To allow for greater flexibility, plugin will bring company types to connect the products. Plugin will add Brand and Seller company types. You can adjust all sorts of things for them, and they will be registered automatically on update. Plan for future versions is to allow adding of more company types. Each company in any of the types will have many predefined data to describe the company (logo, URL, affiliate links and more). If you are using taxonomy for Manufacturer/Brand, new plugin will allow you to copy companies from that taxonomy into product type and use it from there. But, also, each product will have mandatory Brand company type assigned.

Compare Box is new feature that replaces Compare Widget. Compare Box, by default will be visible on Archive pages, and will be dynamically displayed. It will make many things easier and it will work with layouts that don’t have sidebars and can’t use widgets. It is already implemented, and I will post more about it soon, so I can get some suggestions on how to improve it before release.

More information about new plugin version will follow soon.

Compare Widget

Compare widget is updated, and it can now use different layouts (three available) to display products waiting for comparison. List layout is shown on the image on the right. Also, if you are using some cache plugin, you might have noticed null/empty elements in compare widget. Now, the widget supports cache plugins, and if you use such plugin, just enable that in the plugin Settings, tab Advanced, group Cache. When you do that, widget will update its contents through AJAX.

When it comes to compare page, it is very useful with long list of features to compare, to keep on top of the page names and images for products compared. This can be done now, and you can enable it on plugin Settings, tab Rendering, group Compare Page. Option to enable is Fixed Header Row.

Archive Filter

Products archive filtering has gone through major changes, and it has updated with better filtering sidebar, support for more product property types and it has many things fixed. You can see example filter on the image on the left. More things will change here for next version of the plugin.

Various bugs are fixed, including problems with qTip2 tooltips, issues with filtering and few other minor things. As usual, please report any bugs or issues you find in the forums.

Next 1.1.5 is coming out next week and it will include: new compare box to replace current compare widget system, more improvements to filters and starting implementation for products related companies (manufacturer, retailer…). Roadmap on plugin page is updated.

Over the past few years, Google has developed a way to improve SERP display with additional information through rich snippets. GD Star Rating already uses snippets for ratings, and I have already announced that products snippets will be added to GD Products Center. First part of this implementation is now available, and activated by default. Snippets will be used only on main product page and plugin can use markup specific to Google or to Scheme.org implementation used by Bing and Yahoo too. Right now, product name and image are marked in the snippet. Next few versions will include: description, categories, brand and few more things.

New specification property is added: Link, for email or web URL. It has default settings (main plugin settings) for target and rel attributes, and in product editor you can specify link/email, title to use (if empty, it will use link value) and rel attribute. To improve usability of Select controls, plugin now can load and use Chosen.js library. And, a new shortcode is added to generate comparison page link: gdpc_link_compare.

jQueryUI, gdr2 and gdT3 libraries are updated to latest versions, some obsolete JavaScript code removed, and link shortcode expanded with REL attribute. Bugs fixed: problems with some of the rendering functions, broken preview of images in the product editor and broken compare URL’s for the GD Press Tools Pro sitemaps generator.

Please report in the forum any problems or bugs you find. Also, suggest features for future versions, and if you need, tutorials about any subject related to plugin use.

I am developing WordPress plugins for about 4 years, and most plugins I made are created because I didn’t like the alternatives (free or commercial). And for a while, I planned to make a forms plugin, because several I tried over the years were not very well made and I always had to work on them to get the features I need. But, things had change, and now we have Gravity Forms that is getting better with each new version, and I finally can scratch my plans to make forms plugin. Trust me, Gravity Forms is amazing.

List of Forms

With Gravity Forms you can add as many forms as you want. For each form you can see number of entries submitted and you can control each from notifications and fields in the layout. All submitted entries from website visitors are saved into the database, and you can review them and you can save notes about each one or respond the people that submitted them.

Form Editor

Edit the form is very intuitive, allowing you to set as many fields as you want. But, for each field you can set all sorts of options to control field behavior and display. Number of form fields you can use is quite extensive, and includes validation fields (for email, or phone), hidden fields to embed all sorts of runtime variables (logged in user for example, or date, post ID or link…).

