MediaPass – a promising new content subscription plugin for WordPress

One of the biggest misconceptions of the web is that you can’t charge for content. But this trend is turning the tide as more media outlets like the New York Times and Financial Times are allowing people to read certain amount of content before having to pay. While the typical blogger isn’t writing the amount or quality of content or same quality as these publications there’s a lot of good stuff out there that just can’t always be supported by advertising.

So with the end of my spiel, we ran across a new WordPress plugin to help content creators create a paid content section for their site. The plugin is called MediaPass. It will let you “protect” pages, posts, and media/video files in different ways, such as overlaying the whole page with a dialog box or showing an excerpt. Visitors will be kindly reminded to pay up. The plugin is currently in version 1.0 so there are some rough edges but we think this plugin has a lot of potential to be a great plugin.

In the screenshot below are some of the different options for putting up your “paywall” on your WordPress site.

Mediapass v1

Once you install the plugin from the WordPress.org repository, you’ll need to head over to the MediaPass.com site to register for an account. Once your account is confirmed, you’ll go back to WordPress admin and enter in your credentials to the plugin settings. Next, you’ll need to add some shortcode to your posts or pages through the rich text editor buttons. Unfortunately, this part is not the most intuitive as the shortcode generator buttons on the rich text editor aren’t the most obvious. We wish there was a simple check box module as part of the post or page editor screen that could do the entire page overlay protection.

Mediapass v1 editor

So what does MediaPass charge and how do I get my money? MediaPass will take around 35% of your subscription fee to handle the processing and technology infrastructure. And yes, they can take either PayPal or regular credit cards. For now, they’ll send you a monthly check but we hope they’ll have direct deposit in the future. To sum it up, MediaPass has a lot of potential and is worth exploring if you’re willing to work through some of the manual steps.

Full disclosure: MediaPass is a sponsor on my Los Angeles based WordPress meetup groups.

Get it: MediaPass plugin

 

Plugin of the Week: My Custom CSS

Have you ever had to hack the CSS for a WordPress theme or plugin only to later upgrade the theme or plugin and realized you lost your changes? Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a plugin that let you keep the CSS modifications stay intact whenever you updated your theme or plugin?

My custom css

It took us a while to find something like this but we found “My Custom CSS” plugin by Salvatore Noschese. This little great WordPress plugin tkeeps your custom CSS override regardless of what theme or plugin you’re using. Remember that if a certain class isn’t working, you may need to add the “!important” tag like in the screenshot above.

Get it: My Custom CSS

 

Sharedaddy adds Linkedin

If you haven’t updated your Sharedaddy WordPress plugin recently, it might a good time to do so because they’ve just added Linkedin as another sharing service. It’s quite useful if you’re running a business or professional related blog or site. Note that as far as we can tell, the Jetpack version of Shareaddy hasn’t been updated with the Linkedin share button yet. Once you’ve gotten the latest copy of Sharedaddy, add Linkedin by going to Settings -> Sharing and drag down the Linkedin sharing button down to “Enabled Services.”

Sharedaddy linkedin

And make sure to click on “Save Changes,”

If you haven’t chosen a social sharing plugin, give Sharedaddy a try.

Get it: Sharedaddy plugin

 

My favorite plugins of 2011 (so far)

A lot of people ask me what are my favorite WordPress plugins. So here they are in alphabetical order as of June.

I’ve covered a lot of these plugins already but I might omitted a few of them and some of them are new ones I’ve discovered from fellow WordPress designers and developers (like Natalie MacLees of the SoCal WordPress meetup group). All of these are available through the WordPress.org repository so they should be malware free and well-tested. And the beautiful thing is that I have most of the 20+ plugins all running here on WPVerse without any conflicts as far as I can tell.

Click on the Plugin name to go to the WordPress.org plugin page.

After the Deadline (also available as part of Jetpack)
Replaces the built-in spell checker with better spell and grammar checker.

Autoptimize
Speed up your WordPress site easily through HTML/CSS and Javascript optimization.

Bad Behavior
Reduce Spam comments from your site

Contact Form 7
One of the easiest ways to set up a quick contact form.

Enable Media Replace
Overwrite existing media library images without deleting them first.

Hikari Category Permalink
Gives you more control over the way posts appear in the URL using categories.

Google Analyticator
Great way to add Goole Analytics track coding and show summary report on your admin dashboard

Google XML Sitemaps
Works in conjunction with SEO plugins to help search engines crawl your site more accurately.

