I downloaded and installed the upgrades plugin a while ago and I’ve used it to monetize certain parts of my ComLuv site. There’s the usual way of adding plugins to the Upgrades directory and configuring them to be used which I’ll go into in a future post but I wanted to use the system slightly differently, and that was to charge users for adding new URLs to an account or to add default links to their returned list of posts.

The advantage of premium

Some of the advantages to using wpmupremium plugins is the support you receive, knowledge that the plugin will be updated to keep it compatible with new changes and my favourite is, the quality of the code.

When you’re getting premium, you’re getting premium code which for me personally, has taught me a LOT about how wordpress works. Particularly custom hooks and actions and filters. That was always a mystery to me until I dissected the plugins I downloaded from their site so it was a breeze to modify the upgrades plugin to work for users who don’t have blogs and start using the internal functions in a daughter template to do what I wanted.

Modifying the upgrades plugin

I needed to allow the upgrades menu to show for regular users because not everyone who joins the Comluv site starts a blog. This was just a simple case of changing the user level so that everyone, not just blog owners can see the menu and buy credits.

There are two places to modify:

/mu-plugins/upgrades-framework.php
line ~ 197-200 (upgrades plug pages framework function)
change add menu and submenu calls to

add_menu_page($upgrades_branding_plural, $upgrades_branding_plural, 0, 'upgrades.php');
add_submenu_page('upgrades.php', __('Credits'), __('Credits'), 0, 'credits', 'upgrades_credits_output' );
add_submenu_page('upgrades.php', __('History'), __('History'), 0, 'history', 'upgrades_log_output' );

line ~ 1919 (upgrades_credits_output function)
change user check to

if(!current_user_can('level_0')) {

Creating the daughter template

Adding another page you can use as a template is pretty easy, you just need to create a new php file in your theme directory and make sure it has the correct remarks at the top to identify it as a template page.


/*
Template Name: ComLuv purchase url
*/


Next just copy and paste the main calls from another template, you’ll be deleting most of it like the loop to display posts and replacing it with your own hard coded form and text. Be sure to keep the divs that surround the content intact.

I wrote a description of the item being sold and added a form.
(DON’T copy and paste from this page, I had to remove the beginning < characters from the code so it displays properly)

form action='/member/additional-urls/' method="POST">
input name="addurl" type="text" size="30"/>
input type="submit" name="submit1" value="Submit"/>

/form>


I also added a finish_page() function which just closes the /div tags so I could easily break out of what I was displaying without rendering the rest of the custom code below it.

You set the action to the page slug you’re publishing the page as and put a nonce field in there so you can check it with the next bit of code to prevent a naughty user from trying to call the purchase directly.

Handling the purchase

Next, you need to handle the data that gets submitted by your form and do the magic with the users credits.

if(isset($_POST['submit1'])){
$nonce=$_REQUEST['_wpnonce'];
if(!wp_verify_nonce($nonce,'addurl1')){
echo 'Page request deformed, please go back and try again. (b1s1)';
finish_page();
}
if(!$_POST['addurl']){
echo 'Please go back and enter a value';
finish_page();
}
// check if user has enough credits
global $user_ID;
$credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID);
if($credits < 3){
echo 'h2>Error - Insufficient Credits/h2>';
echo 'p>You will need to purchase some credits to register another URL, you currently have strong>'.$credits.'/strong>';
echo 'p>a href="/wp-admin/upgrades.php?page=credits">Click here to visit the purchase page/a>';
finish_page();
}
// if we're here then everything is ok to provide service and deduct credits
$credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID);
$credits -= 3;
upgrades_user_credits_update($credits);
upgrades_log_add_msg($user_ID,'You paid 3 credits for an additional URl - '.$url);
do_add_url($url,$user_ID);
echo 'h2>Site added, 3 credits used on your account/h2>';
echo 'p>You have '.$credits.' credits remaining';
echo 'p>a href="/member/additional-urls/">Click here to refresh the page/a>';


The first bit gets the nonce you created and checks it and displays an error message if it doesn’t match
Next, check the field you’re expecting and spit out an error if it is empty.
Next, check the user has enough credits and spit out an error if they don’t.
If everything is fine, continue.

use $credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID); to get the users current credits total
use upgrades_user_credits_update($credits); to set the users credits total to $credits (after you deduct what your item/upgrade costs)
use upgrades_log_add_msg($user_ID,’You paid 3 credits for an additional URl – ‘.$url); to add a message to the users Credits history page so they know they used some.

