As promised I have put some work into WordBay today (more than I have in a loooong time) and come up with version 1.20 (download from the link on the left). Changes:
- corrected the bug where the “Click for details” icon was taking visitors to an eBay sign-in page instead of to the item clicked on. Many thanks and well done to ChuckMcB, a faitfhul WordBay user and frequent contributor, who spotted this problem and its cause. We might all see a slight increase in sales after this, who knows!
- found some legacy Wordpress functions I was using that needed changing. You won’t notice the difference!
- corrected a small potential security problem - not sanitising $_GET data. Big “no-no” usually, but it’s unlikely this could have been exploited here since WordBay merely passes this data on to eBay. Still, better safe…
It’s got a widget, a lovely widget
You might remember that ad if you are from the UK. Anyway, I also added something people have asked about intermittently ever since the early versions of WordBay: - I added rudimentary “widget” functionality, i.e. the possibility to add posts to your template rather than to content. Now this is DEFINITELY BETA! I just want to run it past you guys to see if you can get any results from this.
It works like this:
Put this code:
<?php echo wbwidget(array ('searchterms' => 'ipod') )?>
…wherever you want in your template, say the sidebar.php (careful not to add the PHP start and end tags if you are placing this within existing PHP code!).
Replace ‘ipod’ with your search terms, using the same search criteria as you would if you were inserting between the ‘[wordbay]’ tags.
Now please note!! It is hard to get good results with this because eBay preformats the feed (using some horrible tables etc.) and there is not much we can do to change that. Hence you need a good minimum width to display the feed, and you probably want to turn off the “Click for details” icon. Maybe you can get better results than me with some judicious css. I certainly didn’t manage to get it looking decent! Let me know how you get on.
Oh and by the way, at the moment you have to rely on the existing settings in your admin panel, which doesn’t help of course. It’s unlikely you’ll manage to get your settings so they look right in both the “widget” and the post&page content, so it’s probably one or t’other. In particular you will want to set the display to a single column, I’d imagine! I have not yet added the possibility of adding per-post settings, that’s another thing people have been on at me for ages, but I am reluctant to take that on right now. It’s the next big job, though, for sure.
Well, as ever, all the best, and keep earning with Wordpress, WordBay and EPN! (and let the rest of us in on the secret if you know it!)
Oh, P.S. WordBay is now tested up to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.9.2 - finally!
Posted on February 20th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »