Batch Upload

The batch upload facility copies your product files en-masse from a staging area on your server to your ezPayPal product file storage area, with the right randomized file names. This way, you don't have to remember or look up the storage location (which has a hard-to-remember randomized name) and the file names (again, random strings, typically). All you do is to copy your product files to a staging area (which defaults to zips under the ezPayPal installation folder), and launch the batch uploader.

Note that the staging area has to have the right kind of protection via .htaccess or equivalent mechanism. The default area is protected.

Upon launching the batch uploader, you get a simple window as shown below.

Ensure that the staging area on your server is correctly entered and hit the Submit button. You will get a screen similar to the following figure.

Note how the files missing in your staging area are highlighted in red error messages. And how you can prevent the batch uploader from taking a particular action by unchecking the appropriate checkbox.

You can update your product versions as well, by specifying them in a text file versions.txt in the staging area. The batch uploader will read this file and offer to update the product versions, if needed. The versions.txt file I used to create the screenshot above is shown below.

Once satisfied with the actions that the batch loader will carry out, hit the Submit button at the bottom of the screen (not shown in the screenshot above), and you will get a report of what has been done.

Template Editor

ezPayPal uses editable templates to generate emails and download pages. For instance, when your customer buys a product from your e-shop, he gets redirected to a download page after he makes the payment at PayPal. This download page is generated out of the "Download Page" template. The email your customer receives informing him of the purchase and giving him purchase details also is template-driven. The email uses three templates: "Email Subject", "Email Body" and "Email Body Html".

A large number of templates are included with your ezPayPal Pro purchase. The Template Editor tool helps you make modifications to them (or to add new ones for your own purpose).

When you enter the Template Editor page by clicking on its button on the Pro Control Panel, you will get the screen shown below.

The various elements of this daunting interface are shown in the screenshot above. To edit an existing template, load it from your database using the drop-down menu titled "Template Selection." Once the template is loaded, you can make modifications to it. You can add or remove or modify various fields from the list of available fields. Please study the annotated screenshot for instructions.

List of Templates

Using Templates

The triplets are used in various parts of the program. For instance, the echeck triplet is used when your buyer pays using an e-cheque, when PayPal recommends that you not send your product until the check clears. Similarly, when a dispute is raised by your buyer, ezPayPal uses the dispute triplet to send a friendly mail to your buyer. The triplets can also be used to initiate mass mail to a selected group of your customers from E-Mail Tools -- another Pro tool.

Previewing and Saving

During your edits, you can also preview your edits using the "Preview" button. Once satisfied, you can save it your database using button near the bottom. You can also save the edited template under a new name by checking the appropriate button (refer to the screenshots above for details). For new templates, please follow the naming conventions for template triplets as in the list of templates above, so that the E-Mail Tools can find them.

Sales Editor

One of the major difficulties with most e-commerce packages is the near-impossibility of editing your transactions in any meaningful way. All you can do is to manipulate your database using some tool like phpMyAdmin. Since you may not know the data semantics that the developer had in mind, you are playing with fire when you edit the data directly. You may end up violating some referential constraint and make your program unusable.

Despite this danger, there are times when you have to do it. For instance, a particular sale may have expired before your buyer had a chance to download his product (which tends to happen quite often for me). You may want to reset the expiry of this particular sale so that the download link works again.

ezPayPal enables you to edit your transactions in a semantic-aware fashion (meaning, you won't irrevocably mess up the data while editing). The interface to do this is the Sales Editor.

Single Sale Editing

When you start up the Sales Editor by hitting appropriate button on the Pro Control Panel, you enter the Single Sale Editor mode. As the text in the interface says, if you want to quickly modify a single sale, and/or send a fresh download email to your buyer, you can use this section. First, load the single sale by providing either the email ID of the buyer or the PayPal transaction ID. If you provide the email ID, the latest sale by that buyer will be loaded. You can then change the expiry date (of the download link) below, if you like. If the expiry date is in the future, you will have the option to resend the email message with the download information to your buyer.

Once you load the sale, you can inspect it by clicking on the "Show" button, or discard it and start over by hitting the "Discard" button. Discarding means unloading the sale from the Sales Editor memory, not deleting it from your database. (In fact, there is no interface in ezPayPal that will let you delete critical information from the database. You will have to use other tools, like phpMyAdmin or a DB client, to do that.)

Note that the actions on Sales Editor (like resetting the expiry or sending email) will require further confirmation on a popup dialog box.

