. And it’s been there for three to four years now. And I don’t know if it’s been updated or touched. But oftentimes, what happens is when they update them, they break their connections to the social networks, and it just creates grief for you that adds additional layers of headaches. And they don’t often give you a calendar like this one gets to manage it, plus you get analytics with this plugin and more, which is why I kind of like this one when I was checking it out. And if I had the extra money to spend, you know, they started nine bucks a month, but the real plan that actually is useful to use is 24 bucks a month. You know, if you got a really big site making lots of money, you can go up to $49 a month on it. And, of course, if you’re making money off of it, then it’s worthwhile, but if you’re just starting out, it’s really hard to justify the costs in the beginning. But all being said, yeah, I’d say the same. I was going to bring it, and I realized, no, I won’t get other things. I give this one a four dragon too.
Alright, the next one, I do have for you. This one here, I thought, was kind of cool. One that I didn’t even — well, I think it’s kind of — it’s not new, I don’t believe. I found it while searching for other stuff. Now, this one’s been around for a while, but it’s Gravity Slider Fields, and what it is, Gravity Forms does not have built-in stuff for adding slider fields in your forms. And those slider fields are sort of like, you know, you can put in questions like, you know, one to ten, how do you like this? One, you know, or — you know, will you download me? Yes, no, you know — and they got a slider that chooses the numbers, and you’ve seen them in all kinds of forms or surveys you’ve done before. And because Gravity Forms has a survey add-on to it, you can create a survey. Now you can put sliders in there, making it a little easier for people to select the numbers and information you’re after. So I thought this was really cool. It seems to be a great little plugin — you add it in, it works with your Gravity Forms, and it has all of the stuff you need to add your sliders in there. It actually tells you to choose the range from zero to whatever — if you’re choosing a currency or some other thing, choose the value, hover drag, just a really useful item for Gravity Forms. And I thought this was going to be a great one, and it’s one that I will eventually add to my forms on my sites the first time I need to set this up and set it off to the side at this moment. But at any rate, I give it a five-dragon rating. Go check it out. It’s Gravity Slider Fields
Amber: The last one I have is Social Auto Poster. I like that name the best.
John: Social Media Auto Publish.
Amber: Social Media Auto Publish?
John: That’s the title right here that I just followed the link for.
Amber: Oh, I must have skipped over media. I guess I was, you know, exhausted from writing all the other ones.
John: That’s why I searched up the wrong plugin last time. You gave me Social Auto Poster and told the title was Social Media Auto Publish.
Amber: Okay, well, this one is like I was searching up Social Auto Poster, obviously, for a client, and these are the top three that I found. This one is my favorite that I was able to find. It is simple and easy to use. No fancy pages to work through — just adding your API, choose whether you want to auto-post blogs, posts, et cetera, the post format, and off you go. You also have the option of posting from a category as well, which I didn’t see on the other one. You get a log loader support, and it seems to work really, really well. And this last bit, I don’t think this one — I need to delete that. But I do rate this at five dragons even though it does have a Pro version just because it’s so easy, but it does so much.
John: Yeah, yep, that last bit was when I went to the wrong plugin — the plugin was actually labeled Social Auto Poster. Their code is so bad that if you try to connect it to the Facebook, you oftentimes end up locking yourself out of Facebook.
Amber: Yeah, so don’t do that one — make sure you put in the word media. I’ll fix that before the notes.
John: Make sure you correct — make sure you use the full correct titles. Not Social Auto Public Poster. It’s Social Media Auto Publish. So you get to the right one, very important. There are some crap plugins out there, folks, and that’s what we try to help you avoid is the crap ones.
Amber: Yeah, I have to make sure I bring the other one the next week’s show to let everyone know. Don’t use this.
John: Yeah, don’t use this one. This one’s down at the bottom of the list. Alright, and you gave it a what?
Amber: I give it a five dragon.
John: There we go. Don’t remember if I gave it a dragon more. If not, it got two. Alright, well, those are the plugins for this week. And, you know, we got no listener feedback or questions yet from listeners or anything. All you out there, I know there’s thousands of you downloading the show every week. I’ve got my stats to prove it. I know that it is being downloaded. I don’t know if people are actually listening, but I know it’s being downloaded. So if you’re not only downloading but listening to it, you’ve got to have something to say to us, least by now. Kickback something to us questions; feedback, audio clips, anything, folks. Send it all around.
