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 #539 here.
It’s Episode 539 and we have plugins for Auto Posting, Gardening, Hidey Titles, Gift Cards, Broken-Be-Gone, Post ID’s … and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #539
John: Alright, this is where we cover up a few things. ClassicPress I don’t have anything right now, so just acknowledge that ClassicPress still exist. I believe one day it will do a very good job but just not as fast as I’d hoped it would be. Alright and if you’re looking for something classic precious, go follow the links in the show notes to it.
WordPress plugins, we do have those and the first one I have for you this week is called FloraPress – Your Garden on WordPress. Now I discovered this one while I was looking up something for the Tavern, I’m busy planning the oasis for next year and getting the garden, you know, determining where my seeds are going to go and what beds and when to plant and when to start stuffing the greenhouse and I thought, I wonder if somebody’s built a plugin for WordPress, sure enough, somebody has, this one’s pretty cool. It is a freemium plugin, so it’s gonna get locked, I chalked a point for that but other than that, this is a really great one. It’s got plant profiles, plot profiles, planting profiles, and more in here, you can sit here and go through and it depends on how OCD you are, as to how much you want to go into details on stuff and either share or not share that stuff out to your site, helps you take your soil chemistry, soil types, monitor your lights, all kinds of things in here, photos, graphics, and then you just display it on your site, so this is a really cool one and I’ve just begun to use it and the free version. Once I get a handle on the free version, I may go ahead and buy the license for the Pro version, depends on how much I’m going to use this plugin here, and how much I’m going to do stuff on the Tavern. And so anyway, I thought this is a really great plugin something well worthwhile and checking out if you’re an avid gardener and you want to track stuff on your own little website, go check out FloraPress – Your Garden on WordPress and I give the free version a four dragon rating.
Amber: So it kind of makes me think of those garden books that people used to take these to keep when they were like growing a garden in a family house.
John: It is.
Amber: A house that’s passed down between the family members only it’s virtual.
John: That’s it. It is this exact same thing only put it on your website.
Amber: It is really cool. Hemdian said there’s a strange background high pitch home not too bad, just a bit annoying. I wonder if that has something to do with my sounding faraway.
John: Maybe. It’s one of those things that my sound boards playing with again.
Amber: So the first one I have today is Social Auto Poster, so this is a plugin that was mentioned a week before last. It was found because I made a mistake on the title of the plugin I was bringing, I did fix in the notes and everything, but this one Social Auto Poster itself, it doesn’t seem to be all that great, so when it was started seems to have done exactly what it said it did, seems to work well. I don’t know if they’d have coding that deteriorated or Facebook didn’t upgrade and their code just doesn’t work with them I’m not sure what’s going on. I did try reaching out to them to let them know that their plugin isn’t working. What it’s doing is it is actually blocking people out — locking people out of their Facebook when they try to connect it. So it’s really not a good thing to be happening with a plugin. It’s supposed to be doing auto updates to your Facebook for you and when I tried reaching out to them, I got a message saying failed to send your message, please try later or contact administrator by another method, couldn’t find another method. I did try again later, it still didn’t work, not only are they seeming to have coding issues or something, but they don’t seem to have great customer service either. Seems like a lot of people tried reaching out their support on WordPress and a couple other places I tried looking at nothing is being done about. They haven’t even been answered, so my recommendation is to Social Auto Poster, I rate it at one dragon.
John: Get the feel well; we haven’t had one of those in a while.
Amber: No, it’s been a while. They don’t happen often but when they do they’re there.
John: Well, we definitely want to warn people about plugins that are problematic, so.
Amber: Yeah.
John: Alright, the next one I have for you is YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards. Now if you’re running a WooCommerce website and you want to give out gift cards, this is a great plugin for you and this is also being used on one of my clients sites and the nice thing about this plugin here is it works well with many different other options on it, allows you of course to create gift cards and different numbers and such and because it’s got a premium version on here, and I do actually get to work with the premium version, I need to fix the number I’ve got here but this one here It works excellent and it allows the sending of gift cards, people to buy gift cards through your WooCommerce store, you can use the gift cards as promotional tools, email it to some of your clients, maybe give them a $10 gift card for Christmas or something they can use in your store, etc, etc. You can limit the gift card usage; you can set all kinds of things. With the premium version, you can customize the email with your own custom picture for the gift card and all kinds of other cool things. Now this week, we did have a problem with the one that’s running on my client’s site and the wonderful thing is, these guys have excellent support, we reached out to their support, explained the problem we were having, they found the problem was caused by another plugin that we’re using and they even sent us back a code patch to fix their plugin to work with the other plugin.
Amber: That’s awesome.
