• Alex Standiford

    I think it sucks that affiliate programs almost always only pay out a commission to the last person who referred that person. I think this is a limitation of most modern affiliate management plugins, and it stifles any collaborative opportunities between your affiliates.

    What if you could share the engagement among everyone who ever referred that person? What if you could pay the person who referred the individual the most? How about this, what if you could pay someone based on the percentage of times they referred that person?

    Affiliate programs as you know them today are so limiting. Siren’s gonna fix that.

  • Alex Standiford

    I made some progress on the Siren’s Add Program screen recently. This is one of the key differentiators of Siren – of course you can do affiliate programs, but it’s just one of many types of programs that you can create. Programs are tracked based on any number of different events, and the way they’re paid out can be based on different incentive structures. You can have as many programs as you need.

    This also highlights a key touchpoint with integrations like LifterLMS! 🧜‍♀️🚀

  • Alex Standiford

    Surely my most significant contribution to WordPress is the number of ASCII art AT-ATs I added above pretty much every Walker class I had to create when making menus 😅.

  • Alex Standiford

    Welp, with what’s being shared around about Hostinger, seems like a good time to mention rule number 1 of Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate links are not okay without getting consent or knowledge from the reader, and they’re definitely not okay on a platform you don’t own.

  • JSON-Based Component Rendering Proof-of-concept

    JSON-Based Component Rendering Proof-of-concept

    I think this is a key component of the future of WordPress, since doing it this way would enable any future admin UI to work natively in an iOS application as well as a web application. You would still have two apps, but everything that actually renders the output is based on the JSON, and therefore can be extended easily.

  • I Created a Free Dockerized WordPress Dev Setup For Integration Testing

    I’ve really struggled over the years to find a good local WordPress setup, and I think I finally have something that I love. It’s been incredibly effective, fast, and adaptable to not only my specific plugin scenario, but with a few tweaks to the script, can be used to set up a local environment for just about any WordPress setup.

  • Killing My Agency Was A Good Choice

    Killing My Agency Was A Good Choice

    Since shutting down my agency last year, I’ve noticed a considerable uptick in the quality of work I find. Let’s hope this trend is a signal that my pivot was the right choice, and it continues to grow.

  • Alex Standiford

    I LOVE THIS IDEA. I’ll be interested to see how this progresses.

    I hope it’s possible to detect that the current environment is the playground. That could allow developers to tailor parts of the experience for the preview, such as pre-importing sample data, pre-configuring connections to APIs, or other un-imagined things.

    https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7251

  • Alex Standiford

    Lesley recently shared a really fun anecdote about how she became weirdly synonymous with pizza. I love these stories, and it’s a pretty interesting case study for the “wacky” TLDs. I didn’t remember her plugin’s name, but I did remember that she was somehow associated with Pizza.

  • Alex Standiford

    Fellow WordPress developers building websites, I beg you. Please learn about must-use plugins, and every time you think about adding a special hook to your functions.php file, think for a moment – is what you’re adding going likely going to want to continue to be used when you change themes? If so, put it in your must-use plugin instead of the theme. You’ll save yourself (or the next person to work on this site) so many headaches when you change the theme in the future.

Alex
Alex
@alex@www.alexstandiford.com

Founder of Novatorius & creator of Siren Affiliates. WordPress engineer and partnership advocate helping businesses grow with flexible incentive programs.

4,817 posts
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