wordpress

Jan

2011

Clone and Backup ready – new Multiple Streams Theme

I’ve just been testing out the final v1.0.0 release of the Clone and Backup plugin, and it works a treat.

After all the comments we received about hosting requirements we decided that this first version shouldn’t be just limited to cPanel.

Now I love cPanel as it has some really cool features in it, but I know that not everybody is as big a fan as I am.

So we decided that for v1 of the plugin we’d skip the cPanel centric attitude and instead create a version that would work with any hosting platform.

I do have to say that we haven’t tested with other hosting platforms (such as hSphere), but because of the approach we’ve used we can see no logical reason for it not working just fine.

(Please raise a support ticket at http://support.plugingreat.com/ if you have problems with the plugin.)

However, there’s always a trade-off when you want to do things for a broader audience.

In this case it means you have to go create the database and user/password at the destination site. This will take you about 2-3 minutes if you don’t do it very often and probably less than 60 seconds once you’ve done it a few times.

At any rate, if you’ve just registered a new domain and assigned a web host, it’s very likely that you’re already going to be logged into your web control panel. Yep?

That’s the logic we’ve used when thinking about this.

So by going with that trade-off, it means you cant (yet) get the plugin to auto-create a database for you with cPanel. The next step for us is to add in that cPanel functionality as I think it will address 80% of our intended audience.

And it will certainly make things easier for me too. 😉

Then we’ll investigate hSphere and any other popular and common web hosting platforms that we get asked to look at.

This means that if your host uses a proprietary web control panel then it’s unlikely that we’ll provide a streamlined database creation method for it. You’ll have to stick with the generic v1.0.0 method.

Okay?

How it works is like this.

#1 – You create and maintain a copy of WordPress somewhere and we suggest on a sub-domain for convenience. We also suggest this installation has no posts/pages/comments and has all your favourite themes and plugins installed and activated and up to date.

So you have a fully functional copy of WordPress that you’re going to use as your master.

#2 – You take out a new domain or sub-domain (or use an existing one if you like) and while going through your normal admin functions to set it all up, you also create a database for WordPress on that domain, and assign a user and password with full permissions. Your web host is responsible for explaining this to you if you don’t already know how to do it.

#3 – On your master copy of WordPress go to the PG WP Clone admin function and fill in the 6 boxes – destination site, FTP user and password, database name, user/password and click the “Clone This Site” button.

After 15-30 seconds – it may take longer depending on the number of themes/plugins/files etc – your new WordPress installation will be complete and you will be given a link to visit your new installation.

All the login details, active plugins and theme etc for your new WordPress installation will be the same as your master.

🙂

You can now go back to your personal download page and grab the plugin only, with the docs to follow in a day or so. I wanted to get the plugin out to you as quickly as possible for test and feeedback.

It’s easy to use.

(If you didn’t bookmark your personal download page, then please raise a support ticket at http://support.plugingreat.com/ and someone will look it up for you.)

If you don’t have the Clone and Backup plugin, you can still get it with a ten dollar discount at $27.00 from here.

***

Finally… The latest in the Multiple Streams Themes is now complete, and on Tuesday at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’ll be running a 50-copies-only sale at $10.00.

I had this theme designed for my own personal use on the free Page Template Plugin site (available soon), but it’s so good I decided to release it as one of the Multiple Streams Themes.

It’s a “softer” cleaner brighter theme in light blue and white, and I’m also tempted to use it on my personal blog as it contains all the features I want that my current theme doesn’t. So don’t be surprised if you see it change in a few days when I decide for sure. 😉

It comes with a hefty selection of pre-designed banners including blank JPEGs and PSDs for them, plus umpteen sidebars, a selection of built in page templates, plus plugins (Ads Manager, Redirection, Squeeze Page Templates), and a set of theme options too.

The theme options allow you to turn on and off the header, top boxes and top and bottom ad areas, change footer text and add analytics code if you don’t have the Script Manager plugin.

And of course the theme supports the WP 3.x features of custom menus, custom header, and background. That last one allows you to further lighten the feel of the theme or darken it down if that’s your preference.

It’s really nice… 😉

WordPress Clone and Backup

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $27.00.

***

One of my developers is almost done with a plugin that will enable you to create an identical copy of one of your existing WordPress sites onto another.

It’s an incredible time saver.

This is what you can do:-

Maintain a single up to date default blog on a sub-domain.
Add all your favourite themes and plugins to your default blog.
Then in a few seconds copy it to a new site.
Repeat.

Then when you need a new blog creating, all you have to do is enter the FTP and cPanel details of the target site and click go.

A few seconds later your target site contains an exact copy of your original blog and all you have to do is tweak a few things like the name and tagline etc, and you’re ready to go.

