GD Products Center is a new plugin that will get its first release in exactly 10 days from now. This time I will give you short history on how and why this plugin got made and what features are planned for the first release, and you will see couple of images from the plugin interface.
A while back I have created plugin for GeekWithLaptop website for comparing computers, phones, printers and other devices. This was done long before WP 3.0 and custom post types. It is a good plugin, and it’s used still on that website. But, there are a lot of things I wanted to do differently on my own time and with many more ideas I had for some more comprehensive product that will truly be main control for product types and products. Over the last 2 years I have got many, many questions about that plugin and people wanted to buy it for their own websites. But, that plugin is made for GWL websites and it’s theirs plugin.
So, over the past 6 months I have been making list of all the features I wanted to have for products related plugin, and that list grow longer. GD Products Center has nothing to do with that old GWL comparison plugin, accept that it is inspired by the idea of having management of products in the WordPress powered websites.
GD Products Center uses custom post types for product types. You can create as many product types you want (phones, monitors, laptops…), you can specify properties for them (meta boxes for the product/post editing), create and assign taxonomies, set customizable rewriting of URL’s, render product pages and compare products within the same product type. Plugin will allow comparison of any number of products in the same time (2, 3, 5, 10 or more if you want), it will allow advanced filtering of the products archives with AJAX support and integration with some of our plugins: GD aZon FUSION (to connect products with Amazon), GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro (for additional taxonomies and enhanced features) and GD Star Rating (for ratings and reviews).
Plugin will also have predefined product types allowing for easy deployment of common product types: mobile phones, tablets, laptops. It will have set of templates for single product, comparison page, comparison widget and archive page (with AJAX powered filtering). Creating of product types will be simplified version of creating post types, and plugin will generate automatically all needed settings. You can control rewrite rules to an extend. You will be able to control editors for images, videos and links, and also set and define list of properties for each product. All that will be added in custom meta boxes for product/post editors.
First Beta version will have most planned features and plugin should get stable 1.0 release a month after that. So, stay tuned for the next week release, there will be a discount coupon available (25%) for as long as the Beta period lasts.
Looking forward to the potential for real estate sites… 🙂
Hey, check out the filtering at http://codepoet.com/browse/regions/north-america/ !!!
Even though it doesn’t “auto-update” the other fields (to never result in “0 results”), it works great!
Will Products Center have that type of search?
Ideally, it’ll even have an auto-update “results count” right next to the “Search” button.
Thanks!
Idea is to have something like that. Problem is to organize all the filtering based on properties for the products. First Alpha version will be out next week, and it will not have filtering, that will take a bit more time.