Screencasts are an important part of any Github Sponsorship. We wanted to have a stable way of enabling our sponsors to get access to our custom screencasts. On one hand – it’s easy to provide a hidden link to your sponsors, but on the other, it just wouldn’t be ideal because we’d have to track who’ve we sent them to and that kinda complicates things. On the other hand we are using WordPress for our Websites. So why not leverage the power of WordPress and make something useful for the rest of the open-source community?
We decided to make a plugin. Initially it was just for us, but then again why not share it with others that are going through the same process as we are. The idea was originally picked up from Caleb Porzio, a developer who uses the “Sponsorware” to provide additional value to his sponsors. Caleb does the same thing with his screencasts – he puts them behind Github authentication that checks for sponsorship to him. As anyone reading his documentation and following the Sponsorware idea would likely have the same needs, we decided to take it a step further and make it a little easier for WordPress users. This is our small token of saying thanks and giving back to the community – our help to others on the same Sponsorware journey.
SCREENCASTING FOR GITHUB SPONSORWARE – PROBLEM SOLVED.
Github users can sponsor either organizations or other users. When you create a Sponsorware video for your sponsors, this plugin allows you to specify the Github ‘login’ of a user or organization (e.g. opensheetmusicdisplay). Github provides a web API for us to check if a certain user is sponsoring this user or organization. Github also provides a way for other applications to safely authenticate with it. Then the plugin has the user authenticate (log in) with Github and calls Github to check if the person that just logged in is a sponsor of the particular video, and shows/hides it based on that result.
SETUP AND APPLICATION
This plugin is for anyone running WordPress – you can easily find, install and use it from the marketplace. It’s a simple Github Sponsorware solution for showing screencasts. You can add any type of video you want with the plugin, but at the moment it only checks for Github login and sponsorship specifically.
The setup is pretty straightforward, the ‘Installation’ section explains the process in detail. The ‘Details’ page lets you in on key information on creating Sponsorware videos and putting them into a post. As for our sponsorship screencasts, the first one is online – anyone can watch it. New ones are in the making. We encourage all digital music sheet enthusiasts to meet other developers and join the discussion on Discord or stay in touch by subscribing by following us on our socials.
Links
- “Authenticate Sponsorware Videos via GitHub” WordPress Plugin on WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/authenticate-sponsorware-videos-via-github/
- Caleb Porzio: Sponsorware: https://calebporzio.com/sponsorware
- OSMD GitHub Sponsors: https://osmd.org/sponsor
