I’ll be 100% honest with you, most of my original attempts to monetise Edublogs were inspired by, and even copied off, Automattic’s WordPress.com.

So much so that we even developed (for Edublogs) and released an upgrades plugin, that essentially does exactly what their original upgrades functionality did – allow you to buy credits and exchange them for features.

But then we got a bit smarter, as did the WP.com guys, and decided to change that into subscriptions, and add in some other cool things – like being able to turn off ads

We called it the Supporter plugin.

And for this we developed our original Supporter plugin, which we gave a debut with this post about how we had developed it to improve Edublogs.

And, as of yesterday, gave it a complete makeover and added in a whole heap of extra features.

Which, naturally, we’ll shortly be using on Edublogs too.

But why should WordPress.com use the plugin?

Well, first up is the blinkin freakin obvious… themes!

Our new plugin allows you to offer your users premium themes, and what have WordPress users been willing to pay through the nose for, for as long as WordPress has been around… yep, that’s right… themes!

So, why doesn’t wp.com simply add in a premium themes menu and be done with it, I mean, we’ve even made it extra gorgeous for them!

Preview... but don't touch!

And then there are plugins. WordPress is synonymous with plugins, so why not let users pay to have access to them!

That’s another thing that we’ve put in that I thionk would go down a treat at WordPress.com :)

And last, but not by any means least, let’s not forget the fact that this plugin allows users to sign up for all your goodies right at the start.. or even give everyone a free trial of them, before cruelly removing them unless payment is forthcoming :)

So come along now Automattic, it’s no shame to admit that someone else might have ad some decent ideas, you’re welcome to sign up any time and off course you’ll also get access to all the other great plugins and themes at WPMU DEV Premium and as much help and support as you can eat!

Here’s all the documentation and download info for the plugin one last time.

Whaddya say?