Business Profile Plugin & Meta Box Plugin Previews

Welcome to PluginTut’s first weekly preview round-up.

This week, we preview two plugins that you might find useful for your next WordPress project. In fact, these two might play well together for someone building a more advanced business website, and become part of your everyday WordPress-building toolkit.

Let’s dive in!

Business Profile Plugin

Download it here.

Created by Theme of the Crop

You might as well add this to any WordPress business website you’re building from here on out. One of the first pages you setup for your client is their contact page, and what’s on that contact page? Their contact information! Business name, address, phone number, and typically a Google Map.

The Business Profile plugin does this for you through a shortcode or widget placement. The’ve recently updated the plugin to support multi-location support, a feature that a lot of folks have requested since the release.

In this preview video, I’ll show you how to setup the widget, run through an example contact page setup, and demonstrate how to add multiple locations to the plugin.

Preview: How-to use the Business Profile Plugin

Oh, one more thing: there’s a huge local SEO benefit when you have this plugin installed. I don’t know about you, but most clients I talk to want more business & traffic coming to their store. This is one step in that direction.

By leveraging better schema data structure, like this:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Attorney”>
<span itemprop=”name”>ABC Attorneys</span>
<div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>123 Main Street</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Malibu</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>CA</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>90263</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>555-423-2352</span>
<a href=”http://googlemapsurl.com” itemprop=”maps”>URL of Map</a>
</div>

Preview: The Meta Box plugin for custom fields

Download it here.

Created by MetaBox.io

Who doesn’t love a good custom fields creator? Well, you, if you don’t know how to code.

There’s a handful of popular custom field plugins I’ve seen before, like Advanced Custom Fields and CMB2, but this was my first experience with the Meta Box plugin. I’m actually surprised I hadn’t heard about it until the author reached out to me, it’s active on 100k websites, according to the plugin repo count.

Hold up, if you’ve never heard of a custom field before, what does it mean to you?

Well, maybe you’re thinking about building a WordPress website to showcase:

• Inventory
• Team pages
• Directory information
• Reviews

If you think of the WordPress editor (the box you type into) as a single field, custom field plugins allow you to add more of them. Not jsut text fields, but date pickers, drop down lists, Google maps and a whole lot more. That’s what makes custom field plugins more popular than the next, well, that and clean lightweight code.

If you’re a developer type, than Meta Box looks like a slick solution for your custom field needs. If you hate writing code, you should look elsewhere.

A first-look at Meta Box

Keep in mind this isn’t a review, but a preview of the plugin.

Wrapping up

I hope you enjoyed this week’s preview round-up!

If you’ve got a plugin you want me to take a look at, or you’re a plugin developer looking for some content marketing services for your plugin or service, contact me.