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 #540 here.
It’s Episode 540 and we have plugins for ShortCode Rumbles, Multi-Count Down, Restricting Users, Black Listing, Karen’s Dark Mode, Vaptcha… and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #540
John: Alright, first off, we like to talk about ClassicPress if we have anything. Well, I still don’t have anything. I haven’t worked with ClassicPress in many months now. I just don’t have the time, but if you’re a ClassicPress user, and you would like to see more stuff in this segment, please send it in to us. We will get it in here, showcase it, and even give you all the credit for that, but we do have WordPress plugins today, the first one I’ve got for you right out the gate is Shortcodes for Rumble and if you don’t know what Rumble is, you’re asleep at the wheel. Rumble is rapidly up and coming and it looks like it is going to be the winner replacement to knock YouTube from its throne. It’s being acquired by somebody, you know, they’re not being acquired so much as they’re getting massive angel investing they’re teaming up with others and well, they may or may not stay true to their goal but at any rate, I guess embedding rumble videos in WordPress has been a little difficult, so somebody came out with a plugin to embed the rumbles in videos using a shortcode to allow you to get them embedded in there and do some customization such as height and width etc for the rumble videos, so if you’re a rumble user or embedding rumble videos, you’ll want to check out this plugin here to make it a little easier, a little more control to embed your videos using this rumble shortcode. So go check it out, it’s Shortcodes for Rumble and I give it a four dragon rating.
Amber: That sounds really useful.
John: Yeah.
Amber: First one I have for today is Blacklist and Whitelist Domains for Registration. I thought this was a really useful plugin. It is easy to use, you download and activate, then you go into the options and they have a section for the blacklist, a section for the whitelist, and you can even choose a message that domains that are blacklisted will receive when they aren’t allowed to get in, so it’s definitely a really cool plugin if this is something that you are in need of.
John: Okay, so…
Amber: And I rate it at five dragons.
John: Cool, so it prevents anyone with a URL such as Joe at no man’s land and you can ban no man’s land so they can’t register any email address with no man’s land on it.
Amber: Yes.
John: Okay, so Okay, well that’s good can be useful. Problem is there are a lot of scammers out there and they’re constantly changing domain names, you end up with a really big list.
Amber: Yeah, but I mean, it is something that can be useful, especially if you have like, if this is something that you’ve been looking for?
John: Well, I can see the uses for it. I’ve tried using these things in the past, they’ve had multiple types of these in the past and I probably found was being able to create the list because every time I get stuff blocked, they’d come out with different domains, so I just finally gave up, the biggest thing is coming up with a way to automate it, you know, have a semi-automated way of doing it and that’s the hard part.
Amber: That makes sense.
John: Because it’s just time consuming. Alright, the next one I have for you here is Display Multiple Countdown on a single page or a post. Now why would you want to do this? Oh, I don’t know, maybe you’re just psychotic and you want to have multiple countdown timers on one page, there are reasons for it. I know there’s been times where I wanted to have a different countdown for different things that were happening on the page, so this is a way to do that and most of the countdown timers, you get only let you put it once on a page and have it counting down single thing as a one single thing. Well, this one here is a little bit different, newer, it allows you to put multiple countdowns on a single page, customize their color, their background colors, their text color, the format, etc, etc. It’s all done using a shortcode format, requires a little bit of work on your part to get it all set up and doing the things you want it to do, but who knows maybe there’s somebody out there psychotic that wants to count down Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, Hanukkah all at the same time on one page, you can set this up and let it go to town. Anyway, sounds like a cool one to check out if you’re into countdown timers, it is Display Multiple Countdown, and I rate it at a four dragon rating.
Amber: Very nice. Next one I have is Night Mode Karen Lite.
John: This is an unfortunate name choice, I’m sure.
Amber: Well, it is a decent lightweight plugin for dark mode, although they only really give you the option for on/off unless you buy the premium and of course, they have all the other options available like you can see them but you can’t do anything with them. I find it very frustrating when they do that personally.