Bulk Editing Multiple Sales

When you select the Multiple Sales Editor mode, you will get the window below. To get started with editing sales, first load all your sales from your database. Click on the button below. Don't worry, it is a non-destructive, read-only operation.Once loaded, you can view them by clicking on the 'Show Sales' button. And hide the displayed table by the 'Hide Sales' button.

Once the sales are loaded (which might take a few minutes if you have a lot of them in your database), you will get the following window. The window contains generous amount of help in terms of text, status messages and tooltips.

The top part of the screen shows the number of sales loaded, and gives you options to display them. The second part, titled "Filter Multiple Trades," lets you narrow the sales loaded in a variety of ways. Once the filtering is done, you can examine the selected sales. The last part of the window (titled "Edit the Filterd Sales") will let you set the expiry date, affiliate ID (if you want to manually track affiliate sales -- not fully implemented yet), the sale status (Refunded, Voided, Completed or Pending), the version sold to the buyer, and the current version of the product.

Despite the dire warning in red about the finality of the edits, your modifications are not actually applied in the current version. The code to do so is not hard to write, but such direct database manipulations have to be done with extreme care. After more tests, the code will be activated in a future version.

Editing Unprocessed Sales

Unprocessed sales are the ones where the communication between PayPal and ezPayPal was disrupted in some fashion. In order to understand it, you need to know how PayPal IPN works.

From PayPal site:

• PayPal sends your IPN listener a message that notifies you of the event
• Your listener sends the complete unaltered message back to PayPal; the message must contain the same fields in the same order and be encoded in the same way as the original message
• PayPal sends a single word back, which is either VERIFIED if the message originated with PayPal or INVALID if there is any discrepancy with what was originally sent

The network traffic can fail at any of these steps. Knowing this, ezPayPal plays it safe -- as soon as it receives the information from the first step, it saves the information into your database. If the communication or the processing fails during any subsequent steps, you can still recover from the error later on using this "Editing Unprocessed Sales" feature. The window you get when you choose this mode is shown below.

From the help text on the interfce: this mode helps you locate unprocessed sales and process them. An unprocessed sale is one which got PayPal IPN info, but either failed validation or post-back. (Refer to IPN guide for more information). These transactions could, in principle, be fraudulent -- attempts by hackers to get your product without paying for it. But most often, it is some network issue preventing your server from validating the transaction with PayPal. Action: verify the transaction on the PayPal website before shipping your product.

Email Tools

The Email Tools lets you keep in touch with your customers in a variety of ways. When you launch it from the Pro Control Panel, you are greeted with the following window.

As you can see, this window is designed to be self-documenting, with generous help texts and tooltips to guide you along. For instance, once you filter a set of email addresses to send messages to, you get the following message about what kind of email templates you can use.

Migration Tools

Warning: This tool is meant for developers and system integrators. It requires editing the source code files and/or database manipulations.

The migration tools are sample scripts provided developers and integrators working on migrating data from an existing system to ezPayPal. These tools were originally developed for my own migration efforts. For a casual user with no existing data to migrate, they may be of limited use.

When you enter the migration tools window, you get four options, which are described below. As usual, there is ample tooltip help to guide you along.

• Migrate/backup DB prefix: Use this tool to import data from a database schema with a given prefix, say, ezpp_ to a new one, say, mine_. Using this tool, you can back up your existing data into another set of DB tables. This tool can also update your DB tables during a package version upgrade.
• Import sales from a DB table: Use this tool to import sales data from a database table, if you have sales data created by some other package in a DB table. You will have to modify the file migrate-ipnData.php to match your table schema.
• Import PHP product definitions: If your old products are defined in PHP files, import them from the existing PHP files. You will have to modify the file migrate-products.php. [This tool is of limited use.]
• Import PHP sales data: Import Sales info from existing PHP files. If your sales data was written to individual PHP files, this tool can import them into your database. You will have to modify the file migrate-sales.php. [This tool is of limited use.]

Database Tools

This Pro tool helps you back and restore your database in a variety of formats.

Export Options

• Export DB Table to CSV file: Exports the selected database table into a CSV file. You can view the files in Excel or any text editor. You will need FILE privilege on your database to do CSV export.
• Export Table Data to DAT file: Exports the selected database table into a data file. You can import the data back into the DB using the SQL import button below.
• Export Table Schema: Exports the selected database table into an SQL file. You can import the data back into the DB by executing it. Note that it creates only empty tables, not the data within.
• Backup the whole DB: Exports all the selected database tables (structure and data) into an SQL file. You can import the data back into this DB or another DB by executing it on phpMyAdmin or any other database program.