Amber: The good, the bad, and the ugly.
John: The good, the bad, and the ugly; we play it all. I promise to play nice from now on too. I’m working hard to play nice. Alright, contests. We do have a contest this week, and our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. We haven’t given them credit for quite some time. They provide us with the premium version of their plugin to run our contests. So thank you very much to those guys there. It’s a really great plugin. I’ve been using this plugin since it was literally brand new, and it has grown and evolved to become such a fantastic plugin for managing contests. So if you want to run contests on your site, check out simple giveaways. This week, we do have a contest running from now till December 23. We are giving away a one-year hosting package to johnoverall.com hosting. This is a hosting package valued at $350. And for some reason — yeah, there it is. That should be a link to it. Nope, that’s the link to my website. I wanted the link to the contest. Well, let’s just go pop over here and go to our contests. There we go. It’s in here on our contest. Just go to the website — links will be corrected in the show notes to take you directly to the contest where you can enter to win a one-year hosting package with johnoverall.com, offering up some of the best hosting out there on the Internet. It’s boutique hosting, so I don’t overload the servers and provide you with fantastic service and all the resources you need to run your website. And again, the one-year package is valued at 350 bucks. So make sure you sign up for this contest and see if you can win one-year hosting, maybe give it to a client or use it for another site you’re building, or who knows, move your site there, and after a year, you don’t like it moved away, but you might just stay. I have very few clients ever leave. Alright, so make sure you go check it out. Check out the contest. Got to cover up a couple of things before we move into the Q&A segment.
First off, the plugins we covered, this show is the Gravity Slider Fields, which I gave a five to, the Delivery Area, which I gave a four to, and the WCFM Membership – WooCommerce Memberships for Multivendor Marketplace, which I gave a four to.
Amber: I feel kind of like I’m torturing myself with these long names. Social Share Buttons, Social Sharing Icons, Click to Tweet – Social Media Plugin by Social Snap, Social Web Suite, which I gave a — it’s all the same name. Social Media Auto Posts, which I gave a four to, Social Media Auto Publish and Schedule now with Gutenberg and WooCommerce support, which I gave three to — make it that four, and Social Auto Poster which I gave a five. You know what, all this unpacking is starting to melt my brain, I think.
John: Well, there you go. She sells seashells by the seashore. Basically, what you just did.
Amber: Pretty much.
John: Said that five times real fast. Alright, other reminders, meetups are hopefully in the wings. They are coming again, folks. We will have them. It seems the meetup group in Victoria is finally dying. I gave it up over a year ago. Somebody tried to keep it alive for a while and realized that the cost wasn’t worth the effort. And another quick thing, if you’re interested being in the interview show, if you’re a developer or no developer, or plugins or anything, contact me for being on an interview show. Also, if you have plugins, suggestions you want to have review, please submit them to the website. We have a forum specifically for submitting the plugin. Okay, it is that time again.
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: Okay, so my first question — oh wait, before I start, if anyone out there has any questions they’d like to have asked on the show, send them in to me amber@wppro.ca, and we will give the answer to the best of our ability. Also, if you stump my dad, that’s just totally awesome.
John: I got Google on my fingertips. It’s hard to stump me.
Amber: Sometimes I have. I think I’ve managed to officially stump you at least once.
John: Oh, well.
Amber: Alright, so first question is, what does it mean when you go to a site and the site says, “Your account has been suspended? Contact your webmaster?” And when you go to contact, it said, webmaster, you receive an email that this email does not exist.
John: Well, as I said before, it means you need to make a phone call to find a human.
Amber: I’m wondering like what’s going on?
John: What’s going on is, if you go to a site and it says your account has been suspended, it means you have an account there, but they suspended it for some reason. They’re not going to tell you what reason it is, whether somebody in the back end went, yeah, I don’t like that person, suspend their account, or somebody tried to hack your account, and it got suspended. It means one way or another; the account’s been suspended. You’re supposed to contact the webmaster to help get the site reinstated, and they’re supposed to give you a valid email address to contact webmaster. But if you get an email back that says invalid, well, first thing I do is check to make sure I spelled the email right because that’s not an uncommon practice. If I spelled the email right according to what’s on their website and it doesn’t exist, then that means they got the wrong email address on their website.
