Category: Plugins

Can artificial intelligence engines replace WordPress developers?

Sure, maybe it could, but then who would share and support the plugins, and how would regular folks know where to turn when things veer off target? 😉 Beyond that, you wouldn’t get to email your lovely customer support rep and get personal attention, or even trust the attention was “personalized.”

I’ve been wondering about the impact artificial intelligence will have on experienced WordPress developers like myself, given I already deal with quite a bit of shade from folks who doubt my skills. Often people mistake me for my own “secretary,” not the developer I am. Some people throw shade obliquely by advertising their services as WordPress developers when in fact they are WordPress administrators/users — and cannot write or understand code, or only do it on a basic level. Developers are fluent in at least one programming language, period. Other people inadvertently throw shade and often sabotage themselves by hiring these people and others who charge much less than skilled developers, and barely eke out an acceptable product. I’m looking at you, Fiverr clients.

I’m not the only one concerned about this disturbing market trend, and I’m not ashamed to complain about it myself once in a while. I’ve worked very hard to learn several programming languages, and I add to my knowledge about the Web nearly every day. The threat of being overpowered by imposters is compounded by the threat of being overpowered by AI. When I hear that AI often writes elegant code solutions, my interest is totally piqued! But evidently, these machines still need to be paired with developers for code review to make sure projects stay safe and on target. And because of this, I’m hoping that more WordPress users shopping for coding help realize that cheap help should be paired with actual developer help for code review. Scrimping on WordPress projects can set a site up for slow speeds, bugs, security holes, and unpredictable functioning. I remain optimistic that this AI development will cause a reckoning for the most scrupulous people out there.

You know why I’m not worried? It’s because there are still great folks out there who understand the value of a human touch. They pay a little more for better product, and understand real value. (Value isn’t the price, it’s the product/service.) I’m looking at you! Thanks so much, customers!

Trying out AI (Bard)

Anyway, I took Google Bard for a spin today to write a sales pitch for “the best PDF watermarking plugin for WordPress.” I’ve edited it very slightly. Here goes:

The WooStamper PDF plugin is the best way to protect your PDF files and ensure that they are only accessed by authorized users. With this WordPress plugin, you can watermark your PDFs with customer contact information, or any other text that you want to display. You can also password protect your PDFs, so that only authorized users can open and/or edit them.

The WooStamper plugin is easy to use and requires no coding or design experience. Simply upload your PDFs to your WordPress site and then use the plugin to watermark and password protect them. The plugin will automatically generate a watermarked and/or password protected PDF for each file that you upload.

The WooStamper plugin is a powerful tool that can help you protect your PDFs and ensure that they are only accessed by authorized users. If you are looking for a way to watermark and password protect your PDFs, then WooStamper is the perfect solution for you.

Here are some of the benefits of using the WooStamper plugin:

• Protect your PDFs from unauthorized access. The Watermark WordPress Files plugin allows you to watermark your PDFs with your logo, contact information, or any other text that you want to display. This makes it difficult for unauthorized users to access your PDFs.
• Prevent unauthorized downloads. The Watermark WordPress Files plugin allows you to password protect your PDFs. This means that only authorized users will be able to download your PDFs.
• Increase brand awareness. Watermarking your PDFs with your logo or contact information can help to increase brand awareness. When people see your watermark on a PDF, they will be reminded of your brand.
• Improve customer satisfaction. By providing your customers with password protected PDFs, you can improve customer satisfaction. This is because your customers will be able to download your PDFs without having to worry about unauthorized access.

If you are looking for a way to protect your PDFs and ensure that they are only accessed by authorized users, then the WooStamper is the perfect solution for you.

Wow. Redundant much? I actually wonder if this post damage my SEO by repeating key terms so much! But there you have it: a big garbage in garbage out machine! I know that were I to feed it more data and a better query, I could get somewhat more detailed and human-sounding text, but this was just a quick and dirty test. Could AI write documentation? Sure, but again: garbage in, garbage out. Could AI respond to support requests? Sure, but again: same, garbage in, garbage out. I expect that AI is more likely to speed our slide into another dark age than anything as humans rely more and more on junk information, and become less and less able to tell where information came from. This could be an entertaining show/battle to watch! ????????

