WordPress Timeago

Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and all the big guns are using the fuzzy date/time of type “3 minutes ago”, “10 days ago” etc. Timeago plugin allows you to use the same format on your WordPress blogs.

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter usrename and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

Click to Call

Adding click to call (click2call) capability to your blog will enable users to call you directly from your website. Clients, buyers, or shoppers no longer need to leave your website or even their computer to initiate a phone call.

WP eBay Ads

Allows you to insert a listing of related eBay products, on the single post page by using a custom field called ebay_search.

Image Zoomer

Image zoomer is jQuery zooming tool. The plugin gives any image on your page the ability to be magnified when the mouse rolls over it. The square effect uses a “magnifying glass” that appears over the image lets the user zoom in to show close-up detail of the image.

Easy Add Thumbnail

Checks if you defined the post thumbnail, and if not it sets the thumbnail to the first uploaded image for that post.

Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus implements ColorBox as a lightbox image overlay tool for WordPress

Big Maps Widget

This is a simple plugin to create a widget of Bing Maps and, hopefully, insert maps into your posts

Updated Plugins

WP-Table Reloaded

WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. Tables can contain any type of data and additional JavaScript libraries can be used to extend it with features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

New2WP Author Box

What the Author Box plugin does is it utilizes the Wordpress dashboard profile section, which is a somewhat neglected area of the dashboard. It will remove the Yahoo IM field which many may find rather useless, and adds a field for the users Twitter name. This is used to create the URL to the authors Twitter page, therefore just the name is needed, without using @.

Simple Twitter Connect

A plugin to make connecting a WordPress blog to Twitter easy.

WP Favorite Posts

Allows users to add favorite posts. This plugin use cookies and database for saving data.

WP Social Blogroll

The plugin adds a cool new blogroll that is able to display the freshness, author name and the latest post-title of your bookmarks. It enables you to sort the blogroll by the latest update of your bookmarked blogs.

WordPress Tweeter

A plugin that will update your twitter account every time you make a new post on your blog. You will be able to use your own tweet template. This plugin is released under GPL. Credit is highly appreciated. When linking to this plugin, please link to this post instead of the download link.

Bulk Delete

Lets you to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags has been updated to version 0.8. The new version adds support for deleting private posts.

Rico Tabbed Menu

This is an updated plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post using Rico Ajax.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Custom Image Sizes

Causes WordPress to create custom sizes for your images when you call wp_get_attachment_image() and related functions

Hello in all Languages

Hello in all Languages displays a “hello” word translated to the official language of the country the visitor’s IP belongs to.

Chibipaint for WordPress

This plugin integrates the java applet “Chibipaint” with Wordpress. This allows the user to draw and save their drawings directly to the server. Features included are editing and mass deletion, editable preset and user-defined templates and canvas sizes.

NdB_UserHidden

Ndb_UserHidden hides parts of wordpress posts for unidentified end users. By surrounding private text with [hide] and [/hide] tags you can force guest users to register and login to view member-only content. This plugin is interesting for webmasters that want to expand their user base for newsletters and other purposes. For download sites it will force users to identify themselves before downloads are shown.

WordPress Tweeter

WordPress Tweeter is a plugin that will update your twitter account every time you make a new post on your blog. You will be able to use your own tweet template.

Updated Plugins

WP Minify

This plugin helps you easily integrate the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator (TOCC) automatically generates a highly customizable dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. All entries are navigable making your site very SEO friendly. TOCC can be configured to display static pages, blog entries and forum comments.

NextGEN Gallery

A photo gallery management plugin

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Email and normal links are obfuscated, hiding them from spambots. It automatically encodes each link, then uses JavaScript to decode and show them. Disabled JavaScript users get access to obfuscated links too.

Hikari Titled Comments

Hikari Titled Comments enables each comment to have a title, so that commentators can give a subject meaning to their comments

WP-ZoomImage With CopyProtect

You can pop up an image or thumbnail by just clicking on it and it will disappear when you click it again

Titled Comments

Hikari Titled Comments enables each comment to have a title, so that commentators can give a subject meaning to their comments.

