Since I started this whole commentluv thing, the site has processed millions of comments, signed up thousands of new users and used terrabytes of bandwidth.
The site is getting busy! and it wouldn’t be able to do any of this without the aid of some pretty fancy plugins provided by http://Premium.wpmudev.org. Here’s a few I use to keep ComLuv up to date and full of features.
Supporter Plugin
This enables the site to charge a subscription for enabling new features, themes and plugins.
It can make any theme or plugin supporter only and handles all the subscription payments, notifications and cancellations without anything more than a single visit to the settings page.
Upgrades Plugin
This is something I’ve put in to take charge of the credits system so I can charge for things like additional urls and default links. It’s also a good way to be able to add single things or packages that aren’t part of the supporter feature set.
Affiliate Plugin
A powerful plugin to track unique clicks, payments, referrals and more. It’s upgradeable with your own plugins and I’ve made one so the supporter and upgrades plugins will integrate with the referral system.
People are already getting paid because of this plugin.
Farms
Nearly all the themes you see in the dashboard are from this pack. They’re all up to date and have all the ads placements hard coded in so I can use the next plugin to show ads to search engine visitors.
Who Sees Ads (wpmu)
This one thing is nearly paying for half the server costs. I didn’t have it activated for quite a while during the first part of the year but a couple of months ago, I configured all the settings so the ads would show to non logged in or search engine visitors and I’ve seen adsense earnings go up in line with the traffic.
Multi-Database
With so many members and blogs (and splogs dammit), the database of a WPMU install can grow very large, very quickly. By using this plugin I can split the database into 16 or 256 individual databases so it becomes much easier to manage. I think this one is due for an update soon.
There are quite a few other plugins used on this site, including a fair number of my own custom ones but my year membership to premium.wpmudev.org that I got in the plugin contest of 2008 for CommentLuv 3.0 has the been the major factor to this sites success and with the new plugins they have for dealing with splogs and ecomerce, I’m itching to get myself another years membership.