Pride before the fall

WordPress Plugins from A to Z Episode 53 Podcasting and more

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  Popping your top ehThis episode brings to you some great plugins for podcasting and site motoring. We also review a great plugin for creating your own accordion menu system.

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

Just some random chatting about Vegas and the marathon there and cheep beer while playing penny slots..

My thoughts on WordPress 3.3, ever notice when the creators of software are thinking they are making it better they actually bloat it right up. It seems WordPress is doing some of that, the  flyout menu annoyed me fast and I installed the plugin Expanded Admin Menus the only problem is that it does not persist across computers or browsers since it is java driven and does actually disable the menu. This gives the best of both worlds and is how WordPress should have done it. A new menu bar at the top in the admin area and the one on the front I liked better before was faster I thought that this new drop down. What does Automatic have someone there who has a hard-on for unnecessary flyouts and dropdown menus, including the new feature tour and WTF how come I can’t turn off the admin tool bar up top..

Shout Outs:

Jason at paidmembershipspro.com another membership plugin he brought to my attention reviewed below..

Manny with some great suggestions for upcoming plugins.

WordCamp Victoria 2012 happening on January 14 2012..

Check out @runnerskye 2012 YYJ Run for Cancer Calendar at http://www.yyjrunforcancer.com

Travis Smith

List of interesting sites that run on WordPress:

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

In case you live under a rock WordPress 3.3 has dropped on Dec 12

List of Plugins:

—–Johns Plugins——-

Paid Memberships Pro

What they say:

Paid Memberships Pro is a WordPress Plugin and support community for membership site curators. PMPro's rich feature set allows you to add a new revenue source to your new or current blog or website and is flexible enough to fit the needs of almost all online and offline businesses.

What we say:

Pretty easy to get setup one flaw I saw was in payment gateway they offer paypal express and pro but not standard seemed strange to me since many folks starting out do not pay for the extra paypal express or pro. This is a premium plugin where all the functionality of the plugin seems to be there but you cannot access the documentation without payment. A good model but I feel it should be disclosed in the description when you download it from the repository. I felt a little deceived on that front. I do like the way it functions it does have a simple check box when creating a post/page to define if the post is member only. All in all this is a pretty goo plugin except for the issues above.

Rating 4 Dragons

NY in VegasBlubrry PowerPress Podcasting plugin 2.0.4

What They Say:

Blubrry PowerPress brings the essential features for podcasting to WordPress. Developed by podcasters for podcasters, PowerPress offers full iTunes support, the Update iTunes Listing feature, web audio/video media players and more. PowerPress is designed as an upgrade to PodPress.

PowerPress is developed and maintained by Blubrry, a podcasting company and community providing tools and resources for podcasters to measure, monetize, publish and host podcasts. Although we'd like you to become a member of Blubrry, no membership is required to use this free open source podcasting plugin.

What We Say:

I have actually been using this plugin for over a year now and felt it was time I reviewed it again since there have been many changes to it and I was recently asked about podcasting plugins.

I still found this pretty easy to setup although it still take time to get it right. Make sure you know if you are going to do more than one type of podcast on the same site there are setting for that. also think though your setting for iTunes before setting them up changing them later can sometimes cause issue there. It also does video in case your planning that.. Make sure to get a Blubrry account so you can use their stats program.

Rating 4 Dragons ease of use but time to get setup.

podPress 8.8.10.12

What they Say:

podPress adds a lot of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.

podPress 8.8.10.12 includes a bug fix. You can read more about this version in the Changelog and pay attention to the Upgrade section.

Features:

  • Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and XSPF playlist)
  • Podcast Download stats, with graphs.
  • View MP3 files ID3 tags when your Posting

…. more

What we say:

There where several other podcasting plugins but they seem to have been abandoned so I did this one again sine it was my original choice when I first started podcasting and what I taught in my classes.

I still found this one to be a bit more difficult on the setting up the one good thing i liked was control over how you player looks and where it appears. The one thing I did not like was the lack of control on a per post basis for iTunes and that there is no verification of the media when uploaded it simply pulls it from the directory you assigned in the settings. All in all not too bad just seems more work after install instead of less.

Rating 3 Dragons for extra work.

Harly heaven——Marcus Plugins———-

—ONE–

WordPress Sentinel
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-sentinel/

This plugin acts as a sentinel that watches over your core WordPress programs, as well as installed themes and plugins. It periodically checks things

WordPress Sentinel tracks all files in a WordPress installation (core, themes, plugins) and then periodically rechecks and notifies the administrator of any files that have changed in any way.
Most attacks against WordPress sites will install rogue code wherever they can – in new and existing files in the themes, plugins and even in the WordPress core files. This plugin is designed to tell the administrator exactly what files have been touched and when in order to make hack detection and recovery much easier.