Whew, I went down a rabbit hole with this one! At some point I decided to share time-limited trial versions of plugins with potential customers. Ioncube is a PHP obfuscation/encryption drop in library that’s been around for a long time. It’s been useful to some people and really annoying to other people. Hey though — sometimes code just isn’t free. I thought I’d give it a try using Ioncube as a way to “protect my code.*”

I sell my plugins using Easy Digital Downloads as a seller platform. I find them to be somewhat more suited to digital product sales than WordPress, though sometimes I’m concerned with the direction the new ownership has taken the product. Oh well, it works well enough, and I’m really familiar with it at this point. In fact, I’ve written several plugins for Easy Digital Downloads, including EDDiMark, EDDiStamper PDF, EDD + Wave, and the plugin I’m talking about here: Lion Cub. (If you’re wondering why it’s called that, “Lion Cub” was just a cute and pleasant name I came up with while tossing Ioncube around in my head.) Lion Cub is a simple but pretty well fleshed-out plugin for WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads which allows you to set up automatic Ioncube license creations on-the-fly with Easy Digital Download customer download purchases. Each purchase item can have a license key automatically added to its plugin package/folder on download request, such that the task for the customer to open your plugin with that license is easy/minimal. If you use Ioncube and have thought about protecting your plugins using the Ioncube software, then Lion Cub would make that much simpler for you. The plugin is free.

Learn more about the Lion Cub plugin at Github.

* Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking at that time. There are a lot of reasons why shipping obfuscated code is pointless, including the fact that codebases change so often and most of WordPress world is GPL licensed anyway. Thank goodness we are free to change our minds! At this time, I’m not sharing trial versions but I’m not not sharing trial versions.

Are you paying someone to manually enter your WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or Gravity Forms sales into Quickbooks Online (QBO), FreshBooks, or Wave accounting software?

Even worse, are you doing it yourself?

Is Zapier not working or your Zap is not successfully moving transactions into your accounting application?

There is another way! Did you know that most reputable online accounting apps feature APIs which allow hands-free data transfer, making manual data entry unnecessary?

I am expert with WordPress and the programming languages it uses. I also know how to use REST and GraphQL APIs. I will write a custom plugin for your WordPress installation which will allow you to take advantage of these APIs. I can securely automate your bookkeeping data entry (customers, invoices, payments, refunds, etc). For a one-time upfront flat rate fee (to develop your plugin) you can save hundreds if not thousands of hours of time and drastically cut your bookkeeping costs.

Get in touch to talk about a custom WordPress + accounting API solution for your small business.

Things have gotten nuts for just about everyone lately, us included. I hope you’re still hanging in there. It’ll get better. It mostly always does. 🙂

If you weren’t aware, I run a small business developing and supporting WordPress plugins. In other words, I’m a computer nerd. Luckily right now the plugins are stable and they can sit tight for a bit. I can focus on customer support… and help run my partner’s business. He lost his longtime secretary to the task of Covid-19 era homeschooling, and I have stepped in to help while we see what this quarter brings. So, I’m very busy, very very busy. Luckily programming for the web lends itself well to streamlining a business, and we’ve been able to automate some bits. Last week I spent some hours over two days writing some code which replaces heaps of manual data entry for his business, practically replacing a full-time employee.

At first I did this using Zapier. We found Zapier a couple months ago, and it’s pretty cool. I was playing with their trial period, creating Zaps to connect his (and my) WordPress-driven sites to our online accounting softwares. This was going pretty well! It was a little “stiff,” meaning I couldn’t tweak or customize as much as I would have liked, but it was doing the trick and saving a bookkeeper a lot of data entry. I pulled the trigger on Zapier’s lower paid plan while it was still 30% off on sale. We were set to go for the year. Until after a week when it became apparent I hadn’t purchased a big enough plan. Whoops! What I didn’t understand yet (because I was busy setting up Zaps and answering phones while barely having enough time left over to do things like eat and shower) is that each Zap can have a lot of tasks. Some of our zaps had 5 or 7 tasks. It just took me a while to understand that each successful “action” is a “task,” and counts towards billing. Whoops, we had chosen the wrong plan.

I wrote to Zapier to ask if they would honor the sale price for a plan upgrade, since we had simply made some beginner mistakes and chosen the wrong plan. I figured they’d just switch us up, especially since I’d been in close contact with them over the on-boarding and had even offered them several carefully thought-out ideas for Zapier UX improvements. Several emails later it was clear this wasn’t going to happen, and well, I’d already rolled up my coding sleeves. Here’s how we replaced our Zaps with… simple PHP, and not much of it.

GraphQL

Things got interesting. I was looking to send data from a WordPress site to a site using a GraphQL-based API, same as Zapier would have to, so I started to look into GraphQL. As sort of a self-taught lone wolf lady developer, I may or may not keep up on all the jargon and the come-and-go new languages and whatnot. But at first glance, it seemed like in order to take advantage of GraphQL, I’d need to involve plugins and node.js and use React, a language I’m not familiar with. All these funky, trademarked words kept popping out at me — words I’d never spent much time thinking about. I started putting together some queries using PHP and JavaScript, then it dawned on me: we’re sending HTTP requests. WordPress does this with a native function, wp_remote_post(). Why am I over-complicating things?

