What supposed to be a quick iteration, planned to be released at least a month ago turned into a (very) large update and was released just yesterday. WP Car Manager 1.3.0 includes some cool new features, a ton of tweaks and really paves the way for more cool new functionality in the future.

So, What’s New?

Without turning this post into a changelog, I’d like to highlight some new features which I think are worth mentioning.

Pagination

By far the most requested feature is finally done and available, pagination. In the spirit of MVP I decided to initially release the plugin without pagination, to first validate the need of car listing plugin. Looking back, pagination definitely is something that could have been included in the first version. But hey, it’s here now. Like the listing page itself, the pagination functionality is fully AJAX featured, updating dynamically on filters you set when searching for that one perfect car.

Yay, I sold my car

Selling the cars you list is for most users the end-goal of course. Before this update, you would either have to remove the listing or add some sort of SOLD text into the listing to let your visitors know it’s been sold. With the new update you can mark your cars as sold in the backend. This adds a nice SOLD overlay to your listings. You can also choose to hide sold vehicles in the frontend, while keeping them in your backend.

Better Onboarding

Onboarding, the process of making sure the plugin is setup properly for you after installing it, has been a priority from the start for WP Car Manager. I believe proper onboarding can make or break a plugin. So many good plugins are uninstalled because the user simply didn’t know what to do after installing it. In the 1.3 update I’ve spent more time on the onboarding process, making it clearer what to do after installation and default pages setup. I’ve also added explanation/instructions to multiple backend pages to make it more clear what these pages are used for.

There’s more where that came from, checkout the full changelog here to see all the changes in WP Car Manager 1.3.0

Looks Do Matter

One of the issues most users run into using WP Car Manager, and most other plugins that use the frontend of your website, is theme compatibility. With little guidelines for WordPress theme authors on how to build their themes and (some) authors simply ignoring these guidelines, it’s hard to assure the pages we generate (like the listing page) look good with your theme.

That’s why we included more styling in the 1.3 update, to make sure our basic elements and layout look the way we meant them to look. They’re still easily overridable and themes that are setup correctly should still make be able to make them blend in with their design. On top of that we’re working together with multiple theme authors that are working on themes that are specifically created for WP Car Manager. Because these themes are build and tested with WP Car Manager, the results will be even better than using a generic theme. I’ve seen some sneak peaks already and I can tell you, they are beautiful. I’ll make sure to post an update when they’re released!

Let’s Talk Money

There’s a lot of ways to use WP Car Manager of course, but the way I see it there are two main reasons.

1. You sell cars (e.g. a car dealership) and want to list the cars you’re selling
2. You provide a platform for people to sell cars (e.g. Auto Trader)

In version 1.2 I’ve added the ability to have your users list their cars on your website, making option 2 a reality. And today I released a new extension that allows you to sell these listing positions on your website: Paid Listing.

Paid Listings for WP Car Manager is powered by WooCommerce. You can setup car listing packages which can be purchased during frontend car submission. The whole process integrates seamlessly with WP Car Manager, integrating the package selection and checkout into the frontend car submission flow.

You can for example charge $2.99 for a single listing but also have a package that contains 5 listings for $9.99. Or you can have a default listing duration of 30 days for free listing but sell 90 days of listing for $3.99. Being powered by WooCommerce, it offers you all the WooCommerce functionality for your paid listings out of the box. You can of course also use a ton of the available WooCommerce extension so you can start selling listing with one of their many payment gateways, accounting integrations or marketing extensions.

You can read more about the extension by clicking here >>