John: These guys did an excellent job. It was really a nice worthwhile plugin, it does well. The premium version is worth the money if you’re going to get into it and go check it out. This is YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards, and I give it a five dragon rating.
Amber: Honestly, I just keep thinking yes. Yes WooCommerce.
John: Yes WooCommerce. It is yes.
Amber: Next one I have is Hide Titles on hover, so this is really easy-peasy, you plug it in and it works. All it does is it hides the titles on your links on your pages, which I personally find it really irritating when I’m scrolling down and like say someone has a bunch of links for research or something every time your mouse blows over it, you get this big long bar of information, this hides that big long bar, but it doesn’t affect the ability to connect to that link at all, so.
John: It’s all good.
Amber: I like it, it just tidies it up. It’s a pretty but doesn’t affect anything, throw it in, let it go, does its job, I rate it at five dragons.
John: Cool. Alright, final one I’ve got for you here today is called Reveal IDs. Now this is a very useful plugin if you’re doing development stuff because oftentimes, you’ll need the post ID to do something and that post ID used to be up to version 2.5 or 6 of WordPress, that post ID used to automatically be listed in a column in your post lists and then around 2.5, they thought oh, people really don’t pay attention to that, only developers really care, so they removed it from the column, they just removed the column from displaying, they didn’t remove the post IDs because they can’t, but the post IDs are still there. What this plugin does for you is it sticks that column back there for you, so you can easily see the post ID. I mean, you can still get the post ID by going to the post mousing over the link and then reading the little code down in the bottom of your browser that appears there and then catch that post ID, but it’s much nicer when it’s listed right there in the column next to your posts all the way across, so
Amber: That’s less tedious.
John: It’s less tedious, you know, saves you know what, a whole 5 or 10 seconds but that saving a 5 or 10 seconds adds up over the course of a day, a month, a week in a year, you know, every few seconds, you can add anywhere or save anywhere helps. It is a pretty cool one, so I like it and it’s a really great one and I’m really happy that they got this out there. It’s been around for a while I just hadn’t run across it. Anyway, go check it out, it’s Reveal IDs, and I give it a five dragon rating.
Amber: And this one that I have is Remove Broken Images. I thought this was a really neat plugin. It does remove the broken images but not by changing anything. Okay, so how it works is it removes the image as the initial HTML output of the page, another errors, and it is preventing the broken image icon from appearing in your pages. It removes the blank space some browsers allocate for the images if they are loading as well. Very useful, doesn’t actually change anything, that’s just the way it looks, so it looks tidier, looks neater, looks better, and it is totally free, worth grabbing up. I rate it at five dragons.
John: Excellent. Good day. Alright before we wander on here, I just wanted to make a comment on Hemdian’s thing here about the sealing wax and pen pal. I got one. I got a night ring from the No Agenda show and little red sealing wax and I’ve used it before. I’ve used it one year when I sent out Christmas cards, I sealed every one of the Christmas cards with it.
Amber: Yeah, it’s actually pretty fun, I got that. I got those too and I’ve used it a couple of times when I write family members but it takes a lot of practice to get it done right?
John: It does. It takes a little bit of practice to do it right. You have to hit the wax just the right before it hardens too faster too soft. It’s really kind of — it’s a trick, it’s a talent.
Amber: Oh, that’s cool a family crest as a stamp would be really awesome.
John: Yeah, well, I was originally looking for a dragon before I got my night ring. Alright, well, let’s wrap up a couple of quick things here before we go into the Q&A segment. Oh, we got to bounce into the contest first don’t we?
Amber: Yes.
John: Absolutely, we do have a contest this week and this week’s contest, our contests are sponsored by the simple giveaways plugin or powered by the simple giveaways plugin and this is a really great plugin if you’re going to run your own contest on a website, get this plugin. I’ve been using it since they first created this plugin and over the years, it’s gotten better and better and they started just donating a full license to me. I paid for it for a couple of years but then they started donating a license to me, so thanks a lot to these guys, they’re really great and their customer service is excellent. Alright, and the contest we have this week is sponsored by johnoverall.com web hosting services and we are giving away a one year hosting package with johnoverall.com boutique hosting services. It’s a small hosting company not overly big, not too small, just the right size, you know, it’s kind of like what’s her name and the little bears porridge, you know, one that tastes just right.
Amber: Actually .
John: Yeah, neither can I.
Amber: Goldilocks.
