Category Archives: Projects

WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup

One of the cool things about writing a blog is that you get instant feedback. Usually people ask for my help customizing plugins but sometimes the feedback can spin up a new project. That's what happened with a blog post I wrote back in December. I mentioned that it would be possible to open the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions in a popup and I got email after email asking me how to do it.

After a dozen emails I decided to dig into this and came up with the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup extension.

Continue Reading…

PDF Form Submissions Add-On for Ninja Forms

PDF Form Submissions

I'm happy to announce my 7th add-on for Ninja Forms, PDF Form Submissions, is available!

I've been busily making minor improvements to all of my existing Ninja Form add-ons and I haven't had a new plugin announcement for a while. It feels pretty great to release something – especially something that relies on a huge pdf generation library. Best of all, I've made this extension pretty dummy proof. There really aren't any settings you can get wrong. You install it, check a checkbox and you're generating PDFs. You can automate the whole process.

Continue Reading…

Redesigning the Table Rate Shipping User Experience

At WooThemes we have 10,000 tickets a month. That's a lot. Like a lot a lot. When you're talking about numbers this big if we can redesign our products to make them more intuitive and reduce our support load by 5% that's 500 tickets a month! That's an entire ninja!

That's why one of the things I want to start looking into is the user experience of all of our products. If we can do less and make our existing products easier to use that will serve us better than adding yet more products that will increase our support load.

One of our products that I think could use work is Table Rate Shipping. It's one of our most configurable and powerful products. The downside of configuration is that it's also complex. It's not one of our top selling products but it is one of the products that needs the most support. Clear candidate for a redesign.

Continue Reading…

Contact Form 7 & MailPoet Integration

MailPoet Contact Form 7
  1. Blogging for Benjamin Competition
  2. Why I'm Grateful to Work on the Web
  3. 24 Pull Requests
  4. Update Downloadable Product's Expiration Date in WooCommere
  5. Get Lost in the Flow and Work for More Than a Salary
  6. Why A Plugin's Popularity Matters
  7. Why You Should (Or Shouldn't) Use Premium Plugins
  8. WooCommerce Terms & Conditions
  9. Only Ship to Continental United States with WooCommerce
  10. Just Talk
  11. Why I Love Jetpack
  12. Making Jetpack Better
  13. Remove Billing Address for Free Virtual Orders in WooCommerce
  14. Notify Admin of Customer Address Change in WooCommerce
  15. Open Your Self Up To New Possibilities
  16. 2013 Resolutions Review
  17. Create a Community
  18. Tips for Starting a Community
  19. The Intent of Goals
  20. Create The Ultimate Invoicing System Using WooCommerce
  21. Change From Address in Ninja Forms
  22. Work With People Who Inspire You
  23. Contact Form 7 & MailPoet Integration
  24. Monotasking
  25. Giving Back to The Community
  26. Adding Fuctionality to Lean Plugins
  27. Choose Stripe For a Payment Gateway
  28. A Dip Into Entrepreneurship
  29. Reward Yourself
  30. Blogging for Benjamin Plugin
  31. Blogging for Benjamin Wrap Up

I just built a plugin for Contact Form 7. Yup you read that right Contact Form 7. After releasing the MailPoet extension for Ninja Forms I bumped into Kim from MailPoet at WordCamp Europe and we struck up a conversation for some more MailPoet plugins.

Continue Reading…

Making Jetpack Better

Jetpack
  1. Blogging for Benjamin Competition
  2. Why I'm Grateful to Work on the Web
  3. 24 Pull Requests
  4. Update Downloadable Product's Expiration Date in WooCommere
  5. Get Lost in the Flow and Work for More Than a Salary
  6. Why A Plugin's Popularity Matters
  7. Why You Should (Or Shouldn't) Use Premium Plugins
  8. WooCommerce Terms & Conditions
  9. Only Ship to Continental United States with WooCommerce
  10. Just Talk
  11. Why I Love Jetpack
  12. Making Jetpack Better
  13. Remove Billing Address for Free Virtual Orders in WooCommerce
  14. Notify Admin of Customer Address Change in WooCommerce
  15. Open Your Self Up To New Possibilities
  16. 2013 Resolutions Review
  17. Create a Community
  18. Tips for Starting a Community
  19. The Intent of Goals
  20. Create The Ultimate Invoicing System Using WooCommerce
  21. Change From Address in Ninja Forms
  22. Work With People Who Inspire You
  23. Contact Form 7 & MailPoet Integration
  24. Monotasking
  25. Giving Back to The Community
  26. Adding Fuctionality to Lean Plugins
  27. Choose Stripe For a Payment Gateway
  28. A Dip Into Entrepreneurship
  29. Reward Yourself
  30. Blogging for Benjamin Plugin
  31. Blogging for Benjamin Wrap Up

Yesterday I talked a bit about why I love Jetpack. Today I want to talk about a couple things we can do to make it better. People's biggest concerns with Jetpack aren't that it doesn't do enough or that it doesn't do it right, their concerns are that Jetpack is too big. This isn't exactly news in the WordPress community and there's already a Jetpack Lite plugin which only includes two out of 20+ modules.

I like the idea of the lite version but there's just way too many useful modules to use the lite version. How can you give up a free image CDN (Photon), email subscriptions (Subscriptions), and perhaps the easiest to set up social media sharing tool (Publicize)? As I said yesterday I Love Jetpack and wouldn't want to go without all of that functionality. To this effort rather than creating another Jetpack lite plugin I've created a plugin which removes some of the less used modules.

Continue Reading…

Text Message Notifications Add-on for Ninja Forms

text message notifications banner

If you're like me you probably have certain areas on your site that are more important than others. You might have a contact form, a blog where visitors can comment, and a client portal to submit bugs. Clearly these three areas all have drastically different levels of importance to your business. But do you actually prioritize these notifications or do they all go to the same inbox?

Wouldn't it be great if you could get notices about bugs right away? What if you could get a notification when a user selects “I want to spend ${god-loads-of-money}” on your contact form?

I came up with a solution to solve these issues and I'm happy to announce that I've just released Text Message Notifications – my 3rd add-on for Ninja Forms!

Continue Reading…

Wysija Extension for Ninja Forms

Wysija logo

I'm very happy to announce that I've just released a Wysija extension for Ninja Forms! If you haven't heard of Wysija before make sure to check them out – they're an awesome newsletter service that you can manage through your own WordPress site. Now, with this extension you can allow users to automatically subscribe to your Wysija lists when they fill out a form on your website.

Continue Reading…

User Analytics Extension for Ninja Forms

Just a few weeks ago I saw a review by Pippin about Ninja Forms and I was immediately impressed. It is intuitive, well documented, & open source; all without a yearly fee. At the same time I was trying to get the most out of my contact forms and I was adding hidden fields that allow me to capture additional information (like geolocation, browser, operating system, etc) about the user without bothering them.

So, in the interest of getting the most out of every opportunity presented to me I took the plunge and developed User Analytics for Ninja Forms.

Continue Reading…

Google Font Picker Control for WordPress

Over the last few months at work we've been digging into the WordPress Theme Customizer and thinking about using it as the basis for a SaaS web app. Building upon the basic controls for the theme customizer is one of the challenges we've been facing and the Google Font Picker Control is the first of (at least two) the controls that we developed to make the Theme Customizer even more awesome.

Continue Reading…