Import Options

• Select a File to Import: Select a previously exported file. It can be a CSV, Data or SQL file exported using one of the buttons above
• Import DB Table from CSV file: Imports (and appends) the selected database table from a CSV file. You can modify the data in Excel or any text editor before importing. The file name should match the table name. Be careful about the primary keys and foreign key constraints.
• Import Table Data to a DAT file: Imports data to the selected database table from a data file. You can edit the data using a text editor before importing. Note that the data is appended to the database table, unless the primary key is violated.
• Restore the whole DB: You are not expected use this option to update your DB. Use it only to restore data to a test database.
  Drops and imports all the selected database tables (structure and data) from an SQL dump file. You can also import the data back into this DB or another DB by executing it on phpMyAdmin or any other database program, hopefully to a non-production database.

Security Audit

Check your ezPayPal for security vulnerabilities.

This tool is work-in-progress.

EZ Reports

ezReports is a reporting engine for ezPayPal.

Description

ezReports is an add-on module for ezPayPal, which provides a reporting and charting engine. It can be installed on the standalone version of ezPayPal Pro. Used it in conjunction with ezPayPal, this modules enables you to analyze your sales and revenue data with the help of charts so that you can pinpoint revenue-generation opportunities.

If you would like to start your e-commerce website, you can purchase the full package of ezReports ready-to-use online for only $12.95.

Features

1. Seamless integration with ezPayPal.
2. Multiple reports provided.
3. Easy to add new reports with the help and sample report provided.

Credits

ezReports uses Open Flash Chart to render beautiful charts.

Installation

Note: ezReports is an add-on module for ezPayPal Pro. You can install and use it only if you have ezPayPal. Or you can purchase the bundled package of ezReports and ezPayPal ready-to-deploy for a discounted price of only $12.95.

1. On ezPayPal screen, click on Pro Functions.
2. Log in if prompted.
3. Click on the Reporting Engine button against the Track your sales and revenue entry.
4. Click on the Install Package and follow the friendly wizard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use this package without *ezPayPal*?

Not in the current form. A future version that can work independently of ezPayPal will be released soon.

How do I create a new report?

The ezReports module is written with extensibility in mind. With a bit of PHP knowledge, it is child's play to add another report. Follow these steps to make your own report.

1. Make a copy of a look at the sample report chart-product.php in the module folder (ezPayPal/pro/ezreports).
2. Rename it to chart-<something>.php. Let's say you call it chart-myreport.php.
3. Edit chart-myreport.php and change the report name near the top of the file (line 9 in the current version.)
4. In the data section (after if (isset($_GET['data']))), define your own data.
5. Save and upload the modified chart-myreport.php to your server, to the same location as chart-product.php.
6. Your report is ready and deployed, and will appear in the drop down menu when you start the reporting engine.

Visit Open Flash Chart to see available chart formats and code samples.

Screenshots

1. Sample report - sales per product pie-chart.
   

2. Sample report - revenue per month.
   
   <

Change Log

History

• V1.00: Initial release. [Nov 25, 2013]

Future Plans

1. Provide more reports.

Changelog

History

• V1.00: Initial release. [Nov 25, 2013]

Future Plans

1. Provide more reports.

EZ Subscribe

ezSubscribe is a subscription module for ezPayPal.

Description

ezSubscribe is subscription module for ezPayPal, which can be purchased online. Used it in conjunction with ezPayPal, this modules enables you to define and sell subscription-based products and services (newsletters, support contracts, advertising contracts or even one time subscriptions like installation or customization service) on your website.

If you would like to start your own subscription system, you can purchase the full package of ezSubscribe ready-to-use online for only $12.95.

Features

1. Seamless integration with ezPayPal.
2. Multiple Configurable products and services.
3. Automatic handling of subscription start, end, modification etc.

Installation

Note: ezSubscribe is an add-on module for ezPayPal Pro. You can install and use it only if you have ezPayPal. Or you can purchase the bundled package of ezSubscribe and ezPayPal ready-to-deploy for a discounted price of only $12.95.

1. On ezPayPal screen, click on Pro Functions.
2. Log in if prompted.
3. Click on the Subscription Package button against the Subscription System entry.
4. Click on the Install Package and follow the friendly wizard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use this package without *ezPayPal*?

Not in the current form. A future version that can work independently of ezPayPal will be released soon.

Why would I want to charge my users for support?

