Handling Expired Adverts Pages – WPAdverts 1.2.4

We have just released WPAdverts 1.2.4 today, if you cannot see the update notification in your wp-admin / Plugins panel give it few hours (up to 24) it should show, or go to wp-admin / Dashboard / Updates and click “Check Again” button.

The main change in the version 1.2.4 is the ability to select how you would like to handle the Expired Ads. On most of the classifieds sites the Adverts are visible for a number of days (usually 30) and after that the Ad is hidden. What was once an Ad details page (ie. http://example.com/advert/test/) becomes a 404 page.

Depending on how your site is being found and used by users this might make your site lose some visitors (who will click “Go Back” button after seeing 404 page) or so-called SEO juice which helps you rank better in search engines. In order to prevent this we introduced a couple of options in wp-admin / Classifieds / Options / Core panel

How to make use of them you can read in Handling Expired Ads documentation.

One update that developers might find particularly useful is an adverts_attachment_uploaded action. This action is executed when WPAdverts finished uploading a file to a Gallery.

This has a couple of uses, for example, you can use it to tag WPAdverts attachments with some additional meta tag and then hide them in Media Library. This is especially useful if you have a busy classifieds site but also a blog which uses images from Media Library. Once you have a meta field in WPAdverts attachments you can use one more filter to hide all Ads images in the Media Library making it much easier to find images for your blog posts.

The other application is an integration with Enhanced Media Library plugin. Using the adverts_attachment_uploaded action you can put the WPAdverts images in categories which will make it easier to browse them later.

We already have Attachment Uploaded snippet ready which explains how to do all of this.