Pippin Williamson is a man on a mission. A humble, soft spoken exterior camouflages an inner brilliance which mere mortals might only aspire to comprehend. For those in the Foreclosurepedia Nation whom break bread with me, you know that my compliments are very few and far in between — Pippin Williamson stands upon the shoulders of giants in my world. I like to think of him as the protagonist on Limitless — primarily, the evolution of man at the end of the movie. Pippin is additionally a legend in many segments of the WordPress Community. Fact of the matter is that in the same way that WordPress powers right around thirty percent of all websites on earth, so to many of those websites run either a Plugin designed by Pippin or have benefited from the code which he has developed.
A fact about Pippin which goes unnoticed is that this Midwesterner — Pippin hails from Hutchinson, KS — brings the same kind of talent to craft brewing as he does to coding! He runs a pretty cool Brewing Blog over at Sand Hills Brewing. Check it out if you want to get thirsty. Unfortunately, for my Linux Readers, there is no wget option to grab a pint! 😉 Pippin is also handy around the wood shop which will sell well with many of the Foreclosurepedia Nation!
And on that same note, Foreclosurepedia is happy to announce we have shifted all of our operations over to our new Ubuntu *Nix Servers here at the Foreclosurepedia GHQ — this includes everything on our LAN/WAN Networks! That includes the publishing of this Article. 🙂
As most of the Foreclosurepedia Nation knows, we are pushing the envelop 24/7/365. When we implemented WordPress as our Content Management System (CMS) we realized, early on, that a Membership Based Environment was mandatory in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Pippin’s Restrict Content Pro (RCP) was the obvious choice. When Foreclosurepedia determined the need to begin delivering downloads to the Foreclosurepedia Nation, Pippin’s Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) was the obvious choice. And when Foreclosurepedia began to stream both data and the Foreclosurepedia Podcasts from Amazon S3 Servers with Amazon Glacier incorporation, where did we turn? Yup, Pippin Williamson. Pippin already had developed the EDD Amazon S3 Plugin Add On.
And a kick ass note on this Add On, it allows the streaming of data from the Media Area and auto embeds it whether you are using EDD or not! Pippin has over a hundred add ons — I gave up count by Page 4 of 7 — and a plethora of other Plugins on his main website.
We caught up with Pippin last week and sat down with him to put some questions which both ourself and Members of the Foreclosurepedia Nation were interested in having answers to:
What sparked your interest in WordPress?
It started near the end of high school for me when I was beginning to build websites for clients. My early sites were all built in straight HTML and CSS but I gradually transitioned to building everything in WordPress after my brother (who ran his site on WordPress) convinced me to start learning it so I could make improvements to his site.
After building my first few sites on WordPress, I was hooked and haven’t looked back since.
What was the genesis to begin Plugin Development?
For me, plugin development didn’t come until I had been actively building sites on top of WordPress for two years. During my second year at the University of Kansas, I built a site for a client that needed some custom functionality. At the time, I didn’t know anything about plugin development, so I built the features directly into the client’s theme. This worked well enough that I went on to write a tutorial about how I built the feature and published it on a website ran by Michael Martin called Pro Blog Design, http://problogdesign.com. Enough people requested a plugin version of the tutorial that decided to go ahead and figure out how to write one. Turned out to be dramatically simpler than I expected. I promptly built several more plugins and haven’t stopped building them since.
Tell us a little bit about the plugins you have developed and the Timeline.
There are too many to list them all (more than 200), but I can highlight a few of my favorites.
The very first plugin I wrote was called Font Uploader. it allowed site owners to upload custom font files to their site and then apply the fonts to specific text elements on the page. Font Uploader was around until early 2014 when I discontinued it. Along with being my first plugin, Font Uploader was also my first foray into commercial plugins and the very beginning of my plugin business, which I still run today.
Restrict Content Pro was the second large plugin I built and was the one that really helped me turn plugin development into a full time career. It was first released in January of 2012 and is still very actively developed today. I have since built plugins that have greatly surpassed the monetary value of Restrict Content Pro, but RCP was the one that really transformed my business from a hobby into a full blown business.
My largest plugin, and the heart and soul of my business today, is Easy Digital Downloads, an eCommerce plugin for selling digital products. It began in April of 2012 and is still very active today. Easy Digital Downloads helped to define my business and is reason my business went from being run by a single person to a team of more than 10.
The next major plugin I built was AffiliateWP, a plugin for managing an affiliate program inside of WordPress. It is my most recent large project and is just over a year old, but is already one of my most valuable products.
I have built and released many, many other plugins, but a few of my personal favorites include Transients Manager, Simple Post Expiration, bbPress Private Replies, and Simple Google Maps Short Code.
What was the driving force behind RCP and then the assortment of Add Ons to RCP?
When Restrict Content Pro was launched, I was in the middle of launching a subscription service on my own website, pippinsplugins.com. At the time, I really wasn’t very happy with the available options for running a subscription site on WordPress, so I chose to build my own (Restrict Content Pro).
I have always believed that one of the best ways to build a great product is to build one for yourself. Restrict Content Pro was built for me and then released as a stand alone product for everyone else.
Where do you see WordPress, as a CMS, in two years?
There will be a continued drive to make WordPress better and better, but of all areas that WordPress will likely go, I suspect eCommerce will play a very large role, especially with the recent acquisition of WooThemes/WooCommerce by Automattic.
How are you able to keep such a High Quality Product like RCP so reasonably priced?
Pricing is difficult but so long as the revenue brought in by the product is greater than the expenses necessary to keep the product running, the price is sufficiently high. Once expenses are covered, it’s a matter of determining a price that is both fair to customers and adequately compensates the creator for their investment. For me, $42 (the current price of Restrict Content Pro) worked well to cover expenses and provide sufficient profit to make the plugin worthwhile.
What suggestions would you have for new users whom are interested in creating their own plugins?
Start now and start small. Many people make the mistake of assuming that plugin development is difficult. Plugins are not, however, inherently difficult. The difficulty of building a plugin is determined wholly by the features that the plugin has. Start by building a simple plugin and you’ll quickly learn how simple plugin development can be. The advanced feature development can come later.
I’ve written an abundance of training material for learning plugin development, which you can find on my site pippinsplugins.com
Pippin Williamson
Website: http://pippinsplugins.com
Twitter: @pippinsplugins
Personal Bio: http://pippinwilliamson.com/
Plugins
AffiliateWP: http://affiliatewp.com
Easy Digital Downloads: https://easydigitaldownloads.com
RCP: https://pippinsplugins.com/products/restrict-content-pro/