Scroll to Top Plugin

Integrate a jQuerry scroll to top control in WordPress manually

Tweet my Script

This plugin watches your Twitter RSS Feed for user-defined “launch codes” to trigger user-defined script URLs.

Dojo Skew Gallery plugin for Wordpress

This is a plugin to create a skew photo gallery utilising Dojo Toolkit Ajax.

Updated Plugins

AVH Extended Categories

The AVH Extended Categories Widgets gives you three widgets for displaying categories.

Smarter Navigation

A WordPress plugin that generates previous & next post links based on referrer. Version 1.2 adds a utility for posts in multiple categories.

SEO Automatic WP_CORE_TWEAKS

Extends built-in features of Wordpress and combines common plugins into one.

WP ImageTagger

This extensively configurable plugin comes packed with a bunch of features enabling image tagging, including search and image taxonomy.

So if you have been having problems with NUS, update to the latest version (1.3.0) and the issues should be solved. Do let me know if you have any problems with the latest update.

A few notes:

• Support for Old FeedBurner accounts has been dropped in v1.3.0, please upgrade your account to a Google account before using NUS.
• NUS will only work on sites with cUrl support.
• Support for additional languages coming in future versions.

Note: I have not used WP_Http as there are problems with fsock and other http methods, it only works for cUrl right now. However, the plugin does contain a file which uses WP_Http which will be used in future versions.

You will get a dashboard notice to update the plugin, if you don’t you can download Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers v1.3.0 from here.

Wordpress External Cron

Allows you to setup a cron to fetch any page on the server

PuSHPress

This plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.

Block Bad Queries

Protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests

Image Space Media

The ISM plugin optimizes your Wordpress blog for Image Space Media’s in-image advertising technology. With the ISM plugin, Wordpress users can seamlessly integrate Image Space Media’s in-image advertising solution into their website and generate ad revenue.

Easily navigate pages on dashboard

Display a folder tree of your pages that is easy to expand and contract on your Dashboard. Designed for people that use Wordpress as a content management system.

MySQL Profiler

WordPress is extremely flexible. However, flexibility generally brings about the issue of performance. WP MySQL Profiler is a simple plugin that assists in improving performance of themes and plugins.

Updated Plugins

Easy Review Builder for WordPress

Create attractive star ratings for reviews. Supports multiple rating categories and an optional auto-calculated summary

Dynamic “To Top”

Adds an automatic and dynamic “To Top” button to easily scroll long pages back to the top.

123 Flash Chat

123 Flash Chat WordPress Plugin can be used to create your own chat room in WordPress. It allows you to insert chat room to your sidebar, with either a lite chat client or a link to standard chat client in popup mod. And you can define the width and height of 123 Flash Chat as well as its skin & language. The chat room displays a “hosted by 123flashchat.com free of charge” message.

Asynchronous Widgets

Allows you to have any registered widget on your WordPress.org-powered site be loaded asynchronously via an AJAX call.

WP-Tabbity

Allows authors to create one or more tab groups containing one or more tabs, animated by the WordPress-included version of jQuery.

WP Function Reference

Provides a box on the dashboard with a list of the functions that are available for you to use in your Wordpress installation

Disable WordPress Updates

Disables the theme, plugin and core update checking, the related cronjobs and notification system.

Updated Plugins

SEO Ultimate

This all-in-one SEO plugin can handle titles, meta, noindex, canonical tags, 404 monitoring, linkboxes, robots.txt, and more. Version 1.6 can import data from All in One SEO Pack.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin which lets you to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags has been updated to version 0.7. The new version supports moving to trash instead of deleting and batch updates.

Rico Tabbed Menu

This is a simple plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post using Rico Ajax.

WP Google-buzz

Automatically displays Google Buzz button for every post. Google Buzz is shaping up to be an interesting new way to share content with your Gmail friends, so why not have a button for sharing blog posts/pages to the service.