John: I find it useful because at least you know the content is there.
Amber: Yes, it’s a great marketing thing.
John: It’s massively good for marketing.
Amber: So what this plugin does is it’ll throw an on/off switch onto the homepage for your visitors and when it’s turned on, though, the backend goes into dark mode too and it’s kind of irritating in the backend because if you’re looking at your plugins, you can’t see your plugin names anymore.
John: Oh, so they messed up the CSS.
Amber: But only in the backend in the front end it’s great that nothing vanishes on the front end. It’s very useful that way but yeah, if you want to activate the option as on in the front page, then you’re going to have to deal with dark mode in the back. That is the issue with this I found so it’s all right it does work pretty well, if you don’t mind the dark mode it can work pretty well for you, so I do rate it at four dragons.
John: Okay, well, something to check out. Alright, the final one I have for you is WooCommerce Products Restricted Users. Now I saw this one first and I thought yeah, I don’t know, is it useful? And then I started looking at it and thinking about it a little bit and, you know, it could actually be quite useful if you’re running a ecommerce store and a membership site and other things going on. You can put up special products that are available only to your members or only to people in your email list, who come in and can see these products, you know, you can have specialized sales, you know, making things elite for people and everyone likes to feel elite and special so you can use that in this kind of way there to create unique products that are only visible for the select list of users. Now the problem I did find with this plugin is that you don’t get to choose groups, you have to add the users individually to a list that can see the product when you’re creating it, which could be extremely time consuming if you’ve got 10s or 100s or 1000s of clients on your website, so it can be very problematic there. The other good thing it could be used for though is maybe you’ve got a special client or a client you’re trying to make happen, you want to offer them a exclusive special deal only to them, then you could set it up and easily add their name to the list and offer them that deal, so it does have uses, but it has the drawback of not being able to work with groups or other things. Other than that I thought it was a pretty useful plugin if it had the groups in it, it might have capped out at a five but hey, I’ve got to give it a four dragon rating. Go check it out; it’s the WooCommerce Products Restricted Users.
Amber: Sounds both tedious and awesome.
John: Yeah, at first, I thought, hey, this could be useful for me to offer up special deals for my clients on the tavern website and then I’m like, I have to add each and every user one at a time, no, I’m not doing that.
Amber: Last one I have is TomS Vaptcha, so this is a type of verification plugin. This supports click, invisible and embedded, WordPress default login form, Register Form, last password form, comment form, and a custom v3.js URL, which I’m not sure what that is. It supports a whole bunch of things and it’s kind of cool. They offered dark and light mode styles and it has the option to change out the area and language from Auto detect to a different language offered within the list, so you only get what they offer in the list but they do give you the option to change it. This is completely free and worth checking out if you’ve been looking around for if you’ve been shopping around for a CAPTCHA thing.
John: Cool.
Amber: I rate it at five dragons.
John: It’s like an alternative to Google’s CAPTCHA. I’d never heard of Vaptcha, so all right. Well, that covers up our plugins for you and this is a segment here where we have open for listener feedback and other promo crap but we got nothing this week. No questions, no nothing, so we’re just going to jump right ahead into…
Absolutely. Contest, contest, contest we do have a contest running. This is our Christmas giveaway this year and our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. These guys are kind enough to provide us with a Pro version of their plugin to run our contest, so thanks a lot to those guys. It’s really great plugin, I’ve been using it since it first came off the line and it’s done nothing but get better over the last few years. Anyway, the contest we got right now is a one year hosting package valued at $350 from johnoverall.com hosting. Yes, I am giving this away I myself. I know it’s so odd sometimes I’m talking about myself in third person but I’m talking about my business in third person because my business is johnoverall.com and it is a great hosting service, it’s a boutique hosting service. I’m having some enunciation.
Amber: Boutique.
