AdSanity – A Pixel Jar Plugin

You may know Pixel Jar as a provider of website and theme development services. While that’s certainly true for the majority of our time, we also spend some of our energy developing some cool plugins. Foremost among these is AdSanity. We’ve been the creators and developers of the plugin for over six years. And with the new release of version 1.1 of AdSanity we wanted to take a moment to look back at the plugin’s history and a small peek into its future.

The Mother of Invention…

As with most stories of plugin development, the idea for AdSanity came out of a need from our own client work. That need was to create a plugin that allowed an easy way for someone to add advertisements to their WordPress site. There were other plugins that allowed ad implementation but most of them were very complex, and often didn’t perform very well. AdSanity was designed to be network agnostic – able to display ads provided from multiple external sources with equal facility. In addition, the plugin could support ads created by the user. Once this tool was put together we realized that we had something that would be useful for a wide range of WordPress users.

The First Release

We released the first version of AdSanity in December of 2011. We initially sold about 50 copies of the plugin in the first month of release. We’ve grown a bit since then and have now sold thousands of copies. In the intervening years we’ve released 20 incremental updates to the plugin. However, we’ve never released anything significant enough for a “dot 1” revision. Until today.

The Future of AdSanity

Now that we’ve launched the new version of AdSanity we’re already looking to the future of the plugin. We have some cool new add-ons planned that will allow users to customize their advertising platform to handle specific needs. We’re looking at feature requests that we’ve gotten and seeing how we can extend AdSanity to meet those requests. Along with improving the code base of AdSanity we’ve also taken steps to improve our support of the plugin. In coordination with the new release, we’ve also launched an AdSanity Help site to give our users a 24/7 place to go for self-service help. As we build new add-ons and create new tutorials we’ll be expanding the help site to keep our users in-the-know.