Transparency Report of December 2020

This is the 21st monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin.

What Happened This Month

Overview of What’s New

• Freemius Integration
• PMB Central Server
• $500 CAD Donation!
• Setting Up Automated Tests

The Details

Freemius Integration

I got started integrating Freemius into Print My Blog Pro. It was pretty well as straightforward as advertised with regards to the plugin (add their custom code snippet, add some conditionals for anywhere you want there to be a premium feature.) It made the plugin’s zip file 800 kB bigger, which is significant but not the total end of the world. My own additions to Print My Blog Pro (a handful of images, and a ton of code) made it a full MB bigger. But both Freemius and PMB Pro do take the plugin from being a small plugin to being much more substantial—in functionality, but also in filesize.

Anyways, I’m happy so far with integrating Freemius.

PMB Central Server

Along with Freemius integration, I also setup printmy.blog as a central server for generating the Pro PDFs. That’s been a bit more work, and I thought I had it all sorted out a couple weeks ago but turned out I’m still working on it.

PMB Central generates the PDFs by forwarding the project data to docraptor.com for which I’m paying (this month I made my first $15 payment), but have a limited number of documents per month. So each Freemius plan affords a certain number of PDFs per month or year or something, so I need to keep track of how many Pro PDFs each site makes, and how many they’re allowed to make in that period of time.

I was having the PDF usage expire when the Freemius license expired, but then it got trickier when I remembered all the free users’ licenses won’t expire (but I still want to limit how many PDFs they make in order to not use up all allotted PDFs per month.)

Anyways, it’s a bit tricky but I hope to have it resolved soon. By the way, I wrote about a technical hurdle I vanquished on my personal blog, all about using Freemius’ private keys and REST API to authenticate users on PMB Central.

$500 CAD Donation

My total donations nearly doubled this month when David Simpson sent me a donation for $500 Canadian. Phew! So that was pretty great.

Having said that, I create another graph comparing expenses, active installs and donations for 2020. You can see a significant increase on month 12 (December 2020), but ongoing expenses are still outpacing donations significantly.

So I’m kinda stupefied someone would be that generous, but a “Pro” version still, hopefully, will get cover the opportunity cost of working on this.

Setting Up Automated Tests

Some of the logic in PMB Central has gotten a bit complex, so I finally bit the bullet and figured out how to add PHPUnit tests for it, which I also blogged about on my personal blog. It took a couple hours, but I’m happy to finally have this tool for helping to prevent bugs in my code in the future.

Thinking Out Loud

What’s Next?

I keep on finding myself mentioning the upcoming Pro version in support queries because it should solve many of the pain points of Print My Blog (the WP REST API often is disabled, different browser behavior.) So I really want to get it out so folks can use it, even though I’m aware there are still plenty of things to work on.

Once I have PMB Central working (hopefully this week), I plan to:

• send out an email to the initial Founding Members containing a link to download the latest version of PMB Pro, a discount code to get a couple free Pro PDFs, and a link to the survey
• once they’ve had a few weeks to answer the survey (probably at the end of January), I’ll send out a link to download and purchase PMB Pro for a major discount to the rest of the Founding Members
• I’m sure they’ll have lots of good feedback which I’ll take a month to implement and then release PMB 3.0 on WordPress.org, which includes the PMB Pro trial (you can make Pro PDFs, but they have a watermark on them)

Please let me know your thoughts!