Custom Fields 1.3

Today we are finally releasing Custom Fields extension version 1.3. You should see an update notification in your wp-admin / Plugins panel within 24 hours, if not then go to wp-admin / Dashboard / Updates panel and click the “Check Again” button.

Before you do that though, read below on what is new in the version 1.3.

I am pretty proud of this one as it solves quite a lot of problems our users asked about

Assigning Forms Schemes to Categories

I often get a question phrased: how to have different fields in the [adverts_add] for each category? For a long time, we had a free code snippet that did this, but since there is so much demand for this kind of functionality i decided to move it to the Custom Fields extension core.

If you are using the Preselect Ad Category snippet you can deactivate it as the Custom Fields 1.3 should be able to take it from here, it is using a similar code so you should not need to assign the categories again, one thing you will need to change is to add a preselect_category=1 param to the [adverts_add] shortcode.

One small update we made is that the assigned form schemes are cascading. This means that you can assign a form scheme to top category only and all sub-categories will inherit it.

Forms Cloning

If you need two similar forms you no longer need to create both of them from scratch. Just create one, then while editing the form click the “Clone” button and work with an already customized form instead of the default one.

Data Sources Interface

Since version 1.0 we had a Data Sources interface that allowed registering re-usable data sources (ie. options) for the fields like Dropdown, Checkbox, and Radio. The problem with this solution was that only users familiar with PHP programming code take advantage of it especially if you wanted to have a data source using custom taxonomy.

Version 1.3 has a user interface for the data sources, so you can register them directly from wp-admin / Classifieds / Options / Custom Fields / Data Sources panel and then use them in the forms.

It’s an elegant solution that any user can use. That being said using the Taxonomy as a data source still requires a small code snippet to register a new taxonomy but it is more of a copy and pastes kind of thing rather than actual programming.

New Field Types

The new version introduces 3 new field types

File Upload – more of the Gallery field that can be set up to either upload the files into the Media Library or to save them as normal files in the wp-content/uploads/wpadverts folder.

Date and Time Field – Date picker which allows entering a date alone (in one of three formats: Y-m-d, d/m/Y, or m/d/Y) or date and time (hours and minutes).

Autocomplete – This field is actually already being used in the Maps and Locations extension (you can see how it looks like in the Maps and Locations 1.4 release post). The autocomplete field can be used with data sources but only with the Taxonomy Data Sources.

Let us know what do you think?

I think that we tackled all the main problems our users had with the Custom Fields extension, but if you think that some important feature is missing please let us know in the comments.