After some Googling I found several interesting articles, most of them repeated themselves and said “well.. edit the ksas.php file in wp-includes” and then stated a long-list with many interesting HTML pieces. This works, but a plugin is more fancy I thought: so I googled on and found a plugin called “unfiltered” content WordPress MU, released by the WordPress guys. This is in so far cool, as you can either stick it in the mu-plugins folder and have it sidewide, or in the regular plugins folder and just activate it on a blog by blog basis. Since I am running this WordPress MU installation on my own and do not have posts to monitor for “havoc causing script includes”, I decided to go for the plugin and enable it side-wide. This way I can upgrade my wordpress mu next time a new version comes out and keep my sanity (because by then I would probably have forgotten about the includes folder and the php file that I need to update every time…)

Hope this helps,
best,
jez

There are different approaches to doing this (adding a paypal button to your wordpress page, or any html or php website):

You can copy&paste the code you find on most pages and wonder why you get really a lot of spam emails
or you can use the “secure merchant id” code from paypal
or you can grab a plugin at wordpress.org

To explain the first (revealing code)

<form name=”_xclick” action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_xclick”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”business” value=”user@spam-me-please.com”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_name” value=”Customer Service”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”currency_code” value=”USD”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”amount” value=”1.00″/>
<input type=”image” src=”http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif” border=”0″ name=”submit” alt=”Make payments with PayPal - it’s fast, free and secure!”/>
</form>

While this has its advantages: you can easily specify the parameters, it also has the problem that your email address is very likely to be scraped and spammed by bots. So next time you receive one of those fake paypal “you need to click here to reactivate your account” emails… guess why you are receiving it.

I use the second version, the paypal secured id, because I am not too keen to exposing (any) email address to spam bots. The code below will generate a paypal button with my id in it. To change that or to get your code you need to login to paypal and get it from the merchant tab. Or you can enter “paypal button” in the search field top right of the page.

2) Click on Merchant services.
3) Click on websites payment standards.
4) Click on accept contributions.
5) Click on get donation button.

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"/>
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="10155388"/>
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" style="width: 100px; float: right;" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!"/>
</form>

And now to the fun part actually: you will not be able to copy and paste the code(s) mentioned above, because wordpress will strip the input fields and nothing will display. So unless you are putting this code into your template (e.g. by including it in a separate php file), it won’t work, I believe.

You can however grab a wordpress plugin, like this paypal plugin to help you out.

Also of help – this support post at wordpress

hope this helps anyone,
best,
jez

Scott Reilly of coffee2code set out to try a 14 days of Plugins Challenge. In the past he has released various (great) wordpress plugins for free which he now tries to update to WordPress 2.5. as part of the set goal to come up with 14 wordpress plugins in the next 14 days.

WordPress Plugin Designers such as Scott Reilly or Lester Chan get less media coverage than theme designers for the reason (I assume) that their work is not that visible. Their work is amazing and really improves WordPress by a lot.

As a WordPress Theme Designer I think it is time to say thanks and return some favours, show some karma and link-love. Keep it up Plugin People!

Lester “Gamerz” Chan’s WordPress Plugins
Scott Reilly’s WordPress Plugins

The ones I love from Lester Chan are: Postviews (does not work here though due to complex loops), Post ratings, Print (allows you to print, right?).

The ones I love from Scott Reilly are: Author images (allows you to show an picture of you below a post or in your template – well you could hard and hand code this, but still this is a neat plugin!), Auto-Hyperlink URLs (autolinks links, as the name suggests), custom comment listing (will incorporate this once again soon, because the current comment section annoys me), Top recent commenters (similar to the one mentioned before) and wpuntexturize (changes annoying curly quote marks (quotation marks) into simple lovely ones). Lorrele’s article on “how to use the post-listings plugin” might be a good place to look at when you have trouble with Scott Reilly’s plugin

(of course for wordpress)

For download counter, check this out download-counter-lite

The best of the best available for free!