Using Zombaio with WordPress, A WordPress Plugin

Zombaio Logo

Building on my work at Your Members, specifically the Adult Payment Gateway Zombaio, I’ve finally gotten around to building a better “recommended WordPress Plugin”.
As the one on Zombaio’s site is little more than a nasty hack sitting in front of WordPress without using any WordPress functions or its Database Abstraction Layer, (it’s using Raw Database functions and is not very WordPress’y at all).

It has now been released (current version at time of writing is V1.0.4) and made available via WordPress extend called WP-Zombaio.

What does the Plugin do?

Logs

Essentially the plugin listens for ping backs for the Payment Gateway and responds accordingly, creating or deleting the user, using the details passed back from Zombaio, and logging the full result for later reference.

Installing the plugin first guides you thru a easy to use install procedure, meaning no fiddly file editing, or trying to setup and understand ZScript.

Just download, unzip, upload and activate.
Nip thru the (optional) four step quick start wizard and away, you, go!

It’s a Wizard Harry
Settings all Done

In addition to the quick setup and user create/delete, the plugin provides a few short codes and widgets, to direct the user from your site off to the Zombaio Join Form and back again.

ShortCodes and Widgets!

Guide

Included in the plugin is a guide, which describes how to setup and use all the features as well as general information about running a Membership Site and getting the most out of the plugin. Especially the Zombaio Seal, which can be a little fiddly to get the code for.

Getting the Seal Code

Security and Access Control

On top of the basic functionality, is included a method to block non members from accessing the site and providing a Splash Page/adult content warning page, meaning no need for additional plugins required to do this, saving you overhead. All guests are redirected to this page, so content is protected!

A Basic Landing Page

As well as this, included in the plugin is the ability to create a menu to show to logged out users that is different to logged in users, in case your theme doesn’t provide this.

Menus

To top it all, the plugin is designed to run your WordPress site with “Anyone can Register” disabled, meaning the only way users can join is via the Zombaio Payment Form, and this means users/members have paid for access.

What is Coming Next?

I’m currently working on a update, which includes credit purchase, and the spending of credits on access to posts/pages, (this can be configured to be timed access, for Live Broadcasts/Webcam Events, or permanent access, like a image gallery), again helpful instructions and information is included in the guide on how to setup and use these features.

(The update is currently in beta testing to a couple of users who have contacted me about the plugin, but you can always grab the SVN trunk/current build and give the current credits implementation a go! You can grab this from Extend, no guarantee that it is stable or safe to use in production/live, you can get it from the WP Zombaio Developers Tab)

Suddenly Graphs

In addition I’m adding graphs and reporting data, to supplement the Zombaio Graphs and reporting to help Admins set how their site is doing. And showing what users are spending their credits on, and how many unspent credits are in the user kitty!

During the development of the next version, to fully support credit purchase in a admin easy to setup and use method, further development time is needed to create a little form builder, as there are several options, which can be difficult to easily describe using just WordPress short code Arguments, hence this blog post is talking about the current release and not about the next release including credits!).

So I shall finish this blog post off quickly and get back to finishing off the next version!

Can I see more Screenshots?

Sure, just pop over to the WordPress Extend page, there are a few more there!

Where can I get it

You can check out the Plugin here on the site, or over on Extend.

I need Help!

If you have any suggestions, feature requests or need help setting up and using the plugin, please do not hesitate to drop me a line, and I’ll be able to give you a hand and get you up and running!

I’d like to Donate

Cool! I put a quick an easy PayPal button on the local WP Zombaio Page for you!

LinkDAQ

Photo credit - petrick : http://www.flickr.com/photos/petrick/70924598/sizes/z/in/photostream/

From the Desk of Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson comes something he built in a day, LinkDAQ.

Like the old BBC Celebdaq, its a “Stock” Trading Game, but instead of trading stocks and shares, you are trading links.

In this case the Cost to invest in a link is linked to the number of other sites that link to that site.
So a site such as Facebook.com and Twitter.com, which are linked to from lots of other sites, rank highly and cost more, in comparison to other sites, such as my own.

It’s using data provided by Majestic SEO. To quote the site:

We use the top 50,000 websites from the MajesticSEO Million dataset, this lists the top sites as ordered by links from unique i.p. addresses, we take this information and use a simple formula to give each domain a daily price.

Going to play it for a couple of days to see where it goes, and how things pan out, come and join me if you fancy it! So far I’m down about $600 on my initial investments, but we shall see what happens tomorrow!