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads

Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.

Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images from the current page and display simple slide shows, all in an overlay.

Flickr Digest

A simple to use WordPress plugin based on Flickr API which digests all your photos posted in last X days in a single post periodically.

Feed Thumbnails

This plugin simply adds your post thumbnails to your RSS feed as enclosures. Nothing else to it.

Simple Twitter Connect

Simple Twitter Connect makes it easy to integrate your site with Twitter, in a wholly modular way.

Updated Plugins

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin obfuscates emails and URL links, to hide them from spam harvesters and Search Endigne crawlers. It uses ROT13 or cc8b to encode each link while PHP is building the page, then uses JavaScript to decode it and show it to the user. If JavaScript is not available, it uses CSS to hide them.

Rico Tabbed Menu

This is a simple plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post using Rico Ajax.

FAQ You

A simple FAQ plugin where you can create Categories and put Questions in them. You can easily insert them in a page with the WYSIWYG editor. Able to turn JavaScript on or off.

WP Google-buzz

Google Buzz. Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + admin panel options (Settings -> WP Google-buzz) + 14 diff button images + mouse over effects.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Simple:Press Forum

Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilising the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page.

Because I realized how much more I’ve been able to do with almost every site I’ve built in the last two years thanks to plugins, I decided to try to start a movement, not out of guilt or self interest, as I have never released a plugin, but rather out of gratitude to the plugin developers who give us their code and in most instances get nothing in return. They do so of their own free will and (in my opinion) should not “expect” anything in return when they do (and most of them don’t), but that doesn’t mean that our thanks aren’t appreciated and won’t go a log way toward keeping things going, to our benefit and theirs.

So I’m asking anyone that has ever gotten even the slightest benefit from a WordPress plugin to say thank you on March 1st by making a small donation, $5 (more if you like) to the plugin/developer of your choice.

I’ve personally committed to $100 to 20 different developers.  If you have little extra money in your Paypal account, or can simply find a way to reach out and say thank you I’m confident it will be appreciated.

Almost as importantly, we need your help spreading the word! Help us to do so by blogging about it, tweeting it or promoting the idea anyway you can think of.

This isn’t intended to make anyone rich. It’s simply intended to say thank you and celebrate the often unsung friends who enable our websites to do so much more than just be blogs.

Twitter Hastag: #wppdd

If you choose to make a donation on March 1st be sure to tweet it and let us know what plugin you donated to help spread the word, I’ve got some suggested language on my original post about WordPress Plugin Developer Day.

Hopefully this will make you feel as good as it does me, they deserve our gratitude.

Mloovi Translate Widget

The Mloovi widget allows you to easily add links to 52 different language versions of your blog and RSS feeds.

Online Backup

The plugin allows online backup as well as email backups both on demand and scheduled. Put your backups on auto pilot with 50 MiB of free space and encryption. Save time and protect your blog from lost info. You will need to register for a free account.

WP Comment Pages

Your users can link directly to an interesting comment, instead of the whole article.

InvestorGuide.com Stock Ticker Link

This plugin automatically looks for ticker symbols like (AAPL) or (GOOG) and link the tickers to research pages at InvestorGuide.com

WordPress Exploit Scanner

This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Updated Plugins

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator plugin generates simple Archives/Sitemap based on your blogs posts and pages. This is not another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a nice post sitemap or page sitemap generator. Now user can show total comments count after posts.

Top 10

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies

Grooveshark for WordPress

The Grooveshark plugin is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to insert a link to music on Grooveshark or a Grooveshark Widget that allows visitors to play music as they view your blog.

WatchCount.com

The WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin (WCCWPPI) is a plugin that allows you to display Most Popular eBay items and auctions in real-time, directly on your blog. You can also display eBay items from any particular seller.

Front-end Editor

A WordPress plugin that enables “edit in place” functionality on your site. Version 1.7 adds support for changing post thumbnails, as well as editing site options.

