Tag Archives: Wordpress Plugins

Have you made a donation to your WordPress Plugin Developer?

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I was put to shame today, well and truly, and be prepared as you may be next.

I read a post regarding the donations that WordPress plugin developers have received from all the hundreds of thousands of people who have decided to downloaded a plugin and install it on their blog. You might think that they have made some pretty tidy amounts from all these donations but nothing could be further from the truth.

Have you made a donation to your Wordpress Plugin Developer?

WordPress Plugins and a lack of financial support

The original article was posted by Kevin Eklund on his blog http://www.tomuse.com.  I would suggest you have a read at it. The numbers and generosity of people is, quite simply, frightening. Not frightening in regards the massive amounts of appreciative donations handed out by us, but the complete opposite, the severe lack of them is more to the point.

Kevin went into detail, speaking to WordPress plugin developers such as Joost de Valk, and Donncha O Caoimh, directly and asking them the percentage of donations they received from users. It seems that upon looking at these figures it was largely under 1% and when the numbers where crunched the figure become more like 0.025% (!!) and this was for one of the most popular wp plugins available, the NextGen Gallery plugin.

I cannot dare to imagine what a less popular plugin would receive in donations but suffice to say it probably wouldn’t buy you (or them) a coffee.

Hardly a just reward for some excellent work the vast majority of us seem to have taken for granted.

Why do we have to pay?

Why should we have to pay for these plugins when WordPress is free? The point is that wordpress may be free but the power of wordpress itself is the plugins the developers create and the support and time they give to help us use and deploy these plugins as we wish.

Without them seeing reward, and I don’t mean Kudos here, the support they give is nearly a full time job for some of these guys, but some sort of financial incentive then we may soon see these valuable wp plugins becoming much more expensive to obtain in the very near future and not through the choice of the developers but because of our lack of contribution financially.

Time to put it right – Make that donation

If your using WordPress plugins, take a minute to think about how much value they add to your blog. Look at your plugins and ask yourself honestly “What is this plugin worth to me?”.

Login and check the settings. You may come across a polite message asking you to take the time and make a small donation to help with the development, maintenance and support of this and future wordpress plugins.  Dont hesitate, every single euro, dollar or pound will make a difference, and if we make these guys rich, well, dammit they deserve it, wouldn’t you agree?

And if they get rich, you think they will stop making great plugins?  I dont! By all of us getting together and pushing a donation their way it only serves as an incentive and gives them the ability to focus on developing more wordpress plugins for US making the whole range of plugins grow and serving to add more value to our own blogs, all for a small sign of appreciation.

Make a donation now before the WordPress Plugin Developers are forced to pull the plug – permanently!

I have, have you?

7 Essential WordPress Plugins

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WordPress Plugins certainly has loads to play with, to the extent that it can all be a little confusing. To narrow things down for the beginner here are my 7 super recommended plugins to make sure your blog makes live easier for you, your visitors and the search engines.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade

Install this plugin if you install NOTHING else. There’s nothing so annoying as performing the upgrades to wordpress via FTP, download and changes and what have you, and the whole time you worry that you might screw something up somewhere. This great plugin walks you through the whole process and makes sure you have downloaded and backed up the wordpress database on every upgrade. Cant ask for more than that.

Google XML Sitemaps

Make Google happy with a handy sitemap for your blog with the Google Sitemap Generator. Install the plugin, change a few settings and hey presto, a nice clean sitemap page on your blog for all and sundry.

Subscribe2

Add a page to your blog, drop a line of code in and you have a fully functioning newsletter subscription service. Fully control viathe settings allows you to decide how the blog posts you make will be sent to subscribers, what they say and when they are to be sent. Super plugin and dead easy to setup.

Share this

Allow visitors to “share” your posts quickly and easy on sites such as Digg, Technocrati and Del.icio.us by dropping this handy plugin into your blog. It adds a sweet icon to the bottom of all your posts and visitors can use it quickly and easily. Also, by registering on the site you some really nice tracking software online to see where people are bookmarking your articles.

All in one SEO pack

Make the most of Search engines by allowing your pots to be read and indexed easily. Simple install applies various SEO options to the post in the “Write posts” subsections underneath the area of writing a new post.

Feedlist

Feed another websites XML onto a page on your blog by just copying the XML URL into your page. Nice and simple!

Post Plugin Library & Similar Posts

Setup this plugin to show other threads similar to the thread showing. Allow your readers to move across other articles of interest quickly and easy. Little complicated to add in unless you use the widget function as you have to drop some code into your template (not brain surgery). Make sure you download and install Post Plugin Library for the necessary files to allow “Similar Posts” to work correctly.

Certainly more to come!