E-Shop Plugin for Wordpress

Will — Sun, 30 May 2010 20:58:39 +0000

Even if we have a membership site, we might want to sell digital downloads for instant purchase. While this can be done with a membership site (by offering a one time payment and giving them access to a limited number of pages), we can also use a free wordpress plugin called e-shop. This may also be useful if you have multiple niches or other sites that don’t have memberships.

I have used 3rd party shopping carts such as 1shoppingcart in the past and they’ve been great to get you up and running really quickly. They handle all the technical details without you having to install anything and many sites like 1shoppingcart handle digital downloads.

Others prefer to use websites that allow you to sell downloads but you have to send them to their site, or possible add a widget to your site. They usually take a cut of each transaction. This is also an option but keep it mind many of these sites go out of business and you end up losing all your transactions (and often email addresses of those who bought). Some sites are even file specific – like music sites allowing you to sell mp3s (but not zip files, videos, PDFs, etc).

One of the concerns with digital downloads is that somebody can pass the URL around to others. So many people try to provide a unique and temporary URL to the buyer to avoid this problem. While this is a good idea, there’s nothing stopping from people from sharing the actual digital file!

Over time and with the continuing advancements in open source software, I’ve opted to set up my own shopping cart. You can also avoid many ongoing monthly fees this way. This is pretty easy thanks to Wordpress and the e-shop plugin for wordpress. Free plugins are now installable right from the Wordpress admin panel so you don’t even have to download anything! If you like the plugin you should consider donating to the creator.

After I set up the shopping cart settings (paypal email address, ‘from’ email, etc) I was looking around to find out where I set up my products. It turns out that is done on a new Wordpress page. So upload your file (that will be purchased) first, so that it is available on your new Wordpress page (there’s a Product Entry section under the blank page area). A dropdown will be available showing all your downloadable files. If you want to give customers a few files at once, I suggest putting them in a zip file.

Here’s a tutorial on setting it up. Note some possible issues with conflicting plugins. I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!

I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!

Membership Site Training

Will — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:35:37 +0000

As you know I’m a huge fan of the Wishlist Member Plugin for Wordpress and use it for my own membership site. Well now the great folks like Stu McLaren at Wishlist Products have created a Premium Membership Site Training course.

Based on their incredible support and existing help videos you know this is a high quality offering you don’t want to miss.

Give Away Your Content Using Tweet for Track

Will — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:46:31 +0000

If you’re an entpreneur, author or other type of expert instead of giving away all your content for free why not make one or more files (PDF, video, audio, etc) available for free if someone tweets about it? There’s a cool free tool called Tweet for Track by our good friends at cashmusic.org. This can give you a viral marketing effect as others see the tweet and then they tweet for the track, and so on. And if you’re not on Twitter, you need to be! Here’s a video tutorial I did (click on the button at the bottom right of the player to view full screen). Note you can uncheck instead of checking ‘Use Twitter for Login’ as mentioned in the video.

Click bottom right button on player for full screen!

In order to make this work you’ll need to download some php code. You can get it at CashMusic. They also have a blog post about setting up Tweet for Track but it’s mostly about setting up the Twitter access. The php code is a series of files with a .php extension as well as two directories. You’ll need to put this code on your server, I suggest in a folder called something like tft so the URL would be http://mysite.com/tft. I use CoreFTP to move the files there.

In order for your website to send a tweet on behalf of the fan, you need to gain access to the Twitter APIs (application programming interface) which are a series of functions that you will need to invoke. Go to the blog post above to find out more. To get this going go to Twitter apps. You’ll need to be logged in to your Twitter account (get one if you don’t have one). For application name it has to be unique so put some like Tweet for Track Band Name, where Band Name is your band name. If you put the code in a directory called tft (my suggestion), the callback URL would be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php. For application website put http://mysite.com/tft and website http://mysite.com

Default access type = Read and Write, and Use Twitter for Login is No (Note you don’t have to select Yes for ‘Use Twitter for Login’ as mentioned in the video), application type is Browser. Once you submit this you will get a Twitter secret and key. You put these and a few other things in the config.php file which is part of the download. The config.php file has some helpful documentation (see below). Paste the secret and key into the file, add your twitter username without the @ symbol, add your Twitter ID (go to your twitter page and click on the RSS feed link at bottom right and you’ll see your_id.rss. Copy that id (the number before .RSS) into the file. Edit the OAUTH callback field to be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php (same as what you put in the Twitter form).

The default tweet and required content are important also. The default tweet is what you want the fan to tweet, so a link to your Tweet for Track page along with the name of the song and your twitter name is a good start. Think about what you want others to see to encourage them to download it too! The required content could be your exact default tweet or a subset of the tweet, such as at least the link to your page. You can leave this blank if you don’t want to force the user to tweet anything specific.

You also need to set the download URL to your file and the track name.

/** * @file * A single location to store configuration. */


// add all your twitter credentials

// get your twitter API keys here: http://twitter.com/apps

define('TWITTER_KEY', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');

define('TWITTER_SECRET', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');

define('TWITTER_USERNAME', 'cashmusic'); // without the @

define('TWITTER_ID', 15013686); // check the RSS feed on your twitter page to find your twitter id #

define('OAUTH_CALLBACK', 'http://yoursite.com/callback.php');
// set to true to make a user auto-follow you, false to display checkbox

define('AUTO_FOLLOW', false);
// set generic error message â€” include an email for help

define('ERROR_MESSAGE', 'Something\'s gone wrong.');
// define the default tweet as it should show up in the initial form

define('DEFAULT_TWEET', 'Downloading free code for a tweet-for-track app from @cashmusic: http://tweet.cashmusic.org/');

// set required content, or use an empty string for no requirements

define('REQUIRED_CONTENT', 'http://tweet.cashmusic.org/');
// set secure download to true (for S3 security) or false for straight http download

define('SECURE_DOWNLOAD', false);

// set amazon credentials if you are using a secure download

define('AMAZONS3_KEY', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');

define('AMAZONS3_SECRET', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');

define('AMAZONS3_BUCKET', 'bucketname');
// set your download title

define('DOWNLOAD_TITLE', 'downloadTitle');

// URL or amazon URI (if amazon, do not include bucket)

define('DOWNLOAD_URI', 'downloadURL');

// add a string to randomize the session variable names. or don't. whatever. define('RANDOMIZE_SESSION', '123456'); ?>

This will essentially get you up and running! Of course I ran into a few glitches along with way. One is making sure you are running version PHP5 (not 4). I had to upgrade this on my GoDaddy web host by going into the admin panel. I also had a problem with some of the core PHP libraries which are part of your web host, the php.ini file wasn’t pointing at the right library. My first point of contact when I had issues was CashMusic (info@cashmusic.org). Then I emailed the support desk of my web host.

Another problem I got was something like ‘can’t modify header, already created’. The most common reason for this is a space before or after the opening/closing php tags (

There are some other things you probably want to modify such as the cashmusic logo. The easy way to do this is delete the bg.gif image in the assets folder. If you see anything else you don’t want you just have to edit the php file that contains it, such as the content_download.php that contains the text on the download page.

Good luck!