PipeWebMonetization is a Wordpress plugin that helps website owners track their revenue in real-time. The plugin utilizes the Coil chrome extension to emit payment and tip events, which are then tracked and analyzed by the plugin. With its dashboard and customizable data views, the PipeWebMonetization plugin provides a comprehensive solution for tracking and optimizing website monetization.
However, building a plugin that integrates with payment events was not without its technical challenges. In this article, we will explore some of the key technical challenges we faced while building the PipeWebMonetization plugin, and discuss how we overcame them.
Integrating with the Coil chrome extension
The first technical challenge we faced while building the PipeWebMonetization plugin was integrating it with the Coil chrome extension. The Coil chrome extension uses the Web Monetization JavaScript API to emit payment and tip events. To reach a reliable connection between the plugin and the Coil chrome extension, we used a JavaScript event listener.
This listener is responsible for batching the events that will later be sent to the PipeWebMonetization backend.
All the event types and states can be found here
Parsing the payment and tip events data
Once we had established a connection between the plugin and the Coil chrome extension, we had to parse the payment and tip events data that was emitted by the extension. This data was complex and varied, and required a lot of time and effort to clean and structure it in a way that was useful for our plugin. We had to develop custom algorithms and data parsing techniques to extract the information we needed from the raw data.
Developing a custom dashboard
Another key technical challenge we faced while building the PipeWebMonetization plugin was developing a custom dashboard inside Wordpress. The dashboard had to be intuitive, easy to use, and provide a smooth way for setting up the plugin installation and integration with the PipeWebMonetization data tracking dashboard. We had to invest a lot of time into developing a user-friendly interface, which is capable of setting payment pointers, revenue sharing and enable paywalls per content.
Optimizing for performance
Finally, one of the biggest technical challenges we faced was optimizing the performance of the plugin. With so much data being generated and analyzed in real-time, we had to ensure that the plugin was able to handle the load without slowing down the website. We had to invest a lot of time and effort into optimizing the performance of the plugin, and into developing efficient algorithms for data processing and storage.
We’re still working on how to make the data transfer even more reliable.
In the next article, we’ll talk about our backend and the challenges involved in capturing the events and storing them. See ya 👋
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