John: Goldilocks, yes. It’s the perfect fit. The bed is just right. The porridge is just right. All of it’s just right, not too big not too small. It’s great hosting services and giving away a one year hosting package valued at $350, you know, so this is something worthwhile I could do is go there, enter the contest, and we need your name, email address, and away it goes, we’ll get you entered to win that. You can use it for yourself, use it for a client, however you want to do it, just enter the contest. Go check it out. Alright, covering up a few things before we move into the Q&A segment, plugins we covered this show I covered up FloraPress – Your Garden on WordPress which I gave a four to, the YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards which I gave a five to, and the Reveal IDs which I gave a five to.
Amber: And I covered Social Auto Poster which I rated at one, Hide Titles on hover which I rated at five, and Remove Broken Images which I rated at five.
John: Absolutely and a couple of quick reminders there will be a meet up sometime in the spring or early summer and news on that will come as it gets rounded up. If you’d like to be interviewed for the WP plugins interview show, just reach out to me at wpplugins.com/interview. Alright, it is time for us to move into…
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: First of all, if anybody out there has any questions, they’d like to have asked on the show, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca and we’ll get them up here and see if we can stump my dad or, you know, answer it, which he seems to be pretty good at.
John: Yeah. Well, if I don’t know it, I just make it up, you know, nobody knows.
Amber: Okay, so my first question is what causes some sites to move so slow when they have ample space left to work with on their site? Does that question make sense to you because it makes sense to me, but I’m not sure?
John: Okay. Well, it sort of makes sense because it sounds like you’re asking why is the site slow when they’ve got lots of storage space left for sticking files in there.
Amber: Yes, that’s exactly yes.
John: Okay. Well, the amount of storage space is irrelevant to how fast a website runs because you gotta remember most hosting companies, not mine, but most hosting companies have 1000s of websites on a single server. They’ll have 1000s or even mine, which, you know, has less than 100 per server. It’s not the website or it’s not the storage space because there’s always a lot of storage space available, drives are never completely filled up. What it boils down to that’s causing the site to be slow is a combination of everything between your computer and that server. It could be the server is slow and servers having a bad day, the server’s being hammered for some reason, maybe one site on the server suddenly got 10,000 visitors per second visiting it, so the server is trying to serve out all those files at once, and it comes up your request, it goes, yeah, you’re gonna have to wait you are 10,001, so that’s the way a server serves up data. The other could be, it could just be slow internet connection, you gotta remember, you and I are talking from across town right now, but that data is not going from my house to yours, that data is going out on the internet making a trip, it might even be going down as far as Mexico or off to England before it bounces back here.
Amber: This is true.
John: You know, so there’s the other problem is where’s the data going? What’s the flow of the data? That’s another problem with the speed of the server. Another problem with the server speed, it could be the configuration of the server and the other problem could be is how much memory does the server have to handle all the requests? The other problem it could be even your own router. One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is your routers have to be rebooted from time to time.
Amber: Yeah.
John: They have to be because they clog up, for some reason they clog up, they load up with I don’t know static charge or something but once you reboot them all of a sudden your speed is restored for a while, so just like your computer, can be your computer might be having problems, your browser’s might be having problems, it’s like the numerous things that go into site speeds insane, there’s ways to help a site run faster by putting caching and other things up there to help it run faster, but that doesn’t guarantee that every person that visits it is going to see that same speed because there’s so much variables in there so it all boils down to all the variables between the computer being used to access the server and the server and everything in between, so there’s just so much that goes into it. It’s so hard to manage it.
Amber: Hang on just a second.
John: Okay.
Amber: Hemdian said could be too many requests either too many plugins or plugins doing stuff too often need to change the site’s heartbeat and robot’s text.
John: Yeah, that’s for the speed. That’s a whole another thing in tweaking your website, that’s a whole another thing. We didn’t even go into dealing with how to tweak your website, I just want you to know all of the variables out there and the variables are insane.
Amber: Okay.
John: That’s your next question.
Amber: Yes, that is my next question. How do you help to speed up a slow moving website?
John: How do you speed up a slow moving website? Well that’s one Hemdian’s suggestion, you know, look at the plugins, see what your plugins are doing, see if you got plugins going off, see if the heartbeat is problematic, you might have to shut off the cron-job, that’s just the beginning and it goes on from there. It’s like, you know, adding caching, the list is insane.
Amber: To simplify it, the main places you need to look are server, internet, computer, and plugins and…
John: And website configuration which includes all your plugins and everything else.
Amber: All right.
John: Alright. Well, read off your next question and then we’ll close out the show and we’ll come back and answer that for those that bothered to come to the YouTube version of the show.
Amber: Alright. How does password hacking software work? It seems like it is trying out all the possible combinations. How does it do that and test it out, you can only put in the wrong password a couple of times before you get locked out of the site?
John: Alright. That’s an interesting one. We will come back and answer that after our girl takes us out of here.
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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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