9seeds

Building Custom WordPress Solutions | Plugin Development

 

Plugin release

Event Ticketing for WordPress version 2.0

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Three years ago, almost to the day, we released the first version of WP Event Ticketing, which is a WordPress plugin that makes it simple to sell event tickets directly from your WordPress website. Because of WP Event Ticketing, people no longer need to use 3rd-party services that charge organizers or attendees $1 a ticket (or more) on top of PayPal processing fees, just to sell tickets. I loved that our plugin would save people money, and give them the power to control their own data.

I can remember with amazing detail how excited (and nervous) I was the day we released the plugin. Since that original launch, the plugin has been downloaded more than 23 thousand times. People have used the plugin to sell hundreds of thousands of event tickets of all shapes and sizes, all without that pesky per-ticket processing fee.

I take great pride in knowing that we’ve saved our users more than a million dollars in fees.

Our plans for the event ticketing plugin have always been big. There are plenty of other ticket plugins out there, but we feel that our long term direction for the plugin is unique. But early last year we realized, in order to reach those goals, the plugin was going to need to be rewritten. I don’t mean a little bit of a rewrite. I’m talking about starting over from a blank slate.

Let the rewrite begin

If you think it’s a lot of work to build a plugin of this size, you should try doing it twice. Oi. We started the process 3 times last year. Maybe more. I’m trying to block out that memory. But finally, in January of this year, Justin, Ben and I locked ourselves in a room and over the course of 3 days wrote the first couple thousand lines of code that would eventually become version 2.0.

Yes, you read that right. We started the rewrite back in January. Here we are, 9 months later, and I would like to introduce you to a brand new plugin…

Event Ticketing for WordPress

There’s that excitement again.

What’s new in version 2

The first thing you might notice is, this is not an upgrade to the previous plugin. This is, in fact, a completely separate plugin. We thought long and hard about this, and in the end we felt that it would be too easy for something to go wrong with a data conversion from the old to the new format. We didn’t want to run the risk of causing any problems for existing users who have events already on sale. We will encourage the users of the old plugin to move to the new version as soon as their current events are completed. Eventually, we will shut down one of the versions.

Next up, custom post types. The original plugin stored all its data in serialized arrays. Which wasn’t really a problem… unless your event had 500 or 1000 attendees. That many attendees could potentially bring your server to a grinding halt. Oops! Well, not anymore. Now everything is stored in custom post types, which is way more efficient and scalable. Not to mention with the new data storage model, it opens us up to some exciting features down the line.

One of the most frequent requests we received was for internationalization. I’m thrilled to say that version 2.0 is completely i18n compatible. We’ve already translated the plugin in to 10 languages. If you would like to get involved and translate it in to another language, please let us know.

Just the beginning

As I said, this release is mainly a rewrite of the previous plugin. So the feature set is largely the same as before. However, the new codebase will make it much easier moving forward to add features.

Download Event Ticketing for WordPress. Then, let us know what you think. We would absolutely appreciate the feedback. Any bugs you find, please report them to support.9seeds.com so we can get them fixed right away. If you’ve got feature requests, we’d like to hear about those too.

WP Affiliate Manager version 1.5

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We’re glad to announce the release of WP Affiliate Manager version 1.5.0.  This version initially centered around a bugfix having to do with a namespace conflict in the latest (3.8.9.x) versions of WP e-Commerce.  However in the process, we were able to add several minor enhancements that will enhance WP Affiliate Manager for the future.

gettext translation wrappers

While not all screens have had the gettext translation wrappers applied (notably the settings and paypal pages in wp-admin), everything else has been added.  Expect a 1.5.x release early in 2013 that will be fully translatable.

As such, we’re putting out a call for translators.  We are willing to offer free one-year licenses (with support & upgrades) for WP Affiliate Manager to anyone who contributes a full translation in their own language. We have a couple of people already talking to us about certain languages, so if you’re interested, please fill out the form on our translation page and let us know what language you’d like to help us add to WP Affiliate Manager!

money_format() for Windows

money_format() is a native PHP function, but it does not exist on Windows platforms.  We added a simple one for those hosting in Windows environments which should get the job done.

PayPal enhancements

First, the sandbox PayPal URL has been fixed.  This is mostly used for development/testing purposes, but none-the-less is important.

Also, we removed the requirement for needing the PHP cURL module requirement.  Instead, WP Affiliate Manager uses WordPress’ native HTTP request methods.

jQuery UI Tabs + cookies + mod_security bugfix

An interesting sidenote… we discovered a bug where if you went to the 2nd tab on WP Affiliate Manager’s “My Affiliates” screen on our test server, your next navigation point in WordPress would either result in a 404 error, or an endless loop of 302 redirects.

