To learn more about Pull Requests, read the Github tutorial on them.

Github is one of the best tools you can utilize to encourage community collaboration, and it is also the tool that makes it exceptionally easy for new users to give back to the plugins they love.

Note: this tutorial shows how to use the inline code editor available on Github. I do not recommend using this for major edits. If you plan to make large contributions to plugins, it is highly recommended that you take some time to learn how to use Git so that you can make your edits on your local machine and then push them up to your forked copy of the repository.

The post Submitting Your First Pull Request to a WordPress Plugin on Github appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

Easy Digital Downloads is a complete e-commerce plugin for selling digital goods in WordPress.

This is an extension that integrates the two plugins and allows you to create automated discounts that give your paid subscribers a special discount on all Easy Digital Downloads purchases.

Want to give your “Platinum Level” subscribers a 10% discount on all shop purchases? That’s easy. Want to give a 5% discount to all “Gold Level” subscribers? That’s easy as well.

$15 – Purchase

The post Restrict Content Pro – Member Discounts for Easy Digital Downloads appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

The video shows everything in-depth, but here are some of the highlights of the plugin:

• It’s completely free from WordPress.org
• Easily create forms with a drag-and-drop interface
• It’s really light weight
• Reusuable fields
• Developer friendly
• Can be extended to be even more awesome

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The post Review: Ninja Forms Plugin appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

Whether you want to build a simple “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” form or an advanced project proposal form that includes a MailChimp signup, this extension for Ninja Forms can take care of you.

The post MailChimp for Ninja Forms appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

• add_menu_page() – For adding a top level page
• add_submenu_page() – For adding a sub menu page to an existing, top level menu
• Additional helpers for adding sub menus to core menus added by WordPress core

The post Plugin Development 101 – Introduction to Adding Dashboard Menus appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

I’ve written about the subject of contributing to other people’s plugins before, but I really do believe it is one of the most important things that we, as plugin developers, can do for the WordPress community.

Have you ever opened up someone else’s plugin and then thought “OMG why?!”? I bet you have. Sometimes that reaction is due to the act of witnessing really terrible code, sometimes it’s because of severe logical errors, sometimes it’s because you simply think differently than the developer, sometimes it’s because you simply aren’t privy to the variables and decisions that the original developer had to make in order to account for the problem he/she faced.

I’ll freely admit that I have said “well I would have done that better differently”, but you know what? I have no clue whatsoever a lot of times because I was not there when the code was written.

WP e-Commerce is a really good example of this. The plugin is one of the oldest WordPress plugins, and is the oldest of the e-commerce plugins. When it was first released, there was no such thing as custom post types or taxonomies; custom meta data was difficult to work with; many of the hooks and filters we rely on today simply didn’t exist; WordPress was completely different back then.

The fact that the development team managed to pull of what they did at that time is nothing less than awesome.

When I tell people that WP e-Commerce is one of my preferred e-commerce plugins, they often look at my incredulously and respond with something along the lines of “why?! Have you used WooCommerce/Jigoshop/Shopp?“. My response is simple: “yep, I sure have. They’re all great“.

I personally really like ALL of the major e-commerce plugins. In this list I include JigoShop, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WP e-Commerce, and Shopp.

One of the reasons I really like WP e-Commerce is because of their struggles. Perhaps it’s just the part of me that really like helping people, but I empathize a lot with projects attempting to overcome a bad reputation. If you look at the ratings for WPEC, you’ll see they are not exactly the most popular of the e-commerce plugins (if judging on ratings alone).

I should clarify a little: I empathize with projects attempting to overcome a bad reputation when they clearly want to earn a better reputation. If you write bad code and never actually try to improve your project then I have a hard time believing you actually care about your users’ experience. The team behind WP e-Commerce is NOT one of those teams that doesn’t care about improving their plugin. They are one of the most down to earth, caring team of developers I’ve met. They really, really care about their users and customers, and they truly want to make WPEC a kick ass plugin again.

Each new line of code that is added or refactored in WP e-Commerce is beautiful. Gary and Justin are both truly great developers, and it’s really unfortunate that they are burdened with the negative reputation that WPEC has acquired over the last few years.

