Software: WordPress
Plugin: Memberpress
Plugin: My Custom Functions

Overview

Memberpress is a plugin for WordPress that allows the owner of the website to create a powerful member based website. It allows you to lock out certain pages unless the user has signed up for a specific membership, all based on rules you set in the backend.

When a user purchases a membership on the website, they are directed to a payment portal that has the description of what they’re about to buy and asks them to input a payment method. It looks something similar to this.

Changing Memberpress Checkout Item Description

Circled above is Initial Payment. It’s a setting that cannot be changed in the Memberpress dashboard in the backend. Why not?! Who knows!

I suspect that this description has something to do with selecting the recurring payment when creating the membership.

To change what it says here, a little Javascript is required. If you do not have a plugin installed, I would suggest using a plugin to insert the javascript. If you do not use a plugin, and instead edit the functions.php file, with one theme update, you will lose your customization and have to do it again (smart WordPress practice is to avoid this sort of issue). At the time of writing this article, My Custom Functions seemed like the smartest plugin to use to edit the php/javascript.

Once the plugin My Custom Functions has been installed, it is located under settings -> PHP Inserter.

Add the following code:

function change_checkout_description($args, $txn) {
	$membership = new MeprProduct($txn->product_id);
	$args['items'][0]['description'] = $membership->post_title . ' - Initial Payment';
	return $args;
}
add_filter('mepr-invoice', 'change_checkout_description', 10, 2);

In the above code, change ‘ – Initial Payment ‘ to what you would like it to be.

Save the custom code, and you should see changes reflected on the front end of your website.

Hope this helps!

website: MINDBODY Branded Heal Code Manager
SaaS: MINDBODY
website software: WordPress
WordPress plugin: MINDBODY Widget

What Is | MINDBODY Branded Web

MINDBODY offers what they refer to as Branded Web Experience that comes in the form of Healcode. A bit confusing, but in a nutshell, they offer an app that integrates with your website to give a user the opportunity to register for classes or buy packages – all the customer front end options one is used to in MINDBODY, through your own company’s website.

The benefit of using such a tool is that the customer doesn’t get redirected away from your website in order to perform this operation. It happens all through dynamic API calls.

You must first enable Branded Web for MINDBODY, which goes to some office somewhere that then do something magical with it and then enable it for you. Once this is done, you’ll get a user/pass notification that you can now use it. I think if I remember correctly, I had a bit of trouble here because they didn’t really respond right away so I had to send them another reminder message.

Creating a Link | MINDBODY Branded Web

Links create shortcuts from your company website to your MINDBODY software. Using these links via. your website, customers can create and manage their accounts as well as buy whatever it is you sell. When the link is clicked on, it will automatically pop up a shopping cart type screen where the customer can do what they clicked on the link to do.

To create a link, browse to the Branded MINDBODY website, log in, and within the top menu, there is an option called links.

From the drop down menu, there are a few options to choose from, one of which is Buy Now – Pricing Options which will allow further choices of what exact product you would like the link to point towards. For many people, MINDBODY is a way to manage a Studio type business, so this is likely different classes or workshops that you’re offering.

Using the Link in a Website | MINDBODY Branded Web

Once the desired selections are made, scroll down to find the exact code for the link. It will look something like this:

So I have the code, now what?

Once you have that code, it needs to be added to the location you wish to put it on your website. I’m going to go through the process of adding it into a WordPress website, but if you don’t have a WordPress website, that code above can be copied and pasted in place where you’d like it on your website. Note that your website will need to have Javascript support to work the widget.

Deploying a MINDBODY Link in WordPress

MINDBODY has a plugin for WordPress called MINDBODY Widget. Install this, and deployment is very straight forward. You simply copy the code for the link created on the Branded Web MINDBODY site, add new Widget within the plugin on WordPress, then paste the code into Widget Code section shown below.

If you copy and paste the exact, full code you copied from the MINDBODY Branded Web site into the Widget Code field, give the Widget an appropriate name, and click create, you should then have a new screen that shows you all of your created links and their related shortcode.

What you need to do now is copy that Widget Shortcode, above it would be:

 [hc-hmw snippet="Teachers"] 

and paste that into your WordPress website where you want it. Save your page, open the frontend of that page and make sure it looks how you like it.

Hope this helps!

program: Mozilla Thunderbird
add-on: gContactSync
address book: Google/Gmail

About Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is software that acts similar to Microsoft Outlook whereas it allows you to send and receive emails from the desktop of your computer.

As an additional bonus, it also allows you to synchronize various other features of your email address providers (like Gmail or Zoho Mail) like a calendar, or an address book.

gContactSync Add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird has an addon called gContactSync. gContactSync is an add-on that synchronizes contacts between Google (Gmail) and an Address Book in Thunderbird. You can synchronize multiple accounts with multiple address books, and it fully supports regular and hosted Google Accounts.

