It’s about bloody time! The new CommentLuv plugin is out there and getting lots and lots of downloads. Over 5000 in the first week actually which is a pretty big number!

The plugin is now standalone which means it will no longer require my expensive dedicated server to work which also means there’ll be no registering to my site to add a feed url or buy additional urls and static links.

Hurray! do you know what that will do to my support tickets? it’ll virtually decimate them! No more pointing people to the member page, no more spoon feeding them their feed urls or explaining how www.something.com is different to something.com . Oh, and no more crashed server in the middle of the night due to excessive load.

Actually, it’s the excessive server load and regular crashes that motivated me to turn the whole CommentLuv thing on it’s head and make it standalone. Once I do that, I can move away from dedicated hosting and put all my sites on a VPS that is scalable, a VPS that’s a bit closer to the majority of visitors to my sites. USA! USA! USA! lol

What’s next?

Well according to the stats at WordPress.org, it takes about a month for most people to update their plugin when they get the notification in their dashboard and so when the end of the month comes around, I’ll switch off the CommentLuv API for the wordpress plugin and set it to send back a message about having to upgrade to the latest plugin.

That’s sure to piss off a few people but, seriously, I can’t keep paying for this server out of my own pocket and I just don’t have the time to maintain the server. I just wanna make plugins!

I’m itching to do a cool facebook plugin, multi author blog plugin, the premium version of CommentLuv plugin and much much more but so far, I’ve been stuck fire fighting the bloody server! time to say goodbye and within this month!

But, before that can happen

I have to transfer all my existing minor sites to the new VPS

And then, design a new theme for comluv.com which is still going to be an awesome guest blogger site with oodles of pagerank and traffic and then move that to the VPS and then code the premium commentluv and then design the site to handle the purchases and then I have to launch the premium plugin and to do that I have to make the videos and to do that….. arrrrggh!

I’ve decided on a course of action for having my own products.. Rather than write an ebook which I wouldn’t do anyway because I just despise writing copy! and rather than try and convert my CommentLuv plugin to become a fully fledged big budget premium plugin (which I will do eventually), I am going to try my hand at releasing some smaller plugins for a very reasonable price.

People want updates and support

From my own experience of my free plugins, one thing that I know people want when installing plugins to their site is somewhere to go for help when things go wrong or when other plugins don’t play nice.

Another thing they want is regular updates or at least the knowledge that their site isn’t going to break because they update their WordPress code and the plugin doesn’t play nice with the new functions.

If it is too big it’s too bad!

The biggest road block to me releasing the super duper update to CommentLuv that would take it into the realms of ‘premium plugin’ is the fact that it’s already grown to such a long list of source code and it’s functionality is already a headache when I start thinking what I’ll have to do it add this or that feature.

I’ve seen it with other premium plugin coders that are trying to survive on their own. Releasing something so big and so super duper that you can charge between 50 and 100 dollars for it means you have to really make it super duper and chock full of features. Then you’ll have to create a support site and probably forums where you’ll spend 50% of your time, the other 50% will be either coding the updates or marketing. Good luck if you want to release more than 1, you’ll need a team of coders, supporters and designers and marketers.

For he guys at premium.wpmudev.org it’s not a big deal but for little ol’ me? well, I’m going to try something different. Something that is maintainable and wont require a visit to Dragons Den or seek angle investors. Something that I can actually release more than one of.

Bring on low cost, great value blog bling!

My plan is to release a set of great value blog bling plugins at a price where people wont have to break the bank or hesitate for too long before buying. I’m going to integrate it with the existing comluv credits system which allows existing comluv affiliates to advertise them and earn a percentage from any credits purchases that result and I’m going to provide top level support that is exclusive to people who purchase the plugins.

They are going to be useful little buggers, these plugins -o -mine! And because they are going to be managable in size and updates, I’ll be able to release more than one. Here’s three very reasonably priced plugins that I have written and found to be really useful for my own sites.

Dashboard Tweeter

Price: – $20
A nice dashboard widget that greets you with your latest @replies from twitter and allows you to respond without ever leaving the dashboard area. The advantage is that you can set up your own twitter application so when your replies go out there, there’ll be a handy link directly back to your blog for people to click.

It also has Direct messages and your twitter stream to browse too. All links and hashtags are automatically converted to open in a new window links and all replies/DM’s will use the proper format so that they are fully compatible with the twitter api.

You can see what it looks like in action here – Dashboard Tweeter

Installation video, lifetime updates and support forum

future: this could be expanded to allow your recent posts to be tweeted from the widget and even notify users who have supplied their twitter username when their comment has received a reply.

