Developer Digital Store Policy

Your Opportunity for Success

When you register in the Masterminds Developers Directory, you are entitled to create your own Easy Digital Downloads Front End Vendor Store. We call this your "Developer Digital Store".

Consider this an opportunity bathed in the same light as opening a store in a shopping mall dedicated to vendors earning income from Formidable Forms work. The biggest advantage your Developer Digital Store offers over an alternate sales channel is that your Developer Digital Store boundaries have no constraints. Sales opportunities are endless with a global customer base.

You and We possess a shared marketing and customer base attracted by some of the best Formidable related tutorials and articles that can be found anywhere and the only Formidable Forms Codex in the world.

We are unique and unique draws people. No other site besides Formidable Masterminds has a higher probability to appeal to a widely diverse Formidable Forms user audience because of the products and services we make available for Formidable Forms users. Do we make money off of this popularity? Yes, we do! And, you can, too!

Formidable Forms is our foundation and this  Best-in-Class  tool is spawning a golden age in form builder technology. Our Developers Resource Center is perched on the leading edge of Formidable’s Golden Age. Won't you join us in reaping the benefits of this remarkable tool?

Why You?

The best Formidable Forms developers in the world are here on display in the Masterminds Developers Directory. If you're reading this, you may be one of these world-class developers already, or on your way to becoming one of the best in the world because of what you're learning through our Developers Resource Center.

Whatever the case, as someone that wants to earn income from providing Formidable products and services, you are welcome to open a Developer Digital Store here on Formidable Masterminds.

Opening your Developer Digital Store means that you believe you are ready and have the confidence to sell your form designs, views, Formidable based apps, styles, and any other downloadable Formidable related products you create.

Terms and Conditions

Before you decide to open your store, there's something you need to understand about us. First and foremost, we are a software development and content creation house. Our software development focus is enterprise-level expert business solutions featuring Formidable Forms. As such, we observe enterprise-level Software Development Standards with our projects and ask you to observe standards consistent with our own when offering your products for sale on this site.

We do not intend to police your software. We believe the way any developer writes software, whether the language is PHP, jQuery, HTML, or CSS, is a direct indication of their individual levels of skill and care.

Software Development Standards

Software Development Standards help create uniform coding habits among software developers so that reading, checking, and maintaining code written by different programmers becomes easier. The intent of these standards is to define a natural style and consistency yet leave source code authors with the freedom to practice their craft without unnecessary burden.

When software adheres to common standards many good things happen:

• Programmers can go into any code and figure out what’s going on, so maintainability, readability, and reusability are increased. Code walk-throughs become less painful. This is especially true when developing GNU licensed commercial software products for sale.
• New developers can get up to speed quickly, which agencies and project teams need.
• Developers make fewer mistakes in consistent environments.
• Developers new to a language are spared making the same mistakes repeatedly, so reliability is increased.
• Developers new to a language are spared the need to develop a personal style and defend it to death. We've seen too many "personal style" examples where code is written as:
  $personal_style === in_array(array("spaghetti","cowboy","obfuscated","serpentine"))
  And if you can read that line clearly, you just might be an exceptional developer!
• Idiosyncratic styles and college-learned behaviors are replaced with an emphasis on business concerns—high productivity, maintainability, shared authorship, etc.

Experience over many decades of professional application development points to the conclusion that coding standards help projects run smoothly. They aren’t necessary for success, but they help. Most arguments against a particular standard come from the ego.

Few, if any, decisions in a common-sense standard are technically deficient; they are matters of taste. So, in the interests of establishing a showcase software development environment, be flexible, control the ego a bit, and remember any project is a team effort, even if you’re a team of one.

As software development practitioners, never forget that your "team" includes your clients. By following consistent standards, you're building your software legacy and delivering code that meets or exceeds their expectations.

The Masterminds Software Development Standards helps our developers build top-tier commercial software products for Formidable Forms. If you want to learn more about developing your own standards, improving the ones you have, or are just curious about what an enterprise approach is exactly, please feel free to download the Masterminds Software Development Standards.

