wordpress

Nov

2010

Private Comments Plugin

Update: Sale starts today, Friday 19th at 5.00pm GMT (12 noon EST).

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Tomorrow I’m going to release 50 copies of my new plugin called Private Comments, and it’s something I’ve wanted myself for ages.

It allows you (as admin) or a visitor to your blog to add a private comment that isn’t seen by the rest of the world, allowing you to hold a private discussion with someone.

This is incredibly useful.

From my own perspective, I sometimes get a comment on my blog that really shouldn’t be published, and that I’d like to reply to there and then.

I’ve found it quite frustrating not being able reply directly to a visitor so they can see what I have to say to them and not involve everyone else. You’ve probably had the exact same issue.

The only way round this is either to use email when I often don’t want to give the person my email address (and that’s not always guaranteed to get through spam filters), or to edit the comment they made and leave it unpublished, but that’s not always noticeable, and it just doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing it.

The visitor can’t then reply without creating a new comment and it all starts to get a bit messy.

The upshot is, we don’t always want everyone to see the content of a discussion do we?

This plugin solves the problem.

It allows you or the visitor to mark the comment as private. Now only you as the site admin and your visitor can see the tic-tac of back and forwards conversation.

And as a little nice bonus, we’ve built in comment threading (nesting) for those themes that don’t support it. This means you can reply to a comment and the plugin will keep it all cleanly organised and directly underneath the original comment.

(There’s a teensy problem with some old WP2.x themes, more on that in a moment.)

The Private Comments plugin does this without requiring your visitors to register on the blog. Instead, it uses the cookie that WordPress normally drops on your visitors browser allowing them to see their comments, and now of course, yours too.

Think of it as being like the blog equivalent of a PM (Private Message) on a forum, but where registration isn’t required in order to keep it private.

(And we’re also planning on making it more robust for those people who do register.)

Apart from the obvious use discussed above, I also realised that this plugin could be used for some other things too, such as client discussions, and even a simple support desk. 😉

Now then…

At the moment, the only downside to this plugin is that it seems to have problems with some (not all) old WP2.x themes, and it doesn’t do the comment threading (nesting) properly or at all.

But don’t worry as the developer is looking at this to see if it can’t be fixed or worked around, and when it’s solved we’ll release a new version. (Who knows, she might get it done by tomorrow.)

The good news is, every WP3.x theme we’ve tried it on seems to work perfectly.

Tomorrow (Friday 19th) at 5.00pm GMT (12.00 midday EST) I’m making available 50 copies in a pre-launch sale at a bargain basement discount price. First come first served, and when they’re all gone that’s it, the price goes up.

Okay? 🙂

I’ll drop you a line tomorrow with details of the sale.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Three Updates

#1 – Affiliate Link Plugin

We’ve just completed testing a bug fix for the Affiliate Link plugin, where we’ve now amended the method of hiding the destination page so that it appears as if it’s part of your own blog rather than a page on another site. We’ve done this by moving from an iframe to a regular frame (and changing a couple of other under the hood things), and it seems to work perfectly.

If you have this plugin, go back to your personal download page and get the latest version there. Just unzip and FTP it to your website overwriting the plugin files that are already there, and you’re done.

Your cloaked links should now work perfectly.

#2 – Script Manager Plugin

D’OH!

I kicked off the sale last Friday and decided to take a couple of days away from it all. When I looked again, I realised that the PluginGreat.com domain expired on Saturday… (It was on my todo list to renew it, and I missed it.)

I’m really sorry about that, I quickly reactivated the domain so you can now go back to the download link that would have come with your email and finally download it if you haven’t already done so.

AND… if you need it you can get support from the support desk on the PluginGreat.com site too.

Egg on my face…

#3 – PL Ahh

Dirk W (hi Dirk) came up with a great idea for Decembers software PLR product, and Eric (one of my WordPress plugin developers) has been busy working on it. It’s such a good idea I’ve been tempted to keep it all for myself, but I told Dirk I’d release it with PLR so we’ll stick to the plan.

If you’re a member of PL Ahh, you’ll be thrilled with it, and I know there’s more than a few members that will make a lot of money from it by selling it, far more than I’ll be making by supplying PLR to the membership. 😉

The plugin itself is internally called Affiliate Ticker, but of course you can call it anything you want. That’s all I want to say about it for now, but it’s well worth having when it’s ready, both to sell or give away and of course for personal use too.

