If you’ve recently upgraded your Sociable plugin to 3.5.2+, you’ll notice that the image icons on your single ad pages look out of whack like this:

To fix this, go into “Settings” => “Sociable” and check the “Disable sprite usage for images?” box. Save and everything should now be all fixed. If you are using WP Super Cache, you might need to clear the cache first. Also some browsers might need to clear their cache as well (ctrl+ reload page).

If you haven’t heard the name Darren Rowse before then now is the time to listen. He’s a very popular blogger who makes 6-figures a year on his Problogger site and definitely knows his stuff. A while back he put together a month long series called “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” and it was such a hit, he decided to turn it into an e-book.

This downloadable e-book is designed to help you jump-start your blog by giving you 31 tasks that will turn your blog into the powerhouse you’ve always dreamed of. The great thing about Darren’s e-book is that you can do it at your own pace and in your own way. Set a goal of reading a chapter a day and take notes. I usually dog ear and highlight the important pieces and come back to them later.

This is a feature that everyone has been asking for and I’ve finally got around to implementing it. You can now add an HTML WYSIWYG editor to the new ad submission description field. So if you’ve enabled the “Allow HTML Code” option in CP, your customers will be able to do some basic html markup to their ad submission!

This feature will be in v2.9.3 but if you wanted to get a head start and use it now, you can easily add it to your site. Use at your own risk though. This code worked fine for me but your configuration might be different.

Over the weekend a new version of ClassiPress was released bringing us to v2.9.2. For those of you who are still using v2.8, you’re sure going to love this update. It addresses many of the feature requests everyone thought was missing. If you haven’t already read about the new features, check out the ClassiPress Features page to understand all the new goodies you get for free.

If you are already using v2.9 or v2.9.1, the main difference (besides some bug fixes) is how the ad form works and looks. There were some people who were having trouble with the modal box form button (it just wouldn’t work) but others didn’t have a problem at all.

Myself and my developer spent many hours working with customers trying to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. We released one patch that fixed it for some, but I still was not satisfied until it was working for everyone.

If you are familiar with WordPress and the many plugins and themes available for it, you’ve probably come across some strangely named files like .mo, .po, and .pot. If you haven’t then the theme and/or plugin has not been designed for translation.

This article explains how to take a .po file that is included with your WordPress theme download and translate it into your native language.

So what the heck are those .mo, .po, and .pot files anyhow and why are they included in my download?

For the ClassiPress forum I use a free software called phpBB. Up until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t having any problems with forum spam but now it seems the bots have me zeroed in. PhpBB does come with a simple captcha-style anti-bot option but for some reason it doesn’t seem to work very well. I have also enabled a feature to require email verification by clicking on a link before their account becomes active.They beat that too.

I must say, the bot engines out there today are pretty damn smart. They have figured out a way to automate and bypass both of these security measures so they can post spammy links to their products or just be a nuisance. Luckily the spammy forum posts haven’t been porn…at least not yet.

By default, ClassiPress includes listing all categories so your site visitors are able to post a new ad and place it in a category even if it’s empty. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even know the category exists and it’s pointless to even have it. With that being said, a couple of you have asked me how to remove empty categories from the ClassiPress navigation which is actually quite easy.

ClassiPress uses the standard WordPress function wp_list_categories which allows you to pass certain parameters into it and alter the results. All of the parameters have certain default values if you don’t pass anything into the function it just uses the defaults.

I know you are all patiently awaiting for the release of v2.9 so I wanted to give you a quick update. First of all, this release is going to be the best ever for ClassiPress and will really take this theme to the next level. Many of the features you have been asking for will be included which I will talk about more later.

The main focus of this release has been to address a couple of things. Primarily to build in the most requested customer features submitted in our Feature Request forum and to better organize the underlying ClassiPress framework and code. When existing customers get the latest upgrade, you will notice how some files have been moved around and additional directories have been created. This is not an attempt to confuse you or make things difficult when upgrading but rather to organize ClassiPress more logically so additional growth and features will be easier to add.

Hello ClassiPress customers!

As you probably already know, ClassiPress v2.8 was released on April 6th and includes many new features and enhancements. Unlike previous updates, this version is quite different infrastructure-wise and requires ClassiPress customers to carefully migrate their current classified ads.

So why did we make the big change?
ClassiPress was originally built without using WordPress custom fields which in the long haul, limits the growth and potential of the ClassiPress product. Version 2.8 has since moved all non-description field information into custom WordPress fields. This is a huge change but will benefit you and your ClassiPress instance down the road so you can take advantage of several new and upcoming features.