Hey, it’s me again, Tyler Carter, part of the product development team on AppThemes. I’m here to discuss Vantage, and the awesomeness that we are so excited to share with you. That’s right, I’m talking about Vantage 1.1.
Offer multiple payment plansWe’ve packed so many features into this release and we can’t wait to get it out. It’s even more solid, usable, and reliable than ever. Here’s just a few of the 6,000 code changes that were made so far:
Pricing Plans
With our new payments API, you can set up your own pricing plans to allow your customers to pick any combination of price and duration they’d like. Every pricing plan can also include either one of the site’s featured options, and can be assigned on a per-category basis.
Claim listing and favorite buttonsClaim Listings
You can now allow your customers to claim individual listings as their own. This allows you to pre-populate your site with any number of listings, and business owners can easily come in and take control over their business listing after paying for a plan.
Payment Gateways
Along with Vantage 1.1 comes a series of new AppThemes Payment Gateway plugins. These gateways allow you to offer payment methods like Stripe, Authorize.Net, and 2Checkout along with Paypal (already included in every Vantage install). Gateways coming soon include Google Wallet and Pagseguro. All gateway plugins will be available for purchase in our upcoming marketplace.
Coupons
Coupons and discountsEveryone loves a good discount! Along with our new Payment Gateway plugins, we will be launching AppThemes Coupons. AppThemes Coupons makes it super easy to offer discounts to your customers in many different ways.
Favorites
Do your customers keep coming back to certain listings? Wish they could have a list of all the listings they frequently visit? We’ve got you covered. Users can favorite listings and they’ll show up right on their dashboard, easily accessible all the time.
Edit business listings from adminImproved SEO
Want to use a SEO-oriented plugin? We’ve got you covered. AppThemes is now better equipped to deal with all sorts of SEO plugins, and other problems that occur while trying to optimize your site. For instance, you can now control the permalinks to your listings right from your settings.
Improved Backend
Vantage 1.1 comes with an all new backend editor for editing your listings. Now you can easily keep track of how your site is doing, see your moderation queue, control a listing’s duration, addons, and more right from the backend of your WordPress site.
And that’s not all
We’ve got so many features and improvements coming that we simply can’t talk about all of them, including:
- WordPress 3.4 Support
- PDF Uploads
- Improved Location Search
- Improved Importer
- Owner Replies to Reviews
- Social Connect Compatibility
- Countless UI Improvements
- Bug fixes and Performance tweaks
- and so much more…
It’s all in Vantage 1.1. And its all coming this month. Stay tuned.
Guys, this is absolutely awesome! We’re so excited about this update and are like a cat on a hot tin roof. These are exactly the changes we’re waiting for. Keep on rockin’ and best regards from good old germany.
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3/11 Joined
Thanks. We’re excited with the release and anxious to start working on the next release. Version 1.2 should get us very close to our original concept.
What’s the timeline for 1.2 Shannon?
Damn! I can’t wait for it
Looks very nice!, Does the seo also work for single listing now ? (meta description)?
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3/11 Joined
Keeping my fingers cross that it happens soon. I am so excited that the updates will cover countless issues that many of us were questioning. Great work as always…You guys rock!!!
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7/10 Joined
Will there be aggregation?
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3/11 Joined
Are you asking about a data feed for listings? Something similar to Simply Hired and Indeed feeds for JobRoller?
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7/10 Joined
Yes. Something similiar, but for sites like Yelp or Urban Spoon maybe.
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3/11 Joined
That would be great but those sites do not syndicate their content or provide any kind of feed. The only alternative would be a data scraper but we would not be creating something like that.
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8/12 Joined
wow thats great… my kind request please add duplicate finder it will be great to create large directory
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3/11 Joined
You know, a duplicate finder could be a good addition. We’ll definitely look into this.
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8/12 Joined
Dear Shannon,
Thank you so much… if possible i have one more request as following
1) I uploaded 20,000 Listings and the website automatically creates expiry date for one month… (in my vantage settings i put 999 days (like 3 yrs) but when i import listings its just 1 month, hope this is small bug in 1.0.1 version… now my kind request
2) it is possible to add change expiry date to all listings or no expiry for all listing and only featured items can be expired and that will auto change to normal listing? because its directory template which means information website… if we have more information (like with out expiry) many peoples visit our website and make book marks from our site… like facebook page
Thanks in advance
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3/11 Joined
1) I’m not sure if any of the changes we have for 1.1 would affect this. Can I get you to open a ticket in the forums. Others may want to know the answer to this and we’ll get a dev to answer.
2) You will be able to do this.
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7/12 Joined
Awesome news! I just purchased Vantage last month and was a bit disappointed to find a lack of payment options, was hoping to get my new site running within a month so this will be just in time. thanks…
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Thanks starrlightmedia. It’s on the way. I can’t guarantee that 1.1 will be ready in time for your project – we’re still testing. But you can download the developer version in your customer dashboard and use it to start working with it. Just realize there may be some bug fixes or changes that affect your project.
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2/12 Joined
Awsome!!!! can`t wait to see this function in classipress. I hope you will keep that in mind, and if it`s possible don`t forget a mobile version.
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3/11 Joined
We will complete mobile versions of all our themes.
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4/12 Joined
Do you have a ETA for Vantage mobile? Really important to me.
Thanks
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A completely responsive design for Vantage will not be available until version 1.2 – maybe three months.
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7/10 Joined
Yelp does have API – http://www.yelp.com/developers, which allows you to pull listings, reviews, etc.