The Masterminds Software Development Standards document is published under the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that the document is "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially.

Secondarily, the GNU Free Documentation License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

Software Standards Attribution

Masterminds Software Development Standards is an enterprise-level Formidable/WordPress software standards document modeled after a paper written by Mike Buckley, Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Buckley contributed his paper as a downloadable resource for the book "The Ultimate Guide to the SDLC" by Victor M. Font Jr, published 2010. "SDLC" is an acronym for System Development Life Cycle. The paper is included on the content CD for Chapter 7—Design and Development. You may download Buckley's foundational document here: General Style and Coding Standards for Software Projects by Mike Buckley

Language Specific Coding Standards

Accessibility Coding Standards

Mastermind developers adhere to the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards.

CSS Coding Standards

Mastermind developers adhere to the WordPress CSS Coding Standards.

HTML Coding Standards

Mastermind developers adhere to the WordPress HTML Coding Standards.

Javascript/jQuery Coding Standards

Mastermind developers adhere to the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards.

PHP Coding Standards

Mastermind developers adhere to the WordPress PHP Coding Standards.

Formidable Coding Standards

This is where our rubber meets the road. Anything we do ourselves that we consider essential to a Formidable project's success is published here.

• Field Definitions:
  • Define meaningful field keys when building forms. Example: "devdir_registration_section" instead of "jhasd". This is extremely important when writing enterprise/commercial grade code for sale. Why redefine keys? see: Writing Transportable Code: Keys vs. IDs.
• PHP:
  • Use Formidable's built-in functions whenever possible. Remember, The Codex is your friend.
  • Always receive field keys as parameters in your custom Ajax or REST PHP functions.
  • Use FrmField::get_id_by_key( $key ) to retrieve the field ID.
  • Write code that supports all current stable PHP releases.
  • Make sure to test all PHP code against the latest release.
  • Comment, comment, comment! Did we say comment? Explain what you are doing with each block of code. Ask yourself, "If I was a new developer seeing this for the first time, would I understand what this line of code is doing and why?" This is why code needs comments.
• General:
  • The web browser and device landscape changes regularly. Our approach is to look forward, not back. Test code in current versions of all major desktop browsers to ensure compatibility.
  • Do not test or provide support for old or abandoned browsers, e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer, and previous versions of Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera.

Software Licensing and Copyrights

Software Licensing

WordPress is released under the GPLv2 (or later) License from the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license is included with every copy of WordPress, but you can also read the text of the license here.

Formidable Forms products are also licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or later.

Any software published for sale in your Developer Digital Store should be compliant with the WordPress and Formidable licenses and be released under the GPLv2 (or later) License.

Copyrights

In the United States, you own the copyright to any software you write unless you've contractually transferred your copyright to a third party (See: Who Owns It?). If you own the copyright, it's your software. You own it and you can charge any price you want in your Digital Developer Store.

To quote the Free Software Foundation:

Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price.

Free Software Foundation

Privacy and Accessibility Laws

We expect you to comply with any applicable privacy laws and accessibility standards.

Your Customers are Yours to Keep and to Keep Happy

Formidable Masterminds does not compete with you for business. Clients that want to hire us to develop an expert business solution contact us in any one of the following ways:

We do not display a Formidable Masterminds entry in the Developers Directory.

Potential clients that contact you through your directory listing are your leads to nurture and convert into customers. How you do that is your business.

And more importantly, how you support your customers is your business. We shall not intervene in customer disputes. It's up to you to keep your customers satisfied and provide for longevity in your relationships.

Your customers are yours to sustain and build relationships with. You must support them and promise they'll be pleased with your products and services. These are reasonable expectations for us to have of anyone choosing to open a Developer Digital Store on Formidable Masterminds.

Sales Payouts

At one time, PayPal supported instant vendor payouts from EDD transactions. But unfortunately, PayPal deprecated that API. Until another automated payout mechanism can be researched and tested, payouts will be generated manually at least weekly or at best, twice each week, whichever proves to be the most feasible.

What Do We Get Out of This?