When I think of WP e-Commerce, I think of all of the great, great new development work that is being done on the project. When many other people look at WP e-Commerce, they simply see the legacy code and compare it to the brand new solutions that have no legacy code.

Have you ever looked back at something you wrote a year ago? Two years ago? Six months ago? Unless you’re the best developer that the world has ever known, I bet you look back and cringe. We all write bad code. WP e-Commerce is the oldest e-Commerce plugin by far, so of course it has some legacy code (a lot of it actually). I have nothing but respect (and a lot of awe) for the development team behind WP e-Commerce because they are taking on the challenge of legacy code and are doing some truly amazing work with it. Some old plugins will stay old because the developers just don’t want to deal with all that shit bad code. I personally have retired quite a few plugins because I did not want to take the time to rewrite them, and they were usually less than 500 lines. Just think of the challenge that is refactoring thousands and thousands of lines of code.

Contributing back to WP e-Commerce is one way that I can help contribute back to a plugin that truly wants to be great again, and a plugin that has contributed immensely to the WordPress e-Commerce ecosystem, as well as WordPress core itself. Did you know that WP e-Commerce is responsible for more core WordPress patches than all of the other e-Commerce plugins combined? Knowing that alone, I feel like the least I can do is give back a little.

For version 3.8.10, which was just released a few days ago, I rewrote the Coupons UI. If you’ve used WP e-Commerce then you probably know that the coupons’ interface has been pretty lack luster for quite some time, and the code behind it was even worse. Since I have several clients that use WP e-Commerce and they have each expressed their frustration with the poor UI, I proposed to Dan Milward that I rewrite it for them.

Over a few weeks, I slowly updated the UI and brought it up to current WordPress standards.

Here are some screenshots of the UI prior to the update:

And here’s the new UI:

To see a comparison of the code behind the coupons’ UI prior to 3.8.10, see here, and to see the code now, see here.

WP e-Commerce is on Github and is very responsive of new patches and suggestions submitted. If you want to give back a little, head on over there.

The post Why I Contribute to WP e-Commerce and What I Did Last appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

While it does not have nearly the robust options that Restrict Content Pro offers for restricting content, this bbPress extension provides the features that 99% of users need: the simple ability to limit forum access to paid subscribers.

You can restrict each forum individually and even individual topics within forums.

The post Restrict Content Pro – bbPress Extension appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

The user response in the plugin’s early days was fantastic. I couldn’t have been happier with how well it was received.

Now, one year later, I’m still thrilled with how the plugin is being received by new and existing users. There are hundreds, or even thousands of sites using the plugin to power their e-commerce needs, including quite a few high profile sites in the WordPress community.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Downloads

At the time of writing this, Easy Digital Downloads has 77,505 downloads from WordPress.org. I would have loved to have broken 100k in the first year, but I cannot complain about 77.5 thousand. That’s a really big number.

On average, the plugin sees about 200 downloads per day.

Ratings

Since version 1.0, the plugin has received 82 ratings on WordPress.org. The break down of ratings is:

• 5 stars – 74
• 4 stars – 4
• 3 stars – 1
• 2 stars – 1
• 1 star – 3

It’s clear the the vast, vast majority of users (at least the vocal ones) are quite happy with the plugin. Here’s a few great things people have said about the plugin:

Phenomenal – The support is fantastic, the options both inherent and through the various add-ons is phenomenal and most importantly to me, the plugin, like all of Pippin’s Plugins, is constantly evolving and growing and improving.

Selling digital goods? You could do FAR WORSE than EDD. FAR WORSE.

Full of features and excellent support – Works great out of the box and if you run into any weirdness or want to do something less orthodox with it, Pippin goes out of his way to help you.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Extensions

From the very beginning, Easy Digital Downloads has had an extensions model. This extension model is what has allowed me to monetize a completely free plugin. The core, fully featured plugin is downloaded for free and then additional extensions to provide non-standard features can be purchased from the Extension shop.

The very first extensions, PayPal Pro / Express and Stripe, were published around the same time as v1.0 was released. Today, there 110 extensions. That’s a lot!