You don’t need fancy

Quickly, I built a plugin to test for an existing customer, add a customer if it didn’t exist, create an invoice, and add a payment inside our online accounting software (Wave). A ton of data entry is done instantaneously, effortlessly. To boot, I could do some data sanitization first, and I could build my own filters and pathways, something Zapier charges more for. This was all built around my method my_remote_post() :

/**
*
* MAKE HTTP REQUEST TO WAVE!
*
*/
private function my_remote_post( $data ) {
    $headers = array(
        // you gotta set up a Wave API connection for this,
        // check out: https://developer.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020948171#application
        'Authorization' => 'Bearer 5****************************n',
        'Content-Type' => 'application/json',
    );

    $response = wp_remote_post( 'https://gql.waveapps.com/graphql/public', array(
        'method' => 'POST',
        'timeout' => 45,
        'blocking' => true,
        'headers' => $headers,
        'body' => $data,
        'cookies' => array()
    ) );

    if ( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
        $error_message = $response->get_error_message();
        error_log( 'Wave HTTP request error' . print_r( $error_message, true) );
        return false;
    } else {
        // for testing:
        // error_log( 'Successful Wave HTTP request response: ' . print_r( $response, true ) );
    }
    return $response;
}

Simple enough, right? This can be adjusted ad lib according to the wp_remote_post spec. Now let’s skip ahead. We’ve gotten some customer data from a submitted payment form. I’ve already used it to check if our customer exists. The customer doesn’t exist. So, let’s automagically create a customer in Wave using GraphQL:

$data = wp_json_encode([
    'query' => 'mutation ($input: CustomerCreateInput!) { customerCreate(input: $input) { didSucceed, inputErrors { code, message, path }, customer { id } } }',
    'variables' => array(
        'input' => array(
            'businessId' => $businessID,
            'name' => $full_name,
            'firstName' => $first_name,
            'lastName' => $last_name,
            'email' => $email,
            'phone' => $phone,
            'currency' => 'USD',
            'address' => array(
                'addressLine1' => $address1,
                'addressLine2' => $address2,
                'city' => $city,
                'provinceCode' => $province,
                'countryCode' => $country,
                'postalCode' => $zip
            )
        )
    )
]);
$response = $this->wp_remote_post( $data );
// maybe make it easier to parse now?
$response = json_decode( $response['body'], true );

So by now if you’re familiar with PHP, you can see how we have easily connected to Wave using the GraphQL language. I’ve put the GraphQL query and variables in a variable called $data, and sent it in the body of an HTTP request. I can adjust my GraphQL query to return only the data I need, and nothing more. Slick. The code above is similar to what I used except I took more advantage of OOP to make form data available throughout my classes. It doesn’t take very long to begin GraphQL queries and how they work. And yes, they’re pretty elegant!

Things I got stuck on

While working on this, Wave’s API (GraphQL) playground became helpful and almost enjoyable. Similar IDEs are available elsewhere, and if you’re learning GraphQL you will likely run into them. I did get a little stuck on things like Wave Business ID…

Wave Business ID
What is it?

Go to “Settings” in your Wave admin panel, and after “https://next.waveapps.com/” in the URL bar will be a very long alphanumeric with dashes. Cut and paste that into an online Base 64 encoder (or use PHP base64_encode()), and you’ll have the business ID to use in GraphQL queries to Wave. You’ll find that then customers and product ids are similar, often the business id, PLUS more characters to specify a hierarchical relationship.

Product ID
A Wave product ID is put together like this:

$waveProductID = $businessID . base64_encode( ';Product:' ) . base64_encode( $program );

Where $program is found under Sales -> Products & Services -> edit chosen product -> find digits after ‘/edit/’ in the URL bar.

“Provinces”
Wave is a Canadian company and speaks of provinces and poutine while we speak of states and potatoes and gravy. The new spec for Wave states is ISO-1366 code (“US-CA” or “US-NJ”), while Zapier was still taking a state slug (“california” or “new-jersey,” for example). You’ve just got to create a lookup table to change your customer’s state input into the ISO-3166 format.

The Bottom Line

The code above isn’t complete (plug-n-play), but if you know someone who writes PHP, it should light the way. With this tip, you’d be able to connect to Wave (or really most any service using GraphQL as an API) to catch a WooCommerce sale using ‘woocommerce_payment_complete’ hook or a Gravity Forms submission using the ‘gform_after_submission’ hook. If you’re hunting around the web looking for help with any of this, I hope this helped. We’re all trying to get through right now, and if I can help save you a little time or money, too, then great!

Capital One + Wave Apps Accounting Integration

Related to this topic is my WordPress plugin which gathers transaction information from Capital One and sends it to Wave via the GraphQL API. You can learn more about that on my Github page for the Capital One + Wave plugin. The plugin makes it much easier to get business and account data (account IDs) from Wave, since it uses the API directly.