Rebuilding my plugins
I will be rebuilding the Verse-O-Matic and the Affiliate Cloak (ClickBank) plugins. Around WP version 2.5 some changes were made that caused the installation of these plugins to not work correctly. Long story short, it centers around the installation of a database table that each of them use.
I will probably utilize the wp_options table rather than put in a new table. With that, I probably will include an option to completely uninstall the plugin, including emptying the values from the wp_options table. (Don’t you just hate it when plugins leave huge amounts of data in your database even after you’ve uninstalled them? I know I do.)
Anyway, this has been bugging me for some time, but I just have not had the time to work on the project. But I really want to get it fixed so these are useable plugins. Then I’ll get them moved over to WordPress.org.
New ClickBank WordPress plugin prerelease
This is the new WordPress plugin for ClickBank users. It allows you to mask or cloak your affiliate links to prevent link hijacking. This is the “prerelease” in that I wanted to get it out and posted, but I haven’t completed the readme file (and a Quick Start Guide). There is a section within the plugin file itself that provides installation and usage instructions. When I finish the additional documentation, that will be added and I’ll update this post.
(If you’re a bot or scraper, or otherwise one of those people that likes to download plugins to provide on your site, don’t waste your time linking to the following file, it will not be the final link when the final release is published.)
Here are the installation and usage instructions that are included in the file:
INSTALLATION:
- Copy this file to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
- Go to the Plugins tab in your WP admin panel
- Find “Affiliate Cloaking Device” and click “Activate”
USAGE:
- Go to the “Options” tab in your WP admin panel and select the ClickBank subtab
- After initial install, you will need to add your affiliate ID
- Determine if you want links to open in a new window or not and set appropriately
- Add ClickBank program(s) to your list
- Once you have at least one program added to the list, you can cloak links in your posts
- To add a cloaked link, add the following to your post:
[text-that-is-displayed|program ID #]
If you wanted the link to read “Learn to make money blogging” and the program ID
from your list was 5, you would type the following in the WP visual editor:
[Learn-to-make-money-blogging|5]
Note: be sure to include the brackets!! - If you have a long list of programs, or forgot the id number for a specific program, don’t worry, there is a dropdown list added just below the WP visual editor for writing and editing both posts (currently, this feature shows only in posts, not pages. However, the cloaking device works and may be used in pages, you just can’t see this helper list in the editing area).
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