Installing the plugin

Getting the plugin

You can obtain the official plugin in one of three ways:

• Search for "Traffman" among the available plugins directly in your WordPress admin panel.
• Download it from its page in the official WordPress Plugin Directory.
• Download it from our website.

Activation

Install and activate the plugin as usual. A dedicated "Traffman" item then appears in the main sidebar of your WordPress admin panel, giving you access to every section and setting of the exchange: Dashboard, Statistics and Settings.

Connecting your account

In the WordPress admin open Traffman → Settings and switch to the API tab. Enter the API key and API secret of the client you registered earlier – both are shown on the client's page, see registering your first client – and press Save.

Saving the credentials starts the verification of the client, which runs on its own: once it succeeds you receive an email, and the client becomes active if your subscription has room for another active client. What that check consists of, and what to do when it stays silent, is in confirming a client.

Checking the connection

The Healthcheck tab of the same settings page is where to look when something does not add up. It holds two buttons, and each checks one direction of the traffic between the service and your site:

• Check the connection from the API server to your client asks our server to call back to your site – the same call the verification makes.
• Check content URL availability on your site asks it to read your homepage, the way the validation of every pushed item reads an article.

Both answer on the spot, with a success notice or with the reason the attempt failed.

A failure here is rarely about the plugin. The usual cause is that something standing in front of the site – hosting bot protection, a firewall or a CDN – answers our server with a captcha instead of the page: when hosting protection blocks our server describes what to look for and what to change.

Turning the exchange on

The Common tab has a Service status switch with three positions, and the exchange only runs in one of them.

Enabled is the working state: your content is offered to the network and other members' content appears in your blocks.

Demo is a dry run. The client takes no part in the exchange – your content is not offered to anyone and nothing real is fetched – but the blocks on your site fill up with demo content, so you can see how they look on the page before going live. Points do not move in this mode.

Paused stops participation without touching any of your settings.

With the client verified and the exchange enabled, two things are left: choose the content your site offers to the network, and place a content block where borrowed content should appear.