I guess you could also use it in reverse to back up your existing live blogs to a backup site on another sub-domain too.

It’s certainly something I’ve wanted to be able to do for a long time and I know there are a few unsatisfactory alternatives out there, but I didn’t feel that they fit my exact requirements.

There’s one that’s an expensive monthly service, and another that’s a Windows application. There’s also a plugin out there, but I think it’s a little too expensive for what it does – maybe if it had a few extra features it would be worth it.

Anyway…

The developer reckons the beta will be ready Wednesday or Thursday next week, and when it’s done I’m going to add it directly to the affiliate scheme at full price as I know it will be a very popular plugin and plenty of people will want to promote it.

But…

In the tradition of the past 12 months and because I like to regularly say thank you for being a subscriber, I’d like to offer it to you at a hefty discount on pre-order.

In return, I’d like a little feedback please. Things like how easy it was to install and use (once you get it), how much time it will save you, any enhancements needed (I’ve already thought of some cool upgrades for later versions), and so on.

Does that sound reasonable for such an amazingly cool and very useful plugin?

The plan is that I’ll make 50 available on pre-order for $10.00 tomorrow (Friday 7th) at 6.00pm GMT, then raise the price to $12.50 for the next 25 and $15.00 for the next 25 before setting the final price at $27.00 (maybe even $37.00, we’ll see).

This gives you the chance to get this plugin at the lowest price it will ever be for a very short time.

An important note though…

I’ve had lots of people miss these deals and then write to me asking if I could give them the same deal at a later date.

I never do as that’s just not fair is it?

First come, first served, be there or be square. You know the score. 😉

Until tomorrow…

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2010

End Of Year Bonus

Update: The price is now $27.00.

***

My staff have put together a little something for you and the proceeds will go directly into their pockets as their end-of-year bonus.

I didn’t have to do this, but I thought it was a warm gesture at this cold time of year. 🙂

(Well, at least it’s cold in the UK, with sub-zero temperatures down to -8 C and 5 inches of snow outside. Not much by some peoples standards, but it’s the kind of weather that brings the UK almost to a halt.)

What they’ve done for you is to create a set of 5 sales page templates – which I think always come in handy – in both standard HTML and Page Template Plugin format. These aren’t Christmas ones, they’re “regular” sales page templates, very clean looking.

Because we’ve also supplied them with the Page Template Plugin, this means you can easily use them to add sales pages to your blogs.

In case you missed the last update, you can now move the sections of your sales page around just by using short code tags. And today we’ve been talking about how we can also allow you to use this plugin with posts as well as pages, which we’ve been asked about a few times now.

We’re not there yet, but we will be in the new year. Then you’ll have a standard unified plugin that will allow you to add these special format templates to your posts AND pages. 😉

Any of the sales or squeeze page templates you have will all be updated to work with the new plugin when we release it in the new year. It’s messy at the moment, but it will all get better.

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

The sale will open Thursday 23rd at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), at just $10.00 for the first 50 sales, rising to $12.50 for the next 50, and then to $27.00 for 100+. As I said above, all proceeds will be shared amongst the staff as their end of year bonus.

I’ll drop you a line about 3-4 hours beforehand to remind you.

Content Replacement Plugin

There’s one other important thing to tell you.

Because the content replacement plugin we released last week has caused so much confusion as to how it works, and also because of clashes with a couple of plugins/themes, we’ve made a bug fix and a few subtle changes to it.

It’s now more intuitive to use, so you should find it works as you expect it to, not as we orginally created it to work. 😉

It made much more sense for us to do this as we seemed to really miss the mark in terms of usage with this one, and for that I apologise.

You now set a start and (optional) end date for the snippet you want to insert in your blog and paste in the short code. The snippet will show as long as it meets the date/time rules for the server.

We’ve also made it so that you can now “stack” them so that as one (or more) expires, others become active either immediately or whenever you set your rule.

It’s much better. Again, I’m sorry for any confusion caused by our initial release.

Sometimes we just get things wrong…

Finally, my apologies as I haven’t been around the last week to reply to blog comments due to minor family illness. I *think* I’m now all up to date and I’ve emailed the people who left me comments trying to get hold of me. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2010

Hot Swap Time Based Content

One of my plugin developers is just finishing off a plugin that will enable you to swap in and out different parts of a WordPress page or post based on date and time.

At this moment you may be thinking “What use is that?”, but it’s something I realised I was doing quite a lot of by hand.

Let me explain.

Imagine you’re running a time-based sale on one of your blogs…

Aha! With me?

There are suddenly several scenarios that jump to mind.

#1 – You’re running a sale from 6.00pm on the 15th December for 48 hours. You want the sale to automatically go live at 6.00pm and close two days later on the 17th at 6.00pm.

