It’s episode 211 and we’ve got plugins for Social Sharing of Images, Cron Job Management, SEO Enhancement, Advertising plugins and a plugin to hide content unless people sign up to your mailing list. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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Listener Feedback / Audio Clips

Really Helpful Podcast for WordPress Users

in iTunes by Mac-Bug from UK on April 13, 2014

I stumbled upon this podcast the other day and am so glad that I did! With so many wordpress plugins available it can be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. Having these expert discussions and individual plugin reviews available is immensely helpful. And sometimes you’ll find one you didn’t even know that you needed until John and Marcus explain it to you. Many thanks!
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Great show.

in iTunes by joanboluda from Spain on March 22, 2014

Great show. Plenty of useful and helpful cured information. John and Marcus are doing an awesome job. Kudos, guys!
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Awesome Insights from WP Gurus

in iTunes by David Jackson from USA on March 1, 2014

This show delivers great insights into all sorts of plugins. You can rely on great information, news, and more. There are a lot of garbage plugins our there, and they help you avoid them. There are a lot of garbage WordPress podcasts, this is not one of them. Definitely give them a listen. Marcus and John are a great one two punch.
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*WordPress Plugins Reviewed by John Overall**

WPX Cron Manager Light

• Version: 1.0.6
• Author: wpXtreme, Inc.
• Last Updated: 1 month ago
• Requires WordPress Version: 3.8.0 or higher
• Compatible up to: 4.1
• Downloaded: 188 times
• WordPress.org Plugin Page »
• Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:

It seems every once in a while the WordPress cron just goes crazy and it has happened to me again. So here is a cron job manager that help you clean up the mess. This one seems to be pretty goo but does depend on an intergration plugin which they walk you though downloading and instaling. once installed it gives you a list of all cron jobs when they run next, the name of the job, how it is scheduled hourlym twicew daily or daily. A live countdown timer to next run, an excute now button and the ability to turn on and off the cron job. All in all a pretty6 good cron manager.

rating 4 Dragons

Advertising Manager

• Version: 3.5.1
• Author: Scott Switzer
• Last Updated: 2 months ago
• Requires WordPress Version: 2.5 or higher
• Compatible up to: 4.0.1
• Downloaded: 360,168 times
• WordPress.org Plugin Page »
• Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:

This one turned out to be an ok ad platform if you are importing ads from another program but not very useful if you are trying to create ads from scratch plus the stats were minimal. It did not seem to have an easy way to insert an image ad, you are required to create html code. Not the plugins your looking for move along but could be useful in some circumstances.

Rating 2 Dragons

Advanced Ads

• Version: 1.3.18
• Author: Thomas Maier
• Last Updated: 1 day ago
• Requires WordPress Version: WP 3.5, PHP 5.3 or higher
• Compatible up to: 4.1.
• Downloaded: 14,615 times
• WordPress.org Plugin Page »
• Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:

Another great ad plugin for some great basic use craeting an ad is a bit on the difficult side and it does not seem to have any real usable stats to it. I fund the creation process for an ad a bit on the lengthy side and the display did not work so well using the short code in a text widget on a page it looked fine but I needed more options on ad creation and gettting stats.

Rating 3 Dragons

*WordPress Plugins Reviewed by Marcus Couch**

Viral Hover Buttons
https://wordpress.org/plugins/viral-hover-buttons/
A wordpress plugin that displays social sharing buttons in your pictures and videos when the users hover on them. Your articles are guaranteed to get more shares and more traffic as a result.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Content Upgrades
https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-upgrades/
Content Upgrades plugin will help you to create “content specific bonuses” in your articles, that people have to opt in for. You first create a special page with bonus content, then you customize a popup email form, that will advertise your bonuses. You link to this popup email form from the content of your article, so by clicking your special link, your visitors will get a popup, offering them to leave their email address to get the bonuses. Once they do the plugin will redirect them to the page with bonus content.

Rating: 4 out of 5

SEO Enforcer
https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-enforcer/

SEO Enforcer is a small plugin that works with WordPress SEO by Yoast (it’s required), that will truncate your title tag if it’s too long, same with your meta description tag. The length they are truncated at is a setting you can configure. There is also an option to remove H1 tags from your content. Typically your theme will show the H1 tag for your post or page title already. Having more than one H1 tag is not recommended for SEO, so this will remove any it finds in your content and replace them with an H2 tag instead.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Plugins Overview:

John’s Plugins: WPX Cron Manager Light – 4, Advertising Manager – 2, Advanced Ads – 3

Marcus’ Plugins: Viral Hover Buttons – 4, Content Upgrades – 5, SEO Enforcer – 4

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