That’s it, easy peasy! Here’s an idea, use credits to sell digital downloads on another page, just check and deduct the users credits before allowing a dowload.

I’ll post a follow up to this soon on how to use the upgrades plugin to add a new package that enables the RSS widget for a blog (I’ll show you how to disable the rss widget too)

You can get over 100 plugins and themes of premium quality at http://premium.wpmudev.org and they all help to make your wpmu site better than the jones’s

Confusing because, I was quite pleased with how the SERPS are for Firedwok and ‘chinese takeaway lancaster‘ which results (at time of writing) to this..

Straight on the map and number 1 on results (with added tags)

It turns out that he was searching for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ which made the site past page 5 on the results!

Bring on the featured links!

A few days or weeks ago, ComLuv got put up to PR6 on the homepage from Google. How nice! I mentioned this in the email newsletter and within a few hours, two links were sold on the sidebar for 30 days each. One with a subscription! woot!, might this be the first month Comluv pays for itself? lol

I thought I’d take advantage of this PR increase and put a text link for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ on with the paid ones and left it a while. In the meantime, I put some more posts on the blog portion of the takeaway website and put in some ‘oriental food’ references on the homepage.

Got me some SERPs

And now, a search for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ results in a number 1 position (and number 2)

1 portion of SERPS please

Very happy with my text link purchase, and because I own the site it means it was free! haha

I guess I can take it down now, it’s done it’s job and it can make some space for another paid ad.

It’s not just me

A paid customer bought a link for UK payday loans back when that search term had them after page 10 (I tested it when they first bought the link) and now that term results in them being on page 1 of google.

They even asked why I had no subscription option for the ads! I switched it on and straight away, I had 50$ per month subscriptions coming in. Very nice!

Get YOU some links

If I can sell a few more links on subscription, I’ll have enough to upgrade the server to more memory and a faster processor. It’s typical that the first time the site has made enough money to pay for it’s own server and bandwidth, it reaches capacity again and needs upgrading! lol. what a fun ride!

You can buy featured homepage links and network wide footer links on the ComLuv page here

Click the image to download a high-res version.

Ice skating anyone?

It’s not too bad, we still get the usual suspects who battle through any kind of weather to get the chips, fried rice and curry sauce in a box. Somehow, the grocery deliveries happened and only the carrotts were missing! They’ll battle through the narrow streets to us again just deliver a bag of carrotts. Try that in London..

Tomorrows forcast is for bright skies, I hope it clears the snow off the roads long enough to get some sweet & sour chicken out to the masses! The weather doesn’t look too good for the South of the country though, there’s a 18 inch snowfall predicted down there. oo-er!

How has the weather been affecting your area? do you love the snow or hate it?

That's not a moon! thats the flu virus

I think I’ll have to try and do some stuff on my laptop that needs doing to the ComLuv site. Things like, a daily visit list of CommentLuv enabled sites based on the most comments received. There are other maintenance tasks I have to do but that’ll take my main pc and it’s bloody cold in my computer room!

Not quite like this but nearly!

Seriously! it’s right cold oop North. Couple that with the fact that the flat above the takeaway has single pane glass in the windows and the one in my computer room has a broken latch which prevents it from closing and you’ve got a perfect recipe for bloody freezing!

All my development work has grinded to a halt because of this cold weather and with it being Christmas and we’re one less chef in the kitchen, there is a huge amount of work to be done in the offline world of a Chinese takeaway. I felt quite stressed in the beginning of this period where I couldn’t get any coding done but rather than get emotionally damaged by the pressure of all this code and web stuff, I decided to just concentrate on what is paying the bills and supporting the family for a bit.

There’s no real problems with CommentLuv at the moment, it’s working on WP2.9 and the ComLuv site is surviving and only just now starting to make some pennies with adsense and kontera so hopefully, nothing major will happen between now and spring so I can start some serious coding again. Pah, who am I kidding? I wont be able to last until spring! lol, guess I’ll have to take another unpaid day away when I’m better just so I can exercise my brain.

