Flack Maguire

By the way, assuming your finances allow and my own certainly have not always been strong either, let me encourage others to also buy the premium version as I will be doing and even if you do not need the extra features. At $10 per year, it is obviously highly affordable. More so, we all should want good developers providing real value to do well in the WordPress community, or any community for that fact.

Sorry, forgot to mark as resolved on my last posting.

Thanks Jordy for the follow-up. Exactly what I was hoping to hear. And, I appreciate the heads up for other plugins still using the GUID directly.

Cheers,
Flack

Excellent point. Yes, I would actually prefer to be charged a yearly fee for serious plugins that I am using in key ways.

As Chris Lema has blogged, the challenge is that the ‘one time fee’ business model can often become unsustainable because the new sales might drop off and existing customers are still driving for support and feature expansion.

For serious core plugins, I want the developer to do well in the service they are providing all of us. It is in all our best interests that they both financially succeed and feel successful/enjoy their work.

By the way, I was more than happy to pay the $199 for the Pro version given the capability it permitted. If Fabian Schlieper has truly fully abandoned the effort, I hope someone will come into the space and provide a tool that matches this capability, either through forking or an entirely newly developed plugin. Obviously, the top choice is that Fabian comes back and becomes active again.

I will think about it more.

Not looking for a long conversation with anyone from WPMU Dev, but I am just shy about using their plugins given the numerous negative comments I have read from different web sites/users in reference to their pricing model & customer support. It apparently does not seem to be at the same level of straight forwardness more typical in the WordPress community. Lots of grumbles out there that is not matched by the majority of other big name companies in the WordPress community.

That being said, I am aware of the Edublogs connection and why some of their team might really get my particular focus. So, it is not a hard wall for me but one I am going to be more hesitant to jump at doing.

Thanks David for taking the time to respond to my posting. Prior to this posting during my past research efforts, I had looked at all the plugins you have created and am using some of them. So, before responding to the specific issue here, let me share my appreciation for what you have made. We have a kindred focus in that I am also working in the youth education, learning, and developemnt space.

On your troll comment, would that not be more relevant to the historic view of WordPress as a blogging platform versus a more full fledged CMS? As I suspect you are doing from reading your other writings, I will be using multisite in a very specific way such that none of my users are just random visitors over the internet but rather all are known and specifically approved. The issues around dealing with trolls is not a reality because we can always have a face-to-face “talk” with the young man or woman if they are not treating their fellow classmates/students with kindness.

Now that I know that I am just not missing some super obvious setting, I will explore what it would take to make a plugin to do this on the back-end. I like the notion of how Mika and Brajash’s plugins allow you to add yourself in the front-end. But, I would prefer to have the removal be something as an option from the back-end dashboard where it shows a user a list of their various sites. Seems like a very natural place to put this. This will allow our users to join and leave sites based on where they are in taking various courses, studies, and learning teams. That changes at a different pace for each of them as they progress through their learning.

I have done a little bit of coding but to call what I have done anything like real coding would be an insult to all coders. I will see if I can find someone to pay to develop a small plugin to enable this one specific capability. If/when I do, I will post a link to the plugin back here and post it WordPress plugin repository for whoever wants to use it.

Thanks again for the help. I now know how to proceed.

P.S. I will also check out Reader.