Not to get rich, for sure! In my case, I have a few popuplar plugins and packages out there on the net. My users kept sending me emails with questions that are clearly answered in the FAQ, documentation etc. When I got tired of cutting and pasting the FAQ answers, I decided to charge them a small amount ($0.95) per question. In fact, I didn't really charge them, I just told them that I would. And, to my surprise, my support load went down by over 90%! I wanted to use a support ticket system, but was worried that it would swamp me with frivilous tickets. A subscription model made sense in my case. Besides, it will certainly cut down on spam.

Why do the email messages from ezSubscribe end up in Spam/Junk mail boxes?

Depending on how your PHP installation is configured, your emails may look like spam to some of the mail sentinel out there. The safest way to overcome this is to set up SMTP for outgoing mail. Logon to your ezSubscribe Admin panel (<your ezSubscribe site>/scp/admin.php) and click on the Emails tab. Click on the "Subscribe" email (typically support@yoursite.com) and enter the values in the "SMTP Settings (Optional)" and section. You will also need to enter your login info in the "Login info (optional)" subsection.

Screenshots

1. Installation integration from ezPayPal Pro Screen.
   

Change Log

Future Plans

1. Design and implement a subscription model.

History

• V1.11: Fixing another bug that caused the subscription page to be hidden. [Nov 26, 2013]
• V1.10: Various bug fixes after testing for use with WP-Plus.org. [Sep 2, 2013]
• V1.01: Releasing ezSubscribe bundled with ezPayPal. [Sep 30, 2012]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Sep 12, 2012]

Changelog

Future Plans

1. Design and implement a subscription model.

History

• V1.11: Fixing another bug that caused the subscription page to be hidden. [Nov 26, 2013]
• V1.10: Various bug fixes after testing for use with WP-Plus.org. [Sep 2, 2013]
• V1.01: Releasing ezSubscribe bundled with ezPayPal. [Sep 30, 2012]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Sep 12, 2012]

EZ Affiliate

ezAffiliates is an affiliate marketing module for ezPayPal.

Description

ezAffiliates is an affiliate marketing module for ezPayPal, which can be purchased online. Using it in ocnjunction with ezPayPal, you can turn your satisfied customers into your brand ambassidors, and get one step closer to that internet dream of going viral.

Features

1. Seamless integration with ezPayPal.
2. Email verification of affiliate registration to prevent bots.
3. Cookie-less scheme to track sales through PayPal IPN process.

Credit

ezAffiliates is a modifed version of Affiliates for All. Please refer to their extensive documentation for details.

For our purpose, we have made the following changes and additions:

1. Tight integration with ezPayPal
2. Email verification and activation of affiliate registration to prevent bots.
3. Admin account securitization.
4. Terms of Service page.
5. Modifications to the overview and index pages to help the affiliates generate links
6. Database storage for admin customization so that ezPayPal can be installed and configured from a web interface without editing any files.
7. ezPayPal look and feel modifications.
8. Cookie handling modifications for it to work with PayPal IPN round trip.
9. Banner serving can use a CDN since everybody can have a free CDN with Dropbox or a reasonably cheap one from Amazon CloudFront (preferred).

Upgrade Notice

Adding a CDN option so that affiliate banners will be served from the CDN instead of the database.

Screenshots

1. Installation integration from ezPayPal.
   

2. Log on screen.
   

3. Overview screen after logging on.
   

Installation

Note: ezAffiliates is an add-on module for ezPayPal Pro. You can install and use it only if you have ezPayPal.

1. On ezPayPal screen, click on Pro Features & Tools.
2. Log in if prompted.
3. Click on Affiliate Package button.
4. Click on the Install Affiliate Package and follow the friendly wizard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use this package without ezPayPal?

Not in the current form. A future version that can work independently of ezPayPal will be released soon.

Change Log

Future Plans

1. Improve documentation.

History

• V1.21: Adding a CDN option so that affiliate banners will be served from the CDN instead of the database. [July 8, 2012]
• V1.20: Adding a banner grouping feature. Banners can be chosen by size using a drop-down menu. [July 7, 2012]
• V1.12: Moving some static files to my Cloudfront CDN. [June 17.2012]
• V1.11: Adding changes to the overview page. [May 22, 2012]
• V1.10: Ready to cut over on buy.thulasidas.com, with affiliate support. [May 19, 2012]
• V1.00: Initial release. [May 12, 2012]