John: Boutique, thank you. A boutique hosting service where I don’t fill my servers with hundreds of clients, I limit the number of websites on each server, I charge a fair rate. I don’t have multiple layers of tears, you know, you don’t suddenly get slammed with overage fees and other things. You pay one rate, you get one service that provides everything you need for your website to run at its best performance possible. Go check it out johnoverall.com and if you want to try it for free, maybe enter the contest, win one year hosting, put one of your sites on it, test it out, put one of your clients sites on it, test it out whatever you want to do. At the end of the year, you don’t want it, you don’t pay anymore, and you still want it well then you got to keep paying, but at any rate, I am giving that away and the contest is running from now until Christmas Eve and we may or may not be able to announce the winner on Christmas Eve. We will have to announce it after because we’re going to do a pre-recorded show for Christmas this year for the 23rd because I got things I got to do. At any rate, go into the contest at wppluginsatoz.com/contest. You have something to say?
Amber: No, I was just agreeing.
John: Okay, alright. Well, that wraps it up and we got to cover up a couple of things here before we go into the Q&A segment, first thing covered up is the plugins we covered in this show, we covered up Shortcodes For Rumble which I gave a four to, Display Multiple Countdown which I gave a four to, WooCommerce Products Restricted Users, which I gave a four to.
Amber: You liked four a lot today.
John: Yeah, well, you know.
Amber: I covered Blacklist and Whitelist Domains for Registration which I rated at five, Night Mode Karen Lite which I rated a four, and TomS Vaptcha which I rated at five.
John: Very good. Alright, a couple of other quick reminders, there will be a meet up in the New Year’s; I will let everyone know when it happens. If you are a developer and you’d liked to be interviewed, hey reach out to me at wppluginsatoz.com/interview. If you got suggestions on plugins, go submit those on wppluginsatoz.com/submit plugin review. Alright, this is where we dive into more fun.
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: Before I get started if anybody out there has any questions they’d like to have asked on the show, send them in to me at amber@wppro.ca and we will get them answered to the best of our ability. May be we can stump my dad. My first question for you is what are APIs and keys?
John: Yes, I remember what API stands for something protocol interface.
Amber: I know that like when you have certain plugins you need to get your API and key.
John: Yes. Well the API is the Access Protocol Interface or something like that. I can’t remember what the acronym stands for and the keys. The keys is basically a public and a private key and they are issued by whoever is running the API server and what that does is it allows you to connect to a service and get data and the key is what allows you to get in there and grab the data and then bring it back to your website and then the key on your website says I’m authorized to use this data and that’s what the API and keys are. The keys are what gets you – what allows you to transmit the data back and forth the API is the actual interface between your website and wherever you are getting data from, be it another server or another service or even your local website has an API service on it.
Amber: Okay. What do you need an API and key for?
John: Many things. We’ll go with the simplest because we were just talking about it.
Amber: Okay.
John: Captcha. If you’re using Google Captcha you’ve got to go get a public key and a secret key when you set it up and you’ve got to insert that public key and the secret key. The secret key tells the web service that it’s your website, the public key is the key that they have on their website and when you transmit data back and forth it’s transmitted with the public key but then it’s authenticated against the private key on your site, so you need the API keys, it’s like the API and key are not separate, they shouldn’t be, they’re the same API key is what you’re talking about because the API is the service. The API is the protocol, the tunnel, the highway, the wire that connects between the websites that’s the API.
Amber: Okay, so they’re actually one and the same.
John: Yeah, well the API is the service itself, the key is what allows you to transmit it but they’re called API keys because the API keys you need to make the API work. It’s like having a door with a door knob on it; you need the door knob keys to open the door.
Amber: Alright.
John: If that helps make it any clearer.
Amber: And I have one more question for you.
John: Okay, well you ask the question then we will run this one out let our girl take us out and we’ll come back and answer it for those that really, really want to hear all this information or listen to the podcast you gotta go listen to the YouTube answer for it.
Amber: Can one use the same API key for everything or are there different API keys needed for every say plugin?
John: All right. That is a very valid question but I’m gonna let my girl take us out of here and we’ll come back and talk about that.
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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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