I’m happy to be able to share today that Never5 released a new WordPress plugin: WP Car Manager. WP Car Manager is a WordPress plugin for managing and listing your vehicles, its goal is to enable anyone to manage and list their cars by using WordPress.

The First Version

The first version of the plugin includes all the basics you’ll need to start managing and listing your cars using WordPress. This version includes advanced car data fields which can be used to filter results at the frontend. It also features image galleries, separate feature management and separate make and model management. A lot of thought has been put into making the plugin as extendable as possible. The combination of WordPress actions and a lot of template files, loaded via our custom template loader, offers true extendability.

Extensions

WP Car Manager will offer a free core plugin that will have all the basic features you’ll need to manage and list your cars, and will offer specific features in paid extensions. At this moment we’ve only got one extension released but there are many more to come! If you’re interested in becoming a third party developer for WP Car Manager, be sure to shoot me an email!

Future Development

One of the hardest parts of this plugin (and probably any product) was stop adding features and shipping it. There are already cool features logged for future versions like widgets that will offer more advanced filtering of the listings results and being able to control what data is shown in the data summary block. Like all of our plugins, WP Car Manager is 100% GPL (2) and you can follow its development on GitHub. Also be sure to log any issues you run into or feature ideas you’ve got at our GitHub issues list.

PHP Requirement

For this plugin I’ve decided to drop PHP 5.2.x support, meaning WP Car Manager requires PHP 5.3 or higher to work. I think even in the WordPress ecosystem we’re at the point where the pro’s outweigh the con’s, where the amount of users we’re excluding doesn’t weigh up against the amount of development possibilities that are gained. Being able to use stuff like namespaces, anonymous functions and proper DI makes my developer heart skip a beat. Before initializing the plugin we check the PHP version and will only load the plugin is the PHP version is 5.3 or higher, we use the WPupdatePHP library for this.

Like always I would love to hear what you think, so please leave a comment below