We have just reached 5,000 downloads of Advanced Events Registration, the premiere event registration and management plugin for WordPress.

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.

Many of you have been using the WordPress forums to ask your questions about the Advanced Events Registration plugin. The only problem with that is that I don’t know anyone has posted anything there. I try to login and check every once in a while, but that is very inefficient and some questions go unanswered. I am hoping to change this with our new forums.

So please head on over and say hello, leave us some feedback in the “Suggestion Box” or show off your site in the new “Website Showcase.”

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

I have just finished uploading the very first screen shots of version 3 of the Advanced Events Registration (now “Event Espresso“) plugin for WordPress.

With Facebook Events, you can organize gatherings and parties with your friends, as well as let people in your community know about upcoming events. The Events applications page displays your upcoming events, any invitations you have pending, and links to your own events.

This week I started exploring the possibility of auto-posting new events to Facebook. Imagine having a newly created event automatically appear in your Facebook profile. Lets take it one step further, invite everyone in your friends list to the event when the event is created. Is this possible? We will soon find out.

Using the premiere event management system for WordPress, the possibilities are endless.

I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to drop me a line and offer your suggestions. Your continued support and suggestions are what keeps me motivated to bring you the best event management system on WordPress.

Authorize.net is not the only thing that is new. I have released several other new addons recently as well. I added a “Member Integration Module” and a “Custom Files Addon” to the list of available features for the pro version of the plugin. Be sure to visit the pro version page to see more!

As well as being an important and cost effective addition to many small organizations and blog owners, it has become a very successful event registration plugin for WordPress. It all started off as a small project for my wife. She needed a simple system for people to register for her scrap booking events. Being a part time PHP developer (as well as loving  husband), I volunteered to help out. So I set out to find a solution and found a very simple Event Registration plugin for WordPress by David Fleming, but it seemed to be missing some of the basic features my wife needed for her business/hobby. We needed a way to accept payments using the PayPal IPN and a bunch of other custom features that seemed to be missing from David’s plugin. (I am not putting down David’s plugin at all, it is a very nice plugin and helped me to get moving on something more advanced.)

So I started studying the WordPress Codex and reading up on how to build plugins in the WordPress environment. After a few weeks of programming and testing. I was able to put something together based on David’s original plugin (version 1.0 I believe.) After a couple more weeks of testing I released the plugin on the WordPress Plugin Directory one year ago today (April 20, 2009.)

After almost a year of user submitted input, I was able to release the Advanced Events Registration Pro version of the plugin. Since the release of the pro version on January 28, 2010, I have made several hundred improvements throughout. One of the latest (and biggest) improvements has been a complete overhaul of all the old code. It now relies heavily upon the core WordPress functions and coding standards. Making it easier to use and more WordPress friendly. I have a Member addon almost ready. Among other things, I have added a way to include your own custom PHP functions, shortcodes, include files, and a simple template system for displaying events. All of which are stored in the “/wp-content/uploads/eventregis/” directory, so you don’t have to worry about overwriting all of your custom additions.  I am also ramping up to release alternate payment gateways such as Authorize.net, 2Checkout, and Google Checkout payment systems.

I love hearing from users, so please tell me about your experience with this plugin.

Free Analytics Tool For PayPal: AnalyzePal

If you are using the free or Pro version of the Advanced Events Registration plugin for WordPress. Then you gotta check out this app for analyzing your PayPal earnings. AnalyzePal is a cross-platform (PC or Mac) analytics tool specially built for analyzing your PayPal sales data.

Here are few of the features:

• Interactive analysis to visualize your growth by event registrations, sales, customers and country for any period of time you choose.
• The ability to generate monthly, yearly or even a cumulative balance sheet in PDF file format at the click of a button.
• Gauge your performance of your event registrations for this month and year using the two progress bars found in the dashboard.
• There is No API involved so it can handle data from multiple accounts.

If you are holding multiple events a year or even in a month. Now you can visually gauge the popularity of each and every event. Download  AnalyzePayPal for free at http://analyzepal.com/ or visit the AnalyzePayPal Blog for the most update date info!

The FREE analytics & reporting package for PayPal business data

Come to find out I was missing a space between a ‘“‘ and a ‘(‘ as seen below.

$sql_create_table = "CREATE TABLE " . $wp_table_name . "( " . $sql . " );";

Here is how it should have looked:

$sql_create_table = "CREATE TABLE " . $wp_table_name . "  (  " . $sql . "  )  ;";

Notice the spaces highlighted in green? That was the killer. So for a while, every time I added a new field to a table in database install file. For a while I was using a function (seen below) to alter the table and add the new fields.

function add_column_if_not_exist($db, $column, $column_attr = "VARCHAR( 255 ) NULL" ){
global $wpdb;
$exists = false;
$columns = $wpdb->query("show columns from $db");
while($c = $wpdb->get_row($columns)){
if($c['Field'] == $column){
$exists = true;
break;
}
}
if(!$exists){
if (!$wpdb->query("ALTER TABLE `$db` ADD `$column`  $column_attr")){
$error = 'There was a problem adding columns to the database.';
}
}
return $error;
}

So, if you are having trouble with the dbDelta function when writing a Wrodpress plugin. Be aware of extra spaces

Here is more information about the dbDelta function and creating tables with plugins:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Tables_with_Plugins

http://wordpress.org/tags/dbdelta-1

http://hungred.com/how-to/wordpress-dbdelta-function/

http://designoplasty.com/2009/05/15/not-using-dbdelta-with-wordpress/