I’m happy to announce I’ve finally flipped the switch on WPJobManager.com, a site which I’ve been working on for a few months now in my spare time. I felt it was about time that I had a better sales platform and a dedicated place for the plugin which has been steadily growing in popularity during the past year.
Up until now I’ve been selling add-ons via Gumroad. It’s a fun service, and it’s easy to use, but it lacks the flexibility I need. In particular I’m talking about licences. Without some kind of licencing system I have no way to verify a customer when it comes to updates and support, the sale is one off (something that’s not sustainable with this type of product), and I have no way to limit distribution of my plugins.
Therefore, I made the decision to switch over to WooCommerce (what else?) and have a proper marketplace for the plugin. Hosted on DigitalOcean and powered by WordPress and WooCommerce, WPJobManager.com is now live.
Let’s take a look at whats new.
Better docs
I’ve moved away from a GitHub wiki and put documentation on the new site to improve organisation, and make it much easier to add new documentation posts. Docs are now organised into groups as pictured. During the build I also took the time to rewrite much of the more popular documentation and add some new tutorials which should help new users and developers.
Plugin licences
It was always my intention to implement licences, but unfortunately Gumroad did not make this easy, nor did they support expiring download links. Now, powered by WooCommerce and a custom licencing plugin I built especially, I’ve implemented both personal and developer licences.
Licences entitle customers to support and updates for a year, and can be renewed for a discount when they expire via the account page.
A new add-on bundle
Something else that had a number of requests was a plugin bundle; this is something else I’ve introduced with the new site allowing customers to buy all core add-ons together at discount. Currently this is priced $99 for the personal licence and $199 for developers.
What about existing customers?
Within the next couple of weeks I’ll be importing past customers into the new system and emailing out licence keys. Until then updates will work as normal and served from the old api. Eventually I’ll update the versions on the old API to the versions with the licence key integration.
What’s next?
Now with the main part of the site is out of the way I have a few new plugins to finish off which have been on hold, and also I hope to eventually add a showcase for sites running WP Job Manager.
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