Overview

This is a protected post for members of the WP Owners Club.

In this session I will show you how to integrate your email service such as Aweber or Mailchimp with WordPress.

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Here’s the scenario,you’ve coded up a change in a plugin.  Three months later you are doing your regular plugin maintenance (you are keeping your plugins up to date aren’t you?  Security reasons you know) and you overwrite the customised plugin ARRGHHHH!!

All your hard work is gone, you will have to recode the changes and I bet you have no documentation or memory of how you did it.

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This is a guest post by Tommy Bussey The SEO Coach

Social media is truly changing the way things are done online. Companies are beginning to truly wake up to the idea that it’s not enough anymore to just broadcast a message to an audience, and today, being successful on the web is all about how well you engage people in dynamic dialogue, which is driven by contributing to conversations, participating, and influencing the buzz that is going around for merging trends. So what makes for great share worthy content?

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What is RSS and why is is important to a WordPress Site?

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This is a guest post by Rebecca Jones, see her bio at the bottom of this post

Favicon is a small icon that displays bright on the browser URL bar, bookmark list or navigation tab. Favicon (the short form for favorite icon) in all its certainty will bring a drastic modification in your website’s outlook, if created with thorough research on the interests of the visitors to the website.

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The pharma hack is one of the most stubborn hack attacks I have to deal with on WordPress sites for my clients, I’ve written more about it here in my post The WordPress Pharma Hack

Once you have fixed the hack, there is the lingering problem of getting Google to update it’s index and remove all reference to viagra, cialis and all the other disco drugs these scum buckets are trying to pedal.

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STOP!

Before you upgrade to WordPress 3.3 watch this video.  The update has a lot of changes and I’m seeing a lot of plugins crashing my clients WordPress sites.

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A bit of free software is providing a lot of people with a lot of business opportunities.

In this post I want to talk about the business of WP, and where money is being made supporting and developing WordPress for the million of sites built upon open source software.

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Have you ever put something out there on your blog and realised it was a mistake.  You quickly delete it and think all is well, only to find that the mistaken post has appeared in your Feedburner feed and you cannot get rid of it.

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Course Details

In this session I will show you how to migrate your WordPress site between hosting companies.

If you are fed up with poor service, frequent outages or high cost hosting, this course is for you.

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In my opinion, Paypal is fast becoming the payment processor of choice for bloggers selling goods and services from their WordPress site.  There are a number of ways to integrate Paypal with your blog, I look at a few scenarios here:

Just In case .. What is Paypal?

Paypal is a credit card payment processor.  It acts as a middleman between your clients and you, processing transactions on your behalf.  They do the hard work of securing and protecting people’s credit card details, you simple accept money and pay a small fee in return.  You don’t have to have a merchant account for Paypal which makes it ideal for small companies or bloggers.

Paypal charges a fee per transaction of dependant upon your transaction value per month.  I pay 3.4% + 20 pence per transaction, your fees will vary by location.  There are no setup or monthly fees as there are with other payment processors.  Full details on transaction fees can be seen at the transaction charge page

If you don’t have an account, you can sign up at Paypal.com.

It goes the other way too, you can send money to people securely, but this post will concentrate on income rather than expenditure.  This is a gross simplification of Paypals services, but in a nutshell it allows you to send or receive money securely online.  Your credit card details are never sent over the net.  People trust paypal and will look for it over other payment processors such as WorldPay.

Now lets integrate paypal with our blog.

So You Want Payment

There are numerous scenarios where you may want to charge visitors to your site, I list them below with an integration idea:

Consulting Services/Service Contracts

You may sell a consulting service or sell your time at a fixed rate per hour.  If you do, using a paypal button is probably the solution for you.  Using this method, you set a small piece of html pointing to paypal which states your account details, the amount you want to charge.

There is a technical manual on configuring your buttons manually, or you can go to the button factory inside of your Paypal account and step through the process  from =my account->profile -> my saved buttons.   Below is a sample button for $0.01 so you can see the process in action, no refunds will be given 🙂

Donations / Tips

A popular way of monetising content is to offer your readers the chance to make a donation or leave you a tip. Paypal allows you to create a donation button in the same way you would create a fixed price button.  Simply  suggest that your readers may like to give you a tip with a big button and see what happens.

A neater way to do this is with the plugin Buy me a beer it integrates with your paypal account and places a call to action at the bottom of each post suggesting a reader should leave a tip if they enjoyed the content.

Membership sites

If you want to have premium content on your site, you may consider a membership site.  Paypal has a subscription facility which allow you to take recurring payments from your customers.

You can create a subscription payment button as mentioned above, and then manually add you members to your site.  The subscription service will take regular payments until your customer cancels the payment.

There are a number of membership site plugins which take this to a higher level, the hard work of coding paypal will already be done for you.  Simply specify your account details and the rest will be done for you, most importantly the process of cancelling memberships when a subscriptions is cancelled is done automatically and your content is hidden from the non-member.

The membership site plugins I have used are Your Members and  Wishlist Member.  Both of these are premium plugins.

Physical Product Shopping Carts

You may want to sell physical products using a shopping cart system such as Amazon uses.

Paypal has a shopping cart and checkout process, where you would add a button to a page or posts which would add an item to a shopping cart, you also place a checkout button on your site so payment can be collected.  This is a little cumbersome as html code needs to be added to each page, do I hear a problem which needs to be solved by a plugin …

I have used one e-commerce plugin which takes the hard work of creating product pages and integrating them with Paypal and it is called WP E-Commerce (the WordPress community is very boring with it’s naming standards I would have called it blog-u-shopper or WordPricer).

