PaySwarm Plugin for WordPress

Introduction

PaySwarm enables people who create digital content such as blog posts, music, film, episodic content, photos, virtual goods, and documents to distribute their creations through their website and receive payment directly from their fans and customers. If you have a passion for creating things on the Web or would like to support people doing great things - PaySwarm is for you.

The platform is an open, patent and royalty-free web standard that enables Web browsers and Web devices to perform Universal Web Payment. PaySwarm fixes the problems with rewarding people on the web - it reduces and nearly eliminates transactional friction. It ensures that the people who you want to support are automatically rewarded for their hard work.

This technology can be integrated directly into WordPress-based websites with support for Drupal and other content management systems in the works. It has a simple, well-defined API, like Twitter, that allows for universal payment on the web.

WordPress Plugin

This is a WordPress plugin that implements a PaySwarm client. This plugin can be installed in a normal WordPress 3.x site, allowing page authors to charge a small fee for selected posts that they write.

Once the plugin is installed, the author of a post has a few options that they can use to markup the post. They can indicate the pieces of the post that must be paid for, what to display for posts that haven't been paid for, and where to place the button that initiates the payment process.

A typical post will look like this:

This is free content; anyone can see it.

BEGIN_PAYSWARM_PAID_CONTENT

This is paid content; only people who have paid can see it.

An author can also provide text that will only be shown for people who haven't paid for the post:

This is free content; anyone can see it.

BEGIN_PAYSWARM_UNPAID_ONLY_CONTENT
This is unpaid-only content; it will be hidden once the post has been paid for.
END_PAYSWARM_UNPAID_ONLY_CONTENT

BEGIN_PAYSWARM_PAID_CONTENT
This is paid content; only people who have paid can see it.
END_PAYSWARM_PAID_CONTENT

The author can also decide where they want to place the button that initiates the purchase as well as a short piece of text that will be shown beside the access button:

This is free content; anyone can see it.

PAYSWARM_ACCESS_BUTTON Fund my coffee addiction so I can post more!

BEGIN_PAYSWARM_PAID_CONTENT
This is paid content; only people who have paid can see it.
END_PAYSWARM_PAID_CONTENT

If no access button markup is specified but paid content markup is, then the access button will appear, with some default text, at the end of the post.

If you want to add a donation button to your post but keep all of the content available for free, just add a PAYSWARM_ACCESS_BUTTON and no other special PaySwarm tags:

This is free content; anyone can see it. However, please donate so I can
keep creating more great content!

PAYSWARM_ACCESS_BUTTON Donate

The price of the post, the license that is granted upon purchase, and other post-specific values can be changed on a per-post basis. Future versions of the plugin may allow authors to let their readers set their own donation amounts for articles.

Prerequisites

Before you install this plugin, you will need the following software:

1. A WordPress website (version 3.x or greater)
2. PHP (version 5.3 or greater)
3. wget
4. make

Basic Development Install

Go to your WordPress installation and run the following commands:

cd wp-content/plugins/
git clone git://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress.git payswarm
cd payswarm
make

PaySwarm Plugin Setup

To configure your new PaySwarm plugin for WordPress, you must do the following steps:

1. Register for a PaySwarm account.
2. Login as administrator on your WordPress website.
3. Go to the PaySwarm Plugin page (select Plugins -> PaySwarm).
4. Click the "Register this site" button.
5. Click the "Add Identity" button.
6. Enter the name of your WordPress website (e.g. "Good Food").
7. Select "Vendor" for the type of Identity.
8. Enter the address for your website (e.g. "http://foo.bar.com").
9. Enter a short description of your website (e.g. "Good Food strives to discover and share delicous recipes.").
10. Enter the name of your new WordPress website Financial Account (e.g. "Blogging Revenue").
11. Select "Public" for the type of Account Visibility.
12. Click the "Add" button.
13. Enter the name of your Access Key Label (e.g. "Good Food Vendor Key 2012-09-25")
14. Click the "Register" button.
15. If there are no errors when you get back to the WordPress plugin page, registration was successful.
16. Go to the PaySwarm Plugin Settings page (select Settings -> PaySwarm).
17. Set the default price for posts (e.g. "0.05")
18. Click the "Save Changes" button.
19. The PaySwarm Session widget should be automatically installed. To ensure that is installed and appears where you want it to, select Appearance -> Widgets and look for the "PaySwarm Session" widget. Drag and drop it to where you'd like it to appear. This widget will display to your customers when they are logged into their PaySwarm provider and are browsing your website.

Getting the Source Code

The source code for the PaySwarm WordPress plugin is available at:

http://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress

Building the WordPress Package

Prerequisites: wget, git, make

To build the WordPress package for distribution, you must have cloned the git repository and have the 'wget' and 'make' programs available. Type the following command to build the package:

make package

Working with the Source Code

Prerequisites: A working WordPress 3.0+ install, wget, git, make

You can clone the payswarm-wordpress git repository directly into your WordPress wp-content/plugins/ directory and hack on the plugin directly by doing the following:

cd wp-content/plugins/
git clone git://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress.git payswarm
cd payswarm
make