Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/
The processor does not run indefinitely once you run it manually – you must add it as a scheduled task in your system. This is a limitation of WordPress. The documentation is available and linked to on the bottom of every Symbiostock admin page.
Next, if your previews are not showing up, it is related to your server in some manner or another. If you are not running Imagick, then you are using GD. GD uses about 10x the memory of Imagick and also does not process non-JPEG images as readily.
All that being said, this is a free system that works when you are willing to put the effort towards it. Every server is different and on occasion you are going to run into trouble during install due to these differences. You are welcome to submit a support request if you fail to rectify the issue yourself.
One other benefit of Symbiostock, since you are a vector artist, is that you don’t need to upload JPEGs; it converts EPS files for you and your customers, so all you do is upload an RGB EPS, and Symbiostock does the rest.
Hey Kenny,
Good questions.
Firstly, site looks good – but as you’ve alluded to, all that matters is sales, and we need to analyze how to optimize what visitors you are already getting.
1) Symbiostock now runs on top of WooCommerce so that the ecommerce portion is simplified. This provides for a lot of customization, personalization, and marketing potential that is not available in legacy.
2) This includes coupons, one off coupons, permanent coupons, different payment methods, and a plethora of other extensions that you probably haven’t even thought of.
3) As it runs on WP through WooCommerce, you can also use any theme and plugin that works with WooCommerce. This means your design can be modernized pretty dramatically, and you can add SEO plugins as well as usability plugins that make the experience better.
4) One caveat that I think will turn people away from legacy is the registration prompt when you select a size on your product page. With the new Symbiostock and its simplified checkout, you can allow users to purchase stuff from you with just an email address and a name.
5) You can also add multiple payment methods, such as Stripe, and accept credit cards right on your site with the new Symbiostock.
As previously mentioned, there are probably a lot of unspoken benefits, but I would say modernizing your design is one large one.
All that being said, there is no magic formula for independents. Even with a new, modernized and efficient site, you’re going to have difficulty getting sales… not because of anything except that it is hard to get traffic to each individual site.
Whether you may or may not be aware, we are working hard to release a beta version of Symzio, which will operate as a one-stop contributor run agency that will aggregate all the images across the Symbiostock sites and permit customers to purchase right on Symzio. This will allow contributors like you to promote one central site which will inevitably also increase your exposure and sales. This will be exclusive to Symbiostock users, and will not be compatible with legacy.
I am encouraging everyone to get their new Symbiostock sites up so when Symzio is released, we can market it aggressively as a group. We’re going to be really pushy about it; contributors have been trying to pull themselves out of the yoke of the agencies for god knows how long, and this is the time and place and opportunity to finally put some elbow grease in for a real, permanent change. Any contributor that is serious about the industry, greedy about making money on their sales, and wants to be able to do this for the rest of their lives should naturally feel excited and push as hard as we are for Symzio to be successful.
All that being said, your site looks good and you don’t ‘need’ to upgrade to Symbiostock, but I think it would benefit your site in a variety of manners. Once Symzio is ready, it will be a huge upgrade to be included.
Symbiostock deals with product delivery after they click on the download link in the email. Symbiostock does not get involved in the sending of the email, or the receiving of the PayPal IPN. Therefore, if no emails are being sent, it is likely WooCommerce or PayPal.
If you’ve done a live PayPal test and it is still not working, I’m not sure what to suggest. Make sure your test install isn’t behind a protected directory, perhaps.
Hi Antony,
Okay, so the way WooCommerce works is you create a product, and if it is a digital product you point the digital download to a location on your server. So what you would be doing is mimicking what Symbiostock does, but manually. So:
1) Upload your video via FTP to a folder on your WP install, but in a protected folder. You would need to add an htaccess file that prevents public access so no one can just manually download it. Alternatively, I believe there is a secure WooCommerce folder you can use – you’d have to look that up as I’m not sure what it is, or how it works.
