I’m talking about the back-end in the traditional systems sense, rather than the new follow-up marketing usage now popular.

Anway I’ve spend the past couple of weeks pulling together all the various aspects required to fully launch BlogPiG as hub for all my upcoming automation plugins. I decided which components I’d need and decided on the following:

• Shopping cart
• Licensing/Delivery system
• Encryption
• Helpdesk
• Forum
• Affiliate system

I’d already started by using Wordpress as the front-end with a modded version the Glossy Blue theme and I wanted all the various back-end components to mimic the overall look and feel.

The encryption piece was an easy decision, it had to be IonCube as I have used it before with great success and it’s something my coder is very familiar with so we could be up and running quickly. Zend is probably more popular but it’s also a lot more expensive and whilst most servers have Zend available NOT ALL do and as far as I’m aware you can’t pack Zend runtime loaders with  your products like you can with Ioncube. Ioncube offers platform independent encryption.

I’d also used my chosen licensing system before, PHPAudit from SolidPHP. It’s a nice simple solution providing easy integration with my chosen shopping cart, PayPal. I might also add Google Checkout at some point too for a bit of variety. The templates for PHPAudit are fairly easy to modify using mostly CSS and tweaking the header/footer files.

Next-up it was the afilliate sytem. I’d heard  a lot of good things about iDev and it looked pretty good on paper so that’s now in place too. Custimisation again pretty simple with Smarty templates et al.

The first helpdesk software I tried didn’t work and there is jsut too much choice out there to waste time waiting for support to respond etc. so I plumped for SupportTrio which seems to offer everything I require plus a knowledgebase which I build-up over time for self-support.

I hate waiting for support to respond to my queries and I always end-up deep in the forums trying to find my own answers so a forum component will be essential to the BlogPiG suite of plugins. I initially tried to get Vanilla working as it seemed pretty and not too bulky but it was returning errors as soons as I tried to run the setup, so that got deleted immediately. Next I tried http://www.simplemachines.org/ which I’ve seen installed on a lot of sites and that went on very smoothly and after loading a suitable base theme I modded it to look like the rest of the site.

One of my pet hates is after I’ve regsitered once for a site and bought the the software I then have to then register again for the helpdesk and then again for the forum! Well that’s not going to happen on BlogPiG.com, it’s beyond my skills but my coder will shortly be integrating all the logon databases across all the various systems so you’ll only need to register once. It’d be nice to get seamless sessions too but I doubt that’ll be possible, we’ll have a go.

So not long now, it’s all coming together nicely and the first paid module, CommentPiG, will be for sale very soon.

As promised here is the first free plugin from BlogPiG. It’s called NukePiG and even though it’s incredibly simply it has proved an invaluable tool to me over the year whilst building my BlogPIG farms.

We all make mistakes, especially when using mass automation tools like the BlogPiG suite of passive income generation tools. Imagine importing over 3000 schedule posts only to find out that you’ve a typo in every affilaite URL. Even with WordPress 2.5 bulk deletion could only delete 10 posts at a time, that’s a lot of clicks!

NukePiG allows you one-click deletion all of your blog posts, pages, tags, categories or links, no messing around in the database, just select what you want to reset and hit NUKE! Withing seconds you can reset an entire blog or simply just certain content elements, it’s your call.

I’m pretty confident I’ve tested most of the major content platforms over the years - Joomla, Drupal, MoveableType, Blogger etc. etc. The list goes on.

One of the more annoyings things I’ve heard is people claiming that just by using one particular CMS your SEO and traffic needs will be sorted, this is complete rubbish. It’s not the CMS itself that makes or breaks your site building campaign it’s how you leverage that CMS features that really counts. At the end of the day 99% of any CMS is all back-end anyway. It’s totally invisible to the end-user and search spiders, and of course that’s the way it should be. Here are my criteria for choosing the perfect backend for my sites:

• Thousands of other users
• Unrivalled expandability
• Fast customisation of front-end (appearance and layouts)
• Good support
• Cutting edge web 2.0 technology

Maybe you shouldn’t use any off-the-shelf system? Perhaps the best path would be to develop your own back-end> DON’T DO THIS! At least not until you’ve proven that there is absolutely no third-party solution that can meet all your needs, and I seriously doub’t that’ll be the case.

