Welcome Laterpay, Our New Technology Partner!

This notice relates to the following platforms: WordPress.com VIP, VIP Go

We are pleased to announce our latest technical integration, LaterPay which is now available as a WordPress plugin.

LaterPay offers publishers a frictionless deferred payment approach to monetization that saves users time and increases conversions. Instead of requiring upfront registration and payment – which derails over 98 percent of all intended purchases – LaterPay defers this process until customer purchases across websites reach a $5 threshold. With this approach, publishers can simultaneously expand existing subscription models, increase their paying customer base, and improve their user experience.

With LaterPay, you can choose from a number of monetization solutions that best suit your needs. For instance, you can prompt users to purchase a specific article, timed access to content, or a full subscription. Single purchases and time passes complement the full subscription model by pulling new potential subscribers into the publisher’s ecosystem while generating incremental revenues.

On the WordPress.com platform, you can access the LaterPay plugin via the shared plugins repository, using wpcom_vip_load_plugin() like this:

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'laterpay' );

For VIP Go, you can install LaterPay by adding the latest version to your plugins folder. The plugin can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

If you’re interested in exploring or implementing LaterPay as part of your monetization flow, reach out to the VIP team.

Welcoming WebDAM to Our Technology Partner Program

We’d like to introduce our newest Technology Partner, WebDAM!

In a world where using multiple software applications just to complete one task is the status quo, WebDAM allows you to cut through the software clutter by managing assets in your DAM directly from WordPress. The new WebDAM Asset Chooser plugin for WordPress VIP streamlines processes so you can get things done faster.

With WebDAM’s Asset Chooser, you can browse, select and insert images from your WebDAM library without ever leaving WordPress. You now have one central location for storing and updating images. No more combing through individual posts. No new tabs. No more replicating assets in multiple libraries. Use the Asset Chooser to insert live links (meaning the asset is sourced directly from WebDAM) so that any updates you make in WebDAM are automatically reflected in WordPress.

To start using the WebDAM Asset Chooser, clients on our WordPress.com VIP platform can load the plugin via the Plugins UI in the Dashboard or in your theme’s functions.php with the following: wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'webdam-asset-chooser’ ); Clients on our WordPress.com VIP Go platform can add the plugin from Github.

WebDAM, a Shutterstock company, is the leading cloud-based digital asset management platform. It connects the visual content that drives meaningful brand experiences at every consumer touchpoint. Over 500 of the world’s leading brands depend on WebDAM to advance the way marketing and creative teams manage and accelerate brand impact. To learn more or get started, contact WebDAM today.

Welcoming Roost to Our Technology Partner Program

We’d like to introduce our newest Technology Partner, Roost!

Roost is the leading provider of web push notification solutions for publishers and online businesses. They give you the ability to intelligently reach your web traffic when it’s not online via their desktops & mobile devices.

The Roost plugin for WordPress gives customers access to a near native WordPress experience while leveraging key elements of Roost’s powerful APIs for customized notification triggering and audience segmentation.

Clients on our WordPress.com VIP platform can load the plugin via the Plugins UI in the Dashboard or in your theme’s functions.php with the following: wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'roost’ ); Clients on our WordPress.com VIP Go platform can add the plugin from the WordPress.org plugins directory.

If you have any questions or would like to get connected to the team at Roost, please let us know, or email Dan Stever with Roost (dan@goroost.com).

Officially introducing Brightcove, the newest member of our Technology Partner Program

We’d like to officially introduce our newest Technology Partner, Brightcove! Brightcove is the leading global provider of cloud content services for publishing and distributing video across connected devices. Founded in 2004, Brightcove has created and defined the online video platform and spent more than a decade helping the largest media companies and brands in the world tell their stories.

You can load the plugin via the Plugins UI in the Dashboard or in functions.php with this line:

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'brightcove-video-connect' )

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.

FindTheBest Update: Graphiq

If you use the FindTheBest plugin, there has been an update:

We’re introducing a new line of data visualization products for online publishers that provide free access to the 10B+ interactive, live-updating, and embeddable visualizations that make our vertical search engines so compelling. An expanded mission necessitated a new name, and Graphiq was the perfect fit. Learn more about the improved Graphiq Search plugin.

Please update by loading the new plugin in functions.php with this line:

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'graphiq-search' );

After 2 weeks, we will retire the FindTheBest plugin. If you have any questions regarding the Graphiq Search plugin, please contact kmarion@graphiq.com.

Demo: Cultivating Your Community with Livefyre and WordPress.com VIP

When: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 1:00 PM EST
Where: Register here

In this session you’ll learn from WordPress.com VIP partner Livefyre why community on your site is so critical and how to effectively engage your audience — all dramatically increasing time spent on your site and return visits.

Led by Livefyre’s VP of Customer Experience Jenna Langer, this demo will cover how Livefyre can work with your site using simple out of the box tools such as Live Comments and Live Chats, all built to get people talking about your content.

She’ll also demonstrate how you can integrate external social content onto your site, including tweets, images and more, and easily customize and control the experience for your readers.

Join us to find out how making your site social has never been so easy — Register now!

Plugin Update: Livefyre Comments 3

We’ve worked with the Livefyre team to bring you the newest version of their real-time commenting platform.

Livefyre Comments 3 brings tons of new features to comments:

• Users can now leave rich text comments with bold, italic, and underline text as well as formatted lists.
• Users can now edit their comments to fix typos or elaborate on their initial opinion.
• Users can now leave an explanation when they flag comments to better inform moderators about problematic content.
• The real-time new comment notifier now shows a preview of each comment.
• Twitter and Facebook content imported via SocialSync are now displayed unified in chronological order with the rest of the comments about your content.
• Images and videos that users link to are now displayed beautifully and full-width in the comment stream.
• StreamHub: Curate customers can fuel the conversation by streaming in tweets by author, hashtag, keyword, and location.

Learn more about the new version of Livefyre.

Note that this plugin requires a manual upgrade. If you’re interested in using the latest version, please get in touch so we can help get you upgraded.

Digital Subscriptions with MediaPass and WordPress.com VIP

MediaPass, a WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner, offers one of the best digital subscription solutions on the market. They’re continually adding new features to optimize the publisher experience, and in two weeks will be releasing some major updates for VIP users.

To kick things off, MediaPass is hosting a demo exclusively for WordPress.com VIP customers, partners, and friends—if you’ve ever considered increasing your web property’s total monetization by incorporating paid subscriptions, now’s the perfect time to give MediaPass a try.

Join us on October 4th from 10am – 11:00AM PDT for a free demo hosted by the MediaPass and VIP teams.

Register now!

Enable Pre-Approved Plugins From Your Dashboard

Starting today, administrators (specifically anyone with the manage_options capability) can enable any of our pre-approved plugins directly from the administration area of your site. No longer do you need to get your developer involved simply to enable a new plugin on your site — you can do it yourself by visiting the “Plugins & Services” menu found in the VIP section of your WordPress dashboard.

However developers can still forcibly enable a plugin for all sites using that theme with the wpcom_vip_load_plugin() helper function. Plugins loaded using this method cannot be disabled from the administration area of the site.

Prefer not to have administrators enabling new plugins on your site? Have your developer add wpcom_vip_plugins_ui_disable_activation(); to your theme’s functions.php file and the plugin activation links will be disabled.

You can also use this functionality in your development environment if you’d like by adding the following code to your theme:

if ( ! function_exists( 'wpcom_is_vip' ) ) {
	require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/themes/vip/plugins/vip-do-not-include-on-wpcom/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui.php' );
}

It will add a new menu item to the “Plugins” menu.