TagSpace

The TagSpace widget lets visitors browse your Wordpress categories dynamically in 3D! Clicking the mouse on the lower half of the screen to move forward.

WP Google-Buzz

Google Buzz. Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + admin panel options (Settings -> WP Google-buzz) + 11 diff button images + mouse over effects.

All in One Webmaster

It has option to add Google, Bing, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code. Single click sitemap submission to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. In addition to that it has option to add tracking code for Clicky, 103Bees analytics!! Site-Verification-Option, Google XML sitemap submission

Most analytics software do provide users with plugins to insert code into themes, but why use plugins to insert simple HTML code into your theme? I have been using a very useful plugin called Footer Stuff (WP repo link) which allows me to add code to the header and the footer of the site without having to manually edit the theme.

The best part of the plugin though is the fact that it will insert the code into the theme no matter how often I change the theme without having to constantly edit the theme.

Footer Stuff Walkthrough

Head over to the plugins page in your admin dashboard and do a quick search for footer stuff, install and activate the plugin and you are ready to add code to your theme.

An option to personalize footer stuff is present under Appearance. Clicking on the Footer Stuff link will display a HTML form containing two text boxes. The box on the top is to add content to your footer, and the second one is to add content to your header.

Once you add the code you want, footer stuff will automatically insert it into your theme, no matter which one you use. However, your theme needs to make use of the functions wp_head() and wp_footer(), without which the plugin won’t work.

Overall I found the plugin to be very useful. Also considering that many people do not have the skills to edit HTML and PHP files, they can do away with several plugins by using this plugin, all you have to do is copy the code from the source and then add it to footer stuff.

Have you used this plugin before? If not, will you use it to simplify theme edits? Do let me know.

WP Google-buzz

This plugin automatically displays Google Buzz button for every post and pages.

Receive Links

Integrate a WordPress site with the Receive Links Link Exchange Network. This plugin works with widgets or in the footer. You need a Receive Links account.

WP Sitemap

A HTML sitemap with both post and pages. Easy to implement, just add a shortcode tag in a page. [wp_sitemap] You can add parameters to change the sitemap, exclude, include, sort and paging and so on.

Taxonomy Images

The Taxonomy Images plugin allows users to associate images from the Media Library to categories, tags and custom taxonomies.

Flickr Digest

A simple to use WordPress plugin based on Flickr API which digests all your photos posted in last X days in a single post periodically.

Page.ly MultiEdit

The MultiEdit plugin creates tinyMCE editable regions or “blocks” inside a page template. This is great for creating a template specific content block outside of the normal the_content() output. Perfect for creating two column single page layouts etc.

Updated Plugins

Shashin

Shashin is a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you display Picasa photos, albums, and videos anywhere in your WordPress site.

WP-UserOnline

This plugin enables you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress site with detailed statistics of where they are and who they are (Members/Guests/Search Bots).

AVH Extended Categories

The AVH Extended Categories Widgets gives you three widgets for displaying categories.

Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Wp-PreventCopyBlogs

Prevent and CopyProtect Your WordPress Blog from fraudulent copies.

With so many articles about not using WordPress plugins, it just begs the question: “What’s wrong with WordPress plugins in the first place?”

I personally love my installed plugins. I have 25 installed on my personal blog, and I couldn’t live without a single one of them. If you venture off to Jeff Chandler’s site, he has 31 installed. Are we freakin’ nuts, or what?

So what’s the deal with all these “without a plugin” posts? I mean, you don’t see plugin authors posting, “How to accomplish ‘xyz’ without a WordPress theme” do you?

Okay, I’m slightly kidding, but this question needs to be asked: “What benefit is there to integrating a plugin into a theme?”

Does the theme load faster? Will there be support for the extra functionality? Will the plugin be better integrated as far as appearance?

Granted, there are many good reasons to integrate some plugin functionality as part of a WordPress theme (breadcrumbs anybody?).

