After some thought I have decided to turn WordBay into a valid WordPress plugin. This will make it more friendly and give it a wider audience, and will make me feel a bit better (this version IS slightly “hacky”). What does this mean?

We may have one more release in this form before then with a couple of new features, we will see. However, when the WP plugin version is released the current implementation WILL then almost certainly be deprecated after a couple of releases at most.

However, if you have the current version of the plugin working and you are happy with the way it works then I would say “don’t sweat it” - I am running this on some sites and am quite happy with it. The “proper” plugin will have to work differently - there won’t be a special page template you install, rather you will simply insert the [wordbay] tags in either your post or your page, and if you have built with the old version you will have to change the template back to “page template” (the tags will continue working as they did). Also, there will be non-programmers using it, so I will have to add a few more features, including of course a back-end with default settings, plus eventually maybe some new tags to override these.

The first version of the valid WP plugin will probably also only have one panel to begin with, as the two-panel layout can break people’s templates. However, I still want WordBay to serve the original purpose - the easy and quick creation of eBay niche sites, so I will continue to develop with this in mind.

New features in the pipeline:

- on-page search box which keeps the visitor on YOUR site
- possibly collecting visitor search engine keywords if they were referred from a SE and using them to generate a “find this” link (as SE indexing is always lagging behind your listings and visitors never quite find what they were looking for!)

Posted on April 14th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized