Demo 5 - Light Window Integration

I put up one more demo on the demos page. Demo 5 uses the light window script to show how a link can be made anywhere in a website to display Fig in a popup using light window. Also in Demo 5 there is a second link that demonstrates sending the two flash vars that fig accepts through the querystring.

For the people that do a little digging, this can present one small problem:

• How do you make a link to one gallery but still have a page where you show all your galleries?

This problem occurs because the removeNav setting is set in the settings.xml file. The solution is actually pretty simple. Make a second settings.xml file (maybe called settings_no_nav.xml) that has removeNav set to true and use that one for the settingsPath flash var along with setting the defaultGallery flash var.

If this is confusing, don't worry. I'm not explaining it that well. I just wanted to show another way that Fig can be used and hopefully Demo 5 shows that.

I need to do some editing on the demos page. Looks too crowded.

FigPro For Sale

FigPro is now for sale on the downloads page. The price is $24.95 and this does not include the source actionscript files. The XML settings page has been updated to display the extra settings that the Pro Version has. A license page has also been added.

Please make sure to try out FigLite before making a purchase. It should give you a good idea if it's worth it for you or not.

I guess I'm going to transition to doing some marketing of Fig for a short while instead of more features. There haven't been any feature requests in the forum, but I have a few in mind.

In other news, I'm getting excited for the release of Expression Engine 2.0 on December 1st. It's a great CMS system and I'm looking forward in trying to integrate Fig with it and generally just playing around with it. Now I just need to scrounge up a $100 for a license to buy it.

Adventures in Selling Software

I have been looking for a way to sell figPro on the internet, but it seems the exact setup I want would need to be custom made. It's hard for me to believe that I can't find a service or system that can do the following:

• Sell multiple licenses of the same product
• Provide a members area to download updates
• Tracks how many licenses of a product a member owns

aMember Pro is the closest solution, but some coding has to be done to allow multiple purchases of the same product. I did find a promising product called webber, but it is no longer actively supported.

I have decided to sign up with fastspring and will have to figure out something from there. They do not have subscriptions for memberships, so my thought is to offer a coupon discount (50% off?) to past purchasers when an update comes out. I'm not even sure that can be done.

After my disappointing search for the right solution, I did think about making a custom solution using PayPal IPN and a basic membership management area with MySQL and PHP. Given my lack of time, that would have been a longer process than I would like and there are always unforeseen problems. There would also be a need for more features like another gateway besides PayPal. And then there is the fact that I have no idea how many sales that might be done. If I only get two sales, then all my time would be for squat anyway. I'm better off using a service like fastspring to start and seeing what happens.

So, figPro should be up for purchase/download sometime this week if my fastspring account gets setup any time soon.

First Update to Fig

Wow. That didn't take long. The new Fig has been up for less than 24 hours and there is a new update. Sorry about that folks.

I added an XML setting called "navText" to the settings.xml file. This setting lets you change the standard "Navigation" text to any text you would like. This seemed like a crucial thing since different languages would need to translate this text. Started a change log in the documentation too.

On the same topic of making Fig multilingual, I updated the FAQ section to show people how to change the "Home" text that shows at the top of the navigation.

New Fig, New Website - New Problems?

I just put up the new Fig gallery I've been working on along with the new website. Everything is still a work in progress and I still don't have much time. I put up a Vanilla forum. I hope to eventually get that skinned to fit the site better and possibly change this blog to match the site as well. For now, this will do.

I don't have the Fig Pro version up yet. That might be a few more days or even a week.

Everything is new, so I am expecting some problems and possibly some bugs. Please let me know what you think or how you think things could be improved.

One thing different about the new version is that it does not have a web administration backend. I'm not sure whether to build one yet. I think it may be better to integrate it with a bunch of other CMS systems rather than make one just for Fig. I guess you can have both though.

Truly, this is all really dependant on whether or not people are willing the pay for the FigPro version, as I won't be able to keep this thing going on the free version alone. Guess we will see after I get that one up.