WordPress Archives - Plugin Republic

How to move domain without losing SEO or subscription payments

I recently rebranded this website, moving from one domain to a new domain. In doing so, I had three major concerns:

I’d lose all the SEO value I’d built up over the years for the previous domain – and therefore all the traffic I get from search
I’d no longer be able to collect recurring payments for plugins purchased from the site on the old domain
Users would not be able to get automatic updates for new versions of products

This is a step-by-step account of everything I did to ensure that my worst fears weren’t realised.

How to add an input field to WooCommerce cart items

This is a simple method to add a text input field to each WooCommerce cart item. Customers can enter text into the field which will be saved as meta data to the cart item – so you will receive it with the order.

Create a popular posts shortcode in WordPress

This is a useful way to display popular posts on your blog to encourage users to read more articles rather than just bounce away. Read more

WooCommerce Product Add Ons Ultimate version 2.0

Version 2.0 of WooCommerce Product Add Ons Ultimate has been released today. Read more

How to add a custom field to a WooCommerce Subscriptions variation product

There may come a time in your life when you’re working with WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions and you realise that you need to add a custom field to a variable subscription product. You can do this two ways – the easy way with a plugin, the harder way with some custom code. I’ll show both methods.

By the way, you can also take a look at this article on adding custom fields to WooCommerce variations.

WooCommerce Name Your Price

A WooCommerce Name Your Price plugin allows you to be flexible in how much you charge for your products – to such an extent that you let your customers choose how much they want to pay. You can set minimum and maximum price ranges, if you wish, or leave the price completely open-ended. You can even allow customers to set the price for optional extras within the product rather than for the entire product. Use Name Your Price to accept donations, build trust, or run special promotions.

Three steps to reduce plugin deactivations

This case study looks at the positive steps I took to decrease the number of deactivations on one of my freemium plugins. The steps are based around identifying the problem, analysing the data, and making changes to the product. There’s probably a clever acronym for this approach but I’m afraid I don’t know what it is. Read more

Add WooCommerce tags to your plugin

I wasn’t aware of these two tags for WooCommerce till I noticed one of my plugins was reporting as not tested with the latest version of WooCommerce. In your main plugin file, not the readme, you can add:

 * WC requires at least: 2.5
 * WC tested up to: 3.1

These declare the minimum version of WooCommerce that your plugin requires and the latest version it’s been tested against.

More information here.

Get next post and previous post by meta key

There are a number of standard WordPress functions to help you add navigation buttons to your posts, notably the_post_navigation which you can use on a single post to print links to the next and previous posts. However, next and previous are defined by publication date – but what if you want to get the next and previous posts according to some other parameter? Read more

How to add a forum to WordPress

This post takes you step by step through the process of adding a forum to WordPress. It’s a simple process to get up and running – in fact, it only takes one click to install a working WordPress forum. We’ll then look at some more advanced options. Read more