WordPress Recipes Demo

The WordPress Recipes Demo uses a standard installation of WordPress to demonstrate what a for-profit recipe blog might look like in practice. The basic premise is that a blogger could depend on the recipes that they create and publish to supplement their income. The ingredients and general description of the recipe is provided, but in order to see the directions on how to make the recipe, a small fee must be paid. This creates a nice give-take balance between the chef and the reader. It allows the reader to know whether they would like to know more about the recipe by perusing some basic information, whether or not they have the ingredients on hand, and a general idea of what is involved in the recipe. This approach also allows the chef to entice the reader to purchase the recipe without giving away the entire recipe for free, thus enabling them to earn extra income from their blogging efforts.

Using the Demo

The demo is fairly straight forward, and requires only 3 steps:

1. Create an account on the demo PaySwarm website.
2. Browse the recipes.payswarm.com demo WordPress site and find a recipe that you want to purchase.
3. Complete the purchase by clicking 'Purchase'. You will now be able to see the full article.

How it Works

Creating an Account

In order to spend money on a PaySwarm-enabled site, you must have an account on a PaySwarm Authority. The PaySwarm Authority is responsible for collecting money from you and disbursing it to the people that sell digital assets to you. All PaySwarm authorities are capable of performing micro-accounting, which is the process of tracking very small monetary payment amounts - as small as 1/100,000th of a United States cent. Unlike other payment networks, PaySwarm is an open payment network that assumes multiple PaySwarm Authorities communicating using open protocols. This is good for the market because it ensures competition between PaySwarm Authorities. The Authorities compete on lowering their fees and providing value-added services, which is great for the customer. An open payment network is great for the PaySwarm Authorities because it provides a very low barrier to entry.

Creating a Budget

One of the benefits of using PaySwarm is that you only have to enter your credit card information in one place that you trust - your PaySwarm Authority. Since PaySwarm is an open, patent and royalty-free standard - anyone can create and operate a PaySwarm Authority. You pick whichever PaySwarm Authority that you trust the most. It's very much the same way you go about choosing a bank.

After you deposit money into your PaySwarm Authority, you can then use the money that you deposit to establish budgets. A budget gives a website limited access to charge you a pre-set amount of money of your choosing. You can cancel the budget at any point - you stay in control of your finances.

When you use a budget to pay for an article in the recipes demo, you are authorizing the recipes website to charge you up to the limit that you set for the budget. Future purchases from the website will automatically use the budget until there is no more money remaining in the budget. This helps you control your spending and protects you against the Website attempting to charge you too much money for a particular item.

Advanced

This section describes some advanced concepts that you may not discover during normal use of the recipes website demo.

Source Code

The complete source code for the PaySwarm WordPress plugin, which is used in this demo, is available on GitHub under an open-source license:

payswarm-wordpress on GitHub

Budget Expiration

When you approve a budget, your can pick when your budget will expire. This feature is included in case you would like to revoke the payment session after a period of inactivity.