As well as the plugin, we’re also releasing another set of 5 sales pages (both HTML and WP versions), and personally I think these are better than the first ones – and those first ones are *very* good. I’ve already seen two of last months PLR sales pages turn up on a couple of sites, so I’m pleased to see they’re already being put to good use.

Ask anyone. If you were to pay to have ONE of these sales pages created for yourself, they’d cost you $47-$97 depending on who did them for you, and all you’d get back is the design with uneditable PNG or JPEG files.

With the ones we supply you get Private Label Rights to the entire pack of 5, plus all the PhotoShop source files, PLUS WordPress page template versions too.

Okay?

Each month from PL Ahh you get TWO PLR products for the price of one.

Typically it will be a standalone PHP script or WordPress plugin or WordPress theme, plus a graphics type product. But I might also add in the odd report that I write myself (or have written with my close supervision). The report would come with a squeeze page to allow you to sell it as a list builder.

Now this current (first) months PL Ahh products I released for November are without sales page or copy. My reasoning is that if you’re not going to put in the effort to make the products yours, then you may as well just be part of an MRR membership instead.

Make sense?

Despite that, I’ve had some people say that they’d like the sales pages and copy included for the products, so I’m going to do that because I want to give you what YOU want, not what I think you should have. This then also gives those people who are prepared to put in a little effort the opportunity to make their version of the products unique.

That difference always means more sales.

Now then…

I really want to see more members join PL Ahh and it’s still possible to join in this first month and while the price is still only $27.

I’ll just repeat that as it’s important.

The monthly membership cost is STILL only $27 for the next 17 new members. (The next step up is another $10 at 101 members.)

You get TWO brand new PLR products each month, and I think you’ll find those two products are a little different from what you’d normally expect to get from a PLR membership.

When the final 17 membership places are taken, the price will go up by another $10.

It’s well worth your time securing these last few places before it’s too late.

You can find out more about the PL Ahh membership here:-

http://www.plahh.com/

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Script Manager Plugin – You Should Get This

This is one of those unassuming but useful little plugins that you’ll end up using time and again across all your blogs. In fact I’ve been trying to imagine how I’ve managed without it all this time.

It allows you to easily and simply add third party javascript code (for tracking and external scripts) to your header and footer area on your blog, either across all your pages and posts or only on some of them if you prefer.

You don’t realise how useful this is until you need to do it.

Traditionally you’d need to add the code directly to the theme’s header.php and footer.php (which can be fiddly), but as soon as you change or upgrade themes, your code changes are always lost.

And as I’ve had it pointed out to me, some themes will break if you go adding javascript to the header.php or footer.php, and now I’ve been reminded, I can remember that this has happened to me at least once.

Not any more.

Now you just add the code to either the global plugin settings, or on an individual post or page and the plugin will automatically insert the code into the right bits of your blog. When you upgrade your theme, or switch to a different one, the code remains and everything carries on as normal.

So, like I said, this is an unassuming plugin that I think you’ll find entirely useful.

Or as Hamant Keval (hi Hamant) said:-

“That is one awesome plugin…”

I’m releasing 50 copies today at just $7.

When all 50 copies are gone I’ll set the regular price, but you’ll get it at a very nice discount until then.

Update: The price is now $17 until I set the final price which will likely be $27.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Extra Added Control

I know that title sounds like it might be for a hair gel, but it’s actually for a new WordPress plugin I’ve had developed called “Scripts Manager”.

Here’s the situation I’ve been in umpteen times, and I’m sure you’ve either hit it yourself or at least you will eventually, it’s just a matter of time.

First the background…

A plugin like Slide Up Ads will automatically insert the javascript required to make it work into all the pages and posts within WordPress.

You just activate the plugin and it’s done.

But I’ve found there are plenty of instances when I’ve wanted or needed to use an external non-WordPress script which requires me to add some javascript to all my pages manually.

For instance, imagine you need to insert some tracking code or another bit of javascript on all (or most of) your WordPress posts and pages.

Usually, either the code has to go into the header above the </head> tag, or it needs to go into the footer, just above the </body> tag.

The only way that WordPress allows you to do this is to go into the theme editor and update the themes header.php or footer.php to include your code.

Now that might seem okay, but in practice what happens is a few weeks down the line, a new version of your theme is released and you update it. Or you find a better theme and decide to use that instead.

This has happened to me, and I figure it must have happened to you too.

When you update or change your theme, all the code modifications you put in get overwritten. D’oh!

More than once I’ve found I have several days tracking missing from one of my sites, all because I forgot to get the tracking code and place it into the updated version of the theme. (I use the StatCounter.com tracking service, and it’s well worth it.)