The problem I foresee cropping up, however, is the user becoming too reliant on the theme for functionality that a WordPress plugin should ideally provide. As a result, that user may be ‘locked in’ to using the theme, whereas others can easily change out their theme without sacrificing functionality (if you’re like me, you go through 2-3 themes a year).

An argument for plugin integration is that of WordPress frameworks. Since frameworks typically rely on child themes for the appearance, the user doesn’t need to change the theme; The user is afforded the functionality of built-in plugins, and the flexibility of changing out themes.

An Exercise for the Reader

Okay, you’ve heard my spill on plugin integration. As an exercise for the reader, please consider the following and join me in the comments section:

• What types of plugins should be built into themes?
• What benefits do built-in plugins provide for you?
• How far should theme frameworks go to limit the need for plugins?

And lastly, are plugins evil?

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Spam is website publishers #1 concern, we wanna share our and our visitors’ emails to those who should have access to them, but don’t want spam harvesters stealing them and sending garbage to us. A lot of techniques had been developed to hide our emails from these delinquents, while having them shown to real people.

Devel

Devel is made up of development oriented administrative components for developers and power users who need more control over their WordPress site. Features are seperated into components which can be enabled or disabled. In addition, devel has an intuitive API for adding your own custom components into the mix using the devel components API.

Adeel’s Zodiac Calculator

A sidebar widget that displays your visitors’ Chinese and/or Western zodiac signs based on their date of birth without reloading the page.

Digital Raindrops CMS Lite

This plugin gives additional sidebars, content panes and templates for your Artisteer Theme.

Disable WordPress Version Updates

WPC Disable Wordpress Version Updates removes the Wordpress update feature.

Updated Plugins

Top 10

Track daily and total visits on your blog posts and display the count as well as popular posts.

Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post.

WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Historical Comment Count

Allows the website owner to track the number of published comments on their blog over time.

WP-Task-Manager

Wp-Task-Manager is a plugin for wordpress which add a small task manager inside the administration panel.

To do list

This plugin provides users with a to-do list feature. You can configure the plugin to have private to-do lists for each user or for all users to share a to-do list. The shared to-do list has a variety of settings available. You can assign tasks to a specific user and have only those tasks that were assigned viewable to a user. You can also assign different permission levels using capabilities.

Leave-a-Note Visual Commenting

Leave-a-Note is a plugin for Wordpress, that transforms your comment section into a visual representation, making each comment a little post-it notes.

PHP Browser Detection

This plugin provides a number of template tags to get browser info, including conditional statements to test for each browser, versions of Internet Explorer, mobile browsers, and iPhone visitors.

Technical Support

Technical Support for WordPress is a way to provide quality support to your clients. After setting up a WordPress powered website for your client, install the Technical Support plugin, which will enhance your client’s Dashboard with a new widget for submitting support tickets directly to your e-mail.

Geolocator

This is a plugin that displays a “worksheet” for verifying and researching addresses with Google Maps.

Updated Plugins

WP Table Reloaded

WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. Tables can contain any type of data and additional JavaScript libraries can be used to extend it with features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML

Store Locator

Effectively manage and display your important stores, locations, or other points of interest on a website in an easily searchable manner using Google Maps.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies.

DG Auto Login

Auto-login as guest or any other user you wish in your wordpress blog from your friend, ally or network website.

WP htaccess Control

Provides an interface to add custom htaccess rules to the htaccess file generated by Wordpress. It also includes Custom Author Permalink.

OnlyWire for WordPress

OnlyWire syndicates your blog posts to over 30 social networking sites *simultaneously* with one button click. Increase your blog traffic overnight.

As a plugin author myself, I’m not surprised by this news. With the world economy still in the pits, more plugin authors are feeling the crunch. While they would like to release free plugins for all, at the end of the day, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed.

Within this article (rant?), I will go over the types of plugins I would pay for, an argument for paying for plugins, and go over several business models I see popping up.

Plugins I Would Pay For

Here are several categories that make a plugin something I would pay for (yours will undoubtedly be different).

