I am happy to announce we are releasing today Authors 1.3.
You should see the update notification in your wp-admin / Plugins panel within 24 hours, if not then go to the wp-admin / Dashboard / Updates panel and click the “Check Again” button this should allow you to update to the latest version.
As always, it is a good practice to create a backup before updating your website.
New Field Types in Authors Forms
This update mainly improves the integration between the Authors extension and the Custom Fields 1.3. There are the following new fields available: File Upload, Autocomplete, Date & Time and, Label fields (of course available when applicable, for example, the File Upload is not available in the Authors Search form since it does not make sense to search by file upload).
That’s a short paragraph explaining what’s new but quite a lot of under-the-hood work went into the update to allow using these fields.
API Changes
We are making few changes to the API to allow better customizing what the Authors Panel and to suit your needs:
wpadverts_authors_manage_adverts_add_content – filter allows replacing the default [adverts_add] shortcode in [adverts_author_manage] / Create Ad panel with your own shortcode.
wpadverts_authors_manage_adverts_manage_content – filter allows replacing the default [adverts_manage] shortcode in the [adverts_author_manage] / Edit Profile panel with your own code.
adverts_author_manage_menu – filter allows adding new menu items to the [adverts_author_manage] shortcode before the items are sorted (as we had a filter adding the menu items after sorting which did not make much sense).
Better Security
In WPAdverts 1.4 we introduced checksums to better protect site owners and users from hacking attempts, the new system is available in the WPAdverts core for a while and now it is also available in the Authors plugin.
The checksums system will enable itself automatically, you do not need to do anything to have it activated.
What do you think?
If you think this update is missing some key features please let us know in the comments, we will probably have version 1.3.1 soon so if you have some great ideas that will not require rewriting the Authors extension we will be happy to include them in the next release.
Comments (2)
Can you also include a feature that enables authors’ posts to be automatically posted to facebook groups?
I am afraid we are not really planning this feature as FB and other social media sites made it hard for small businesses to access the posting API, but you can use some third-party plugin like JetPack Publicize to have the submitted classifieds ads automatically sent to FB.