Rating – 3 out of 5

–TWO–

WP DoNotTrack

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor's privacy.

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor's privacy. WP DoNotTrack uses (a slightly modified) version of jQuery AOP to catch and inspect elements that are about to be added to the DOM and renders these harmless if the black- or whitelist says so.
The current version is blacklist-based and stops tracking by media6degrees and quantserve. This can easily be changed in the javascript though. Future versions will include a WordPress admin-page to change these settings.

** This is an interesting model for a plugin, and one who’s overlying concept may one day become an issue in WordPress as a whole. At what point should we / can we be circumventing internal functionality of other plugins and/or scripts?

Rating 2 out of 5

–THREE–

Theme-Check

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-check/
A simple and easy way to test your theme for all the latest WordPress standards and practices. The theme check plugin is an easy way to test your theme and make sure it's up to spec with the latest theme review standards. With it, you can run all the same automated testing tools on your theme that WordPress.org uses for theme submissions.
The tests are run through a simple admin menu and all results are displayed at once. This is very handy for theme developers, or anybody looking to make sure that their theme supports the latest WordPress theme standards and practices.

**A great theme development tool! I used this to find issues with a hand-coded theme I was working on and it saved me hours of headaches.

Rating 4/5

–FOUR–

NY in VegasWP Accordion Slider
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-accordion-slider/

The WP Accordion Slider plugin allows you to upload images from your computer, which will then be used to generate a jQuery Accordion of the images. Custom titles and content from various sources can be shown. Content, excerpt, and content limits can all be used for posts and pages.
Each image can also be given a URL which, when the image is active in the slideshow, will be used as an anchor wrapper around the image, turning the image into a link to the URL you specified. Images can also be deleted via the plugins Administration page.
NOTICE: Currently in Beta.

This plugin also enables the use of shortcodes in widgets
Features:

  1. Set Auto Play (and thus, slide delay, whether to pause on hover, and auto restart delay)
  2. Create custom titles
  3. Set caption height, delay, and easing
  4. Create custom content for captions or capture content from the post’s or page’s content, content limit or excerpt.
  5. Set accordion navigation key. If set to true, users can use right/left arrows to navigate through the accordion slider.
  6. Custom set the div/ul ids as well as set the image/div sizes.
  7. Ability to Deactivate/Reactivate images/slides without deleting them
  8. Set Caption Background (white/black) transparency
  9. Cross browser tested (IE7+, FF 3.6+, Chrome 10+)

Download

Latest version: Download WP Accordion Slider v1.8b [zip]

Rating 4 out of 5

** I had some interaction with Travis Smith, the plugin’s author. He was really great about giving instant feedback. If you use this plugin, please thank Travis at @wp_smith

——

Some Terms here for plugins: Nothing special this week..

Yes that is a hotel how strange ehIn closing here is what is coming in future podcasts:

An interview with Scott Cariss the creator of the File Monitor plugin coming soon, just as soon as I can connect with him.

scroll plugins or banner tickers

Commenting plugins

404 redirect plugins

Ad banners plugins

More Lazy Plugins

How to Contact Us:

John can be contacted at:

on my website @ http://www.johnoverall.com/ or you can follow me on Twitter @Ahkonsu or even like me on Facebook at  http://www.facebook.com/JohnOverallcom

Marcus can be contacted at:

Marcus Couch can be contacted at his website at marcuscouch.com, on twitter   @marcuscouch and on facebook at facebook.com/marcuscouch

Some of the music provided tonight is from Mevio's Music Alley. Check it out at ‘music.mevio.com http://music.mevio.com

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4 replies
  1. frank
    frank says:

    Regarding WP DoNotTrack: it indeed can be scary at first to see the extend by which one can change a WordPress-page with nothing but a couple of lines of JavaScript. But doesn’t that in itself prove that one has to be careful with not only the plugins one installs, but also with the external JavaScript that some of these plugins make your blog include (e.g. the Automattic plugins, which insource Quantcast tracking code)?

    The goal of WP DoNotTrack is to provide WordPress-admins with the ability to enforce the level of privacy that they want, instead of the level of privacy a random plugin provides, by stopping the JavaScript-initiated inclusion of 3rd party code. The new version (I guess you reviewed 0.1.0) includes an options-screen to choose between full or optional filtering (based on navigator.doNotTrack), between a black- or whitelist and the ability to change the hostnames inside those lists.

  2. Adam Erstelle
    Adam Erstelle says:

    A good tool for any web admin is Ghostery. It is a simple addon that identifies any / all tracking and thirdparty items that a website uses. Great for admins who might not be able to dive into the code as well as others can.

    I always check my own sites after being built to make sure they are clean…but it is sure interesting when visiting other websites. The highest number I’ve seen is 30+!!!

    I should have mentioned, Ghostery is a browser addon, not a WordPress plugin.

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