Define I Have Donated = True

As a website developer working on large scale WordPress projects I often think… Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could just turn off the donation nag for plugin X?

As a plugin developer working on a heap of free plugins, I often think… Wouldn’t it be lovely if people actually donated to these plugins?

Tonight it dawned on me that it’s high time to start a standard for these problems. Here’s what I’m proposing:

In my plugins, I’m going to start adding a donation nag / marketing space, but I’m going to wrap it in a check for a constant that you can add in your wp-config.php file to hide my nag. It’s just enough effort that you really have to think about the fact that you’re hiding a donation link so maybe you’ll actually donate. But this offers an easy way for web professionals to remove marketing crap from the UI that they are presenting to their clients.

• It’s easy to implement for plugin developers
• It’s easy to implement for website developers
• It offers an opportunity for website developers to present clean admin UI without hacking plugins
• It can be applied across an entire MU network (I hate it when plugins spam my customer’s customers.
• It forces website developers to consider the fact that they are benefitting from the plugin developer’s work and that the plugin dev would love a kickback

Here’s an example of what I’m thinking. I’m going to be adding something to the Image Widget that will add some sort of clean and simple reference to Modern Tribe and our other plugins along with a request for donations. I’ll wrap that in a constant called I_HAVE_SUPPORTED_THE_IMAGE_WIDGET.

/**
 * To hide this blurb, simply support the image widget by
 * buying one or more of the Modern Tribe premium support licenses
 * or simply donate to Modern Tribe (http://bit.ly/imagewidget). 
 * We think that $25 per single install or $200 for a MU install 
 * is completely reasonable, but it's really up to you.
 * Then all you have to do is add the following to your wp-config.php:
 * define( 'I_HAVE_SUPPORTED_THE_IMAGE_WIDGET', true );
 */
if ( !defined( 'I_HAVE_SUPPORTED_THE_IMAGE_WIDGET' ) ) {
	echo $support_image_widget_blurb;
}

What do you think?

P.S. The Image Widget, having nearly 400k downloads has probably yielded no more than $250 since it was created several years ago. The state of plugin donation is pretty abysmal. Though I have to admit that I suck at donating to plugins as much as the next guy.