The plugin

We are proud to announce that we launched our first product easily available to the public. The package represents a WordPress plugin that allows blog owners to accept articles submitted by guests that don’t have an account in the administration area. In fact we launched the product more than two months ago but we are making a public announcement now, as we just released an update to it, adding some features that suggested by some of the first customers that chose to use it.

Availability

For this plugin we decided to take advantage of a very powerful community and marketplace: codecanyon. For those who don’t know of this great platform, codecanyon is part of a network aimed to educate developers and to give them ways to create revenue, provided by a company called Envato.

Keeping in mind that we are at our first contact with this environment we can say that we are happy with the exposure offered by them and the means to promote the products or to give support for them to the customers. This is why just now, after the first update, we decided to announce our plugin here too – we wanted to have a good understanding of the system before talking about it. Clearly the feedback is positive considering that the first features added were in fact extracted from ideas we got from the community.

Another strong point was the fact that each package published there is reviewed by a team of professionals that have a strict set of standards. They are also the ones to set the prices for products, after a process of evaluation. Because of this we considered that the simple presence of a product there is a statement of its quality and that the price is fair.

Purpose

The plugin is intended to be used by WordPress site owners that want to accept posts from their readers without the need to create user accounts for them. By installing our plugin you will then be able to place a shortcode inside a page and from that point on the guests will be able to use a form generated by the package to submit articles. The details will then be listed in a new area in your WordPress administration and any registered user with publishing privileges will be able to check the content, to edit it and to decide if it needs to be published or rejected. You can see more details about the plugin on its page on codecanyon, here and you will also be able to see a live demo showing its features.

Since we do think that eating your own dog food is a way of showing trust in your own product and a good testing method we made this feature available on this site too. So if you want to write a post for this blog we invite you to go to this page.

Support

We are actively providing support for our product and we want to help anyone with using it, hoping that we can make your experience with this product as pleasant as possible. The plugin has both a basic and an advanced documentation inside the archive you download and on a public webpage. We have also set up a test website here and anyone can use it a while before deciding if it is worth buying. Another way that might help customers understand how simple the setup is would be a short video you can find here that shows everything from installing the plugin up to publishing articles received with it.

We are offering personalized support through item comments, posted in this discussion. We think that this is an effective way to keep in touch with our customers either for helping them, or for getting much valued suggestions from them.

Please note that this blog post is just an announcement. We welcome any general opinions about the plugin as comments here but be sure to use the discussion thread mentioned above for support.

What is next?

We hope that this package will prove to be useful for site owners, as it already seems that it might be. Considering this we plan to continue giving support for the plugin and to extend it by adding features that are needed. We are also keeping an eye on the entire experience with Code Canyon and in the future we plan to publish there some other ideas we have at the moment. We are also very interested in your feedback, so if you have any opinion please feel free to let us know using the comments.

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