But, that’s not all, Gravity Forms has add-ons. Currently, there are 6 add-ons available. 5 of them will help you integrating plugin with Campaign Monitor email marketing service, MailChimp email marketing service, FreshBooks invoicing service, Twillo for SMS notifications and PayPal. Sixth add-on is for expanding default WordPress registration form and replacing it with form made using Gravity Forms so you can gather more info about the user during registration process.

Plugin includes default styling, but that can be changed and expanded so that you can give it better look for the theme you are using. All my xScape based themes all have custom styling for Gravity Forms so that they can get more native look inside the theme pages. Also, with numerous hooks inside the Gravity Forms, you can expand it and add own fields, values for fields and many more things.

Here, on Dev4Press, I use Gravity Forms for 6 different contact forms for the past 2 months, and it really made my life easier handling different contact submissions and responding to them. Forms are very flexible and so far, I only used hooks to add items into some of the selection fields, everything else is done with Gravity Forms alone.

If you decide on purchase, there are 3 different licenses you can get: personal (for 1 website with no add-ons), business (3 websites and basic add-ons) and developer (unlimited number of websites and all add-ons with priority support). All 3 include one year of updates and support. Whatever license you decide on, getting Gravity Forms will very much improve your WordPress powered website. Highly recommended.

For custom taxonomies there are two ways to create permalinks, and by default even for hierarchical taxonomies, URL is non hierarchical. Now, you have option for this, and by default is set as automatic and will generate such links. You can turn them off. Also, there is another rewrite option: with front, to add base rewrite prefix for taxonomy.

Expanding RSS feed with custom post types implementation is changed due to some conflicts with previously used method, and it should be working fine now. Plugin will not change feed if the feed has previously set post type, so it will only affect normal feeds.

Development of 3.0 Pro plugin version is starting soon with features announced last week. Lite version remains in maintenance, but as you know, no new features will be added to id beyond support for registering post types and taxonomies. So, hurry, and upgrade to Pro to get some really cool features with more coming in 3.0.

GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools: http://d4p.me/gdtt

This is the current list of features GD Search Tools plugin will have:

1. Use of MySQL FULLTEXT index for indexing posts and comments table.
2. Support for natural language and boolean types of search as supported by MySQL.
3. Implementation of filters based on content type and other criteria.
4. Expandable search context with additional data types.
5. Use of AJAX to get search results with on the fly filtering.
6. Logging of all the search requests into database.

Plugin will have predefined templates for displaying search forms and search results with filtering so you can get it to work with any theme. xScape Theme Framework will support new plugin with all themes. List of features is far from complete, and there is always room for more suggestions. Plan is to get current planned features into first stable version, but all good suggestions will go into the future features list.

Pricing for the plugin is yet unknown, but it will be comparable to GD Press Tools. As of yet, I am not sure if plugin will have Lite version, but it’s not impossible. I hope to release first test versions by the end of May 2011.

Operating Systems

MS Windows is the most used OS in the world, and this chart shows the same for visits on this website. These 5 OS here made up 96.2% of all OS tracked. Different Linux distributions and mobile phones tracked the rest 3.8%.

OS Charts for visits on Dev4Press: may 1 2010 - aug 1 2010

Browsers

There are 2 browsers charts. First one shows browsers regardless of the browser version. Firefox browsers dominate, with Google Chrome in second position.

Browsers for visits on Dev4Press: may 1 2010 - aug 1 2010

If we take a look at browser versions, chart shows that Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5 are most popular choices.

Browsers for visits on Dev4Press: may 1 2010 - aug 1 2010

MS Internet Explorer is still most used browsers in the world, but for individual websites and websites that are specialized as Dev4Press is, you see that visitors are more informed and are using browsers that are leading in the web standards implementation. I prefer using Opera, but these charts don’t include data from my visits to the website.

Conclusion

In November, I will post another overview and compare it to this.

From now on, all themes will go through Beta phase before theme is released here. This will help to better test the theme and make it more stable. Also, we can use this period to make new default styles, so you can also suggest color palettes or enhancements.

lightScape Beta features new version of xScape and several new features: Use of WP media dialog to upload or use images from media library, Upload and use default avatar, global settings and improvements to Blueprint support and implementation. Also, several bugs are fixed, mostly with Menu Designer.

xScape.info Demo Website:
http://xscape.info/
lightScape Beta Demo:
http://xscape.info/load/?theme=lightscape

If you follow the discussions on the current WP 3.0 progress, you surely know that major problems remaining right now are Menus and custom post types. And while the custom post types are working good as far as I can tell (with few problems still), the same can’t be said for Menus.

