Episode 70: Mailbag – Plugin Pirating, Caching, Project Management

Today’s episode is brought to you by SearchWP. This is a plugin for WordPress that improves search functionality within the platform, allowing you to create distinct search engines, assign priority, and much more. Check out

On today’s podcast, Brad and Pippin are answering questions from our listeners and followers.

Here is some of what you will hear answered:

Plugin piracy: How Pippin and Brad deal with it.

Marketing and sales flows: How Brad and Pippin manage their marketing.

How Redis Cache can be used for WordPress and an explanation of object caching.

The recommended roadmap for a PHP developer to become a WordPress plugin developer.

Technical information about plugin updaters, slugs, and what takes precedence with WordPress.org.

How Brad and Pippin handle project management and how they decide on features.

Links and Resources:

Redis Cache

BuddyPress

A CDN Isn’t a Silver Bullet for Performance

Trello

GitHub

Slack

Zapier

Baremetrics

Calculate What Feature to Build Next

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 70. This time Pippin and I will be answering listener questions. But first–

PIPPIN: This episode is sponsored by SearchWP, a plugin for WordPress that dramatically improves search functionality within WordPress. It allows you to create custom search forms to search within files such as PDF files or text documents. It allows you to create distinct search engines, so you could have, say, one search form that searches your products and then another search form that searches your blog posts or the other pages on your site. You can weight searches so that you can say that, like, taxonomy terms are more important than meta values or post content. It’s a really powerful search plugin from Jonathan Christopher, and it is available at SearchWP.com. If you haven’t checked it out yet, definitely go take a look.

BRAD: Awesome. Let’s get right into it. I’ll read the first question here. “How do you deal with plugin pirating? Any thoughts to share?”

PIPPIN: Well–

BRAD: Oh, boy.

PIPPIN: I think anybody who has built a commercial plugin that has received any more than maybe five customers has probably dealt or seen pirating to some degree. Now we should probably be careful on using the word “pirating” because technically sharing GPL code is not really pirating. But, overall, the general idea is you have a commercial plugin that you sell, whether it’s through your own site or CodeCanyon or any other website, and somebody either buys it or obtains a copy somehow and then resells it or redistributes it through another source without giving you compensation for it is what I think people are typically referring to when they say plugin pirating. What’s your experience been?

BRAD: We’ve only had one that I’m aware of, one instance of this. And what the person did is they took WP Migrate DB Pro.

PIPPIN: Hold on. Do you mean only one instance that you know of where your plugins where ever redistributed or only one that was problematic?

BRAD: Yeah, that’s — I don’t know of anyone else sharing our plugin. I’m sure it’s happening. I just don’t think it’s gotten enough attention that I’ve become aware of it because–I don’t know–I don’t go out there hunting for these folks, right? I don’t make it kind of my philosophy. It’s just to just kind of accept that a little bit of that is going to happen, right? It’s always happened with software, right? Anything digital is going to get passed around. So, okay, fine.

When it becomes a problem for us is when someone would take it and then they pass it of