Jack Born On Marketing, Online Business, and PHP Code

For some of 2004 and all of 2005 I’ve been marketing a software package that I wrote called Ultimate Form Mail. My goal in 2006 was to take it from sideline project to “the big leagues”.

A big part of that was launching a new website for Ultimate Form Mail… which I did just a few weeks ago.

But I’ve also decided that it’s time to make a major investment in the packaging of the software, the code itself, and the distribution. So along with a new website, I’m happy to announce:

• A new release of the code, version 3.2
• A self-installer package that uploads the software to your server
• A new checkout system
• A new licensing system that I created
• A new affiliate system, for any clients that want to earn healthy commission checks promoting the code
• New volume discounts for bulk orders

The release of version 3.2 of Ultimate Form Mail is a major step forward in the code.

• Reply to visitors with attachments
• More powerful templating for emails sent to the visitor and website owner
• Simultaneous signup of visitors to your mailing list (third party mailing list manager, for example)
• More options for editing the emails that are sent out
• Even more security to protect against spammers
• Including the ability to stop most spam attacks before they even begin

With Ultimate Form Mail, you get a 15 day trial to test out all the most advanced bells and whistles.One of my goals in 2006 is to launch one new project a month. By project, I’m talking about ideas that have been rolling around in my head and worked on in bits and pieces through late 2004 and most of 2005.

In order to make that happen, I had to come up with a system that made it possible for me to manage commercial transactions (credit card processing)

One of my best clients hired me to take a disjointed old site and turn it into a dynamic site that was easy to navigate and easy to update.

As I worked my way through the project, I found myself calling upon almost every trick in the book that I had ever come across. Here is a partial list:

• AJAX
• Output buffering
• Force Type for nice urls
• Javascript DOM
• Zebra striping on some of the tables
• Server side cleaning of Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer garbage code that comes when the client copies and pastes into the web based content editor

At the risk of straining my elbow patting myself on the back… I am particularly proud of my use of AJAX on the site to make it more user friendly. Initially I was using iframes to generate some of the content but I was able to combine PHP output buffering with a spinkle of AJAX to get a much better outcome.

At the beginning of the project, I presented my client with two choices of CMS. I knew that they wouldn’t want to use the one I had created for my other clients and my own sites (as nice as it is) because they kept mentioning they wanted to be able to continue on uninterrupted in the unfortunate event that I were hit by a falling piano, meteroid, or milk truck.

For the security of the client, I won’t divulge which one they went with, but I will say that as good as the CMS was, it was lacking some major components that I had to add in to make it more user friendly.

I still can’t believe how little progress has been made with open source CMS products (or closed ones, for that matter) over the years that I’ve been building websites and marketing systems for clients.

This same frustration is what led me to create Ultimate Form Mail a year and a half ago: failure to find anything in the marketplace, free or paid, that did the job the way I wanted it done.

But I digress.

With the recent release of Word Press 2.0 I decided it was high time to revisit my first plugin: Static Jack.

Not only did I rewrite and update the code for Static Jack, and fix a few bugs, but I came up with an idea for an all-new plugin that I call “Safe Include”.

I also discovered that, unlike WP version 1.5+, WP 2.0+ plays VERY nice with Static Jack. It’s practically tailor made for it. I’ve tested it with several themes and haven’t seen any breakage yet.

If you enjoy any of my plugins, please

1. Link back to my site with a short blurb or post
2. Signup for my mailing list where I’ll notify you of several projects I have in the pipeline, and keep you up to speed with any of the plugins I have for Word Press

Download “Static Jack” plugin here

Safe Include by Jack Born is a new Word Press plugin that is an off-shoot of my other plugin, staticJack. Both of these plugins are meant to make the job of adding static content to your Word Press blog simple, safe, and quick.

The really cool thing about Safe Include is the way in which you can write a post or page and just pop a {{placeholder}} in the body and bam… static content is added to the page or post.

If you want the static content to make up the entire post, then just use the placeholder alone. If you are using a static “block” of content (a contact form, or a short snippet of server side code) that you want to inject into the middle of a post, then this lets you do it.

Plus, this new plugin lets you go right into the code of your theme and inject static content wherever you want, in much the same way.

Easy to install and even easier to use.

If you like the code I want you to do two things

1. Link back to me with a short post about the plugin
2. Sign up for my update newsletter so I can announce new plugins and non-WP projects that I have in the pipeline. You’ll also get notifications about plugin updates.

Download “Safe Include” by Jack Born

When I was teaching myself PHP many, many years ago I thought that commenting my code was a complete waste of time. I was writing the code for my own use and so it wasn’t important to me that someone else be able to follow my logic very easily.

Fast forward through the years and today I find commenting my code to be one of the most important ways to save myself time. With all the projects I’m constantly juggling, it’s critical for me to comment my code so that I can come back days, weeks, and sometimes months later and pick up where I left off without much effort.
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