BroadFast For WordPress 2.2, Intelligence Module 0.8.5

An important upgrade to the WordPress autoresponder has been released and sent to eligible customers. Here are the new and improved features:

  • Now it’s easy to change the text of the “Subscribe” button or use a graphic instead of button
  • Segmentation allows you send emails only to selected segments of your mailing lists (Intelligence module required)
  • Select time of the day when autoresponder email should be sent
  • Added email sending error log
  • Added explanations about “In queue” and test “cron job” link
  • Question based captcha can be used instead of (or along with) reCaptcha
  • You can now automatically have users who subscribe to your mailing list be subscribed also to your blog (as WordPress users)
  • Email templates (Intelligence module). More info here

If you are customer who didn’t get their upgrade, please email us to get it. If your order is more than 1 year old you can renew upgrades and support for another year with 60% discount.

Someone asked us why updates aren’t sent through the WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t allow commercial plugins in the repository so this is not an option. It is not impossible to build our own update procedure but it’s really complicated work because we’ll need to also check if the user who’s getting the upgrade is active customer. Believe me, you don’t want to deal with entering license keys and problems when the domain name isn’t found in a registry. It’s much easier to delete the old plugin and install the new one once in few months.

Free PDF Bridge Plugin for WordPress Developers

Note: This plugin was initially developed for our WatuPRO customers (more info here) but it’s not limited to a specific plugin. So we are releasing it to other developers.

What Does the PDF Bridge Do?

This plugin lets you apply WordPress filter to any piece of content and convert it to PDF. Simple as that. Depending on the version you download it uses the html2fpdf library or the MPDF library.

How To Use It In Your Plugin Or Theme?

The plugin is super simple (you could very well write it yourself) and adds a filter that can be used from your plugin or theme. The filter name is “pdf-bridge-convert” and all you need to do it, is to apply it to your HTML content. Then don’t forget to output PDF headers when sending the content to the user. Here is an example assuming you have your HTML in $content:

$content = apply_filters("pdf-bridge-convert", $content);
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($content));
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
echo $content;
exit;

Download

The plugin has two versions:

  • Version 0.2 that uses html2fpdf library. It’s small (121 KB) but doesn’t work with complex designs or foreign languages.
  • Version 0.6 that uses MPDF library. It’s large (12.9 MB) but works with different languages and complicated designs.

Enjoy and let us know if you think it needs improvements.

Getting “None” for Grade/Result in WatuPRO

Here’s a frequently asked question. Why are my users sometimes getting “None” as grade/result on a quiz?

The answer is that None is shown when no grade/result matching the points or percentage achieved is found. This is always the reason, no exceptions.

So please check your grades. They must cover the whole possible range of:

a) points, if you are calculating grades by points (this is the default option)

b) percentage, if you have selected “Calculate grades by % correct answers instead of points collected”. For versions older than 4.2.5 please make sure that your percentage based grades overlap so any decimals are covered. For example if grade A is defined as 80% to 100% correct answers, then the lower grade should be defined as (for example) 60% – 80% and NOT to 79%. Versions newer than 4.2.5 will round the percent to whole number so this will not be required.

You can use the variables %%POINTS%% or %%PERCENTAGE%% on the final screen to help you figure out what is achieved by the user and why they are not getting any grade.

Please also don’t confuse category grades with global grades.