2) Once you know where the file is, you create a non-Symbiostock product on your site. This initiates a normal WooCommerce product creation page. There, you would enable ‘Virtual’ and ‘Downloadable’. Depending on whether you want multiple licenses or not, you decide if it is a simple or variable product. If it is a variable product, you can just manually add licenses as you would a Symbiostock product.
3) Whether it is a simple or variable, you will then have to tell WooCommerce where the file is – you do this by adding a file via that same page, and entering the file name and url of the location of the file. WooCommerce is weird in that even if it is on your server, you need to put a URL there, even though it converts this to a local search when it actually gets the file for a customer.
4) Add your pricing and titling and what not.
5) Upload a thumbnail for your product – watermark it if you want.
6) That’s it!
The only caveat here is you won’t have a video preview – that is a complex addition which would involve manually creating the preview video then adding that functionality to the product page, etc, which is out of the scope of something I can explain here.
Hi Till,
The permissions settings are done to not only the ss_media folder, but a number of other places. They are required so you can upload your own watermark, create thumbnails etc.
The second error you are getting is because the first error is being printed to screen so the server can’t send header information after that. The core issue is the permissions thing. You can try commenting that line out (line 34) but metadata reading and writing may not work then, and it’s a hack I can’t comment on.
If you need personalized support, you can submit a support request.
Hey Riobom,
What’s the URL of your site? Is it fully functional with a store ready to go with professional images?
You can PM me if you don’t want to post it publicly.
I am backed up with approving sites because we are getting a lot of people who submit it before they have any images up and I can’t approve them at that point.
You are right Antony – every little helps. The key is, as I said, everyone jointly doing their part to market it whenever they can. A link here, a post there, a like here, a tweet there. Every single one matters and tells the big search engines that Symzio matters. The more it matters, the higher every image will show up, the more sales everyone will get. Doing it alone will be very difficult.
The one thing that I keep in mind is that industry altering things do happen, and they can start small. We’re talking about this in this forum, and who knows, months from now we could be really starting to see daily sales through Symzio and our independent sites that makes it a real contender in the grand scheme of things.
And if and when Symzio takes off, it will be permanent; there is so much instability in the industry nowadays, but it is because one huge company comes, advertises, gets clients and milks them, then another one comes and does the same thing. Symzio will be the first aggregate to provide stability to both customers and contributors.
I sincerely believe that if most contributors think and feel the same way everyone in this thread does, and does their part to promote it, there is no way it can’t take off. But it is dependent on every person taking the initiative.
We’re spending a lot of time ensuring Symzio looks really nice and is easy to use. I want the customer experience to blow away the competition with ease and simplicity so that all our marketing efforts work with a site that is extremely sticky.
I think it’s a fantastic idea to brainstorm in the meantime. We can market it before it’s ready, but I don’t see too much benefit in that because it is going to be a lot more sticky once you see live images showing up.
Here are a few of things I’ve already got planned:
1) I’m going to add a search form on Symbiostock.org that populates every page that will let people search Symzio.
2) I’m going to create a thread every single day in the Symzio forum that will be titled ‘November 2nd, 2015: What have you done to promote Symzio today?’. It will reflect the date every day and I’m going to press everyone to put their marketing activities there. For example, if you blogged about Symzio, you link to your blog. If you liked a Symzio FB post, put it there. I’m going to do it every single day and hope that everyone gets inspired by my efforts to join in.
3) I’m going to post member images and link to them every day on facebook, twitter, pinterest and google plus. I already have all the pages reserved.
4) I’m going to create an account on different forums where it is permitted and openly introduce Symzio to people and remain active, linking to Symzio in my signature.
5) I created a free service years ago that I’m going to start using religiously:
It’s really good because you add tasks that you want to do every day, and every day you check them off. Very useful to keep track of things easily. For example, I’m going to add ‘Place member image on Facebook post’ as a task. I figure every day, I’ll dedicate an hour or so to promoting Symzio through these mechanisms, then try to promote it in other ways the rest of the time.
