This is so disappointing. Dennis Hoppe has written a really really good plugin. Post Page Associator allows you to create a “page” in WordPress, and place content from one, or multiple categories on it, and by modifying the associated CSS file (or creating your own template) you can make it look just the way you want. It truly is a great plug in. There is a paid version, and a free version. The free version is where my issue with this plugin begins. Now, WordPress is created and made available for free, not to be sold. Even though some plugins on third party sites are commercial, plugins that appear in the Official WordPress Plugin Repository are also meant to be free. This plugin appears in the repository HERE. On the authors own site, he bills the program as free from the repository:
So imagine my surprise when I activated the plugin and saw this in my Dashboard:
Not only did it appear in the Admin dashboard, it also appeared under the “Editor” permissions group as well. Thankfully, I don’t have “subscribers” activated on this particular site, as I expect (but can not confirm) it would appear in the subscriber dashboard panel as well. If this isn’t bad enough, should you choose not to donate to the author, and click the button in the bottom right labelled “No thanks, Remove this box now!”, as expected the box goes away……..and so does the plug in! It de-activates itself!
RANSOM and ULTIMATUM! Pay up, don’t use it, or live with a very large obtrusive and ugly nag screen in everybody’s dashboard, that’s your choices.
I believe this is a violation of the spirit and terms of WordPress, and I call this “Dashboard SPAM”. I have no problems with plugin authors including a “Donate” button on their plugins “settings” page, or an advertisement for their plugins paid version, and its benefits over the free version, but I feel what the author has done in this case oversteps the mark. At no point during my selection and installation of this plugin was I asked to accept this term/condition.
I have just been looking to see if the author has made a note anywhere about how to remove the spam part, and I stumbled upon THIS thread. The first thing that caught my attention is that the author does indeed provide a way for you to remove the spam when asked – his answer:
Another suggestion in the thread states that removal of the “donate.php” file is all that is required to make it go away. This may have been true of previous versions, but in the current 1.3.21 version, no such file exists. In the current version, the author has renamed this file to “contribute.php”, and now, simply deleting this file will crash your entire WordPress install. The author has written it in such a way that there is code in this file that code elsewhere in other files looks for, and if it doesn’t find it, it WordPress crashes.
Post Page Associator is not, and will not be used on this site.