It’s a beautiful Friday here in San Francisco and I’m crazy for staying indoors and making this video now but I really wanted to reveal the new 3.0 multi-step ad form. So I just put together a screen cast to show you all how the new multi-step ad form submission works. In this demo you will see exactly how your customers will submit, review, and then pay for their ad via PayPal before it automatically appears live on your site.

For one of my ad categories called “Boats”, I created a custom form layout and then added my two custom fields.  I then reordered the fields and made them mandatory all within a matter of seconds. I also demonstrate how the new form validation works for both fields and image uploads.

In step two of the new ad submission form you’ll see a summary of the ad as well as a breakdown of how much it will cost. There is also a “terms of use” text box that you can easily modify to your needs. Once the ad has been submitted, you automatically get redirected to PayPal to make your payment. After payment has been made, you’ll be sent back to ClassiPress to see your new ad published.

Besides all the great new features included in ClassiPress 3.0, I also wanted to bring up the much improved installation process. Most Premium themes or plugins you install (including ClassiPress 2.9) require you to manually create pages, assign them to a custom template, name the permalink/url a certain way, publish them, find the page id, paste it into another field, and then save.

Not only is that process a real pain, but it takes time and allows the opportunity for mistakes. It also means those who don’t like to read instructions or cannot read English will have a lot less trouble getting their site setup. It also is a good thing for those who are new or aren’t very comfortable with WordPress in general.

Many of you have been asking how to be part of the 3.0 beta testing program. Well, today we’ve officially launched the first ClassiPress beta testing program and now is the time for you to become part of ClassiPress history.

Being a beta tester actually requires a lot of work on your part so before signing up, please make sure you are ready for the commitment. You will need to dedicate several hours of your time (over a two-week period) to help flush out any bugs before 3.0 is ready for a GA release.

For the last couple of days I’ve been working on the new user dashboard and ad editing pages. Now that I’ve just about wrapped those up, I wanted to give you a quick preview of what they look like. As you’ll see, the new user admin area is much more complete and includes a sidebar so your customers can easily navigate around. It also gives them more of a “membership” style feel since they essentially have an account on your site (site registration is now mandatory in 3.0).

You will also notice the addition of tag and image editing. It will show a thumbnail image for each of their ad images, a checkbox to delete an image, and additional image upload boxes. There is a new option in CP 3.0 where you set the number of images allowed per ad which controls how many upload boxes will show up.

3.0 is also setup to automatically block non-admin users from accessing your WordPress back-end (i.e. /wp-admin/ section). This means you no longer need to rely on plugins like “IWG Hide Dashboard” or “Role Manager”.

Anyhow, enough talking….I’ll let the video tell the rest of the story.

One of the most talked about features of ClassiPress 3.0 is the ability to create your own custom fields and forms. This cool new feature will make it easy for you to have a different form for each category.

For example, say you have a WordPress category called “Cars” and you want to have fields called “Year”, “Make”, and “Model” that are all drop-down lists. No problem. Just create each custom field, add the drop-down values, and then add those fields to your “Cars” custom form layout. That form will only display when someone is posting a new ad under the “Cars” category.

In this video demo I show you how to create a custom form for a category called “Electronics”. Then you’ll see how it dynamically shows up on the ad form page. It’s that easy to create your own forms and fields all from within the WordPress admin.

Building WordPress themes (especially as complex as ClassiPress) requires a lot of attention to organization and details. It doesn’t take much to write a bunch of messy code with no comments just as long as it works, right? That’s usually fine if you’re building a theme just for your website but if you plan on selling or giving a theme away for free, it’s very important to write clean code with lots of comments. This is one of the reasons it’s taking me longer than expected to release v3.0.

So great, you write clean code with comments but how do you create a theme and what are the proper standards you should abide by? With WordPress being as popular as it is, you would think there would be hard and fast guidelines on how to develop and release a theme but surprisingly there isn’t much.  Yes, you can find lots of blog posts from people claiming their way is correct but for me, I’ve taken advice and ideas from all sorts of sites. Another great way is to reverse engineer an existing theme by some of the best themers out there today like WooThemes or StudioPress.

Yes, the rumors are true. ClassiPress version 3.0 is late, behind, belated, blown, delayed, held up, hung up, in a bind, in the lurch, jammed, lagging, missed the boat, overdue, postponed, put off, slow, tardy, and any other synonym I failed to list. Why do you ask?

Well, as you might have read from my forum response, there are several reasons but that won’t stop us from working hard on getting it completed and released as soon as we possibly can.

If you haven’t already purchased ClassiPress and are holding out until 3.0, I recommend you get in now while the prices are still low. They will increase once 3.0 comes out so even if you don’t want to install 2.9.3, you can lock in your price and just wait for the free 3.0 update. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 😉

If you haven’t already noticed, yesterday ClassiPress v2.9.3 was released which is a general bug and security patch. There are no new features as we are saving those all for 3.0 which is due out towards the end of January (assuming everything goes as planned).

I felt it was important to fix several bugs in the 2.9 branch before taking ClassiPress to 3.0. When I first started working on 2.9.3 is was supposed to have only been a small release — mainly adding support for new PayPal currencies, fixing a mail function bug, and improving the discovery of the ad thumbnail image path. Well, I ended up spending many long days cleaning up and stabilizing the product which was much needed.

So should I upgrade or not?

That’s the question most of you existing customers will ask. To contradict myself from the previous blog post, “ClassiPress v2.9.3 Coming Soon“, I recommend all ClassiPress customers upgrade to v2.9.3 because of the fixes and small security issue. If you’ve done lots of customization and don’t want to redo them all after the upgrade, I recommend manually making the upgrade by looking at the changelog.txt included with the update.

I know most of you are patiently waiting for v3.0 but there are a couple of important fixes that need to be addressed with the current 2.9 version. They primarily affect new customers who are having trouble seeing their image thumbnails or current customers who use international characters and/or some currencies.

If your primary language is English, USD as your currency, and your thumbnail images are working fine, then you don’t need to bother with the upgrade unless you really want to.

When I started working on 2.9.3 last week, I wanted to make some other updates but I decided it was best to hold off. Once you add new code, it changes the position of all the text that needs to be translated which results in .po language files getting all messed up. I didn’t want to create more work for those who use ClassiPress in another language besides English and with 3.0 due out in January, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.