I have also opened up a new subscription service for you to get the latest news, expedited support in the forums, and cutting edge updates.

Screenshots:

Calendar Week View

List of Attendees

Movie Listings (in Custom Files Addon)

Vote for Event Espresso

Event Espresso has been nominated for the prestigious “2010 Plugin of the Year Award” at WordPress Honors. Please take a few minutes to show your support for Event Espresso (and any of  your other favorite plugins,) by voting.

Need a little more incentive? Each person that registers on the WordPress Honors website will be entered to win great prizes from other great WordPress theme and plugin developers.

So hurry up and cast your vote for Event Espresso and start winning prizes!

Now he has taken the events of this past weekend and has given us an example (and a plugin) of how to attach images to your WordPress RSS feeds.

In a recent blog post, Event Espresso goes head-to-head with Eventbrite. While Event Espresso boasts no per event registration fees and transaction fees and your customer’s data is stored safely on your server. Event Espresso comes out looking like the best option for a self-hosted event registration and management systems. The Eventbrite hosted event management system continues to hammer you with outrageous fees.

For a limited time, get $10 off the basic license using the discount code EVENTBRITE when checking out.

Read the full story >>

I have been following this whole episode from the very beginning. After reading the post “Syn-thesis 3: Switchers” I added my own reply about how I feel about the GPL and how it has affected my own WordPress plugin, Event Espresso. As time went on, more people added their comments/experiences with GPL compliance pertaining to how it affects their business (big or small) and why they don’t think that being GPL compliant will work for their business.

There were two comments (by Ash and Liz) in particular that I wanted to reply to, but the comments for the post were closed. So I sent Matt the following letter, via his contact form.

Hi Matt,

Sorry to bug you on your contact form. I wanted to reply to Liz and Ash about how the GPL license CAN and DOES work for small business, but I noticed that replies were turned off or not working.

I just wanted to give them an example of my situation and how I made the GPL work for my own small business.

In my situation, my web design business was not doing so well. I had a pretty hard time competing with some of the bigger web design firms in my area, as well as competition from design firms in India and other developing countries that offer much lower prices for the same work.

How does this pertain to the GPL?

Well, my wife Shelly is into stamping, crafting and scrap booking. She holds stamping/crafting/scrap booking classes and workshops in our basement about once or twice a month. Ironically, every year (over the last 5 years or so) she has an event called “Stamp Camp” where about 20-30 women show up at a local church or restaurant to learn how to make custom hand made cards, scrap book pages, and other fun stuff using rubber stamps.

I had almost given up on web development, when Shelly asked me to make her an online registration and payment system for an up-coming Stamp Camp. So I figured I would find a plugin in the WP plugin directory, but I had a hard time finding something that met her needs. So I created my own event registration and management plugin then added it to the plugin repository. After a short time, people started using the plugin and asking for more features, requesting support, etc.

As you can imagine I became pretty busy, and a few people were paying me for support or the addition of features. I started realizing that maybe I should add some of these features to a premium version of the plugin and sell a support license for it. This way I could keep the plugin under a GPL license and still make a little money for all of the hard work I had done. So I started selling a premium version (support license) of the plugin (“Advanced Events Registration“) on my blog.

How does being GPL compliant help my business?

Over the course of about six months the premium version started selling pretty well. People continued to give me great feedback and even sending me their versions of the plugin with their modified code. (I did have a little hiccup early on when someone I brought on to help me demanded I change the licensing, but I managed to overcome this poison and keep the license GPL compatible in the end (making me feel much better about the plugin and its development.))

The plugin has become very beneficial to other small businesses/organizations since its conception and is being used all over the world. Keeping the plugin GPL compatible made it possible for other programmers to change the code to suit their or their clients needs. It has also saved many businesses/organizations hundreds and even thousands of dollars a year that they would have had to pay in fees and monthly services at other event registration companies, such as Eventbrite or Reg Online.

Selling a support license for the plugin and keeping it GPL compatible has turned out to be a good move for myself and my business. It has also afforded me the opportunity to keep my business running, as well as allowing me to  keep doing what I love.

Since the plugin has started becoming more recognized. I had to come up with a better name for it, because that name just wasn’t doing it for me. So I renamed it “Event Espresso“.

How did I come up with that name?

I love coffee and often frequent the local coffee shops around town. We have a calendar hanging on our wall at home that has different Italian restaurant or cafe themes on it for each month. One month it had a couple of large coffee cups on it and in fancy writing it said “Espresso!” So I started thinking to myself, “how can I tie espresso into the name of my plugin?” Then, just like that, it hit me! Event Espresso was born.

Thanks!

Seth Shoultes

To celebrate, we offering $10 off the purchase price of premium version of the plugin, to the first 50 people! Use the discount code AER5000 to claim your discount at the time of purchase. Order now and you will also get a first look at version 3* of the new Event Espresso plugin.

*Everyone who has purchased the Advanced Events Registration plugin will also get a free upgrade to the new version shortly after release.

WP-Junkie Shoping Cart Example

Tired of adding lots of HTML button code to WordPress posts and pages?

Introducing WP E-Junkie, a quick and easy to use solution for selling product downloads using the WP E-Junkie Shopping Cart system and WordPress. All you need is an E-Junkie account, your E-junkie client id and a self hosted WordPress website.

Buttons are easily added to a post/page by pasting a small shortcode containing the product id any of your products hosted on E-Junkie.com.

The plugin is totally free and custom buttons can even be added via the plugin settings page!

Check out the new WP E-Junkie Shopping Cart, view screen shots, or see the plugin in action.

Apparently several people have had the misfortune of downloading a pirated version of my Advanced Events Registration plugin from some file sharing websites. One person’s site was entirely overwritten with spam posts and links pirated software. While another persons entire website was completely wiped out.

The website owner (whom I wont mention here) actually threatened to sue me because five years worth of content was completely removed from their blog. When I asked for a copy of their receipt from the purchase of the premium plugin. The person stated they had downloaded it from a free file hosting website. Can you believe it! So I stated the obvious, “You didn’t purchase the plugin from my website, so you will need to contact whomever you received the files from. I am not responsible for code that may be distributed by outside sources.”

Moral of the story:

Premium plugins and themes may be GPL licensed (or not in some cases.) Unless you get them from a trusted source, you may be taking a major risk using them.

Related information:

How Downloading a Premium Theme/Plugin From the Wrong Place Can Ruin Your Site

Downloading a Premium Theme from the Wrong Site can be Expensive

Download Free Premium WordPress theme :What’s the Catch?

WordPress Premium Developer and Author Piracy My Thoughts

The Ethics of WordPress Themes at a Premium