Configuration

• Affiliate Programme Name: Set this to the name of your affiliate programme. It will be shown at the top of all the screens used by affiliate.
• Affiliate Base URL: Set this to the URL of your affiliate program. This is where your affiliates log on to. If you have a domain or subdomain for it, you may want to enter it here instead of the default value.
• Affiliate Referrer Parameter: his parameter is used in affiliate links, and contains the affiliate number. For example, a link might look like http://...?ref=123 for affiliate 123.
• Affiliate Data Parameter: This parameter is also used in affiliate links, and carries the custom data from the affiliate. For example, it might contain the user search keywords, to allow for optimisation of a PPC campaign.
• Affiliate Cookie: The name of the cookie which stores the referring affiliate.
• Cookie Lifetime: The lifetime of the cookie in days.
• Cookie Domain: The hostname for which the affiliate cookie should be set. You should leave this unchanged unless your checkout is on a different domain to your store. For example, if you have
  http://www.example.com
  for your store and https://secure.example.com
  for your checkout, you should set cookie_domain to example.com. Note that ezAffiliates will not work at all if the store and cart are on completely different domains. For example, you might have
  http://www.example.com
  for your store, and
  https://example.secureserver.com
  for your checkout. This configuration will not work.
• Currency Symbol: The currency symbol as it will appear on your affiliate reports.
• Currency Code: Specify the currency SWIFT code. e.g. USD.
• The URL to your E-Shop: This should be set to the base of your shop.
• Commission Percent: You can give a fixed amount of commission per order, or you can give a percentage. If you give both, they add. Set these variables to the percentage rate and the fixed amount which you want to pay to your affiliates.
• Commission Fixed: You can give a fixed amount of commission per order, or you can give a percentage. If you give both, they add. Set these variables to the percentage rate and the fixed amount which you want to pay to your affiliates.
• Lifetime Revenue Share: If you want affiliates to share revenue for all the orders their customers place, set the following to TRUE. If you only want them to receive revenue share when customers have an affiliate cookie set on their browsers, set it to FALSE. For example, suppose an affiliate introduces customer X. X places an order and the affiliate receives commission. After that, X changes browser, meaning that he no longer has an affiliate cookie set. He then places another order. If this variable is TRUE, the affiliate receives commission on this order too (provided X uses the same account of course). If this variable is FALSE, he does not.
• Notification Email Address: If you want to be notified when ezAffiliates accepts an order, or marks an order shipped, enter an email address here
• Administrator Email Address: The following address is used as the sender for these email notifications, and also for email notifications sent to affiliates
• Order Fields Available: Affiliates can be given full or restricted information about the referred customers and their orders. The fields you want to reveal should be placed in this list
• Order Fields Headings: Affiliates can be given full or restricted information about the referred customers and their orders. The fields you want to reveal should be placed in this list
• Random RPC Secret?: RPC secret is used to secure communications between the shopping cart and the affiliate system. Setup can create a random string for you. Click on the Show button to see the random string. RPC Secret: The following secret is used to secure communications between the shopping cart and the affiliate system. Just choose something that will be hard to guess.
• Reuse ezPayPal DB credentials?: Leave this option checked to use the same database credentials as ezPayPal. You do not need to fill in the next three options then.
• Database DSN: Fill in the settings for your database below. Note that all testing has been carried out on MySQL 5.0. Specify the DSN in the format: mysql:dbname=blah-blah;host=blah-blah. The host part is usually localhost.
• Database Username: The username for your database. In most installations, they use the username the same as (or derived from) the database.
• Database Password: Specify your database access password.
• Session Cookie Name: This is the name of the cookie which is used for ezAffiliate sessions. (It is set for affiliates and administrators, but not customers of your web shop.) If you run two instances of ezAffiliates on the same domain, you should change it for at least one of them, as otherwise they could interfere with each other.
• Time Zone
• Terms of Business: Affiliates will be asked to agree to the following terms of business
• Affiliate Help: Help text to be shown to the affiliates on the overview screen. Describe your affiliate program here, and give helpful hints.
  The default entry given here is specific to our e-shop. You must edit it to suit your purposes.

EZ Support

ezSupport is a paid support module for ezPayPal.

Contributors: manojtd
Donate link: http://buy.thulasidas.com/ezsupport
Tags:
Requires at least:
Tested up to:
Stable tag: 1.10
License:

Description

ezSupport is paid support ticket module for ezPayPal, which can be purchased online. Using it in conjunction with ezPayPal, you can request that a fee be paid for every support ticket you get for your products.

If you would like to start your own paid support ticket system, you can purchase the full package of ezSupport ready-to-use online for only $12.95.

Features

1. Seamless integration with ezPayPal.
2. Configurable pricing for your support.
3. Configurable auto-closing of support tickets.

Credit

ezSupport is a modifed version of osTickets. Please refer to their wiki pages for details.

