Pippins Plugins
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Finely crafted WordPress plugins, tutorials, reviews and more.This site has come about in part as a way for me to focus all of my custom WordPress plugin work in one location, but mainly as a resource that I hope will help to fill the gap in WordPress plugin development documentation. My goal with this website is to provide a resource for all levels of plugin development.
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
Since 2012, I have written a year-in-review post to detail and share highlights and challenges of the previous year. So as is tradition, here is my review of 2018.
Previous year in review posts: 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017
In all, 2018 was an incredibly successful year for me and my company, Sandhills Development. We had some great achievements that expanded the team, grew our revenue and profit, acquired a new product, sold two plugin products, branched out into a new market and industry, and matured as a company. We also, however, had some significant challenges that were perhaps ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
I am excited to share that WP Simple Pay has joined Sandhills Development.
WP Simple Pay, led by Phil Derksen, launched four years ago with the goal of offering a simple way to integrate Stripe payments into WordPress. It has stayed true to its goal and continues to be an excellent way to process payments and subscriptions with Stripe.
Since 2013, the team at Sandhills Development has worked to build the best products we can in eCommerce, membership, affiliate marketing, and other verticals. While doing that we’ve learned a lot about what we do well and what we’ve done poorly. We’ve also learn ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
In October, 2012, I released a plugin called Simple Google Maps Shortcode. It was a very simple plugin that simply registered a shortcode that could be used to display a Google map of any address on a post or page. The plugin was simple, efficient, and did just the one thing very well. Overtime it grew to more than 10,000 active installs and is still actively used on thousands of sites. Today I’m happy to announce that the plugin has a new home and has been acquired by WebFactory.
Gordan has already released a few updates for the plugin and plans to continue developing it into a more powerful ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
Today I’m really excited to announce the launch of a new, dedicated website for Sugar Calendar! Say hello to sugarcalendar.com.
This is the first in a large series of updates we are working on for our sweet and simple event calendar plugin for WordPress. In the coming months you will see new features released, improved interfaces, numerous add-on plugins, and a whole lot more!
Back in November, 2017, John James Jacoby joined my team at Sandhills Development specifically to work on Sugar Calendar. With the skills and experience that John brings to the table, we will be elevating ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
Full Screen Background Images Pro is a plugin I first built seven years ago that allows site owners to easily configure background images on their site that scales automatically based on the browser size. As one of my earlier plugins, I’m thrilled to announce that it has a new owner and home. Last week, Scott DeLuzio and I came to agreement for him to take over sales, development, and support of the plugin.
The plugin can now be found at https://fullscreenbackgroundimages.com/.
I am really excited to see Scott take the plugin further by adding great new features and bringing it up to date ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
As is my tradition at the end of each year, I’d like to share experiences, failures, and successes from 2017.
Previous year in review posts: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.
Personal
From a personal perspective, there’s a number of things from 2017 I’d like to share, including accomplishments and challenges.
Moving to a new home in the Kansas Sandhills
Of everything that happened in 2017, there is one single highlight on the personal side of things: getting acreage outside of my city. In June, my wife and I noticed a property for sale three miles north of Hutchinson, KS ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
Six years ago I announced the launch of premium memberships to Pippin’s Plugins for access to advanced tutorials, code reviews, and other member-only benefits. I have been continually humbled by the response and support my memberships received from the WordPress community and I would like to sincerely thank everyone that signed up. Today, however, I have discontinued memberships to this site.
My ability to consistently produce new material and to provide code reviews like I used to has continually waned as the product side of my business has grown. For a long time I held onto the hope that I c ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
About twenty months ago, while sitting on a couch in Auckland, New Zealand, my team and I flipped the switch to enable automatic renewals for AffiliateWP. Two months later we did the same thing for Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro. This was a move that we had been working towards for nearly a year and it’s one that we believed would fundamentally change the position of the company over the next one to two years. Now that it has been twenty months, maybe we can answer the question: were we right? Did it make a significant impact for us or was it all futil ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
On December 14, 2016, my team and I pushed a significant change to our Easy Digital Downloads products: we increased the price on all extensions by 50-250%. Yes, you read that right: up to a 250% price increase on certain plugins. This change was done for a number of reasons, which I will get into shortly, and has resulted in a very interesting last three months. Since I have always been very open with my company’s financials, I would like to now share some reflections on the change that we made and to also share some of the aftermath of the change.
The backstory
Since the ..read more
Pippins Plugins
3y ago
Sugar Event Calendar, my simple event calendar plugin for WordPress has just received a large update that resolves a few long-standing issues and introduces several new features, including category filtering of calendars, better mobile display, improved event list widgets, and several new calendar display types.
This release has been a collaborative effort between myself and Daniel Espinoza, who joined me to work on Sugar Event Calendar back in August of 2015, when we released the last major update to the plugin.
New calendar views
By default, the calendar of events will show fu ..read more