Launching WPJobManager.com

I’m happy to announce I’ve finally flipped the switch on WPJobManager.com, a site which I’ve been working on for a few months now in my spare time. I felt it was about time that I had a better sales platform and a dedicated place for the plugin which has been steadily growing in popularity during the past year.

WP Job Manager download stats growth

WP Job Manager download stats growth

Up until now I’ve been selling add-ons via Gumroad. It’s a fun service, and it’s easy to use, but it lacks the flexibility I need. In particular I’m talking about licences. Without some kind of licencing system I have no way to verify a customer when it comes to updates and support, the sale is one off (something that’s not sustainable with this type of product), and I have no way to limit distribution of my plugins.

Its alive Therefore, I made the decision to switch over to WooCommerce (what else?) and have a proper marketplace for the plugin. Hosted on DigitalOcean and powered by WordPress and WooCommerce, WPJobManager.com is now live.

Continue reading →

The Blogging for Benjamin contest concludes

1209551891_9084437443_z

This is the final day of Daniel Espinoza’s Blogging for Benjamin contest and I’m happy to say I managed to post every day in december – a great achievement. I covered a variety of topics including:

  • 9 topics on WooCommerce
  • 11 topics on plugin development in general
  • 2 workflow related posts
  • 3 posts on WordPress and the WP ecosystem

And then there were some personal posts and reviews. I even built a new plugin.

Keeping on top of the blogging was sometimes difficult, but got easier towards the middle as I got into a routine. Towards the end the difficulty increased again as I ran out of interesting topics to cover, but I got there in the end.

Continue reading →

The process of building a plugin (a one day challenge)

Building plugins is fun, especially the smaller ones. Today I thought it would be a good challenge to build one whilst documenting the process; I’m actually writing this post as I plan and build the plugin itself with the hope of having it finished by the end of the day.

What am I building? A small post-series plugin so I can group all of my #WTBFB posts and allow navigation between them on my blog.

Bring on the challenge!

Continue reading →

My WordPress.org wishlist

3242515357_191e29a5b4_z

Love it or hate it, if you make plugins and want any amount of exposure you are going to need to use WordPress.org – the exposure it provides (so your plugin is searchable via the WP dashboard), and the convenience of it’s plugin updates, make it necessary.

I don’t dislike WordPress.org, but there are several aspects I’d love to see improved and made customisable. Here’s my wishlist.

Continue reading →

The WooCommerce 2.1 notice API

If you’ve built a plugin for WooCommerce before you may have come across the ‘message’ functionality which let you add messages (or errors) to the frontend using:

1$woocommerce->add_message( 'Hi there' )

2$woocommerce->add_error( 'You bafoon );

Part of the development of WooCommerce 2.1 was refactoring the main WooCommerce class which involved moving out unrelated methods (such as the messages) and moving them into their own classes.

We’ve replaced this particular functionality with some new functions and a new notices API which is much more flexible. The old methods are deprecated.

Continue reading →