davidchait

you can look at openads.org, but don’t even know if that, one of the more established ad systems, does click-fraud tracking directly. You’d have to look. I’d doubt many ‘simpler’ plugins would do any sort of fraud evaluation.

This is why many people use real outsourced ad systems the moment they are looking to do advertising. ??

-d

also, note that the homepage of the average WP site is NOT a ‘mostly static page’. generally it’s sort of page 1 of the archives (since everything defaults to date paged). Yes you can then create a custom home page via a page template.

Just making sure we’re all talking the same language. ??

-d

there’s the IRC channel, there’s these forums, and there is wp-pros mailing list (which is generally paid assistance). wp-pros folks might do support over the phone (at yet a higher fee).

there used to be a group doing free initial installation. don’t know if they’re still doing that, or if you are beyond installation issues and looking for other help. you don’t say.

-d

If you want it physically inside the post, you need to either:

– use a plugin with a custom tag (I assume one has an <adsense/> tag…) to embed where you want it in the posts. That way, it gets inserted for you ‘on demand’. You just add a tag.
– embed it physically in the posts you care about
– embed in your template, and use CSS to ‘float’ it into the right location (I’d have to think about this, since the text flows around it…).

-d

CG-Amazon works with 2.1 from my own testing, though I’m using a version of code beyond my last public release. ?? The advantage over WP-Amazon is it doesn’t embed ‘fixed data’ into your post, just a tag with an Amazon ASIN product code — which is resolved into a live lookup later (along with formatting). Means you can globally adjust formatting.

It also does very nicely for ‘now reading’ type lists for sidebars, having it’s own internal category system and personal ‘product database’.

The power doesn’t end there — those are just the quick and easy things. It can be used to build a mini shop off your blog (well, more of a product ‘catalog’ at the moment), and can be talked to directly for keyword-based product queries, or other customized lookups.

As Otto notes, depends on what you want it to do (and where!). ??

-d

I’ll eventually get around to updating CG-PostOrder (as well as my other plugins)… just need to get through next stage of stuff at my day job! ??

-d

Thanks Joni!

I disagree with Kahil strongly. “There is no market for mass plugin production.” Depends on ‘mass’ — if the few hundred users a year who download my plugins would become paid users, that’s pretty good. The ‘market’ is there in terms of size (hundred-plus is a good start, thousands is better).

“it makes no logical nor financial sense to start making plugins for profit.” Well, not if your belief is that you can buy commercial plugins and then go give them away, no. And possibly from the other direction: it’s not necessarily feasible, even if people like you didn’t think it was your right to undermine commercial-thinking developers, people like me living in high cost-of-living areas of the US (let alone the world!) have a hard time making ends meet at $5-10 a pop. At least, not until I hit a few thousand paying users, then we’ll talk! ??

Now, you also basically make statements that it isn’t feasible because you could just give it away. That’s not quite true.

If you agree to the terms of the purchase of a commercial plugin, you are bound by those terms. Not all WP plugins are GPL, and they don’t become GPL just because you say so, so redistributing a non-GPL (or other non-free license) plugin for free, modified or not, would be a violation of that license/purchase, and a violation of the law. Could you do it if you wanted to? Yes. Should you? No. Is it any different from software piracy for you to redistribute a plugin that you purchased as a commercial product? Nope, sorry.

Should we get into an argument over whether or not plugins can be non-GPL? No, as it’s been discussed and debated at length, and there really isn’t clarity in the GPL on this subject. And this isn’t a discussion of GPL — it’s a discussion of whether you would pay for a plugin. And I >think< you have actually answered you WOULD, if it were a custom piece, or otherwise unique (tell me if I’m wrong on that, not trying to misrepresent you).

Of course, if it’s unique, but interesting to more than just you, regardless of whether it is GPL, you don’t HAVE to give it away for free. You see, that’s a CHOICE when purchasing something that was GPL based. You can ask for the code, you can distribute it for free, but it isn’t required of you — you CAN let someone make a living off of GPL-derived work, or off GPL-related work.

We can agree to disagree. I think the reason it’s not financially feasible is because of the exact mindset of folks here who say they’d never pay for a plugin, but might on a rare occasion donate.

If you would donate to EVERY author whose software you use, plugins or otherwise, you are helping maintain the OSS world. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Automattic wouldn’t be a ‘business’ right now if it wasn’t for WP, and WP has developed over the past few years because of many people outside the core team, who gave time for free. In a sense, much OSS has become like shareware of old, too much sharing, not much paying (or, not much feeling on the part of the users that they should pay, that there’s a reason to, a benefit to… that by not paying/donating, they are actualy ‘harming’ the ‘ecosystem’.

So, I agree with you questioning financial feasibility ON THAT GROUNDS, that anyone who feels that they love WP, love the plugins they use, but wouldn’t pay a cent, because after all “it’s free software”, don’t feel there’s a ‘need’ to financially support such developers. Thus, self-fulfilling prophecy. ??

