Demo: Here

Documentation: Here

I love the idea of crowd funding. It’s a perfect mixture of social media, wisdom of the crowds and good old fashioned business. For those of you who dont know what crowd funding is, it’s a way of collecting funds for a project, product or initiative.

Individuals commit to funding your project but are only charged if you reach some pre defined target. This plugin specifically uses PayPal’s adaptive payments API. I chose PayPal for a few reasons – mainly because it works internationally, unlike the alternatives which are USA only.

With this plugin you can create an entire project on your WordPress blog. Users can commit to funding your project without leaving your site – apart from a brief visit to PayPal of course. You don’t need to send your traffic off to some 3rd party site.

This has some massive benefits. All the time you spend marketing your project will benefit your own blog, instead of some 3rd party site. This will give you some long term social media and SEO advantages.

After you’ve payed PayPal’s payment processing fees, you keep 100% of of your funders’ contributions. That’s more money for you to get your project started.

Anther huge benefit is that you can create any type of project you want. As long as you aren’t breaking any of PayPal’s rules (which would only really prohibit illegal projects), you’re free to fund what ever you want.

So go ahead and take crowd funding for a spin. I’m offering free, premium-level support for anyone who wants to fund a project using my plugin. So you dont need to worry about anything going wrong.

So go on, make 2012 the year you get that dream project of yours off the ground.

I need your help.

I’m creating Zenfolio – a free WordPress theme that I’m hoping to release in a few weeks. It’s a simple, no frills portfolio theme.

Zenfolio lets you create video and image portfolio entries. When you’re done, it lays out your portfolio as responsive grid. Yup, that’s right. Zenfolio is responsive, so you can take your creative work to the mobile web.

This is a demo of what we have so far.

I’m taking a radically different approach to creating themes – starting with Zenfolio. Firstly, I’ll be giving it away for free, which is absurd considering its quality, customizability and support I’ll be offering.

I’m also opening Zenfolio up to the community. For developers, Zenfolio is on GitHub. You can fork it, play with it and even push any changes you make.

Opening up Zenfolio to our community will make it incredibly robust - more robust than most commercial themes.

For everyone else – the folks who will be using this theme - I’d like to know what you want from a portfolio theme. What do and don’t you like about Zenfolio? What would you change?

Obviously I wont be able to implement every single suggestion, but I will take everyone into consideration. Now is your chance to get in early and make an impact, while SiteOrigin is new.

Please post your ideas and suggestions in the comments below. If you know of anyone who might need a portfolio theme, please tell them about this post. It’s my goal to make the portfolio theme of their dreams.

Here are some of it’s really cool features:

• Responsive (ready for mobile devices).
• WordPress 3.0+ goodness – menus, custom post types features images.
• Full screen image slideshows.
• Built on Origin Framework, which means it’s incredibly customizable using a simple interface. No coding or slicing required.
• Custom built, secure image resizer. No one likes getting hacked.
• Responsive grid shortcodes.
• Translation ready.
• It works as a blog too.

It has a simple drag and drop builder. Perfect if you dont like fiddling around with shortcodes.

Theme developers, feel free to include this plugin with your themes. All the CSS and JS are GPLed, so you’re free to use and abuse the entire plugin.

Download it from the WordPress plugin directory.

RoadMap

• Improve representation of Orman’s design using CSS3. The borders for the price field in the featured column aren’t a perfect recreation.
• Improve price table builder UI.
• Add more price table designs.
• Test in IE8. I’m using Mac, so any help here would be appreciated.