For our purpose, we have made the following changes and additions:

1. Tight integration with ezPayPal
2. Database storage for admin customization so that ezSupport can be installed and configured from a web interface without editing or setting permissions to any files.
3. ezPayPal look and feel modifications.
4. Ticket validation check to ensure that the payment has been made, and hasn't expired.
5. HTML Mail support.
6. Secure access to install.php and upgrade.php scripts using ezPayPal logon.
7. Auto-creation of help topics based on ezPayPal products.
8. Free support for purchases from the ezPayPal store during the download grace period.

Installation

Note: ezSupport is an add-on module for ezPayPal Pro. You can install and use it only if you have ezPayPal. Or you can purchase the bundled package of ezSupport and ezPayPal ready-to-deploy for a discounted price of only $12.95.

1. On ezPayPal screen, click on Pro Functions.
2. Log in if prompted.
3. Click on the Support Package button against the Paid Support Ticket System entry.
4. Click on the Install Package and follow the friendly wizard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use this package without *ezPayPal*?

Not in the current form. A future version that can work independently of ezPayPal will be released soon.

Why would I want to charge my users for support?

Not to get rich, for sure! In my case, I have a few popuplar plugins and packages out there on the net. My users kept sending me emails with questions that are clearly answered in the FAQ, documentation etc. When I got tired of cutting and pasting the FAQ answers, I decided to charge them a small amount ($0.95) per question. In fact, I didn't really charge them, I just told them that I would. And, to my surprise, my support load went down by over 90%! I wanted to use a support ticket system, but was worried that it would swamp me with frivilous tickets. A paid support model made sense in my case. Besides, it will certainly cut down on spam.

Why do the email messages from ezSupport end up in Spam/Junk mail boxes?

Depending on how your PHP installation is configured, your emails may look like spam to some of the mail sentinel out there. The safest way to overcome this is to set up SMTP for outgoing mail. Logon to your ezSupport Admin panel (<your ezSupport site>/scp/admin.php) and click on the Emails tab. Click on the "Support" email (typically support@yoursite.com) and enter the values in the "SMTP Settings (Optional)" and section. You will also need to enter your login info in the "Login info (optional)" subsection.

Screenshots

1. Installation integration from ezPayPal Pro Screen.
   

2. Log on screen.
   

3. Support Ticket page.
   

Change Log

Future Plans

1. Design and implement a subscription model.

History

• V1.10: Changes to make it compatible with the new version of DbHelper. [Nov 18, 2013]
• V1.02: Adding support for passing email as a GET parameter to open.php. [Oct 13, 2012]
• V1.01: Releasing ezSupport bundled with ezPayPal. [Sep 30, 2012]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Sep 12, 2012]

Changelog

Future Plans

1. Design and implement a subscription model.

History

• V1.10: Changes to make it compatible with the new version of DbHelper. [Nov 18, 2013]
• V1.02: Adding support for passing email as a GET parameter to open.php. [Oct 13, 2012]
• V1.01: Releasing ezSupport bundled with ezPayPal. [Sep 30, 2012]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Sep 12, 2012]

EZ Text Links

Sell text links on your website powered by ezPayPal.

This module is not ready as an EzPayPal module yet. However, we have a WordPress plugin version that works in conjunction with Easy PayPal. It is described below.

Easy Text Links

A robust and modern plugin to help you sell and manage text links on your blog.

Contributors: manojtd
Donate link: http://buy.thulasidas.com/easy-text-links
Tags: text links, advertising, revenue, ezlinks, easy text links
Requires at least: 3.5
Tested up to: 3.7
Stable tag: 1.61
License: GPLv2 or later

Description

Easy Text Links is a modern plugin to help you make extra revenue from your blog by selling text links. Text link advertising can be significantly more lucrative than contextual ads. This plugin automates the insertion and expiration of the links, and helps you with quick reminder emails to your advertisers.

Other plugins that do similar text link advertising do exist in the repository, but they are typically front ends to services that provide such links (such as Text Link Ads, for instance.) They take a significant cut of your advertising revenue (50% in the case of Text Link Ads) acting as the middlemen between you and your advertisers. Easy Text Links, on the other hand, is for those who want to interact directly with their advertisers, and keep the whole revenue for themselves, cutting the middlemen.

Easy Text Links keeps track of the expiry dates of the text links on your page, and removes them when expired. It also gives you easy means of sending a reminder email to the advertiser, block or delete the links all from your blog page itself, without having to go to the admin page. Of course, it is smart and secure so that only the blog admin with the right privileges will ever see the options to modify the links. It does all this magic using a modern AJAX/jQuery framework with an attractive lightbox effect.