To the best of my knowledge, Automattic has salaried employees. I’d bet there’s a lot of WP development at this point whose ‘cost’ is being paid for, is being underwritten in many ways, some direct (support for some big installations of WP-MU or something), some indirect (I don’t know for a fact, but I’d hazard a guess there are indirect sources of cash there).

Contrast that with much of the ‘secondary market’ of themes and plugins goes greatly unsupported, with donations and purchases too few and far between. One or two in the plugin side of things has broken out and developed and sold suites of plugins with paid support and help. I’m likely going to HAVE to follow that model in the year to come — I have no choice, with users not donating enough, but the support emails come and go. (Joni, thanks to you for being a supporter both in words, and in donations!)

So, I’d agree that there are issues with making money in OSS, but the issues are of education and self-responsibility in the era of OSS. If the software is good and useful, pay for it — or, if you can contribute back (forums, support, coding, etc.), give back in ‘bartering’ methods.

Just because it’s “free software” doesn’t mean someone isn’t paying the bills. In my case, I underwrite most of what I do with my day job. In the case of WP core, I’d presume by now much of it could be underwritten by Automattic. Heck, most important Linux development these days are full-time-employed people at major companies, either the Linux resellers (redhat, et al), or custom software or hardware developers (who contribute free drivers, free enhancements, but because they are leveraging the ‘free’ software in other ways… Go look at the TomTom GPS free downloadable bits, for instance…).

<off the soapbox>

(and the odds are I’m so busy with the job that DOES pay my bills for the next week that I won’t be reading this potential-for-a-flamewar actively… anyone can feel free to write me offline in support, or disagreement! ?? )

-d

sponsored themes are fine, though I’d think frowned upon in the free/public libraries. certainly, if they aren’t GPL-compliant, they shouldn’t be up on themes.wp.com — and GPL-compliant means people can remove the sponsoring if they want… ??

-d

If you are doing a REALLY custom frontpage, then you can do everything in an actual code editor and upload the changed file as you work.

That eliminates many of the issues of editing in the code-panel of the Page editor.

Yes, if you are entering anything custom, you need to always do it from the code panel, as the html panel will eat stuff up like crazy.

As a starting point, you should be able to see the unmodified block if you don’t have CSS hiding it to begin with. Then, you can add the JS and see if it ‘transforms’ it properly. The last step is to add back any ‘hiding’ CSS (I don’t know if it does that — but that’s how sIFR works).

Just some quick thoughts,

-d

I responded offline on this, but thought the basic answer would be of use to others.

sIFR2 (which the original FT uses) is built upon trying to fit the sifr font to the size of the original font. So if you don’t pick the original font carefully (or tweak the sifr settings!), the lines won’t fit the same.

In this case, the new font is much narrower than the original, so where the original might take three lines, the sifr font only needs two — and leaves the third line blank.

Such is sIFR2.

Enter sIFR3 — redesigned significantly to do more ‘accounting’ of space, and resize things when it can to fit best. I’ve got CG-FlashyTitles 3 in alpha (or beta, depending on when I’m writing!) right now, using sIFR3, and it does resolve many of the space fitting issues people have run into — thanks to the hard work of the ‘new guy’ developing sIFR3. My work is the easy part. ??

-d

I haven’t tried my CG-Inbetween plugin with the latest releases in a while, but it was designed to handle this sort of thing — so long as you can insert one function call in PHP into the right place in the theme. ??

Usually the theme’s index.php file is where the main loop is, and the outputting of each post’s individual data.

-d

I wrote a nice long response, looks like it got eaten. ??

Hadn’t seen that style of system — yes, decent for SEO use.

Should just drop into your theme. Either via header, or if just on one Page you can make a custom Page Template and do everything custom.

Setup is similar to my CG-FlashyTitles plugin… but I ‘work’ on every page/post of a site, and I’m not sure you’d want that in this case.

-d

Did you try the last release of wp-cache?
https://mnm.uib.es/gallir/posts/2007/03/23/1017/

I should note, I haven’t. But let’s not call public, opensource, KEY plugins ‘abandonware’… It’ll get picked up by someone if he can’t. Put it on the ‘Ideas’ list that it should be a core-included plugin — that’ll keep it always supported and updated! ??

-d

at some point I’ll have to release my custom ordering plugin. it works off a custom field, but sorta requires you always use it on all posts. Good for vertically-oriented uses of WP.

Well, there’s many ratings plugins if you don’t want something custom.

There’s tagging plugins, there’s the built-in category support, for filtering things. Reviews category with a ton of subcats would do the trick.

There’s custom fields, where you could enter particular details about a product. A query on posts+matching-field would give you a decent result. Or just use them to supplement category.

I have a custom plugin I built to have an ‘article type’ (i.e., news, review, …) which is orthogonal to categories, so you can see posts by category still, or you can see sorted reviews or news. I don’t know that I’ve released it publicly.

Oh, and you should use WP-Cache to speed up your pageloads… ?? ??

-d