Welcome to Triqui MochiAds Arcade plugin for WordPress official page
This is the one and only official page for this plugin, so check it frequently!
It works with Triqui MochiAds Arcade theme for WordPress and allows you to create an arcade site based on MochiAds games.
CURRENT VERSION IS 1.3 RELEASED ON JANUARY 21, 2011
I suppose you know how to install and configure a WP plugin. So I will only focus on this plugins features.
MOTIVATION
This plugin is intended to turn your WP blog into a MochiAds arcade site that will allow you to earn money both with Adsense (or other kinds of web advertising) and MochiAds publisher program.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of portals and a lot of crappy games (among them, some of mine!!) so you won’t have a chance to attract a decent number of visitors if you just publish games.
That’s why in this plugin you will have to add games manually. You have to create your niche arcade site if you want some chanches. No matter if you create a racing games portal or a portal with all game names starting with “T”… you must create your niche.
Read Case history: creating a successful niche Flash arcade site for some hints.
PAGES
The plugin has four pages, but once installed and configured it, you will need only two of them.
I designed the plugin to make game management as quick and simple as I can.
MochiAds page
This is just a welcome screen, quite useless but it contains a “Donate” button, so check it frequently :)
1.2 upgrade: news and issues about the plugin will be prompted in this page by an iframe
Setup page
If you are installing the plugin for the first time, you just updated the plugin, you don’t remember if the plugin is up to date or simply you don’t know what to do and it’s raining, click on “Setup”. This page will create all necessary tables, directories and categories in order to make the plugin work.
If your configuration is up to date, this page simply does nothing.
1.1 upgrade: this page also checks for duplicate games, and purges the mochi table to keep it as light as possibile. Why should you have duplicate games? Because the unique game id code changed from uuid to game_tag during MochiAds‘s feed development.
Feed Games page
MochiAds updates the list of games in its distribution feed once a day. So you should call it once a day.
Games you already have in your database are marked in gray, while new games are marked in green.
In the upper form you can see “Looking for the first 100 games from offset 0”
100 represents the number of games you are retrieving from the feed. The feed at the time of writing contains more than 8,000 games, but with numbers higher than 1000 you can stress your server. Moreover, if you run this page daily, you should never enter a number higher than 200
0 represents the offset, and can be used to retrieve old games from the feed without stressing the server.
Example: you want to retrieve the last 1,000 games… it’s preferred to run the page twice with 500-0 and 500-500 rather than asking for 1000-0.
Playing with these two numbers will allow you to grab the entire feed in a matter of minutes, step by step, offset by offset, with no stress for the server
1.3 upgrade: the plugin has been fixed to store the new “languages” field introduced by Mochi guys.
1.1 upgrade: the plugin now supports the new feed options to enable new micro-transactions revenue share for Mochi publishers
Manage Games page
This is the page that will manage your blog
** IMPORTANT ** Never add or delete a post from the “Posts” section in your WP Dashboard or you won’t be able to manage the game linked to that post from the Manage Games page.
Each game has three status (statuses?), and all games can be previewed directly from this page clicking on “Play”.
new: the game is (guess what?) new, this means you haven’t decided yet whether to publish it or not. With this status, the game does not appear in the blog. New games are listed in gray.
You have two buttons: Publish and Don’t publish. Clicking on the first one will turn the game to published status while clicking on the second one will turn the game to unpublished status.
published: when a game is published, it means you published it on the blog. By default, when you publish a game, you leech the swf from Mochi servers so you won’t earn money as a publisher (publisher status OFF), but you can turn on this feature, and the swf game file will be copied in your directory (publisher status ON) allowing you to earn money with “MochiAds publisher program.
Then, if you turn off the feature, you will start again leeching the game from Mochi servers and the swf game file will be deleted from your game directory
With the “Delete” button you will turn the game to unpublished status and eventually delete the swf game file from your directory, if you had publisher status ON
Notice: always check the game size before turning ON the publisher status: some hosting services have limited space and limited bandwidth, and if you copy a lot of games you may run out of space and/or bandwidth. Check your hosting company for more information.
Also notice: If you are using Triqui MochiAds Arcade theme you will need to edit one line to make it work with publisher option, or you’ll continue leeching games even if their publish status are ON.
I am preparing a new version of the theme with some interesting improvements including this one, meanwhile open index.php page into your Triqui theme folder and change line 17 (the line starting with <embed src = "... just in case you edited the theme) with
Notice too (last one): The “Delete” button only works on games published with the “Publish” button. You can’t delete games inserted with the old (and discontinued) version of this plugin – the one that published games automatically – If you want to delete one of such games, you must delete it from the “Post” section in the WP Dashboard.
unpublished: a game gets the unpublished status when you decide you won’t publish a new game, or when you delete a published game. An unpublished games does not appear in the blog and is listed in red. You can publish an unpublished game clicking on the “Publish” button.
In the upper form you can choose how many games you want to manage in the page, the offset (works in a similar way as the feed offset), what kind of games (new, published or unpublished ones) and a string they have to contain in their name.
1.1 upgrade: games with Mochi Coins enabled are marked with a $$ before their name (check Planet Basher 2 to have an example).
In the upper form now you can extend the search to game tags
I will add more options soon, I am open to any suggestion.
DOWNLOAD
Here we are… time to download the plugin. It’s free to use, modify, hack and so on. However, if you are making money out of it, my PayPal address is triqui@libero.it, just in case…
Also remember I won’t give support to any request if you change some code in the plugin
Download the plugin and enjoy.
I would like to hear your opinions.