Alex from Zirona has released a Wordpress plugin that allows visitors to donate money in return for a back-link of their choice. The process has been automated and no interactions are required making this a great revenue generator for power-bloggers and niche hobbyists who can now be rewarded for their efforts.

The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be.

There is a critical bug in 0.1.1 (currently available version at time of writing) whereby if you increase the value of DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT and a visitor donates a value less than your DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT amount the donation will not be visible and the visitor who just generously made a donation will call foul.

To resolve this issue do the following:

1. Open an FTP connection to your website
2. Edit donationscloud.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
3. On line #45 change the value of “5.00″ to be the same as what you set for DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT within settings.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
4. Save changes

By increasing the minimum value that visitors can donate any future donations will appear in the donation cloud. Looking at the source for Donations Cloud it seems there is no minimum amount checking meaning someone who donates $4.99 will not receive a back-link, this should be announced to visitors and/or a server response mentioning that a donation of less than the minimum amount will not generate a backlink.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Customisation, Plugins, Revenue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.