All posts filed under: Contract

A new era in document automation with WordPress

Published by Richard Best

Like so many others, I’ve seen enough to be convinced that AI is here to stay, that it will get exponentially more powerful over time, and that the technology will transform many areas of work. Of course, document automation has been making inroads into the drafting of many kinds of documents for a long time. The value of automation, and the efficiencies and cost savings it can bring, are undeniable. Now that AI is on our doorstop and bashing down the door, what does this mean for orthodox document automation? With orthodox document automation, typically we create docx templates with ‘direct replacement’ merge tags and ‘conditional content’ merge tags that are processed to produce a customised document when someone fills out a form or answers a questionnaire. Another way of doing it is to convert html output to a docx file. In each case, the process (when done properly) ensures consistent and predictable outputs. With AI, the question becomes whether this tried and true method will be overtaken. My current view is that, at the …

Document automation is coming to a WordPress installation near you

Published by Richard Best

WordPress and Gravity Forms are both awesome. But, for a long time, there’s been a gap in what the ecosystem can do in the realm of document automation. This has been the case because either: you had to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services; or your options were limited to PDF output, or document output that did not accommodate conditional content. Solutions that require you to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services can result in a loss of control over your data, as well as potentially expensive monthly or annual fees. Solutions that limit you to PDF output restrict what you or your clients or customers can do with the generated output. And solutions that enable output to .doc or .docx formats but do not support conditional content are just too limited for any use case where chunks of content need to be included or excluded depending on what a person enters into a form. GravityMerge is changing all that, and it’s doing …

Attention WordPress course creators – mad cyber week deal on The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators

Published by Richard Best

I suspect many of us, myself included, are now suffering from Black Friday to Cyber Monday fatigue. So I’ll keep this brief. For a very limited time, I’m offering full access to The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators for the madly discounted price of $29. That’s a whopping 66% off the normal price. The course helps you to protect your course content, avoid being sued, comply with important laws, and keep what you earn in your pocket, in under 90 minutes! This includes walking you through quick and automated creation of your own copyright statement, disclaimer, terms of use, and privacy statement. Oh, and you’ll get all 6 of our ebooks too, which cover protecting your course content, using others’ content safely, licensing content to get promotion, mastering your email marketing, having a privacy statement, and shielding yourself from lawsuits. This deal will never be repeated again, so be quick. There’s never been a better time or place for course creators to get their legal house in order. GET THE DEAL HERE AND NOW, before it …

Content scraper plugins, contract and copyright

Published by Richard Best

The story I thought I’d introduce this post by telling a story. It’s a story about Jim, an everyday guy who has a website for which he wants more content. Jim already works hard on his site, adding new posts frequently, but he wants more content to drive more traffic to his site and to help monetise his site. He can’t do it all alone. Jim finds a bunch of sites with interesting and relevant content that he thinks would be perfect for his own site. These sites don’t generate web feeds of any flavour so Jim does a trawl of WordPress plugins and finds a commercially available plugin in a well-known plugins marketplace that does exactly what he wants. All he has to do is: install the plugin; create a post or page in his site and click a new icon in the editor which opens a pop-up window that asks for a URL and a CSS selector; get the URL of the page on another site that has the content he wants and …

Discouraging public redistribution of commercial themes and plugins – poll results

Published by Richard Best

Background Back on 4 August of this year, I published a post called Theme and plugin shops – Discouraging public redistribution – User poll.  The poll that was included in the post sought people’s views on the reselling of commercial themes and plugins. It did this because people’s views on this issue are relevant to the inclusion of a contractual mechanism I’d proposed for theme/plugin shop terms of use. The contractual mechanism I’d proposed would seek to discourage purchasers of a commercial theme or plugin from making the theme or plugin available on a website for download by others (whether for free or a charge), even when the theme or plugin is 100% GPL-licensed. The proposed term would say that, if a customer decides to make your commercial theme or plugin available on a website for download by others, you may exercise a right to deactivate their access keys (if that’s how you’ve set things up) and to terminate their access to support and updates. I explained why, in my view, this sort of clause …