To install, select Tools -> Add-ons

Search for gContactSync and click install.

Once installed, you will be prompted to restart Thunderbird.

Adding Accounts to gContactSync

In the top menu bar in Thunderbird, you will see a new item called gContactSync. This is what you’ve just installed! To add a new email address contact list, simply click the menu item: gContactSync -> Add Account. Follow the on screen prompts to connect your Google account.

This will likely be your one central address book that you synchronize all your other local (in Thunderbird) addresses to.

Edit Account Synchronization Settings in gContactSync

Once you’ve added the accounts you wish to have synchronized, you’ll be able to choose how you want the synchronization to happen.

What I like to do is have a central account that all others synchronize to. All in one spot that that on my phone I can just have the one address book synchronized. This is accomplished in the ‘Pick the direction for the synchronization‘ option, where one selects ‘Write only‘ (image above shows ‘Complete‘) if you wish to send the contacts to your Google Address Book, and not read all the addresses from the Google Address Book and put them into that local address book – doing this would create a copy on the Google Address Book and the local address book associated with the account selected for editing.

One can also disable synchronization of the address book, or re-enable the address book synchronization if there has been an error that has disabled it.

Hope this helps!

software: WordPress
plugin: Really Simple SSL

The Problem: Browser Error | Your connection to this site is not fully secure

So, you’ve gone through all the troubles to setup an SSL certificate for your website and then you browse to the front end with Google Chrome (the one strong arming this SSL certificate issue) and you get an error:

Your connection to this site is not fully secure. Attackers may be able to see the images you’re looking at and trick you by modifying them.

The Solution: Make Your Site True HTTPS Redirect

One would have thought that simply activating the SSL certificate in the server side of things would have done everything necessary for SSL.

However, SSL needs to be enforced on the website as well for nearly all links (which includes images). This means everything gets forced to be served over HTTPS instead of HTTP and/or is served from secure third party suppliers. Fortunate for us savvy WordPress’ers, there’s a plugin that forces this, aptly named: Really Simple SSL.

Click Install Now -> Activate -> Go ahead, activate SSL!

Once you activate Really Simple SSL in the WordPress Plugin install dashboard, you’ll get a finally step to activate the plugin by finalizing the migration my manually doing some back end things:

If you’re a risk taker, you can just click: Go ahead, activate SSL and see what happens.

If you’re a stickler, you can scan every single file on your website to follow the advice about changing any reference to HTTPS instead of HTTP, and making sure scripts are all from a domain with an SSL certificate.

At first glance, I had a few dozen .css and .js file for just one site that had houndreds of lines of code to scan, so I took the risk and it all worked out OK.

Hope this helps!

software: WordPress
plugin: WooCommerce

Holy that title was a handful to write, but I think it says exactly what we’re going to do here today. This article will make the assumption that you have WordPress installed as well as the plugin WooCommerce.

Add New Product | WooCommerce

To start, you must create a new product. On your Dashboard, left hand menu -> Products -> Add New Product

I will also now assume you know how to edit the Product Description for this product. However, we’re going to now browse to the Product Data, and let WooCommerce know this is a Variable Product, which means that when users are checking out the product, they have a few options to select between.

Defining Product Attributes | WooCommerce

Once you describe this product as a Variable Product, we now need to let WooCommerce know what the variations are! These are known as Product Attributes

I will show you how to do in product definitions of the Attributes, but there is also a broader global attribute definition that is very handy when you have multiple products that will have the same variables (think t-shirt sizes S-M-L-XL for example).

When you click on Add New Custom Product Attribute, it will first ask you for a name, and then ask you to define the attributes. This is fairly straight forward, done much like you would add tags to a Post.

Please note that selected on this page is “Used for variations” and not selected “Visible on the product page”. I know, it’s hard not to want to have that second one selected.

Define the Product Variations | WooCommerce

Once you have saved attributes, now select Variations from the left menu and select Add Variation. This will pop up a new variation that will have a drop down list of the values you defined in the Attributes section.

Managing Stock of a Custom Attribute Variation | WooCommerce

As you can see in the image above, I’ve created the variation of Medium and Large. There are two ways to manage stock of items, one is on the product level and the other is on the variation level. If you expand the variation you’re looking to manage stock on (I’ll do Large for this example) you will see an option to select Manage Stock, and then a value bar open up where you can say how many you have in stock.

Manage Simple Product Stock in WooCommerce

To manage stock of a product that’s not variable, it’s done on the product inventory tab.

Hope this helps!