Co-Branding

Ever wanted your own PHP script to sell, without the need to do any of the coding? Co-brand and sell WSN.

Things to Consider

• It's your product. You put it on your own website (or distribute it more directly if you prefer), select your own name for the script, include your own theme and do your own marketing. You buy licenses from WSN at bulk discounts and choose whatever price you'd like to sell them to your customers at.
• Support will be handled by WSN for you where possible, though this may not be possible in the case of editions in languages other than English.
• You can just sell a version with a pretty theme if that's all you want to do... but consider that your product could fill a niche need which WSN doesn't properly address. Examples: a coupon site, a recipes site, a real estate site, or a Spanish version marketed to Spanish speakers with Spanish support. Most customizations won't require any PHP knowledge, since you can include custom fields and language and such with your theme.
• Feel free to co-brand any of the WSN scripts (Links, Gallery, KB, Forum, Classifieds, Software Directory, Directory), or even all of them at once.
• Got sub-niches to cover? You can sell multiple cobranded editions tailored to each sub-niche.
• No contract needed, nothing complicated to worry about, no lawyers, you don't even need to tell WSN that you're co-branding. If you'd like some special terms that can be arranged too.

Technical Details

Here's how you get started:

1. Your first step is to create a theme of your own. Get the latest autosetup.php and make sure you select at least two languages to install, so that you'll get the multilingual templates (which are automatically translated to english-only, while the reverse is impossible). Then start customizing -- please read the template development guide to learn what you need to keep in mind to make your theme easy to work with.
2. Download a copy of autosetup.zip and extract it to a site on your computer. Then open the autosetup.php installer file within that in a text editor like notepad.
3. If you want to sell versions of all 7 WSN scripts, change $brandprefix = 'WSN'; to $brandprefix = 'My Very Own Super Duper'; or whatever branding you'd like. If you just want to do a special version of one script, change $singlescripttitle = ''; to $singlescripttitle = 'My Very Own Super Duper Directory Script'; instead.
4. If doing a version in another language, translate the rest of autosetup.php and change the language selector to have it install your language by default. All the language is near the top.
5. On the site that you've created your theme on, export your customized theme at Admin -> Templates -> Theme Packager using whatever custom theme name you'd like. Place the .tar.gz file it gives you into the folder you extracted the autosetup.zip to. If the theme only customizes the wrapper and stylesheet, you can use it to sell all 7 scripts without any modifications. In the autosetup.php, change the $themecontent = ''; line to $themecontent = 'yourthemename.tar.gz'; to reference the theme file.
6. It's probably not worthwhile to translate the WSN admin panel (there's a machine translation tool), but if you really wish to do so then copy /templates/admin/ to /templates/admin_yourlanguage/ and translate the text in the templates of /templates/admin_yourlanguage/. When done, create a .zip out of that site, copy it to the autosetup site, and reference it on the $translatedadmin = ''; line of autosetup.php like $translatedadmin = 'admin_yourlanguage.zip';
7. If you're going to have a sales website (rather than arranging payment and assigning liceses personally), change $salessites = 'http://scripts.webmastersite.net/'; in the autosetup.php. This controls where the admin panel links to prompt people to activate their trial. If you're only cobranding one script with $singlescripttitle, the purchase link will go directly to the $salessites value. On the other hand, if you're selling all 7 scripts through one autosetup file, your $salessites value is a prefix after which the script name will be appended. For example, if $brandedprefix is Co-Brander and $salessites is http://yoursalesite.com/ then your Co-Brander Gallery product will link to http://yoursalesite.com/cobrandergallery.
8. If you don't yet have a payment processor with which you can collect money from buyers, consider 2checkout or paypal.
9. Close autosetup.php and re-zip the site which contains that and your theme file. Note: it's also possible to bundle the theme package directly into the autosetup.php as one file, but this is more difficult -- ask support for details.
10. Start distributing your new product however you like: a website, to clients, direct sales to interested contacts, or a big billboard on the freeway.
11. Buy WSN licenses at bulk discounts as cheap as $30 per license, in monthly payments for as long as 24 months to spread the cost. Whenever you make a sale, use the license splitter tool to split off one of your licenses and email the license info to the buyer. If you want to avoid all risk, you can wait until after you've got a buyer before you purchase their license (though this will leave less profit margin than buying in bulk).

Want to talk over your idea, or have any questions on how to proceed? Ask below: