A/B testing on WordPress: a framework for developers and tutorial

Some months ago, I changed one link in the menu in my website postpaycounter.com. After that, it looked to me more people were purchasing products, i.e. the conversion rate had increased. But how to check whther that was really the case, or if it was just an accident/impression? Use an A/B test, I told myself!

With an A/B test, half of the users are served one version of the page, the one with the old link, and half of them another version of it, the one with the new link in place. When a sale happens, we may then log that as a success for the kind of page that was used, be it the A version or the B one.

In my case, the two versions of the page simply consisted of two different links in the menu, while I wanted the success to be logged when the user purchased something (I use Easy Digital Downloads to handle purchases).

I could find a bunch of plugins that allowed to set up A/B tests, but they all seemed pretty difficult to customize from a developer perspective, and I was already seeing myself wrestling with someone else’s code that provide tons of features useless to me, but through which was nearly impossible to interact with Easy Digital Downloads. So I decided to build my own, simple implementation, with the aim of it being tailored to developers rather than users who needed an interface.

An A/B test implementation example

This is an example of how to use the little framework. To set up a test, you only need to provide two functions:

Continue reading “A/B testing on WordPress: a framework for developers and tutorial”

Tutorial: Use PayPal Adaptive Payments API (with Embedded Lightbox)

There are two things I am currently working on:

School
Integrating my Post Pay Counter WordPress plugin with PayPal, so that site administrators can pay their writers directly from their blog pages, without having to head to the PayPal website

Apparently, it turns out that you do not get to choose how much time you want to dedicate to the first point. That, matched with the fact that PayPal APIs are horrible and that the documentation is often useless, is making the whole process much longer than I thought. Meanwhile, I am sharing what I have come up with until now (which works pretty well, actually), scheduling a second part of the tutorial for when the job will be completed.

PayPal Adaptive Payments: what it is for

Adaptive payments handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. You are an application owner, such as a merchant that owns a website, the owner of a widget on a social networking site, the provider of a payment application on mobile phones, and so on. Your application is the caller of Adaptive Payments API operations.

Standing to what I have been able to discover about PayPal’s different payment mechanisms over summer, Adaptive Payments represents the most flexible way to transfer funds from one account to another. Also, it seems the only method you can effectively integrate PayPal in your application. Adaptive Payments is in fact for those applications in which your account, as application developer, is not the one you are drawing funds from. Shortly, you need to move money on behalf of someone, and your application is the intermediary.

In my specific case, I needed a way to let administrators put their credentials into my plugin and have PayPal let me get money from their accounts and transfer it to their writers’ ones. Adaptive Payments method was really suitable because it allows six transactions per each request, so that it is possible to send different amounts to several people with only one API request. As bottom line (which I did not need and did not care to dive into), it also allows Chained Payments, in which the primary receiver passes part of the payment to other receivers, splitting the original amount.

Continue reading “Tutorial: Use PayPal Adaptive Payments API (with Embedded Lightbox)”

Posts To-Do List: keep track of writing ideas

I worked for several blogs and websites. In most of them, we often felt the need to share hints and ideas about future posts, about what each of us stumbled upon while surfing. Unfortunately, there was not a great way to fulfill that need, and we often told each other via email, or emailed the admin who would in turn forward to all the writers. That is the reason why I wanted to build a WordPress tool that could simplify this sharing process.

That WordPress tool is a plugin and is called Posts To Do List.

Continue reading “Posts To-Do List: keep track of writing ideas”

Post Pay Counter: WordPress payment manager

Easily calculate and handle authors’ pay on a multi-author blog by computing posts’ remuneration basing on admin defined rules. The administrator can specify criteria upon which payments should be computed and the stats will immediately be viewable. Both a general view with all users and a specific one for a author are possible. It can easily help you implement a revenue sharing/paid to write model for your business.

Continue reading “Post Pay Counter: WordPress payment manager”