Post Pay Counter

The best way to pay authors on WordPress

Post Pay Counter caching features

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Post Pay Counter supports caching and is compatible with WordPress caching plugins.
Post Pay Counter mostly implements caching for post stats, plugin settings, user settings and active payment criteria.

Since Post Pay Counter version 2.716 (May 2017), server side caching improves stats performance significantly.

On our tests, with several payment criteria active (words, visits, Facebook shares, comments), we manage to load around 10k posts in under 5 seconds on an average VPS with memcached. Un-cached stats may take up to 15 seconds to show up though, so the performance boost is clear. Post stats caching is active by default, and its status can be tweaked in the Miscellanea >  Performance section.

The standard caching caches stats details for each post, but actually rebuilds the stats table for every visit. Websites with massive amounts of data to handle may want to also cache the whole stats page for a given view. In other words, they may take a snapshot of a particular stats page that takes long to load, and then serve it quickly multiple times after.

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Add custom statuses to Post Pay Counter stats

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This is just a quick note for developers who want to allow custom statuses in Post Pay Counter stats. By default PPC allows publish, future, pending and private, but you’ll see it’s not difficult to add your own ones. I’ll assume you are a developer, so I will only provide the details on where to hook and assume you know what to do at that point.

You will need two functions hooking to two different points:

  • Filter settings retrieval adding your custom statuses to the array of allowed ones. The filter in this case is ppc_get_settings, line 111 of classes/ppc_general_functions_class.php. Have a look at the structure of the array and add your status to the sub-array counting_allowed_post_statuses.
  • Tweak the WP_Query arguments to include your custom statuses. Here the filter is ppc_get_requested_posts_args, line 100 of classes/ppc_generate_stats_class.php. You want to edit the post_status parameter (which is an array), adding your custom ones.
    (Advanced note: don’t make the WP_Query settings-dependent. You can see that by default PPC includes all possible statuses in the WP_Query post_status parameter, and not only active ones. This is to make stats quicker, and only discard irrelevant results in PPC_counting_stuff::data2cash().

This is an example code to allow drafts to be included in stats:

 

How to pay per BBPress Topics and Replies

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It may be important for you to pay for BBPress Topics and Replies. This is especially useful, for example, if you have users on your site providing support through a BBPress forum, and want to reward them depending on the number and quality of their posts. Indeed, it is possible to pay for BBPress topics and replies with Post Pay Counter!

BBPress Topics and Replies counting typesIn fact, Post Pay Counter supports arbitrary post types, and all you need to do it enable BBPress ones.

Head over to Post Pay Counter > Options > Miscellanea > Allowed post types, and make sure you have the two fields Topic and Reply ticked, and those types of contents will be included in countings as well. You may of course enable just one of them.

And that’s it! Topic and Replies will be displayed in the Stats page just as with any other post or page.

License activation fails with timeout

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On 2016/07/20, we moved to a new server solution that should have cleared any timeout issues, both for license activation and PayPal transactions. Of course if you are still experiencing problems you can still follow the instructions below, but most issues (especially with GoDaddy servers) should be a nightmare of the past.

People who had their license manually activated may experience issues (especially with PayPal) because their license does not seem active for the license server. This can be easily fixed by deactivating your license and reactivating it.

It may sometimes happen that license requests (activation/deactivation) fail with a connect() timed out! error. This is usually due to server problems, either of your server or of our own. Letting a couple of hours pass and trying again can be a good idea, to start.

license-activation-timeoutIf you are sure that outbound connections to arbitrary hosts are allowed from your server (and please, don’t take it for granted, check it out!), then it is likely that your server IP falls in our host firewall filters. This is often the case for domains hosted on GoDaddy. Since those filters are not managed by us, there’s no way for us to to white-list your IP. One thing that could solve is to reboot your server so that a new IP address will be assigned to it.

If above advice fails, we do provide manual license activation, so that addons features can be unlocked and you can fully use paid plugins. However, please notice that features that require remote requests to our server (such as Facebook authorization, or PayPal payments) may not work, even if we manually activate the license.

However, this issue is often temporary: it may happens that after some time (couple days, couple weeks) requests get through eventually, so that all plugin features can be used. Your IP could be blocked for a short time frame and then removed.

Still, if you want us to manually activate your license, we need a temporary admin account on your site. Go ahead and open a support ticket in the right forum with our admin login credentials (remember to mark the post as private so that only support staff will be able to see it!)

Posts never marked as paid show up as paid

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Issue

Posts which you have never marked as paid show up as already paid, making the author balance incorrect (or even negative).

Solution

This problem probably happens because you use a duplicate post plugin: when you duplicate a post, depending on your settings, even the post custom fields could be copied. Post Pay Counter payment history is stored in a (hidden from editor) custom field, so that if you duplicate a post, even the payment history gets copied.

To prevent this, you need to edit the duplicate post plugin settings, adding to the fields exclusion list _ppcp_payment_history. In the following screenshot you see how Duplicate Post should be set up (look at the bottom field, under Do not copy these fields).

duplicate post settings

To fix the issue for existing posts, you need to delete/overwrite the _ppcp_payment_history meta. This will most likely require direct database access or an advanced custom field editor.