You’d think I’d learn, but it just seems to be one of my blind spots…

At this point you might be smugly thinking, “Ah, I use the free Google Analytics for my tracking, and I have a plugin that does that for me.” 😉

My advice for what it’s worth is to get rid of GA immediately. This is a prime example of the case where many people follow the crowd and put themselves in a situation where they hadn’t even considered the consequences.

This is what those consequences can be…

If you use GA or AdSense, then a competitor can pay a few dollars and find every single one of your websites. (I’ve actually done this myself to study the structure of how one of my competitors was working his network of sites.)

And of course the other BIG downside to GA and AdSense is that if you upset Google, they can easily de-index ALL your sites because you’ve kindly let them know where they all are by adding tracking code to them.

The crowd is often wrong (1 in 5 times – 80:20 rule), and if you think hard about things and then follow a different path you’re much more likely to have the edge and to succeed.

That’s been my personal experience.

So I decide to get this plugin created to end once and for all the problem of updating and changing themes, and losing my StatCounter code.

And of course, I made it a little more flexible than I actually needed it to be, because… well you never know when it might come in handy.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you’ll see there’s a new admin section where you can paste your metatags and javascript into the appropriate area.

In that section, there are global areas where the contents of each will appear on every post and page.

These global areas are for:-

Header Scripts
Footer Scripts
Onload Scripts

That last one is for those unusual little instances where you need to run the script after the rest of the page has been loaded.

(I found recently that by using this plugin, it solved a problem with a script where all the pages on my blog were being blanked out in the Opera browser, but not in IE, FireFox or Safari. Very strange, but now fixed.)

And then we took it a little bit further, because in some cases you might only want your code to appear on certain pages. 😉

So on every page and post in the admin panel, there’s a new section underneath the editor where you can either:-

Overwrite the global settings.
Append BEFORE the global settings.
Append AFTER the global settings.

Between the global and the post/page settings, this gives you total flexibility over where your scripts are active on your site. 🙂

On Friday (5th) afternoon, 50 copies of the plugin will be available for just $7. When all 50 copies are gone I’ll set the regular price, but you’ll get it at a very nice discount until then.

Watch for a new blog post tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Oct

2010

Nickel Sale Today For WordPress Affiliate Link Plugin

Update:

The nickel sale for the affiliate link cloaker plugin for WordPress is now CLOSED, but you can still get it for $17 until the official site and affiliate scheme becomes live using this link:-

WordPress Affiliate Link Plugin – $17

(For reference, the nickel sales page is still there on the link below, but the payment link has now been removed. You can still use the link above to purchase.

http://plugingreat.com/nsafc/)

***

In a few hours as I write this, the nickel sale for a very cool plugin that integrates with WordPress and lets you hide and track your affiliate click throughs will go live, today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

Essentially what this plugin will allow you to do is to create affiliate links on your blog that look like a regular page or post. It does this by hooking into the WordPress permalink system – something that standalone scripts can’t do.

As if that alone isn’t good enough, it will also track your click throughs allowing you to work out which products you’re promoting are the most popular. And of course when comparing those clicks through into conversions, you can then work out which are the best programs to promote in terms of direct earnings. 😉

Next, you can force your URL to stay in the address bar while the target page you’re promoting is shown in an iframe.

This effectively means that to a casual visitor it looks very much like the page they’re viewing is part of your blog. 😉

And finally, you can check a box that will hide the links from menus and page lists (WP 3.x +). This will come in very handy if you want to create an affiliate link, but not have it appear on your menus and widgets etc.

When we officially launch this plugin, it will be for $27 and will include minor upgrades all the way up to v2. This is your chance to get the same deal but at less than half the price.

These nickel sales have a habit of being very popular and taking off very quickly, so you have to be a bit quick to get the best deal.

Let me put it like this…

You’re going to get a good deal on this plugin if you get it in the nickel sale at whatever the price. It’s way better than waiting and then seeing it on sale at $27 in a week or so’s time. Isn’t it?

But you’re going to be more pleased with your purchase if you can get it at the lowest price it will ever be. Right?

Don’t kid yourself with this one. This is probably one of the most unassuming but truly useful plugins you’ll ever see, and I can guarantee it’s one that you’ll be using all the time.

The nickel sale starts at just $6.97 and goes up by 5 cents every time a purchase is made. The faster you get there, the better (lower!) the price.

At 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) today, I’ll make a new post here on this blog with the location of the nickel sale.

-Frank Haywood