Here's the hook that you sensed was coming. What does Formidable Masterminds get for allowing you to open your own Developer Digital Store? We earn a commission on your sales.

Every passive income opportunity has an associated cost to realize the gain. The cost for opening your Developer Digital Store and gaining the opportunity to produce passive income is 10% of sales.

Passive income can be a great way to help you generate extra cash flow, whether you’re running your Developer Digital Store as a side hustle or just trying to get a little extra dough each month. Passive income can help you earn more during the good times and tide you over if you suddenly become unemployed or voluntarily take time away from work.

With passive income you can have money coming in even as you pursue your primary job. If you’re able to build up a solid stream of passive income, you might want to kick back a little. Either way, a passive income gives you extra security.

The commission structure is built into Easy Digital Downloads and commissions are deducted automatically when sales are recorded in your Developer Digital Store.

The 10% commission covers our bank charges and hosting costs. The full 90% remaining is yours to keep. As you set your product prices, remember to factor in the commission when you calculate your profit margin.

How to Calculate Sales Price by Gross Profit Margin Goal

We learned a long time ago when we owned a brick and mortar computer retail store, that most conventional profit margin calculators DO NOT calculate profit margin correctly.

A 35% profit margin in a retail operation is a generous revenue goal that should cover all of your overhead with room to spare. So for the sake of this example, lets assume you want to make a 35% gross profit margin on your products. Conventional wisdom says to multiply the product cost by 135% to calculate the profit margin. In other words, we want to "markup" the price by 35%. This is the conventional (and wrong) formula to markup your cost to reach a 35% gross profit margin:

( product cost x ( desired gross profit margin + 100% ) ) = sale price

For this example let's say the product cost is $100 and we want to earn a 35% gross profit margin. We markup the price by 35% by multiplying the cost by 135%. Using the conventional formula, we can calculate our sales price this way:

( 100 x ( 135% ) ) = $135

How can we prove that with a sales price of $135, the gross profit margin is truly 35%? Since we multiplied by 135%, logic dictates that if we subtract 35% from the sales price, it should bring us back to the cost of $100, right?

You can also multiply the sales price of $135 by .65 and it should give you the same result of $100. Does that make sense?

Let's see if that reasoning works. Here's the first example where we subtract the 35%:

$135 x 35% = $47.25
$135 - $47.25 = $87.75

Here's the second example where we multiply by .65:

$135 * .65 = $87.75

We know our cost is $100, so something isn't right with the conventional formula. We expected these calculations to bring us back to our cost of $100.

When we check our profit margin this way, we have a cost of $87.75, not our true cost of $100. We're losing at least $13.25 of overhead coverage on every sale. That's a big chunk of gross profit margin to lose when we're counting on it to cover our business costs. You're not going to make a lot of money if you keep widely missing your gross margin percentage targets.

The conventional formula does not calculate margin correctly. In fact, by multiplying our cost by 135%, our true markup is 25.93%, which is 9.07% lower than our expectation. We wanted to earn 35%. How do we correctly calculate margin then?

Here are the correct formulas:

• The gross profit P is the difference between the cost to make a product C and the selling price or revenue R.
  • P = R - C
• The markup percentage M is the profit P divided by the cost C to make the product.
  • M = P / C = ( R - C ) / C
• The gross margin percentage G is the profit P divided by the selling price or revenue R.
  • G = P / R = ( R - C ) / R

Using these formulas, let's calculate the gross profit margin percent using our example problem:

P / R = G
$35/$135 = 25.93%

Gross margin percentage and markup percentage are not the same thing. To correctly calculate a sales price with a 35% gross margin percentage, use this formula:

( C / ( 1 - ( G / 100 ) ) ) = R
( 100 / ( 1 - ( 35% / 100 ) ) ) = R
( 100 / ( 1 - ( .35 ) ) ) = R
( 100 / .65 ) = $153.85

This gives us a true gross margin percentage of 35%. However, the markup percentage is 53.8%. Don't confuse markup percentage with gross margin percentage.

Here's a Formidable margin calculator to help you set your pricing.