Turns out the bug was caused by a perfect storm of Apache’s mod_security (which is enabled on our test server) and the use of jQuery UI Tabs with a cookie save option.  What was occurring was the cookie name was being saved as “ui-tabs-1” and if your last visited tab was the 2nd tab (index 1) the cookie was saved as “ui-tabs-1=1”.  This would be passed with each HTTP request as a cookie header.  Since mod_security doesn’t like anything where “1=1”, it was changing the request, causing WordPress to become all sorts of confused.  You can see a bug report about it here: http://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticket/8027

The solution was to name the cookie, so the automatically generated name wasn’t used:

jQuery("#tabs").tabs({
    cookie: {
        name: 'wpam_detail_tab'
    }
});

Enjoy all of the fixes!

New plugin: Authorize.net SIM Gateway for WP e-Commerce

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A while back we released the WP Affiliate Manager plugin which integrates directly in to the WP e-Commerce plugin to allow you to easily track and pay affiliates for driving traffic to your site. We have since been keeping an eye on the WP e-Commerce community and when we saw the opportunity to help with another plugin, we jumped at the chance.

Today we released a new payment gateway for WP e-Commerce: Authorize.net Server Integration Method, or SIM for short. From the Authorize.net website:

SIM provides a customizable, secure hosted payment form to make integration easy for Web merchants that do not have an SSL certificate.

WP e-Commerce has a wide range of payment gateway options available, and we’re happy to help expand their reach by giving users one more option to choose from.

If you are interested in reading more about how Authorize.net’s SIM works, you can check out the developer center at Authorize.net.

The plugin is available now and is compatible with the new 3.8.9.x software.

New Plugin: Genesis Simple Headers

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Earlier this week I was installing some of the Genesis child themes (aff link) on a WordPress multi-site network. I quickly realized that I had a problem on my hands. If more than one site wanted to use the same theme, they wouldn’t be able to use a custom logo because uploading the logo to the theme directory would make it the only logo available for all network sites using the same theme. So, I spent spent some time retrofitting half a dozen themes to use the WordPress headers functionality to replace the logo on each individual site.

Then it dawned on me… Why not just build this as a plugin? That was, of course, followed immediately with “why didn’t I think of that first?”

Obviously, if you are running a single site you can simply FTP in and upload the file to your server. But, if you have clients who you’d like to keep away from FTP and make it simple for them to upload a new header once a day (if they so choose), then the Genesis Simple Headers plugin will do the trick.

You can Download Genesis Simple Headers here.

To install, download the plugin, unzip it and upload the entire ‘genesis-simple-headers’ folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then activate it from the WordPress plugins menu. It requires that you have Genesis 1.5 installed and if you aren’t currently using a Genesis child theme, this plugin is totally useless.

Once it’s installed, go to the Appearance tab and click the Headers menu option. You will be given the opportunity to upload a file to replace the logo. The page will also tell the size of the image to upload (if you upload a different sized image, you’ll be asked to crop the image prior to saving).

All current Genesis Child Themes are handled in this plugin with the following two exceptions
– Prose: The functionality is built in to that child theme already.
– Family Tree: I’ll add this one when I can figure out how best to go about it.

Let me know what you think of the plugin!

Cheers!

New plugin: WP Chargify

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Early last year we were contacted by Jason Glaspey who was looking for a custom WordPress plugin. He wanted a plugin that would let a site admin hide content from the general public but make it available to paid members. While there are several plugins like that already available, this one would be different in that it would use Chargify as the payment processor. We agreed to the project and he hired us to build WP Chargify.

Shortly after delivering the finished product, circumstances beyond Jason’s control forced him to shelf the project. Even though we had been paid for the project, we were still bummed since we like to see the plugins we write get used. After a few months went by, we didn’t really expect anything to happen with the plugin. We had basically written it off. Until last month…

Last month we were contacted by two people who both had copies of the plugin. Jason had sent them our way saying that if they needed help, we were the guys to contact. After we helped them both out, Jason and I talked about the project and what the next step might be for the plugin. After a short discussion, we both agreed that making the plugin available to the WordPress community was the best thing to do!

Here are some questions you may be wondering:

What does that mean?
Jason, the original owner of the code, is making the plugin a free, open source plugin. So that means, the WP Chargify plugin is available for you to download, use, modify or whatever else you want to do with it.

Will more features be added?
We (9seeds) will manage the plugin project, but it is being released as-is and at this time we have no plans to continue development on it. However, if you make any enhancements to the plugin that you think others could use as well, you can submit the patch to us and we will be happy to merge it in and release it at our discretion.

What if I find a bug?
You are welcome to submit a bug ticket and hopefully somebody in the community will be able to assist. We will be monitoring the forum as well. If you need help in a more urgent fashion, you can contact us and we’ll be happy to provide an estimate.

Why would you release it if you don’t plan to support it?
This plugin isn’t going to be for everybody. Hopefully another developer will find it, be able to make use of it and eventually take over continuing development on the project. If we can give that developer a head start with the code we’ve already written than it’s totally worth it.

If you are a developer and interested in being part of the development team for WP Chargify, be sure to let us know!