• The plugin is a timesaver – Plugins such as Akismet and WP Spam Free save me from having to deal with SPAM.
• The plugin provides peace of mind – Plugins such as WordPress Database Backup and W3 Total Cache provide peace of mind. My data gets backed up, and my blog is protected from an influx of traffic.
• The plugin helps my readers – Plugins such as Subscribe to Comments, PageNavi, Related Posts, Popular Posts, and many others that improve the reader experience.
• The plugin makes something complicated simple – I’m thinking of creating XML Sitemaps, creating forms (cformsII or Gravity Forms), or listing podcasts (PodPress).
• The plugin fills a unique niche – An example includes the WP Touch plugin, which is for mobile users of your WordPress-powered site.

An Argument for Paying for Plugins

In 2009, we saw the premium theme market jump into the stratosphere.

Jeff predicts the same for plugins in 2010.

One thing that has always confused me is that a lot of the “free plugins forever” advocates have a different opinion towards paying for themes. Why is that so?

Unless you purchase the theme’s developer license, you only get to use the theme on one site. And if you’re like me, you probably go through three (sometimes four) themes a year (I’m never satisfied!).

A plugin, however, is there before, during, and after the theme switch. I can use it on more than one site (if the license permits), and upgrading it is much less of a hassle than themes.

On my personal site, I’ve pretty much had the same plugins for 3-4 years running. If I were to pay for those plugins, that’s a good return on investment in terms of mileage.

For those who would never consider purchasing a plugin, remember, as the economy gets worse, your favorite plugin may be the next to get abandoned by its author for financial reasons. It’s not at all uncommon, and I would argue that this is the rule, not the exception.

Plugin Business Models

Over the past year, I’ve observed several plugin business models crop up. I will go over these briefly and weigh in on each.

Donation Model Only

Some plugin authors still choose to rely on donations for plugins. For a minority of plugin authors, the amount of donations is sufficient.

However, I haven’t experienced success with the donation model, even after pushing it heavily. My most popular plugin received 1-3 donations every six months.

Free Plugin – Charge for Support

While some plugin authors have been successful in charging for support, for the most part, users download the plugin and move on.

An example is providing a download link for the plugin, and charging the user a subscription fee for support forums.

One thing I don’t like about this model is that it reinforces the fact that the time to take coding/updating the plugin is trivial. Sure, support takes up time, but maintaining the plugin takes up a lot of time also.

Free Plugin – Charge for Add-ons

Another model I’ve seen is a plugin being provided for free, but add-ons for the plugin are an extra fee.

If the plugin proves popular enough, and the add-on is a must-have, you’ll likely find great success with this model.

The time you spent coding the “base” plugin will be offset by the income you receive from the add-ons.

One-time Fee for Plugin – Extra for Support

Another model I’ve witnessed is the user being charged a set fee for the plugin. If the user wants support, the user must subscribe to a forum of some sort.

I personally disagree with this model as the user often pays more for support than what the actual plugin is worth.

It’s also my opinion that if you charge for a plugin, support must be included.

One-time Fee for Plugin – Support Included

A model I’m fond of is just outright charging a fee for the plugin with support included.

The downside of this model is that the user should expect a higher price. Since the user is paying only one time, the higher price compensates for all the support the user is expected to have over the lifetime of the plugin.

Typically the price goes higher for additional site licenses, as support is expected to increase.

Subscription Based Model

A subscription-based model allows you to spread costs across all of the subscribers. The goal here is to gain as many subscribers as possible by charging a low price.

As a result, support and upgrade costs will be spread amongst all subscribers, where each subscriber gets the overall benefit. And since some subscribers will stick around for the next billing period, there is constant revenue.

One thing to include is to have a “Buy Out” option, which will allow users a lifetime subscription for a set fee. This is the One-time Fee option, so the price will be dramatically higher than a subscription cost.

I personally chose this model for my first premium plugin and it has been fairly successful so far.

Conclusion

Within this post, I went over the types of plugins I would buy, my reasons for purchasing a plugin, and the various models I’ve seen crop up.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these topics.