Custom post types and taxonomies

Even though custom post types were implemented in WP 2.9, it was very basic implementation, and you couldn’t do much with them. But now, custom post types are on the same level with the posts and pages. And while there are some bugs still remaining, I am confident that it will be sorted out before the official release. This website uses custom post types for the central documentation, and right now the only thing I couldn’t implement is having comments with posts in documentation.

Custom taxonomies are much improved with additional hierarchy support. You can try my GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugin to see how all that works right now.

Menus

As of yesterday, I managed to create first menu and to actually see the editor working properly and display nesting of the menu items. But, menus editor in my opinion is not good (not to use stronger word). I have several problems with the way the menus are implemented. They are forced into a taxonomy, even thou, menu has nothing to do with taxonomy. Menus need much complex data model to be able to allow much wider range of items and taxonomies are not good for that. Editor will be a pain to use if you need to create big menus that have hierarchies of pages or categories with no settings on how to handle page item that already has sub pages or categories with sub categories. In my xScape theme I have built menu designer that has much more options and more control over the menu items and how they are displayed including different way to render items. Also, all menus in xScape are saved into the WP options table as serialized objects, and that I find more logical than approach in with WP native menus. Also, it’s easy to expand such structure. But, deed is done, and I don’t believe that anything with menus implementation will be changed in the next 2-3 weeks. We will see who the menus will perform and how much problems will cause in the long run. Good idea, average implementation.

WPMU to Multi Sites

As for the merge with WPMU, I still have to test how the conversion of WPMU website will go to WP 3.0, but from what I have seen over the Internet, that should go without problems. As for standalone multi site installation I tested, there are many inconsistencies with WPMU and I think that there will be problems with migration of plugins and themes specifically written for WPMU. I will write more on the migration next week when I do that with xScape.info website.

Speed

Speed. WP 3.0 is much faster in all operations. This is not just subjective view, but I actually measured that speed improved by 15% and memory usage is now lower by 10%. Many changes made to meta boxes on post edit page are great and improve speed and usability, but they will break many plugins that relied on JavaScript to modify default meta boxes. But, I guess that with so many changes one can expect that problems with plugins can’t be avoided.

For the past month I have been improving all my plugins to work with WP 3.0, and so far everything works great. Same goes for xScape themes, and everything works in both normal and multi site installations. More on WP 3.0 coming soon, I will make more tests with menus after Tuesday when Beta 2 is announced. Migration from WPMU will follow next weekend.

For custom taxonomies I have added more options that are added with WordPress 3.0. Also, number of things is changed and updated and fixed to solve the problems with latest WP versions.

If you test plugin with WordPress 3.0, please report any potential problems so that it can be fixed before WP 3.0 is released.

Adding new Custom Post Type

And with that, plugin changed the names, since it’s more logical, than to create new plugin. At this point with current latest nightly build of WordPress 3.0, everything works fine, and I expect that until the release of WP 3.0 final, some things can change and break the plugin.

If you use older versions of WordPress, everything about custom post types will be hidden and you will not notice much changes. Many things with taxonomies are changed and fixed.

Pro edition had some more changes under the hood with improved tinymce plugin and full support for latest jQuery. In the next few versions, Pro editions will get more new elements including 2 new widgets for custom post types.

If you test plugin with WordPress 3.0, please report any potential problems so that it can be fixed before WP 3.0 is released.

gMap This

First major new feature is new module called gMap This. This module adds easy implementation of Google Maps into posts allowing you to set a map with marker and note for the marker. On the image right you see the map editor in the post edit. Once you set the map for the post, map will be displayed at the bottom of the post. gMap This module is implemented in baseScape and also upcoming photoScape theme. Later tonight I will post the video of gMap module in action.

A great many things are improved within the framework, more places for expanding added, code improved and sped up and few bugs fixed. baseScape now also implements gMap module, includes number of fixes and improved styling for some elements.

Stay tuned for more news today and in the coming days for new theme and more video tutorials.

Demo Site: http://xscape.info/
baseScape: http://xscape.info/basescape/