Extensions are written by a large number of different developers. I have personally written about two dozen extensions, and the other 86 are written by other developers. Some developers have written one extension, others have written nearly a dozen.

As of today, there have been 1823 extension purchases, grossing a total of $51,382.20.

The very first month of extension sales saw just 3 purchases. This month (only half way through) has seen 124 sales. Last month had 326 sales.

Since the first sales, Easy Digital Downloads has generated $16,458.58 in revenue for other extension developers (excluding myself). A quarter of that number was last month alone, so this number is growing every single month. By the end of this year I expect to be paying $8,000 or more per month to other developers, perhaps even more; much, much more.

One third of all revenue generated through the plugin has gone to other extension developers.

Contributors

Easy Digital Downloads started as my own personal project. Today, however, I can happily say it’s not just my project any more. Over the last year, there have been five core contributors to the plugin. One of those is no longer active, but the other four (myself included) are still actively contributing code to the EDD ecosystem; this means to the core plugin, extensions, and themes.

51 developers have contributed code to the core plugin. That’s just awesome.

Support Tickets

As comes with any large plugin, Easy Digital Downloads has a pretty heavy support load. On the EDD support forums, there have been 1,845 tickets posted. The WordPress.org support forums have seen 240 tickets posted.

On average, there are about 10 new tickets posted per day, and around 100 replies to those tickets posted each day.

In the beginning, I managed all support requests. As time went by and the plugin became more widely used, and the support load grew, I began hiring part time support staff to help out. Today, there are five part time support techs. Between the six of us, we’re able to answer and resolve the majority of all tickets within 24 hours. Obviously some tickets take longer to resolve, but on average, tickets are resolved quite quickly.

iOS App

A few weeks ago, we released the first ever official iOS app for a WordPress e-commerce plugin. The app allows store managers to track sales and earnings via the iOS device quickly and easily.

Getting this app out the door was a huge milestone for me and something I’m exceptionally proud of. To me it shows that we (everyone behind EDD) aren’t just trying to make a cool WordPress plugin, we’re working really, really hard to build a complete system for managing your digital sales, and that goes far beyond just having stats in your WordPress dashboard. Oh, and a 3rd party developer released a free extension for Panic’s new Status Board iPad app. How awesome is that?!

My Goals Going Forward

Easy Digital Downloads has come a really, really long way, but I’m not even close to finished with this plugin.

Here are a few of my goals for the plugin’s next year:

1. Pass $100k annual revenue (I expect this to happen this year, easily)
2. Pass 200k downloads on WordPress.org
3. Generate $10k+ in revenue for other developers per month

Have you used Easy Digital Downloads? Did you enjoy it? Do you still use it? Have you purchased extensions? I’d love to hear about anything and everything you have to say. Oh, and if you’d like to save 30% on any new extension purchases, you can use HAPPYFIRST during checkout!

The post Easy Digital Downloads – One Year Old appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

Our discussion included methods for how to structure your plugins, maintain backwards compatibility, supporting your plugins, playing nicely with others, pricing, and more.

The post WordSesh Presentation with Brian Krogsgard appeared first on Pippins Plugins.

With simple short codes and widgets, you can easily add signup forms for any of your newsletter lists in your WordPress pages or widget areas.

The plugin is exceptionally simple to use and designed to provide a no-nonsense, 5-minutes or less setup.

The plugin doesn’t include CSS since it is designed to inherit the styles of your theme, but if you want to customize the appearance of your signup forms (width, height, color, etc.), here are some sample styles:

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form#scs_form label {
 /* styling ALL your labels the same */
 
}
 
form#scs_form label[for="scs_email"] {
 /* styling the “Enter Your Email” label */
 
}
 
form#scs_form label[for="scs_fname"] {
 /* styling the “Enter Your First Name” label */
 
}
 
form#scs_form label[for="scs_lname"] {
 /* styling the “Enter Your Last Name” label */
 
}
 
form#scs_form input[type="submit"] {
 /* styling the submit button (not compatible with IE) */
 
}
 
form#scs_form input {
 /* styling the input boxes */
 
}

The post Simple Contactology Signup Forms Plugin appeared first on Pippins Plugins.