Import Blogroll with Categories
Lets you import links (blogroll) with categories intact

la petite url
Great URL shortner using your own domain

NextGen Gallery
A grand daddy of WordPress plugins that allows you to quickly build WordPress thumbnails and picture galleries. There are tons of add-on plugins to extend it even further.

Page Links To
Redirect pages or post to other URLs.

Relevanssi
Enhances WordPress’ built in search function to make it easy for visitors to find content.

Search and Replace
Just wrote about this powerful (and dangerous) tool a few days ago to let you search/replace the WordPress database tables.

Sharedaddy (also available as part of Jetpack)
Allows your visitors to share pages and post with a few clicks. Initial setup could be a lot easier but still a good plugin.

Simple Lightbox
Easily replace full size image links to lightbox viewer.

Twitter Goodies Widget
Nice looking Twitter widget to show your tweets on your sidebar with customizable color schemes.

Widgets Reloaded
Replaces some of the built-in widgets that come with WordPress including a better version of archives, authors, bookmarks (blogroll), calendar, categories, navigation, pages, search, and tags. Some of the widgets like bookmarks are extensive upgrades while others like calendar aren’t as complex.

WP Super Cache
The “That was easy” way to speed up your WordPress site. Can work in conjunction with Autoptimize.

WP CSS button
Add a slick-looking Web 2.0 call to action button with shortcodes.

Using Pagelines Platform Pro and Jetpack together

We took a look at the free version of Platform Pro a few months ago and were impressed with the features and customization options enough so that we bought it. So we recently built a traditional blog for a client with the commercial version of Platform Pro.  We also looked at Jetpack plugin when it first came out a few weeks ago but were turned off by some bugs typically found in a version 1.0 product. Pagelines  So we decided to take a second look at both Platform Pro and Jetpack at the same time. These are not meant to be full reviews but provide some key insights in a short amount of space.

Platform Pro
During the process of customizing our client site we were reminded of how powerful Platform Pro can be but there are a ton of options to look through. One of the most powerful features allows users to select what kind of modules show up on each type of page (home, blog, individual posts, etc.).

For us, this process became be downright confusing when we had to figure out which page type we were modifying. We had to keep refreshing the published page to see which page type we were editing at the moment. It’d be great if there was a preview or explanation of which page type was being currently edited.

We also wish there was a simple footer module that could be used instead of 3 or 5 column design that forces the user to show extra content when it may not be needed or desired.

Also as we mentioned in our previous review, some similar options are saved into two different pages. For example the social network features of the theme appear in three separate pages: global options (footer Twitter feed), Template Setup (post/page sharing buttons), and Header and Nav (Social Network profile URLs). Our suggestion would be to perhaps keep these fields on their current pages but also add a new page that has all the social media features on one page.

Platform Pro when it was first released was great for its time but the complexity of the theme panel is starting wear us down even after we’ve used it on several sites. Call us hypercritical but if we’re confused, imagine what a new WordPress user could feel like. We hope the next major revision of Platform Pro improves the grouping of menus/options and provides a more intuitive way to build page types.

Jetpack
When we were first tried Jetpack, we didn’t try the bundled Twitter widget so this was a good time for us to try it out.

Some people once seeing it on their site may be disappointed that there’s not much options for color styling. The Twitter Widget looks very plain and boring but heck it works without very little effort or configuration. We’re using the standalone version of the widget, here on our site on our sidebar, so you can see it’s very plain-jane.

If you want something that’s slicker and customizable with colors, we’d recommend the Twitter Goodies Widget by NetWebLogic. It’s a bit more effort to customize the color but it maybe worth the effort to some.

Here’s a tip for Jetpack (and Sharedaddy stand-alone) plugin users who are using Platform Pro. If you enable Shareadaddy to show sharing buttons on the home page, your sidebar widgets may wrap to the bottom of the page into the footer area. And it currently doesn’t show the share buttons on the home page anyways so selecting it doesn’t work in the first place. To fix the sidebar from appearing in the footer, you need to set the display to show only “Posts and pages only.” See the screenshot below.

Wordpress jetpack sharedaddy index

Get it: Platform Pro theme / Jetpack plugin

New version of OnSwipe coming late June

A few months ago we took a quick look at the brain dead easy way to publish an iPad friendly version of your WordPress site using OnSwipe. We were told by CEO Jason Baptiste that they were going to launch with a new version a few weeks ago but for whatever reason it didn’t materialize.

A few minutes ago, we just got word that Jason and his team are ready to launch a new version of OnSwipe for all popular CMS including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Tumblr later this month on June 23rd. Watching the video below, we’re guessing they’ll be now supporting smaller mobile devices like iPhones and Android phones and that they’ll be offer content hosting as well.

