What are we up to in 2018?

Happy New Year! I hope that 2017 was great for you and 2018 will be even better.

The beginning of the year is a great time for individuals and companies to make new years resolution and plan the coming year.

According to the self-help communities in order to keep your new year’s resolutions, you need to write them down and make them public. This is what this post is for. I want to share with you what we want to do in 2018.

WPAdverts and Gutenberg

This year WordPress.org will most likely release WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg Editor. This is a major shift in how the pages and posts will be created and we want to be ready for that. In 2018 we will be focusing on integrating WPAdverts with Gutenberg.

This project is still young so most likely we will have just a basic integration. It will allow to visually set up shortcodes (in Gutenberg they will be called blocks) without a need to visit documentation each time you want to use one.

For WPAdverts itself we are not planning major changes anytime soon, only small improvements, and bug fixes. We just recently had a major gallery update by the end of 2017 and want the dust to settle (so to speak) before creating introducing other major changes.

In other words, we will be mainly taking care of issues that pop up on the WPAdverts GitHub page. The issues are reported by users or added by us. If you want to be on top of what we are working on subscribe to this page. Even better if you have some problem or would like to have some feature developed add it to out Issues tracker.

Existing Add-ons

 

BuddyPress Integration

We are planning two updates to make creating BuddyPress classifieds site easier. First one will allow sending a BP message directly from the Advert details page. Currently, the details page only redirects to a page where the user can send a message.

An additional button in the BuddyPress profile to allow a user to quickly post an Advert without going to a separate page with the [adverts_add] shortcode.

 

Custom Fields

We actually already have an update for WPAdverts Custom Fields add-on ready. It will fix some minor issue and additionally allows to set validation rules for gallery uploads.

The other small update is switching form layout, you will be able to select between:

• Aligned Layout – the field labels are next to inputs
• Stacked Layout – the field labels are above inputs

The default one is Aligned Layout. If your theme does not have a lot of content width the stacked layout might work better with your theme.

This update will be described in more details in a separate blog post when it will be released.

Another update i would really like to do for the Custom Fields add-on are conditional fields, that is a field which shows if certain conditions are met. That being said this is quite a complex feature and it is hard to tell if we will be able to add it to already busy schedule. If this is something you will really want to have let us know in the comments, we will add a higher priority for conditional fields.

 

WooCommerce Integration

This add-on has few issues reported to our internal bug tracker. Once we will resolve them we will want to add one major feature to this extension.

Packages – this will allow users to buy for example 10 postings credits. Then the user will be able to post ads and “pay” using the credits. This is a feature with the highest priority and should be in the first quarter of 2018.

 

Maps and Locations

We will want to improve search by location but more importantly, we want to integrate [adverts_list] and [adverts_mal_map] shortcodes in a way that searching on the [adverts_list] will modify the results on the map.

This kind of layout is quite popular (for example Airbnb is using it) and we want WPAdverts users to take advantage of it as well.

New Extensions

In no specific order of importance.

Stripe Integration. The default Payments module allows charging users using PayPal and Bank Transfer, we want to add Stripe to it, so you will be able to charge users using credit cards as well.

Mark As Sold. Simple add-on to allow owner and administrator marking the Advert as sold. This will be quite easy to develop so most likely this will be the one of the first we will be working on.

Ratings. This will allow users to rate and comment on the Advert.

Authors. This extension will allow users to create their seller profiles where they will be able to display some information about them and list all of their active Ads.

Note. Both Ratings and Authors add-ons will require quite a lot of work and it is possible we will be able to deliver just one of them this year.

Integrations

Pricing Plugin Integration. This will be more of an integration between some third-party pricing table plugin and the Custom Fields add-on. It will change how the [adverts_add] page works. The user will first need to select a pricing and then he will see an [adverts_add] form with a form scheme applied to this pricing.

We are often asked how to hide or show fields depending on what pricing was selected this integration will allow to do it and on top of that user will be able to select the pricing from a beautifully designed pricing page.

We have not yet selected a pricing plugin we will integrate with, but most likely this will be one of pricing table plugins available at WordPress.org. (Feel free to vote on your preferred plugin in the comments).

Membership Plugin Integration. Users often want to allow posting Ads only to users who purchased a membership. We made it somewhat possible by adding “requires” and “requires_error” params to the [adverts_add] shortcode.

We want to take this feature one step further by assigning the pricing to memberships in some 3rd party membership plugin. This will allow you to sell membership packages which will include an ability to post Adverts.

That being said we have not yet decided which membership plugin we will be integrating with, so feel free to vote on your favorite membership plugin in the comments.

Summary

This is pretty much it for 2018, about 12 big tasks. To be honest, for a small team like ours this is quite a lot. While writing this article i did not think it will be this long, but the user base is growing, users are submitting new ideas so a to-do list with great ideas is steadily growing.

We will do our best to deliver all of this features by the end of December. In the blog posts on this site i will inform you about our progress, so if you haven’t done yet, please subscribe to the blog (the subscribe box is in the right sidebar) and please help us reach more users by sharing this post on social media (you can do it using the buttons below, thanks!)