6) Paid advertising – I’m going to scavenger the net for all the places SS, Adobe Stock and Dreamstime and such advertise and try to follow on their coat tails. Obviously I don’t have a large budget but any money I get from Symbiostock or Symzio will go into it.
I have a great deal of faith in Symzio and always believed it is the key to this whole effort, but it is highly dependent on a community of contributors that are as aggressive as I am in marketing it. Everyone needs to use social media to promote it regularly as if it is their own personal website.
There are going to be members that don’t do anything and just want to benefit from our work, and it really does not matter to me because in the long run, only those that are willing to work hard for a better situation will really, actually benefit from it. You’ve been very supportive from the get-go Steve, and I feel an obligation to try my best to help you monetize your work. It’s this sort of camaraderie we want to create so that everyone works tirelessly for the collective good.
If you have any other marketing ideas or suggestions, share them. In my mind, at a base level, all members should use social media and any blogs they contribute to to promote it. This, in addition to adding their Symzio portfolio to their signatures (once it’s live, obviously).
I have gotten a few blogger and one full size purchases, no extended. I think I understood that running sites independently would be tough, but based on my own experiences, marketing one’s own site takes a long time and it would be better if we all marketed one central site to make our efforts cumulative.
I really am impressed with a lot of the Symbiostock sites that are going up, and despite the amount of effort everyone is putting in, it is difficult to bring in customers for every small niche.
That’s why we are spending all our time developing Symzio. A fully functional independently run agency that ties all Symbiostock sites together was the original plan when I first got involved in this, and I rightly believed that it was needed for this to work.
The good news is it’s coming along really well. We will be launching an extended beta initially. Additionally, I am investigating the possibility of developing and releasing premium addons to Symbiostock in the form of the stock submitter and the video module. The video module will require custom server configuration, but if I can create a standalone plugin that works with Symbiostock, at least people have the option of that.
Nothing is written in stone regarding those two because I don’t even know if it’s technically possible, but I’m looking into it. If standalone users can use Symbiostock to also distribute their images to agencies, run their independent site, and manage their images within Symzio, it will provide an all-in-one solution that has many methods of monetization. All in all, I’m working very hard to make sure that you guys are able to make the most money you can out of your images with the least amount of headache.
The one thing I am going to be doing, however, once Symzio is live, is heavy marketing, and I’m going to implore everyone else to market it with me. We don’t have the financial means of paying for mass advertising, so we’re going to have to work as a group to make it really find the customers. This will be a far more fulfilling effort than it must be for each individual contributor to try to market their own site independently.
Hey Jing,
You don’t do it through either – to get it to run every minute you have to add it to your system’s scheduler (cron job). Usually this is done via your control panel (Cpanel, plesk etc). You can ask your web host about it if you can’t locate it.
Hey Jing – if you mean the vendor aspect where you can have multiple users and Paypal accounts, we currently have no plans for that. We’re working hard to get the next stage of Symzio launched, which will serve to aggregate all the Symbiostock sites anyways so, at least for now, Symbiostock is meant to work as a plugin for individual artists.
Legacy Symbiostock is a theme that also works as a plugin – the new Symbiostock is not a theme, it is just a plugin. As such, it works very differently in the backend and so you must migrate from legacy to Symbiostock – simply installing it does not work.
There is a free migration tool here:
http://www.symbiostock.org/shop/
You can also submit a support request if you want us to migrate for you:
http://www.symbiostock.org/support/
Good luck!
Hey Brandon,
Looks like you are using Legacy Symbiostock – unfortunately, we don’t provide support for it anymore as we’re actively working with the new version of Symbiostock.
Beautiful!
I’ve added an action hook there for you so once the plugin is updated you can just hook a function adding that code to it. Good work.