Just to let you know there is a new, 0.5BETA version of WordBay available over on the downloads page. It fixes a bug pointed out by users (thanks guys) whereby a page without the WordBay tags on does not display it’s content. Stupid oversight, but pretty major bug. All fixed now, so please install the new version and keep letting me know how it’s working. I have plenty of ideas for improving WordBay, but I first want to reach the point where we have a stable version, so I AM interested in feature requests, but most of all bug reports at this stage.

By the way, there is an issue where, relatively rarely, no items are displayed, but there is no error message either. I believe this is some kind of issue where the eBay feed comes back empty because of server load or whatever, and I don’t have much control over this. We’ll see how bad this issue is, because it may not be frequent enough to bother about too much, other than making sure we trap it and show some kind of link whereby the visitor can continue browsing.

Also I want to get some instructions together for the new WordBay so please let me know if there was anything unclear regarding installation. I also want to get some CSS classes documented and integrated so users can easily change the appearance of the listings - they can currently look a bit cheesy, even when styles are inherited from the main blog template.

STOP PRESS: another bug discovered - WordBay seems to be leaving a DIV tag or something open, thus screwing up the styling on the rest of the page. Firefox tends to trap this, but it messes up the styling of sidebars and stuff in IE, so will get working on a fix asap.

Posted on May 6th, 2008 by admin
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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 admin
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