Now back to my snot filled hankies. where the hell does all this snot come from? something must be losing out on liquids in my body so all this snot can be produced. bleurgh

Wordpress Mu or WPMu is already familiar to me after creating ComLuv.com to run using it so I was looking forward to receiving this book to see if there were some things I had missed. Oh yeah, I missed a lot!

If you’re looking to build a Wordpress based site that also has the option of allowing your own readers to create their own blogs then you need to look at WPMu. Not only is it the same platform that wordpress.com uses for their millions of blogs, it’s also expandable to be a social network in it’s own right. It does this with the buddypress and bbpress plugins. This book shows you how to use them all.

In the beginning

Like all beginner books, the first part deals with the introduction and installation chapters. In other books, this is just a page or two but with PacktPub books, you get the full deal. Step by step with pictures and alternative methods. Even right down to setting up Apache to work with subdomains which is going to save you a lot of trouble hunting around forums for answers.

Expansion

After you learn how to set up your site and modify it’s appearance, you’ll want to know what plugins and features can be added. The middle section of the book takes you through different options like buddypress, bbpress (forums) and other useful additions that will make your site stand out from the rest.

As with other beginners guide books, the author works with a case study site and as you progress through the chapters adding more things, you will be able to follow on with your own local install and compare results. This makes it a lot more interactive to learn and with the pop quizzes and “what just happened” reviews, you’ll really prepare yourself for your project.

More than words..

As well as covering the technical details for installing, maintaining and optimizing your site, the author also goes into the real life way of creating and running a blog/social network hub. Things like monetizing your site or ways to increase traffic are given a whole chapter and will really help the new webmaster get to grips with their site.

thinking Mu?

If you’re just considering looking into WPMu or you run more than one wordpress blog and want to consolidate them all to one site then you should buy yourself this book. It’ll give you enough information so that you can try it out without worrying about having to bring in outside help. You can view the books contents page and read more about it here :

Wordpress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide

I was posting about my woes at Comluv and just a few days later I finally managed to track down the random freezes on my AsRock M3A790GXH – 128M motherboard and OCZ DDR3 Gold Series RAM

Random crashes on Vista/7 – AsRock M3A790GXH/128M with OCZ DDR3 Gold RAM – Solved

Shiny, SHINY! RAM!

It turns out that OCZ DDR3 RAM needs 1.9v instead of the regular 1.5v that it would get from the motherboard. A quick visit to the bios and I switched the DRAM voltage to 2.0v and the pc has been up and running for days without a problem. yey!

Dedicated server non responsive after high traffic – solved

They put the fast in, um, ukfast

It’s been up for 7 days and the CTM graphs are showing me that my CPU usage and system load are down a lot from what they’ve been.

Monthly view upgrade shows better performance

Looks more dramatic on the 1 year chart

My last issue was my laptop charger, it went poof! I did a search online for a universal charger and the best price I could see was over 60 quid! luckily, I was able to buy a Toshiba charger from ebay for 9.99 for next day delivery.

sorted! (for now)

Here’s a list for future me to read to feel the future shame..

06 Nov *edit* made some progress!

1. Intense Debate Commentluv
   • I need to split up the css so it’s in a separate file
   • I need to add a check for existence of jquery at the start and load it if not already loaded
   • I need to pretty up the extra url field
   • I need to hide the existing url field on a logged out form and populate it with the value in the one I added with the script
2. Premium Support page
   • Create the different charge bands
   • Create paypal buttons with IPN url
   • Create said IPN receiving script
   • Integrate it with the comluv affiliate plugin for paying referral site
3. Premium Extras
   • Create different charge groups
   • Create paypal buttons
   • Create IPN receiving script
   • Integrate said script with affiliate payment
4. Referral contest
   • Work out the prizes
   • Type up the description post
   • Set up a single area for entries

That’ll do for now, there’s more but I’m getting depressed

Easy with a REPLACE function on the wp_posts table.

You just need 3 things for the replace command :

1. The row you’re altering
2. The string you’re searching for
3. The string you’re replacing with

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE( `post_content` , "fiddyp.comluv.com/files/", "fiddyp.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/" )

It did the whole table of posts in less than a second. Sweet, now all my images are back to normal on this site.

Here’s the vid

Some of my soundbytes got included in another video too, must have said some good things