Amber: Well, here’s the weird thing — and they never made an account.
John: Well, maybe they made one for you when they set you up for that website.
Amber: I suppose that’s possible, but yeah, it was a weird thing. So, really, it’s just a technical glitch that’s being caused someway somehow. It’s nothing too major otherwise.
John: Nothing too. It’s nothing nefarious that I can see about it. It’s just the fallibility of technology, and the human fallibility, which combined with technology, makes it exponential. You put humans and technology together, and when things go wrong, it becomes an exponential mess.
Amber: Okay.
John: And the only way around it a lot of times is to talk to a human, but a lot of times now, finding a human off of a website is near impossible because they don’t want to actually talk to you. They want you to talk to their website. Nobody wants to talk normally anymore or make a phone call when you could solve something like this in under five minutes with a phone call, but it’ll take hours to get it solved through technology.
Amber: When that happens, who are you going to call? Ghostbusters.
John: Yes, Ghostbusters. That’s who I want to call for it. Absolutely. They can come in with their electron guns and just slice through the building and just take it all out.
Amber: Okay, so my next question is if you go to a site that’s been compromised as like a guest/visitor, how likely are you to be compromised just by being there, and how does that work?
John: I’m not sure I fully understand the question here.
Amber: Okay. Stickdesk.com, that site just got wrecked. And if you go there, my understanding is if you go to a site that’s been wrecked by viruses and whatever, then just by being there, you pick up the viruses almost like an STD. So is that actually how it works, or do you have to interact with the website in order to get the viruses and everything yourself, or how does that work?
John: Alright, it’s a yes and a no. Because if it’s been wrecked to the point where they’ve set up some drive-by downloads, then yes, you can be massively damaged and compromised just by hitting the website, and stuff starts downloading in your computer that you can’t stop. Yeah, so it can happen that way. And then there’s a no. It could just be a hacked website, been defaced, and all kinds of messes have gone on, but the hackers didn’t put in drive-by downloads for it. So it’s a yes and a no. It’s a high-risk situation. It’s like driving through Detroit. Will you get shot driving through Detroit? Maybe or maybe not. It depends on how fast you go. So same sort of thing on this one here. It’s like it’s got a problem and a problem, yeah, drive-by hacking, as Hemdian said. Yeah, it was dubbed drive-by downloads years ago, and it was a major with Google ads for a while. Drive-by downloads where ad would load on a website, and the hacker had managed to insert a drive-by download into the ad. And so yeah, that’s where you got to hope that your computer has good antivirus and other stuff on it to stop stuff from coming in immediately.
Amber: Okay, well, that does make sense. I was just curious how it worked.
John: How it works is, they deface it, they put up programs — can you remember, every time you hit a website, your browser download Javascripts and images and everything else. Well, when it downloads that stuff, your computer tries to run those Javascripts. And when the drive-by downloads are again a Javascript or something similar that’s downloaded in your browser, your browser tries to run it, your computer tries to run it, and then it can infect your system.
Amber: Okay, well, this last question here. I actually wrote this before we had our giant storm here, and I kind of got my answer during the storm.
John: Well, then we’ll deal — you ask the question, I’ll answer it, and then you can give us what answer you got.
Amber: Okay. So I remember losing Internet back when, like, you know, you could pick up the phone and listen on your neighbor’s call secretly — so, you know, way back in the 90s. And during high winds, we would lose Internet, phone, all the weird things. But I’ve realized we don’t really lose Internet during high winds, or often when we lose , or when the authority says. Because oftentimes, you know, we lose power, I was able to go on to the Internet with my phone still able to do things. And I was wondering, like, doesn’t the Internet still run through cable? Why is it that we lose the power, but we don’t lose Internet?
John: Okay, we will talk about that one when we come back from closing out the show. For those of you that are waiting breathlessly for this cliffhanger, make sure you tune in to the YouTube channel for it. Alright, let my girl take us on out of here.
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