Onswipe Demo Video from Onswipe on Vimeo.

We look forward to seeing what OnSwipe has in store for us – check back here at the end of June!

Quick Impressions of WordPress 3.2 beta

WordPress 3.2 is coming soon – sometime in late June. So here are some of our thoughts and preview of it in no particular order on the latest beta version. By no means is it meant to be an in-depth review – for a more thorough look at 3.2 beta, check out WPMod’s review. Note that things may change between now and the final 3.2 release.

Once you login to WP admin, you’ll see there’s a whole new look to the whole admin system. Our “nitpicky” take is that the some of the proportions aren’t as well thought as the current 3.1x releases. By proportions we mean the sizing of certain text and images relative to each other.

Wordpress 3 2beta menu The new admin vertical navigation bar now uses less space so more usable area is saved for the rest of the page but upon first impression it’s not as pretty as the current release. On the functional side it does show which module you happen to be in much more clearly with a right pointing arrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other big change is the full screen post/page editor now has “distraction-free” writing with a minimal set of toolbar icons. The toolbar will also fade away once you start writing something. It’s very “zen-like” and great way to focus on creating content.

As for the new Twenty Eleven theme itself, we think it’s a great evolution for the default theme. There are a ton of widget areas which should make content areas really easy to populate. Wordpress 3 2beta widgets

One of our main concerns was that it seems to have a lot of vertical spacing between the navigation bar and page title.

Wordpress 3 2beta page title

We also ran very quick tests with the NextGen gallery, Enable Media Replace, and Autoptimize plugins, all which seemed to work without a hitch. We ran these plugins through their paces by creating a gallery, overwriting an image, and seeing if the CSS/HTML were optimized. Basically these plugins seemed to work and didn’t crash the site. It’s not an extensive test but we were able to see the basic functionality was in good shape.

So that ends our quick look at WordPress 3.2 beta. Stay tuned for more in the upcoming weeks.

Plugin Tip: Google Analyticator

One of our “must have” plugins is Google Analyticator by Ronald Heft. It will let you track the traffic on your WordPress site using Google Analytics. The best part is that it will give you an admin dashboard widget that shows how much traffic your site is getting every time you login to WP admin (see below).

Google accounts analytics

But recently we ran across some problems with Google Analyticator after we moved our site from MediaTemple to MDD hosting. For whatever reason simply pasting in the Google analytics ID number didn’t work. Google Analytics wasn’t receiving any of the tracking information, so we had to go for the alternative option to authenticate the plugin (and site) with Google.

However, when we tried to authenticate the plugin with Google, we got an ambiguous error message from Google’s site:

The site “http://example.com” has not been registered

Unfortunately the error message from Google is quite cryptic and has no solution attached to it.

So how to fix this? It’s relatively easy: go to Google’s domain management site and register your domain.

The tricky part is on the second page of the signup process where it will ask you the “Target URL path prefix.” Simply type in your domain. You don’t need anything else unless your WordPress site exists in a folder – for example: /blog/ or /wp/ .

But for most people, just type the root URL, example:

Google accounts analytics register

We found it strange that we never had to do this before considering that setting up a Google analytics account should (in a perfect world) automatically create a domain account but we can’t complain since Google Analytics is a free product.

More background information about this particular issue and other trouble shooting tips at Ronald’s support forum…

 

Plugin of the Week: Search and Replace

We ran across an interesting problem when we transferred a WordPress site from Dreamhost to Bluehost. We actually did a database export/import with phpMyAdmin instead of using the XML export tool built into WordPress.

When the database was transferred over to the new site, something had converted or rendered the apostrophe characters (‘) in the site to a weird character string: â€™

So we had this seemingly weird string appearing on different posts and pages.

So how could you fix this? One way would be to give the aptly named “Search and Replace” plugin a whirl. It worked really well for our site considering it replaced over 400 character errors – which would have taken a really long time to fix manually.

Once the Search and Replace plugin is installed and activated, you’ll find it under the Tools menu. Select the database field where you want to perform the search and replace. Most of the time this would be “content.” Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to use the search + replace function.

Search replace plugin

Make sure you have a backup of your the original MySQL file just in case you need to restore it because there isn’t an undo function. Again, there is no undo so be careful using this plugin.

Here are five other common conversion errors that we also had to fix.

• = bullet point •

— = long dash/hyphen —

“ = start quote “

” = end quote ”

’ = apostrophe '

Get it: “Search and Replace” plugin

Side note: If you’re an advanced user and want to prevent this error from happening, here’s a solution at the MySQL level.