Just to let you know about a new version of the Wordbay WordPress eBay plugin, v.1.6.1 – go and get it from the download page if you are already an owner, or if you are not, find out more here.
As usual, to install just upload all the files, overwriting the existing ones – make sure you backup any custom templates first and make sure you upload both the contents of the wordbay.zip file and the contents of templates.zip.
The most important change in this version is (finally!) a widget for the plugin. You can see it in action on this and most other pages of the site, in the right sidebar below the ads – that’s the vertical one, and you can have it in a horizontal position too. To install, just go to the Widgets section where you will find the imaginatively titled Wordbay listings widget. Just drag the widget over to a spare widget position. There are just a few obvious options to fill in in the widget settings, they are self-explanatory. Note that you should choose either the vertical or the horizontal template, depending on the orientation of your widget slot (there are new templates for this in your templates directory, prepended with “Widget_”). Once you have done this, you should get listings appearing in your chosen widget position. Of course, they will be the same on every page, that is the point. In your reports you will see the custom ID prepended with “WIDGET – ” to indicate that a click on the widget earned the sale.
Note that you can have as many widgets as you want! But remember, there is no point using all the same keywords. Also, there will be an overhead in that every time the page reloads, Wordbay has to fetch data for ALL listings on the page separately. Caching helps, but not so much on a low traffic site, so don’t go crazy!
Other stuff
Also in this version I have tried to address a quirk that some people have observed (me included), which is a lot of these “Stat failed” warnings turning up in their error logs. I have said that they are not really a big deal, just a PHP issue which you can read about here if you are technically-minded. It’s nothing to worry about, these are “warnings”, not “errors”, which means they are not actually affecting performance. But I HAVE tried to add additional safeguards to reduce the incidence of these warnings. It may not be possible to eliminate them entirely, we’ll see if my tweaks at least help.
The other thing is the problem some people have been reporting in getting listings to display from particular sellers. Honestly, I have tested this all again and cannot reproduce the error, it all works fine for me, but if you are still having this problem, of course I am willing to have a look at your specific setup – maybe we’ll turn something up.
Let me know how you get on! By the way, this release is really just tying up some loose ends before I go on another major upgrade spree – watch this space!
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