Wordbay owners can now download version 1.6.2 of the WordPress eBay plugin. It incorporates a couple of new features that have become available through the new eBay “v2″ RSS feed. These new options are:

• Available To: this allows you to select which countries items being listed should be deliverable to. It’s not actually as useful as you might think because geotargetting overrides this by default (there is no point in specifying a fixed “available to” country regardless of where the visitor is coming from, unless you can think of one!) But if you are not using geotargetting, you could use this for non-eBay countries to list products available to that country from, say, eBay US.
• Condition: more usefully, you can specify up to four different “conditions” (New, Used, etc.) to filter items listed. This option is only available globally right now, but I can see people wanting this to be accessible on page-specific settings too, so I will do that eventually.

I went through all the other new features in the RSS feed (you can see them here in this document EPN produced if you’re interested) and to be honest, although there are lots of interesting options, I really couldn’t see any others that I thought were worth including, but let me know if there is anything in there you really want to see implemented in Wordbay.

Other changes

I have also fixed a minor flaw with geotargetting and more significantly, made it possible to specify a BLANK keyword in the Wordbay tags, i.e. to list ALL items from, say, a particular seller. I am amazed no-one ever mentioned that this was not possible before, but one user brought it up recently.

Speaking of sellers, I would still appreciate feedback if anyone is having trouble getting products from specific sellers to show up on a particular post or page. I think I have ironed out some bugs on that front, but would like to hear from you if you have any issues.

Last but not least, I have bowed to pressure and incorporated the template files back into the plugin package, meaning there is no longer a separate templates.zip file to install! This is for two reasons, 1) It was causing too much confusion among new users and 2) it made it impossible to install Wordbay from the WordPress dashboard and required the templates to be FTPed to the right directory, again a problem for less experienced users.

So please be warned!: If you have made customisations to your Wordbay templates and don’t want to lose them, you MUST back them up before installing a new version of Wordbay (or unzip and FTP the new package minus the templates directory) or they will be overwritten! Sorry, I don’t have a way of pleasing everybody at the moment – maybe I’ll think of one!

OK, that’s it for now, but I am sure I will be back in the next month with some more updates – I have a never-ending to-do list, but that just means Wordbay keeps getting better and better

Related posts:

1. Wordbay 1.6 released – fully compatible with the new eBay RSS feed