WP-Chargify Plugin

March 31st, 2010 | Posted in Wordpress Plugins | 8 Comments »
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The WP-Chargify Plugin is the first tool we’re releasing. It is designed to allow WordPress users to use Chargify to manage their subscriptions and members. If you haven’t seen it already, Chargify is a great service that just kills it in terms of user experience, ease of use, reporting tools, and even an iPhone app so you can see how your site is doing on a day-to-day basis.

And WP-Chargify makes incorporating the Chargify service into WordPress dead simple.

We’ll be updating the support docs regularly, and will be making it even easier to install, but for now, feel free to download the plugin and give it a shot.

Download the WP-Chargify plugin here.

8 Comments to “WP-Chargify Plugin”

  • Richard says:

    HI – This looks like a really interesting plugin. However, when I installed it on my site (running WP 2.9.2) I got this message:

    “The plugin does not have a valid header.”

    Any ideas please?

    Many thanks
    Richard

  • Richard says:

    Hi again – I managed to fix the problem above. It seemed to be related to adding the plugin via uploading the zip file from the site’s backend/admin interface. When I ftp’d the plugin folder, all was well.

    However, I’ve noticed two issues:

    (1) when you deactivate and then reactive the plugin, the settings are lost and one has to add them in again.

    (2) The plugin doesn’t seem to handle multiple different subscriptions for different users very well. I experienced errors on the Chargify sign-up/payment screen.

    Have you had these problems?

    Cheers
    Richard

  • admin says:

    @Richard, can you be more specific in your second issue? And we’ll add the deactive/reactivate issue to our list of fixes. Sorry about that.

  • Eric says:

    I am working on setting up your wp-chargify plugin with WordPress 3.01 and have 1 issue and a few questions:

    #1) The issue is that when the wp-chargify plugin is activated I get errors at the bottom of the “profile” page for users: Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [simplexmlelement.--construct]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘<' not found in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/mysite/wp-content/plugins/chargify/lib/ChargifyConnector.php on line 160

    #2) Is it possible to "return" more information from Chargify to WordPress than just the email address? I just set up a test sign-up page and it successfully created an account, but I would like to also return the subscriber's full name and possibly some additional "custom" information such as their address and/or website.

    #3) Is there a better website that I should visit to ask these questions? (A forum or bug-tracker or something).

    Thanks for the great plug-in!

  • David says:

    Hi,

    This looks like just the thing I’ve been searching for. Can you give me some idea of the status of the plugin? Is it under active development?

    Does it integrate with WordPress user accounts? Can registered WordPress users see which subscriptions they have active?

    Do you have any screenshots showing what the WordPress site looks like from the users’ point of view?

    Are there any major limitations/bugs?

    (asking a lot of questions up-front, as I don’t yet have Chargify, payment gateway, merchant account, etc set up and I want to make sure I’m on the right track before committing the time and effort)

    Thanks very much.

    Cheers,
    David.

  • Ken says:

    Can you use chargify and the plugin to manage wordpress mu signups?

  • Alson says:

    wp-chargify is much appreciated and it’s been fairly easy to install and use. However, I’ve been seeing intermittent errors with wp-chargify as (I think) Chargify returns blank documents:

    {{{
    [Tue Oct 05 19:40:16 2010] [error] [client 67.169.29.180] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Exception’ with message ‘String could not be parsed as XML’ in /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/chargify/lib/ChargifyConnector.php:187
    Stack trace:
    #0 /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/chargify/lib/ChargifyConnector.php(187): SimpleXMLElement->__construct(”)
    #1 /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/chargify/chargify.php(90): ChargifyConnector->getAllProducts()
    #2 /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/chargify/chargify.php(225): chargify::products()
    #3 [internal function]: chargify::subscriptionListShortCode(”, ”, ‘chargify’)
    #4 /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-includes/shortcodes.php(206): call_user_func(Array, ”, ”, ‘chargify’)
    #5 [internal function]: do_shortcode_tag(Array)
    #6 /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-includes/shortcodes.php(151): preg_replace_callback(‘/(.?)\\[(wp_capt…’, ‘do_shortcode_ta…’, ‘<a href="htt…')
    #7 [internal func in /…/trunk/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/chargify/lib/ChargifyConnector.php on line 187
    }}}

    Have you seen Chargify return empty responses to API requests?

    Also, do you have any interest in using Github for this code? Would be easier for others to help.

  • admin says:

    I threw this by the developer and here is what I got back, hope this helps.

    That does make sense. Chargify will periodically just be over capacity or the XML call will fail, it’s the nature of API calls that this will happen sometimes. The problem is that the chargify connector library that they wrote and that we’re using doesn’t really deal very well with those problems. It needs to be gone through and have some try/catch blocks added to it to make those throw some nicer errors than what happens currently which is that it assumes that it will -always- get back valid XML which just isn’t true. The other option, now that I’m thinking about it, would be to put the simplexml decode step directly below the curl call in the sendRequest method which would make it much easier to catch a fail and throw a reasonable error response without having to try/catch throughout the entire connector code.

    Due to some crazy events with Chargify this week, we’re going to wait before we make any adjustments and see how they respond to their new pricing kerfluffle. But we may add this functionality in the near future.

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