Month: June 2012

Jun

2012

Five Pack US Themed Sales Templates

Offer Closed

***

By popular request, today and for 48 hours I’m releasing (just in time) five very cool sales pages for the Page Template Plugin. The templates include the plugin and it all comes bundled together.

The sales page templates are all US themed and are ideal for use to run Independence Day special offers, but of course they’re fine for any other time of year too.

You can see 60% screenshots of the templates here:-

one two three four five

The price is just $10 for all five ($2 each!) and is good for 48 hours from the sale start, then they all get a price of $7 apiece. That’s a saving of twenty-five dollars.

So you get:-

o The brilliant Page Template Plugin
o Five US themed sales page templates

Please don’t miss this one, once the site and affiliate scheme is live then there will be plenty of affiliates sending in traffic and this deal will be gone forever.

At just $2 each today, I don’t believe there’s any good reason not to get them while you can.

The sale goes live at 7.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST) and is good for 48 hours from then and after that it’s all over.

I mean it. 😉

This is just one of the ways of me saying thank you for being a subscriber. I know there are plenty of marketers out there who would be charging a LOT more than I’ve ever asked from any of my subscribers.

I know these templates are very popular and that’s why I’ve put together this sale – I’ve had lots of people ask me where are the themed sales pages you promised, and this sale is my response.

You’re welcome.

In case you don’t know what the Page Template Plugin is then you can check out what it can do to your WordPress sites on the link above.

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2012

Click-Me Alert Bar

Offer Closed

***

Update: You can watch the overview video above (okay I got carried away and it’s a full feature-rich tutorial) and also see a working demo of the Alert Bar in action on the link below.

http://broadexample.com/

On Wednesday at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m releasing a very cool (and sneaky) new plugin called the “Click-Me Alert Bar.”

I outright stole this idea from a WSO, but I think I’ve made mine a lot better. You be the judge. 😉

In the other plugin, you had to upgrade to the “pro” version just to get the features that mine has right out of the box. Mine is a third of the price in this sale.

So what does it do?

You know those little “alert” bars that appear at the top of your browser when a pop-up is blocked or you’re missing an addon to play certain media? Well this plugin does that but you get full control of the alert bar on your blog so that you can deliver your own message.

We’ve been a little bit clever with it and added in WordPress Conditional Tags (we *like* those) so that you have total control over which alerts show where.

Features?

o Create multiple alerts and have different ones show on different pages and posts including special pages like home, 404, tag, category pages etc.

o Multiple alerts on the same page (one at a time only), either rotated or picked randomly.

o Split test statistics for clicks so you can see which alert performs best.

o Set the delay time before the alert shows.

o Rich Text HTML editor for the clickable URL text.

o Rich Text HTML editor for the message.

o Select one of the built in icons or use your own.

o Colour picker for the alert bar, so you don’t have to use plain yellow.

o Set the alert bar to your preferred height.

We’ve been testing all day and as is typical with me I’ve just asked for some usability changes but they should be done by tomorrow.

Now there’s going to be a little change with tomorrow’s sale if you’ve been a customer for any length of time. I’m going to be running it through an affiliate scheme. OMG! I know… 😉

So you’ll be able to snag it yourself and then get your money back by promoting it. (That’s something I typically do for products I buy and like and it works for me.)

Set yourself a reminder and tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) the sale goes live. At any rate I’ll drop you a line a few hours before, and then again when it starts.

More details tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2012

Why You SHOULDN’T Upgrade To WordPress 3.4

Well it had to happen sooner or later. The WP dev team have released an update that’s broken jquery plugins everywhere and the uproar has just started.

So we’ve seen WP 3.4 released and had first reports of the Slide Out Tabs plugin breaking. We’ve fixed it – go back to your download page to get the new 1.0.2 version and you should be fine.

The fix for this looks like it just needs these lines of code modified to suit and added to your plugin if you’re a developer or brave enough to hack at these things yourself.

add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘pgst_loads_scripts’);
add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘pgst_loads_scripts’);

function pgst_loads_scripts(){
wp_enqueue_script(‘jquery’);
…
…
}

Our next steps are to check any and all of our plugins that use jquery. We would have normally done that as part and parcel of a new WP release but my regular dev is part way through a home move and it didn’t get done in his absence.

The problem has occurred it seems because the jquery library now doesn’t get called first like it always has done. Who knows why the WP dev team have done this and the likelihood is it will get changed back in 3.4.1 and my guess is that will happen quite soon.

In the meantime it looks like there could be a fairly easy fix and that just means tweaking all our plugins to add the new code that forces the jquery library to be called first. This might cause problems with other plugins so we could need to be quite careful about how we apply it.

The learning point of this story is…

Don’t be an early adopter. Let other people test any new code out first and let them feel the pain. Just because WP is “nagging” you to update to the latest version doesn’t mean you should.

By the same token, don’t let any software you use auto-update itself. Always go into the options or preferences of ANY software (including your browsers) and turn off auto-update. In 99.99% of cases it won’t make a dang difference to you day to day, but it will almost certainly save you from some pain at one point or another. Let other people report the bugs and when it looks like all is clear, you go do the update yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to have unscheduled losses caused by bugs in new software.

Finally, that’s one of the key reasons I like the free PortableApps so much. You can keep a backup of all your working apps just by copying the files to a backup location. If the new update breaks or you don’t like it, you can easily go back to the old version by just copying the files back. Dead easy.

And if you ever have to re-install your OS, then all your portable stuff can be up and running almost immediately.

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2012

Scripts Manager Plugin Weekend Sale

Offer Closed

***

The other day I received an email with a suggestion for a plugin I’ve already had created. 😉

I sent back a copy for him to take a look at and his reaction was the same for everyone else who uses this plugin – awesome!

The plugin I’m talking about is called “Scripts Manager” and it’s one of those deadly useful “workhorse” plugins you want to install on every site.

Let me give you a really good example of what it does and how useful it is.

I’d been doing some work with a friend on a project and I’d changed the theme about three times when he told me I was breaking some code he’d added to the original theme.

D’oh!

It turns out he’d added some javascript affiliate code to the theme’s header.php, and also amended functions.php to add some Twitter code. Every time I updated or changed the theme, the javsacript and PHP he’d added disappeared.

Aha!

As soon as I realised what was going on, I showed him the Scripts Manager plugin and that’s when I received yet another “Awesome!” comment.

The plugin allows you to add javascript code to both the header and footer areas of your WordPress installation without changing any of the theme code. After I realised he was also adding PHP into the functions file of the theme, I had Scripts Manager tweaked to include the ability to do that too.

I hope you can see how truly useful this is, and the main use for myself is to add StaCounter tracking code to my blogs, but it works just as well with Google Analytics (or any other scripts, Amazon, AdSense etc) if that’s what you use.

The great big killer benefit of this plugin is it allows you to quickly and easily add any kind of global script code to your blogs and then forget about it, secure in the knowledge that when you change themes you’re not going to break anything. (Been there, done that, hated it, kicked myself, got the plugin written.)

It will also let you add special code on a page by page, post by post basis too. You don’t need to only use the global scripts settings if you don’t want to, so that makes it very flexible where you don’t want the script being called on every page.

Starting today (Saturday 9th June) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running a 48 hour sale for this use-everywhere workhorse plugin – Scripts Manager – starting at only $12.50.

After this weekend sale is over or when 50 sales occur, the price of the plugin will rise to ~~$27~~ and it will be added to the main PluginGreat.com web site.

I’ll drop you a line when the sale starts.

-Frank Haywood