If you have a popular blog, text links can potentially bring in much more revenue than any contextual advertising. In my case, the difference was easily a factor of 100. Keep in mind, however, that most contextual ad providers (such as AdSense) do not like paid link placement, for obvious reasons. Your blog may get penalized in terms page rank or search listing placement. Please weigh the pros and cons carefully before embarking on text link advertising. If you do decide to go for it, this plugin will be able to help.

Features

1. Automatic removal of your text links upon expiry.
2. Ability to send a reminder email to your advertiser with one click.
3. Ability to delete and block your links and modify their expiries.
4. Convenience of managing your links (delete, block, set expiry, email advertiser etc.) right from your blog post where the link appears, without going to the plugin admin page.
5. Attractive and modern interface with lightbox effect.
6. Highly secure and robust against potential hacker attacks and attempts to manipulate links.
7. Now available in your own language using machine translation curtsey of Google and Microsoft.

Pro Version

A pro version of this plugin is available with the following added features:

1. Fully automated link sales and expiry (with the help of the Easy PayPal plugin available at WordPress.
2. Your advertisers will see "Buy Now" buttons to purchase links.
3. Basic widget support.
4. Automatic email reminders to you and your advertiser when the links are about to expire. (WIP)
5. Choice of several attractive "Advertise Here" images. (WIP)
6. Advanced widget support with a dedicated widget. (WIP)

Installation

You can install it using the WordPress Plugins -> Add New interface.

Or,

1. Upload the Easy Text Links plugin (the whole easy-text-link folder) to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in your blog.

To use the plugin, insert the shortcode [ezlink] in a post. See the FAQ for more information.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are "Link Packages" and "Sold Links"?

Link Packages describe what you offer to your advertisers. They specify your rates and other relevant information to entice advertisers to divert some of the marketing budget in the direction of your blog. For instance, you may have these packages: (1) "AboveFold" with Price=$100, Expiry=720 (which is a month in hours) (2) "AboveFold (3mo)" with Price=$250, Expiry=2160 (three months in hours) (3) "Footer" with Price=$50, Expiry=720 and so on. You can list them wherever you want by giving the shortcode [ezlink packages]. You will also see all your packages listed on the Easy Text Links admin page in a neat table, where you can inspect, modify or delete them.

Sold Links are, naturally, the links you have sold to your advertisers. You can display them on your posts or pages by the shortcode [ezlink links]. If you want to display only a particular link (whose ID is, say, link1), you would give the shortcode [ezlink links=link1]. For multiple links, you give the shortcode as [ezlink links=link1,link2]. Again, the sold links will appear on the plugin admin page where you can manipulate them.

The links and products, when listed using the shortcode [ezlink], will be formatted as an unordered list (<ul>...</ul>).

I don't want the links to be an unordered list. What can I do?

You can specify an option in the shortcode as [ezlink option=nolist]. This option can be given with any combination of [ezlink packages], [ezlink packages] or [ezlink links=link1,link2,link3...].

How do I specify a "Advertise Here" link pointing to a blog page?

You insert the shortcode [ezlink invite] (or [ezlink advertise] or [ezlink here]) to display such an invitation.

Note that you have to create the target page/post with a title like "Advertise Here" or something similar and point to it on the plugin admin page (under the "Advertise Here" Target: option). Once that is done, your [ezlink invite] shortcode will point to that page/post. In that page, you can use [ezlink packages] shortcode to list your link packages, and give any contact details so that your advertisers can get in touch with you.

Can I have a full list of shortcode keywords and syntax?

1. List packages (within <ul>...</ul>) : [ezlink packages].
2. List all links (within <ul>...</ul>) : [ezlink links]
3. List specific links (within <ul>...</ul>) : [ezlink links=link1,link2,link3...].
4. Suppress <ul><li>...</li></ul> around any of the lists above : [ezlink option=nolist ...]
5. Advertise Here display : [ezlink invite] or [ezlink advertise] or [ezlink here]

How can I get the links or packages in a widget?

The Pro version version of Easy Text Links gives you basic support for widgets. You can use the WordPress default Text widget to insert the shortcode and it will be rendered as expected. A dedicated and multi-insertable widget with fully configurable text links will be released later.

The lite version does not offer a widget. The work around is to install the Shortcode Widget. You can then place the [ezlink] shortcodes in the widgets provided by Shortcode Widget.

I deleted/blocked a link by mistake. Now it has disappeared. How do I get it back?

Go to the admin page of the plugin, and edit the Sold Link by clicking on the edit icon (green pencil) on the floating toolbar. You can then set the status to anything other than Deleted or Hidden.