For something built in a mere 24 hours its rather good, and it uses Twitter Bootstrap for it’s Framework, and it has a legitimate use of the good old HTML Marquee tag! And Dom should be pushing out updates and things to the site, and tweaking the algorithm.

You can also follow the developments on Twitter @linkDAQ and @TheHodge

There is also a TimeLapse video of the code being written:

My CV and some other Updates

Just a quick post to say hello.

I’ve updated my CV and tidied it up a little.
So any feedback on it would be useful! (Drop Me a Line rather than a Comment please)
Link in the SideBar on the right!

I should really write on my blog some more, but not a lot to write about of late.
JetPack Extras is doing OK, but JetPack core decided to implement the main feature I added, that being Pinterest but, Extras has evolved, it still of course has the ability to control button placement and has the extra Twitter Via/Related options, and the ability to share the WP.me shortened URL, makes a nice Twitter Card, embedding a short Preview of the Post with the Tweet, (check this Meta Tweet for an example) works with any wp.me url you share on Twitter by the way!

Most useful, mainly updated to keep up with JetPack core and use the new shiny hooks they have.
You can check it out on extend. Feedback/request are always Welcome!

Made a couple of tweaks and updates to the Blog in the background, added a better 404 page and updated the .htaccess rules, I have all subdomains pointing to the here, (unless their is a separate to show), so its a good idea to redirect non sites to here, rather than duplicating the content.
Also tweaked the Root .htaccess to have a Error Document (404) since it was just standard Apache Error, bit nasty, but now better, LOLCATS TO THE RESCUE! 😀

Heres a extract of the rules, if you find it useful/handy:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^barrycarlyon.co.uk  
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://barrycarlyon.co.uk/%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
ErrorDocument 404 http://barrycarlyon.co.uk/wordpress/404-2/
ErrorDocument 403 http://barrycarlyon.co.uk/wordpress/404-2/

Next thing to do, is probably update and replace the MineCraft Server Site probably using Twitter Bootstrap as a new basis. It’s now a whitelisted server for Armchair Heroes or on Facebook, but of late I’ve been getting my MineCraft fix playing over at PhantomCraft, like a lot of open Servers I tend to get robbed/cleaned out and griefed a lot, but then again I am a little close to spawn. It’s a fun server to play on and the regulars are quite nice.

Hopefully moving further away when I get a chance to play some more, thinks are pretty busy at the moment between Magento fun at Day Job and Freshers Fun at the Union.

Then I really should get the Portfolio page on the Blog fixed up to showcase what I’ve done before, since I am a Freelance Web Developer (you got any work going or want a quote for? (Drop me a line)

So a couple more weeks and we’ll be back to the usual grind.
Hopefully I will have more to write about soon!

Extra Jetpack!

So recently I’ve been mucking about with JetPack, for various bits and pieces.

Mainly the first thing done is just to make the sharing buttons appear above and below a post.

But from browsing the JetPack Support Forum over on extend I thought I’d make my changes available.

So, attached to this post, is my modified version of JetPack 1.4.2.

Which includes the following additions:

Applications I Use 2: gfxCardStatus

Heres a little handy app that works quite well. Specific to Macs with Dual Graphics cards, normally the only way to change cards is to log out and log in again, after changing the preference under Power Settings. You have one for Power Saving and one for High Performance graphics.

Cody Krieger (@codykrieger) wrote a handy little App that will let you change Graphic Cards without having to logout, quite handy if you want to just muck about for a bit and then open up Team Fortress 2, or do some Video work.

So I present today gfxCardStatus.

As the Author writes:

gfxCardStatus is a menu bar application for OS X that allows users of dual-GPU 15” and 17” MacBook Pros to view which GPU is in use at a glance, and switch between them on-demand.

Most of the time it spends all its time just in my Task Bar sleeping showing which card I have enabled (i for the power saving low powered card, and d for the high-powered card).

It works quite well, sometimes you request a change and your machine won’t honour it straight away, normally this is down to another application doing something graphics heavy, so locking the control out.

One useful feature built-in is the ability to auto switch the graphics card in use based on the current power source.
Which I don’t personally use, but then I tend to hot swap between on/off PSU far too often.

I’ve a couple of options missing and some different settings available, but it depends on what model of Mac you have and the Graphics Card present in your machine.

All in all its quite a handy little app, and its Free. You can download it from http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus and start using it straight away.