Overview
Countdown Download is a WordPress Plugin to allow site owners to provide modal dialog boxes providing one time special offers.
Plugin Build
Our focus on designing the Countdown Download plugin was:
- Clean, simple design,
- Ability to define independent modal dialog boxes on each web site page,
- Easy to use options for choosing how long to display the countdown, how it should countdown, and payment button options.
With this in mind, a plugin was built which added an additional box to the Pages and Posts within the WordPress Administration:
Countdown Download - Administration Interface
WordPress Administrators can easily define a title, text, currency, the price of the product / service, along with a duration before the offer expires.
Cookies and IP checks are used to ensure users cannot circumvent the one time offer and attempt to reload it.
For site visitors, if they land on a page where the Countdown Download has been enabled, they would see a modal dialog box:
Countdown Download - Modal Dialog Box
This ensured that the popup would not be blocked by many browser and antivirus-based popup blockers, whilst hiding the main site content to draw focus to the current option on screen.
Licensing and Updates
A key requirement of this WordPress plugin was the ability for the client to provide updates automatically, and require a license key for full activation and functionality, as this was a premium ‘paid for’ product that the client would sell to their customers.
This was achieved by:
- Implementing our Licensing Update Manager component, a server/client PHP / XML library which allows a WordPress Plugin to only work once activated with a valid license key, which can be obtained from the licensing server.
- Using LUM to allow WordPress Administrators one-click access to update their plugin when a newer version becomes available.
- Allow us and the client to upload new versions of the plugin through the server interface.