I added a link. But it doesn't show up. What's wrong?

Note that in the Pro version, you have to Approve the links before they will be displayed. This is in preparation to letting your advertisers specify link details after purchasing. You probably don't want to allow such user specified content to appear on your blog without checking. If you do, you will find an option (WIP) to allow it.

Screenshots

1. Links inserted by Easy Links Pro. Note the floating tool bar that appears when you hover over the link (if you are logged in as the admin to your blog) giving you easy access to the actions you can take.

   

2. The Admin Page. The tool bar appears as you hover over a row in the Links Packages or Sold Links table.

   

Change Log

• V1.61: Bug fix related to hidden admin page. [Nov 12, 2013]
• V1.60: Compatibility with WP3.7. [Nov 7, 2013]
• V1.51: Adding integration with stand-alone EzPayPal. [Nov 6, 2013]
• V1.50: Compatibility with WP3.6. [Aug 8, 2013]
• V1.42: Preparing automated link sales. Links need to be approved now before they appear on your blog. [Jul 9, 2013]
• V1.41: Bug fix in Easy PayPal integration. [May 20, 2013]
• V1.40: Introducing internationalization using Google/Microsoft Translate Widgets. [May 17, 2013]
• V1.34: Bug fix on displaying the link toolbar. Documentation and help changes. [May 15, 2013]
• V1.33: Adding basic text widget support. [May 14, 2013]
• V1.32: Fixing the plugin updater module. [May 13, 2013]
• V1.31: Link package expiry defaults to the Easy PayPal expiry, and the edited value is sticky. [May 12, 2013]
• V1.30: Initial release of the Pro version. [May 8, 2013]
• V1.20: Handling empty attributes in shortcode, and hidden and deleted packages. [May 3, 2013]
• V1.11: Minor bug fix. [May 2, 2013]
• V1.10: Correcting W3C markup validation errors on the admin page. [May 1, 2013]
• V1.01: Handling blocked and deleted links. [Apr 23, 2013]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Apr 20, 2012]

Future Plans

1. Templating package listing and "Advertise Here" page and link.
2. More fields in templates (BUYER, PACKAGENAME etc.)
3. Making package and link expiry specification flexible (today, tomorrow, +-nd/w/m/y)
4. Widget support (Pro version).
5. Integration with Easy PayPal (Pro version).
6. Use JSON in AJAX-jQuery communication for standard compliance.
7. Style the admin tables to match WordPress admin themes.
8. Internationalization.

Changelog

• V1.61: Bug fix related to hidden admin page. [Nov 12, 2013]
• V1.60: Compatibility with WP3.7. [Nov 7, 2013]
• V1.51: Adding integration with stand-alone EzPayPal. [Nov 6, 2013]
• V1.50: Compatibility with WP3.6. [Aug 8, 2013]
• V1.42: Preparing automated link sales. Links need to be approved now before they appear on your blog. [Jul 9, 2013]
• V1.41: Bug fix in Easy PayPal integration. [May 20, 2013]
• V1.40: Introducing internationalization using Google/Microsoft Translate Widgets. [May 17, 2013]
• V1.34: Bug fix on displaying the link toolbar. Documentation and help changes. [May 15, 2013]
• V1.33: Adding basic text widget support. [May 14, 2013]
• V1.32: Fixing the plugin updater module. [May 13, 2013]
• V1.31: Link package expiry defaults to the Easy PayPal expiry, and the edited value is sticky. [May 12, 2013]
• V1.30: Initial release of the Pro version. [May 8, 2013]
• V1.20: Handling empty attributes in shortcode, and hidden and deleted packages. [May 3, 2013]
• V1.11: Minor bug fix. [May 2, 2013]
• V1.10: Correcting W3C markup validation errors on the admin page. [May 1, 2013]
• V1.01: Handling blocked and deleted links. [Apr 23, 2013]
• V1.00: Initial release. [Apr 20, 2012]

Future Plans

1. Templating package listing and "Advertise Here" page and link.
2. More fields in templates (BUYER, PACKAGENAME etc.)
3. Making package and link expiry specification flexible (today, tomorrow, +-nd/w/m/y)
4. Widget support (Pro version).
5. Integration with Easy PayPal (Pro version).
6. Use JSON in AJAX-jQuery communication for standard compliance.
7. Style the admin tables to match WordPress admin themes.
8. Internationalization.

Page Seller

Sell your blog pages in printable PDF format so that your faithful readers can show their appreciation. Powered by ezPayPal.

This module is not ready for sale yet.