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3/11 Joined
Yes, Yelp does have an API but there are very explicit restrictions about what you can do with their data. Including…
And there are many more. It’s just too many restrictions to create something that would be useful to customers. We would love to do it. Anyone have any other ideas for feeding data to Vantage?
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7/10 Joined
Gotcha. Thanks for the replies!
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5/12 Joined
Cool..
5/11 Joined
Hi!
Nice to hear about the progress on Vantage.
When (if at all) do you plan to incorporate Map feature (like the one in GeoPlaces/GeoTheme) and Events integration into Vantage? I have awaited Vantage for over 18 months now and am running out of time now as I need to start City Directory project. Already your customer I would prefer to see top-notch implementation of those mentioned features by AppThemes than to use those poor-executed themes.
But the information is the key here – please advise.
Lukas.
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3/11 Joined
Lukas, extra map features and events will come in Vantage 1.2. As soon as Vantage 1.1 is complete we will be getting to work on those items. No timeline as to when 1.2 will be released. We’ll be completing it as quickly as possible.
What specific map features are you talking about?
1. Draggable cursor to set lat, lng?
2. Show all businesses on one map from a search result?
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1. Yes
2. Yes
3. More
I need to have a discussion with Josh and Cristi about this. We have a list of things that we want to implement but we need to see what is realistically achievable within a reasonable time frame.
This is fantastic, i really cant wait, the new design features will work great for us.
Great work Guys!
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7/12 Joined
Any idea when this will be out? its August 2012
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3/11 Joined
By the end of the month.
hey, i would like to know if you are about to add support for rtl?
i want to buy the theme, but i can’t as long there is no support for rtl.
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3/11 Joined
Support for RTL is not something that we are making an effort to support. Not sure if there is a plugin or child theme that could help with this. Would there be enough interest in an RTL child theme to produce one?
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8/12 Joined
Dear Shannon, I want to make some listings as featured and remove to normal listing any time in admin panal. this Option is very very important to control listings… Please advice me this option will be available on 1.1
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3/11 Joined
mprakashm, I’m not sure what you are asking for. Do you simply want to remove a listing at any time via the admin? You can do that in 1.1. Do you want to change a featured listing to a normal listing at any time via the admin? You can also do that in 1.1. I hope that answers your question.
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8/12 Joined
Dear Shannon
I am asking little more than featured listing like following
If the Directory means there is many kind in a same directory like following
in a single directory there is
1) Verified Member,
2) Not verified Member,
3) Premium Member,
4) Gold Member,
5) Platinum member
6) Trusted Member
Like above …. some single listing has (Premium Member / Verified / and futured Listing) (This member paid for (premium & Futured Listings)
Some single Listing has (Only verified Member ) they are not paid but verified
Some single Listing has (Trust seal, Gold Member, Featured Listing & Verified Listing ) (This member Paid for (Trust seal, premium membership, featured Listing)
Hope you understand what i try to say…. Is there is any option to add more plans that will differentiate customers by giving star rating or encourage to increase membership levels?
Is this available in 1.1?
Please advice me friend
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3/11 Joined
You can create different pricing plans and name the plans whatever you want but…
The plans have no association with the member. In fact, there is no member status, ranking or similar. That would be interesting and I’d like to ask that you add it to our ideas exchange.
Hi Shannon, can you tell us a bit more about the Event functionality coming in 1.2? I need the ability to show past/current/upcoming events at the listings (venues) already entered in my Vantage site and to have event listings that users can review and that link back to the venues they are on at.
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3/11 Joined
Well, we are about to discuss events in greater detail, so it would be great if you could add these suggestions to the ideas exchange. Whenever we consider the addition of features, we always go through the ideas exchange to see what people want.
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5/12 Joined
Hi Shannon, I have submitted my suggestions in the Ideas Exchange but I would appreciate hearing a bit about what you have in mind for Events.
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3/11 Joined
Thanks, mtchairs (that’s a funny handle). We’ll definitely share our thoughts when we have a better idea about what we want to do.
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6/11 Joined
Hi, hate to be a pain but I see on this post that it states 1.1 will be available in August. I am about to start a new project that needs to be finished mid September could you tell me are you still looking at a definite August release for this because if not I may need to look at an alternative solution and I really don’t want ? Thanks
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3/11 Joined
Vantage 1.1 is going to be released this week.
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6/11 Joined
Excellent News thank you !
I will be buying Vantage this week. I can’t wait for 1.1 to come out. I have to ask, when is 1.2 scheduled?
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3/11 Joined
Dan, I’d love to give you a date on Vantage 1.2, but we do not have a release date at this point.
I heard a bird whistle “Maybe 3 months”…..
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3/11 Joined
That bird sings a good tune. As always, we’ll be working on it as quickly as we can.
I’d like to see user achievements, some sort of like button (not fb), and messaging, chat, and friending functions.
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7/10 Joined
@Jonathan, for the “like” button functionality you should check out our Daddy Like plugin in the Marketplace. It’s what we use on our comments here.
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8/12 Joined
I am facing very very big problem in vantage… I was added more then 20,000 listings with picture’s… hope you peoples knows how hard it is, i spent too much money to the staffs to done this… but after upgrading to vantage 1.1 all the listings in vantage 1.1 picture’s gone…
I need immediate solution… Please help me…
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3/11 Joined
We have a fix on the problem in progress now. This should be available today.
By the way, no data or images were lost. It’s just a simple little script that will fix everything.
Cheers!
Yup, the fix worked great. All pictures are back! Thx for a very responsive action on this matter!
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3/11 Joined
You’re welcome Annonse. I’m glad it worked. It proved to be one of those slippery bugs, but it looks like we have it under control now.