Three Buttons, One Dashboard: How We Embed Payment Links in This Blog
The paywall post showed you what happens when content is gated behind a payment event. This one is smaller and more practical. It's about buttons, the kind you click to actually pay for something, and how we generate them. Sometimes its just this simple thinks that make us happy.
You don't need PayGlue to add a payment button to a Ghost post. You can build one yourself at your payment provider's dashboard and paste the link in. You can also use a tool like Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee, which already does a perfectly good job of this and is worth a look if all you need is a simple tip jar. None of that is wrong, and we're not pretending otherwise.
What we do differently is keep it in one place. Instead of jumping between your payment provider's dashboard, a separate tool for tips, and another for tickets, you generate all of it from the PayGlue dashboard: pick a product or paste your own link, customize how the button looks, and drop the embed into Ghost. Same mechanism each time, regardless of what's behind it.
Below are three buttons we built that way, just to show the range.
A tip jar, the simple version
This is the closest thing to what Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee already do well. If you found this post useful and want to throw a few euros our way, here you go.
Nothing fancy here. It's a link, styled and embedded through our dashboard instead of through theirs. The result for the reader is identical either way.
A product link, this time for an event ticket
This one is different because it's tied to an actual product, not just a loose link. We set up a one-time item in our payment provider, and the PayGlue dashboard pulled it in as something we could attach directly to a button, price and all.
If the price changes on the provider side, the button reflects it without us having to touch the embed again. That part is the actual reason we built this instead of just hardcoding a link.
A button that isn't about money at all
Not every button needs to charge anyone. Sometimes you just want a clean, consistent call to action that matches the same style as the ones above.
We added this one mostly to make a point: the dashboard doesn't care whether what's behind the button is a payment or a form. It's a button generator first, payment integration second.
Did you notice the buttons looked different?
If you scrolled past the three buttons above without giving it much thought, go back and look again. Different size, different color, different style on each one. That wasn't an accident, and it wasn't us being sloppy with consistency either. Each button was customized separately in the dashboard, on purpose, to show that you're not locked into one fixed look across your whole site. A tip jar can look casual, a ticket button can look more like an actual product purchase, a contact button can look like neither.
So why not just use Ghost's own button
Ghost has a built-in button card, and it works fine. Ours isn't a replacement for that, it sits next to it. The difference is mostly in customizing and where things live: ours pulls directly from your connected payment provider's products when you want that, keeps the styling consistent across however many buttons you embed, and means you're not hopping between three different dashboards to manage them. If Ghost's native button already covers what you need, there's no reason to switch.
We're still in private beta, still building in public, still happy to hear if something about this flow feels clunky. Reply to this post or reach out directly if you do.
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Pic from Emmanuel Appiah on Unsplash