This is the 39th monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin, documenting my journey to be fairly compensated for my time and reach 10,000 active installs.
💰 $6,024.49/$34,556.08 (fairly compensated for time)
🖥5,210/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)
What Happened This Month
Plugin Stats
Mailing List Stats
Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.
Website Visits
Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)
Freemius Stats
Freemius gathers other stats about sales and sites using the plugin.
Finances and More Plugin Stats
The Details
Microsoft Word Document Format Beta Update
The May 2022 report shared that I have a version of PMB open for testing that allows you to create Microsoft Word documents; and I also mentioned that anyone who tests would get a major discount when it’s released officially.
Well, I haven’t had anyone take me up on that offer, so I’m going to forge ahead with it myself.
For the record, I’m following the same approach as the WP GooGoose plugin, which basically saves an HTML file as a “.doc” so Microsoft will recognize it’s intended to open the file. It’s working ok but I have noticed that although Microsoft will recognize hyperlinks in the document, when it then tries to create a PDF it will lose them. This seems to be a documented bug in Microsoft Word, which is unfortunate (but kinda what you’re signing up for by using Microsoft Word).
Free Licenses for Ukrainians and Discounts for Humanitarian Aid
In April 2022 I announced free licenses for Ukrainians and significant discounts for anyone donating to humanitarian aid. That deal has now expired with no one taking me up on it.
Obviously, that wasn’t the best idea but I was pretty glad to have at least tried something.
Security and Code Style Improvements
A few months ago I submitted PMB to the ClassicPress code repository, and just last month I got a reply. They ran the plugin through the WPCS code sniffer and found a number of issues (some relating to potential security items, like “nonce checks”, and some more code style) which they brought to my attention.
So I took a few weeks in June to address them (and to setup WPCS to run on my plugin) and re-submit it.
The ClassicPress plugin review team is now looking it over, but regardless I’m happy to have taken the time to improve the plugin’s security posture and make the code more readable.
Thinking Out Loud
Struggles with Elementor
I designed PMB to create documents in such a way to integrate as well as possible with other plugins, like Elementor. However, I communicated with one Elementor user this month and see it’s not doing that well.
The problem, it turns out, is Elementor’s liberal use of flexbox, which PMB Pro doesn’t support that well when making PDFs (because the underlying technology, Prince CSS, doesn’t support that well.) The trouble occurs when there’s a pagebreak inside a flexbox, which is really quite common.
Hopefully, the underlying PDF-creation technology, Prince CSS, will have a fix soon, otherwise, I’ll need to either add a ton of CSS to pull Elementor’s content out of flexboxes, or officially say Elementor isn’t supported.
What’s Next?
Last month I said ePub footnotes was up next, but I get the sense that’s really far from everyone’s mind. (It slipped mine too this last month.) So in the absence of more feedback, I’m inclined to drop that.
I think next up will be releasing the Microsoft Word doc format.