#2 – You start at a heavily discounted price, and after 48 hours flip to the regular price.

…and variants of the above.

Marketers do this kind of thing all the time to reward their regular customers and subscribers, and also seed the marketplace with a new product to get it talked about. I do it for those very reasons myself.

Here’s another good use and one I’m planning to do in January.

You write several blog posts that actually constitute an ebook or short report.

Your subscribers get to read it for free, and in return for this free content, you ask for comments and feedback. You let everybody know that the content will auto-expire at a certain date and time and will then only be available for purchase when you release your ebook.

Suddenly you’ve given what (on the face of it) is free content, a LOT of value.

And you’ve picked up testimonials and suggestions for improvement along the way.

Most importantly, all the while you’ve been doing this, you’ve earned the gratitude of your subscribers.

Take careful note of the above. It’s marketing dynamite (on a timer) when used carefully.

On Wednesday 15th at 6.00pm I’ll be running a 48 hour low cost introductory sale of this new plugin.

It’s another one of those steps to turning WordPress into a total marketing machine, and you need this one in your marketing arsenal.

Christmas Sales Pages Update

In our never-ending quest to do great stuff that blows your socks off and puts a grin on your face, we’ve updated the WordPress bit of the Christmas Sales Page Templates.

There were two big problems with the original version.

Problem #1 – The elements on the templates were fixed in place.
Problem #2 – The order button had text on it as part of the button graphics.

We’ve now fixed both of those.

Solution #1 – We’ve created short code tags to represent most of the elements on the page.

This means you can now write your sales copy in the main editor, and position the elements wherever you want them within the copy by adding a tag where you want it to appear. 🙂

The short code tags you can use are:-

[product] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of the Product Options fields.

[testimonial-1] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 1.

[testimonial-2] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 2.

[testimonial-3] – Inserts a johnson box with the contents of Comments Options 3.

[certificate] – Inserts a certificate graphic with the contents of the Certificate Options fields.

[purchase] – Inserts the order button with the contents of the Purchase Options fields.

[ps] – Inserts the PS detail with the contents of the P.S. Options fields.

[footer-links] – Inserts the footer links or text with the contents of the Footer field.

[br] – Inserts a single line break and is incredibly useful as the WordPress editor (TinyMCE) will strip out extra breaks in visual mode editing.

That last one was a spark of brilliance from the plugin developer and I’ve asked if we can have it included in the next version of Big Ed too.

You’ll notice that the exception/exclusion with the above tags is the Header Option.

It has to be at the top and will break the appearance of the page if we tried to make it movable.

This means you can now do things like create your page sales copy so it looks something like this:-

———————
[br][br][product]

Yes! That’s right! You can… blah, blah, blah.

[testimonial-1]

This enables you to… blah, blah, blah.

[certificate]

[testimonial-2]

So why delay? Order now!

[purchase]

Closing text… blah, blah, blah.

[ps]

[testimonial-3]

[purchase]

[footer-links]
———————

Note that the [purchase] tag has been used twice so that you can put the order button in its regular place and also at the bottom for those people who go straight down to look for the price.

Cool huh?

Solution #2 – Alexandra L wrote to us to say that as a French speaker she wanted a method of changing the text on the order button or for us to supply the blank graphics.

D’oh!

Fixed. So now you can do that too.

We’ve added a new Purchase Option called “Purchase Button Text”. Any text you enter into that field will appear like magic on the order button. No graphical editing required.

😉

The text itself appears to be embedded into the button and part of the button graphic (done with CSS I think), so again it’s another bit of brilliance from the designer and developer.

…

The result of these two changes means great looking sales page designs which anyone can use on any of their WordPress blogs without really needing to know anything about HTML.

Just upload, activate and add sales copy.

The only thing we can’t make easier for you is the sales copy. It’s a skill you *need* to learn for yourself. Practice makes perfect.

…

The plugin isn’t perfect yet and there are a few inconsistencies such as the short code tags not matching the option description, but we’ll fix that with the next release. I wanted to get it out to you ASAP while it’s still leading up to Christmas. 😉

Just go back to your personal download page (you DID bookmark it, right?) and grab the zip.

What you’ll find when you upload and activate it is that the page looks EMPTY when you first select a template and publish.

Don’t forget (like I did) that you need to add all the short code tags in your page editor before they show. Ahem. 😉

…

Finally, Multiple Streams Themes 4 and the squeeze page templates that went on sale on Friday now have just a few copies left at the $12.50 price point, so they’re still quite cheap if you don’t already have them.

Probably the next release of the Page Template Plugin will incorporate both squeeze and sales page functionality and you’ll be able to choose between the two with templates being optional extras.

Have fun…

-Frank Haywood