Click to accept processes: a closer look at Gravity Perks

Published by Richard Best

Context As you might have gathered from some of my earlier posts, I’m a big fan of Gravity Forms, a fantastic plugin that just gets better and better with the passage of time. I’ve used Gravity Forms in the past to create ‘click to accept’ mechanisms but, at least as I’ve deployed them, they required inclusion of a link to terms of use which would then open up in a new window or tab (for anyone who bothered to read them). With this approach the terms themselves weren’t visible on the same page as the click to accept box. Legally this wasn’t a problem but perhaps it wasn’t the most user-friendly approach. In Legal checks when building a content-driven WordPress website I mentioned that you could go one step further by purchasing and installing the Gravity Perks plugin which includes a GP Terms of Service Perk. I noticed that this add-on for Gravity Forms helpfully adds a Terms of Service field to the available Advanced Fields and can produce something like this: At that point …

Template terms and policies for WordPress multisite businesses

Published by Richard Best

Introduction As many if not most readers will know, with WordPress’ multisite feature, you can set up your own network of sites, whether for yourself, friends, clients or customers. The WordPress Codex puts it in these terms: “As of WordPress 3.0, you have the ability to create a network of sites by using the multisite feature. … A multisite network can be very similar to your own personal version of WordPress.com. End users of your network can create their own sites on demand, just like end users of WordPress.com can create blogs on demand. If you do not have any need to allow end users to create their own sites on demand, you can create a multisite network in which only you, the administrator, can add new sites. A multisite network is a collection of sites that all share the same WordPress installation. They can also share plugins and themes. The individual sites in the network are virtual sites in the sense that they do not have their own directories on your server, although they …

Protecting WordPress consultancies with terms of business

Published by Richard Best

Let’s take a look at WordPress consultancies As readers will know, the WordPress marketplace comprises a wide range of business types, including: development and design agencies; theme and plugin shops; website generation platforms; app platforms; and consultancy businesses. For this post I want to focus on the last of these: WordPress consultancy businesses. These are the sorts of businesses that provide the likes of: commercial advice and coaching in relation to WordPress-related businesses (think Chris Lema); advice and training materials on how to “become an exceptional WordPress consultant” (WP Elevation) or on how to “kickstart your WordPress business” (Matt Report Pro); and WordPress workshop and on-site training services (like BobWP). These kinds of businesses do not necessarily provide any development or design services (they may do as separate services but that’s not my focus here). Rather, their services are more commercial, strategic or educational in nature. If you own or work for such a WordPress consultancy, you may have asked yourself about the kind of contractual terms you should be putting in place with your …

Legal checks when building a content-driven WordPress website

Published by Richard Best

Introduction Recently I’ve built two blogs (both running on WordPress of course). The first is this one and the second is a blog for a group of lawyers in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the second blog is to enable the lawyers to share their knowledge and thoughts on a particular area of practice with clients, potential clients and the wider legal community. As well as building the site, I also attended to the usual legal and related issues that arise with a content-driven website like a blog, just as I did for this site which is similar in many ways. I’ve done this sort of thing many times in the past, for myself, for colleagues and for clients. Each time I do it, I run through a range of legal and related checks in my mind that ought to be covered off. I thought it might be useful to document the checks for others building similar sites. The purpose of this post, then, is to do exactly that. The checklist covers the kinds …

How to build a contract generator with WordPress and Gravity Forms

Published by Richard Best

Background and introduction I purchased a Gravity Forms developers licence back in October 2009. It was one of the best WordPress-related purchases I’ve ever made, as the forms plugin has gone from strength to strength over the years and is now so polished, with so many useful add-ons, that it can truly convert WordPress into an app machine of sorts. In the intervening five years, I’ve put Gravity Forms to all manner of uses, including making a number of contract and licence generation tools with it. Among other things, I’ve used it to build: a website terms of use, mutual confidentiality agreement and privacy policy generator (see ubuildcontracts.com); a Creative Commons licence chooser that built upon the code output of the Creative Commons licence chooser by adding government-specific elements to the code to reflect guidance in the New Zealand Government Open and Accessing Licensing framework (known as NZGOAL) (I’ve since taken this licence generator down); and a generator that enables one to build a fully populated instance of a Government Model Contract for Services, with …