I am yet to be convinced that a blog is the best platform to sell stuff, a service such as Shoppify or an e-bay store is probaly better, but hey what do I know, if you are selling physical products successfully from a blog let me know in the comments section.

Pay to Post

Y0u may want to charge people to add a post to your system.  For example a jobs board where there is a fee to add something to your blog.  One of the simplest and best solutions I have found for this is a plugin called EasyPayPal. This also allows the simple creation of members only content so you really should check this one out.

Selling Ad Space

If you are in a position to sell Ad space on your blog, paypal may well be the processor you use.

You can setup an advertising page and setup paypal, buttons to sell ad space.  The other option is to check out an ad plugin such as OIO Publisher which allows you to sell ad space and integrate it with your Paypal account to accept payment.

Info Products

If you have an e-book or webinar to sell, how do you integrate paypal with your site to take payment before your content is made available for download?  The problem here is that you want to collect payment and protect your link until payment has been made.

wp-member the membership site solution I mention above does this as does EasyPayPal, but I would recommend you may want to look at e-junkie, this is an offsite payment processor and download fulfillment service.  This takes the headache of delivering your info. product to your customers, my mantra is always if someone will take on a headache for me and the cost is okay go with them.  The service starts at $5 per month.

Check Out The Many Paypal Plugins

There are a number of paypal plugins over and above what I mention, check out the plugin repository http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/paypal

Paypal Get’s My Thumbs Up

I hope this have given you some ideas for integrating paypal with your site.  I have only touched on the solutions here to give you a feel for what paypal can do for you.

I have been using Paypal to collect payments for my services since I started this site, the trust people have in Paypal increases your likelihood of a conversion.  I love the ease I can take payments, pay others and of course give refunds (I have a no fix no fee guarantee).  The charges sometimes feel a little high, but removing the hassle of credit card security probably makes up for that.

Need Help Integrating WordPress With Paypal?

If you need help integrating your blog with Paypal, I would be happy to give you a quote, please visit my service page and let me know your requirements.

Image by 59937401@N07

WordPress comes with a number of inbuilt user roles to control what registered users can do when they login to your blog.  I want to explain the various roles available and what capabilities each type of user will have.

There’s Just Me, Why Do I Need Roles?

If you are a lone blogger who does all the writing and administration themself then you only need two types of user;  readers who do not login and therefore don’t need a role and an administrator.  This post is probably not for you, but if this is your scenario, there are a couple of things I recommend:

1. Disabled new user registration to keep your blog watertight, this can be done from the WordPress dashboard -> settings -> general and uncheck anyone can register
2. Change the default displayed name of the admin account from admin to your own name.  This is done from  dashboard-> users ->edit the admin account -> complete first name and last name, then from “Display name publicly as” set your full name.  This just makes the blog more personal instead of a sterile person called admin writing all of the posts.

I Want a Publishing Empire Tell me About Roles.

When you create additional user accounts on your blog, you can then assign a user to a role, there are five roles subscriber, contributor,  editor and administrator.  Each has an increasing level of permission to perform actions (know as capabilities) on your site.

This post will take you through each role and it’s capabilities.  I will start with the least privileged and build up a profile of the additional things each level can achieve.

Update

Feel free to read the whole posts, but I’ve created a video tutorial to show you users and roles in depth.

[leadplayer_vid id=”506431D229224″]

How Are Roles Assigned

By default all new users created on your blog will be subscribers, an administrator level user then need to edit the user and assign it a new role.  This is done from the dashboard -> users -> authors and users -> edit the required user -> from the role drop down, set the user level.

Subscriber

Subscribers have the ability to read your blog posts.  This is the same level as unregistered readers and visitors to your blog so why do you need a role for this?  The answer is you may not need this level, but some blogs have featured available only to logged in and registers users.  Some of those may be:

• To leave comments, this is a spam control procedure
• To see certain posts
• For a private blog where only registered users are granted access, and creation of the users is left up to the administrator

There are various plugins which require a subscriber role so out of the box the subscriber role may not seem necessary, but each installation is individual.

Contributor

Moving up the scale contributors are at a level where they can create content on your blog.

The contributor can read posts, create and edit posts from the dashboard.  They can also delete their own posts which have not been published.

The point to note about contributors is that they can create draft posts but cannot publish them.  A more trusted user level is required to edit and make the post publicly available.

Author

An author is a more trusted level of contributor, they have all of the permissions of a contributor, but they can also publish their own posts, delete their own published posts and also upload files to add to posts e.g. images to include in posts or videos to play within a post.

Authors only have control over their own content, other authors and contributors posts can be read but not edited or amended.

Editor

When we reach an editor level we move into site wide permission territory.  As the name suggests editors have control over other users content to publish delete and create new posts, but an editor can also created amend and delete pages, have access to, and control over posts marked as private.  Check out the visibility of a post it can be public, password protected or private, only editors and above can see private posts and pages.

Editors can create categories, and blog roll link entries, moderate comments and even create and amend new users.

Editors are trusted members of your organisation, they can affect your blog at a fundamental level.  What they cannot do is change the look and feel of the site, for that we need an ….

Administrator

The admin level user is the super user for the site, along with all of the other capabilities discussed above, they can change the theme, upload and install plugins edit users and modify the look and feel of the dashboard.

Control of who is an administrator of your site is crucial for a secure site, harden the password and consider changing the login ID to something other than admin.

A last Word on Roles and Capabilities

If you have multiple people contributing to your site, make use of roles, assign them the minimum permission required to get their job done, you may have scrupulous procedures to safeguard your passwords, but do your contributors?  You may trust them but making them an admin level users when all they need to do is upload their post for editing is just creating a security loophole on your site.

Further Reading

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#Roles

Image by maikelnai