Guest Blogger Notify

Price – $15
If you’ve ever had a guest blogger come to visit and write on your site then you’ll like this one. It will allow you to choose which meta boxes you want shown on an add new post page in your dashboard when it’s a contributor.

It’ll also add a user configurable message box to the write post page that you can use to let contributors know what your posting guidelines are direct on the page they’re writing on.

What sets it apart will be that it automatically emails the contributor when their post is published using the message you set.

No more support tickets or emails from contributors asking if their post is published yet!

Instructional video and premium priority exclusive support.

Future : this could be expanded to have a feature where guest posts will show an author box with the users bio description and links to their site.

Choose Full Feed Post

Price: -$15
This will be useful if you use subscribe to feed by email services by Feedburner or Feedblitz.

It will allow you, on a post by post basis, to choose which posts will show the full text and which posts will show just the summary in the RSS feed of your site.

Now you no longer need to choose one or the other, you can have both! If you have set your feed to excerpts only but you have a newsletter type post or something you would rather the reader sees fully in their feed read then you can. Similarly, if you have full feed posts set then a particularly long post can be set as excerpt only which keeps the size of the emails that are sent out down to manageable levels.

Same full exclusive support and instructional videos.

future: This can be expanded to have a feed only shortcode function so you can show text , images and links only in the feed. A great way to encourage people to subscribe.

Life time updates!

One of the advantages to me and to the purchasing user would be to have lifetime updates and priority support.

If I am getting paid for it then answering your support questions is a no brainer! I would be happy to exchange my time for your money

Updates to wordpress break the plugin? no problem! if you’ve paid for a plugin then it seems fair that I would make sure that it would be compatible with future versions of WordPress. Once you have paid, you will be guaranteed lifetime updates.

All of this for just a few dollars.

Would you pay ?

If you knew you were going to receive 1st rate support and guaranteed updates, would you consider paying between 5 and 20 dollars for a plugin?

your comments are welcome!

I’ve started coding the upgrade to my CommentLuv plugin, it’s going to be called CommentLuv 3.0 (original huh?)

More features than you can shake a stick at

This time around I want to do it all again from scratch and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to add to it.

• Dofollow
  Just for the last blog post link and it’ll be configurable like Lucia’s linky luv plugin
• Keyword luv (sort of)
  This will allow a registered comluv user to have their registered site name next to their real name in their comment.
• Custom CSS
  How many people have been asking for this? lol, it’ll be in the new version!
• Use the new comment meta table
  I’ll store the last blog post, user id and request id in the comment meta so the comment text doesn’t get mangled and every link will be identifiable by the info panel. no more ‘cannot find member’ messages.
• Auto registration
  Why not allow the blog that installs commentluv to click a button and be registered straight away? yey!
• Premiumness
  I would like to add premium options, one would be to allow you to give your registered users a full 10 posts to choose from when they comment.

If there’s more you want to add, let me know in the comments…

[edit] I’ve just realized, this post is number 300 on this blog. Synchronicity. mmm Yummy.

If you’re lucky enough to have a subscription to Premium WPMU Dev account then you’ll have access to great monetization plugins like the Upgrades or Supporter which take all the pain out of providing a ‘pay for’ service that can handle payments through Paypal, Google or even Amazon gateways.

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

I won a free premium membership to WPMU Premium with the 2.0 version of Commentluv and let me tell you, it was one of the best prizes I have ever received! The plugins, themes and support forum were pivotal to getting The ComLuv Network up and running.

Having an account there is pretty much a must-have for anyone considering starting their own blog network on the WPMU platform, the support is first rate and the extra plugin and themes are what makes WPMu such a great platform to work with. My favorite plugin is the Supporters plugin which opens up the ability for you to create your own Typepad style blog network with users becoming “supporters” for your set price subscription which will allow them to have access to premium plugins using the premium plugins plugin (try saying that with a mouthfull of cheese!) and the premium themes plugin.

I’ve got all three (and more) running on The ComLuv Network and they’re already getting me subscription payments that are sent to my Paypal account every month, all I have to do is keep the site growing and provide the things that people want and it should start paying for itself and maybe make some profit before Christmas!

If you’re familiar with WordPress then it’s just a small hop, skip and jump to upgrade to WPMu so you should take a ganders at their site and enter their contest to be in with a chance to win a years premium membership worth $419

All you have to do is visit this page and follow the instructions. Simple!