Trust me on this, I learned it the hard way, right at the start of my site building career I convinced myself that there was nothing on the market that would be good enough for my site building exploits so I hired a coder to build me the ultimate back-end from the ground-up. It took over 9 months and thousands of dollars in development to get anywhere, not to mention hundreds of hours of testing and fixing and testing again. The product’s potential was amazing and it had some really awesome features but tying them all together and getting everything integrated was a total nightmare.

Fortunately whilst the developement was underway I was running a lot of parallel tests on off-the-shelf-systems and one in particular stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. It met all my criteria and best of all it provided the perfect framework for tying together all of the functions and features I’d been trying to have developed. What was it? WordPress of course! It was a simple, easy to use platform with infinite customsation options available through the addition of plugins. Most importantly it was in use by millions of websites already. I immediately shelved the custom development project and had the all key features re-coded as WordPress plugins.

This was the birth of BlogPiG…

Within the next few days I’ll be releasing the very first module from the BlogPig suite of productand the best part is it’s going to be completely FREE!

NukePiG has proved to be an invaluable tool for me whilst creating my BlogPiG farms. In a nutshell it allows you to selectively nuke(delete) all of your posts, pages, tags, categories, links from your blog, leaving you with a nice fresh, clean, empty blog.

It’s not uncommon to make the odd mistake when your’e creating thousands of scheduled content items for your blog, especially in the early days whislt you’re getting the hang of things. One wrong column header in the CSV you import with ImportPiG or a small typo in your seed keyword used by ContentPiG and suddenly your blog has thousands of incorrect posts and maybe even tens of thousands of tags if your’e using TagPiG. Deleting these with the native WordPress interface is a real bind as it only allows you to display 20 items per page, even with the new bulk delete feature of 2.5 you can only delete what you can see listed so it still requires thousands of clicks to empty your pre-populated blog.

The only way to achieve a bulk delete until now was to go into the database itself and manually truncate the tables directly using SQL, not exactly a slick workaround. 

Enter Nuke PiG. Simply check the boxes for the content items you want deleted from:

Then hit the NUKE button and within a couple of seconds your blog is ready to go again with a fresh batch of content items. Here’s a preview of the simple UI:

NukePiG is ready to go, but I’m just finishing testing it with the lastest WordPress version and then it will be available for download from here & the WordPress.com plugin directory.

I bought a lot of software during in my early years of internet marketing and I’ll be the first to admit I was often taken in by the sales hype only to be dissapointed by the final product.

With this in mind I’ve made an early decision not to follow the traditional hype based product launch so BlogPiG.com will be a BULLS**T FREE ZONE! You will not see any mention of the following words:

ninja, nuke, laser guided, holy grail, lazy, jerk, secret, dominate, tsunami, flood, silver bullet, storm, unleash, quake, goldmine, riches, explosion, millions etc.

BlogPig will just be about delivering the honest facts about what this software can do for you and what results you could expect if you used it. If you do end up buying it then it will be for the right reasons and becuase you know it is the perfect tool for you, NOT becuase of my hypnotic writing style and a bunch of marketing claptrap.

Woohoo! My first post about BlogPiG™, it’s finally time to go public….

I’ll be keeping this blog updated with news and announcements about the impending launch of BlogPiG™. The latest version is currently undergoing extensive testing and is earmarked for a September release.

Here are a just a few of the features:

• BlogPiG™ automatically generates its own relevant & unique content
• BlogPiG™ intelligently publishes new content from its database over time
• BlogPiG™ automatically generates its own taxonomic internal linking structure
• BlogPiG™ intelligently expand its linking structure to incorporate new & old content items
• BlogPiG™ automatically grows a network of high quality organic backlinks

BlogPiG™ autonomously revives archived content items by adding new relevant comments

Much more to come and please don’t hesitate to ask any questions…