Under certain circumstances, an auction will perform better when the winning price is equal to the highest bid. A few folks asked in the forums if Prospress could work in this way, and with the generous financial backing from Tommy Sibiga of Young Life, Tonyest went ahead and developed a way to do it. Tommy was also community spirited enough to allow the code to be released publicly, so anyone can now use it.

If you want the winning price in your auctions to be equal to the value of the highest bid, download the Prospress No Proxy plugin from WordPress Extend.

Prospress one point one.

One day at a time, making a
point of a better experience.
One less thing to worry about.

Thanks to all contributors and beta testers

The newest and most significant update of our Prospress marketplace plugin has just been released.

This marks a major milestone for the plugin. In addition to new features and bug fixes, Prospress 1.1 includes more hooks and improved structure to benefit developers and users alike.

New features:

• Buy Now: You may now offer instant gratification in the form of a buy now button. A user doesn’t even need to be registered or logged in to buy now, Prospress will automatically create a user account once they have made their purchase
• The Final Countdown: Live the excitement, bite your nails as you watch the final 24 hours of ‘that thing you always wanted‘ tick away one second at a time! You’ll be as excited as these guys.
• Less is More: Simplified Capabilities. Redundant Options removed. Less clicks have been proven to extend your life.
• Sensible Defaults: Custom taxonomies enabled by default. Index and single item pages now feature a selection of handy Prospress widgets by default.
• Pagination on Prospress Index page for popular marketplaces.
• PayPal IPN: If you don’t know what this is, then it’s doing it’s job correctly. PayPal IPN is a special communication between PayPal & your Prospress marketplace to notify it of payment related activity. It will add the type of reliability to your marketplace you’d typically only receive from a premium plugin.
• 100% WordPress 3.1 Compatible!

For Developers:

• Child-Theme support for custom auctions index templates.
• WordPress Settings API method for super-quick and simple additions to options pages.

As always, you can download Prospress completely free from its home in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The biggest new feature to make it in is Buy-Now. And it’s not just any old buy-now. A lot of work has gone in to integrating the PayPal IPN, so buy-now in Prospress will have the reliability you’d usually only get from a premium plugin.

Update:

The beta is now public and can be downloaded from the here.

To upgrade, please:

1. Deactivate Prospress
2. Replace the Prospress directory
3. Activate Prospress

Please do not use on live sites for now and post support requests in the beta forum.

Your password must be 12 characters with lower, upper & middle case; at least one number, one special symbol and some Cyrillic.

Even on WordPress registration requires 5 steps:

1. Enter a username and email address
2. Check email for activation link
3. Click activation link in email
4. Check email again to receive password
5. Return to site & login with username & password

I hated making everyone undergo these 5 steps to request help in the forums or place a bid on the demo marketplace. Life’s too short for redundant website registration. That’s why I worked with the Ashwin from App2 Technologies to come up with a better solution.

You can test this new solution here. Just click the login or registration links in the upper right hand corner of the page. The plugin is called Social Connect and it makes logging into and registering with a WordPress site much smoother. On this site, I’ve combined it with SimpleModal Login to create a super slick process. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. If you encounter any bugs, let me know!

Social Connect for your Marketplace

So what’s this got to do with auctions & marketplaces? Well, the easier it is to register on a site, the more likely people are to bid.

At the moment, Prospress.org is acting as a beta tester. But Ashwin and I will release Social Connect in the WordPress plugins directory so every Prospress marketplace and WordPress site can use it.

After releasing Prospress version 1, I received a few bug reports within the first few days. I fixed the bugs and then decided to “wait a few days until I’d finished new features” before releasing an update. Then I fell ill and 3 weeks later I still hadn’t released the fixes for these bugs. To prevent this happening again in future, I’ll be taking a more agile approach to Prospress. You can expect smaller and more frequent releases to fix bugs.

Updating can be a pain if done manually, so I will clearly identify the important changes between updates and if they don’t affect your site, you can choose to skip the update. Releases with a third decimal point, eg. 1.0.2, will indicate bug fix releases, while releases with one or two points will also include new functionality, eg. 1.1.

I’d also love to get a list of beta testers. If you’d be willing to help, please send an email to brent at prospress dot org.

The name of the feature is the slightly confusing Custom Taxonomies. If you’re not familiar with the word taxonomy, it refers to a generic system of classification.

In Prospress, a custom taxonomy acts just like blog category. You can create category items and assign them to different auctions. For example, an automotive marketplace might use taxonomies for make, colour and age. The marketplace administrator can populate the make taxonomy with Ford, BMW, Mercedes, colour taxonomy with red, silver, black and age taxonomy with 1 year, 2-3 years, 3-5 years and 5+ years.

It’s quite easy to create and use custom taxonomies in Prospress, just follow the steps below. Click on each thumbnail for a full size version.

1. Enable Custom Taxonomies

Visit the Prospress | General Settings admin page.

Check “use custom taxonomies”, under the Custom Taxonomies section and click save.

2. The Auction Taxonomies Admin Page

Refresh the page so that the Auction Taxonomies menu appears under Prospress.

Visit Prospress | Auction Taxonomies admin page.

3. Create Taxonomies

Create your taxonomies on this page following the instructions provided.

Base your taxonomies on commonly searched for characteristics of the items auctioned in your marketplace.

4. Add Items to your Taxonomy

Create your taxonomies on this page following the instructions provided.

You can add as many or as few items as you need.

5. Categorise your Auctions

Add taxonomy items to your auctions in the same way as you would add a category to a blog post.

People posting auctions in your marketplace will also be able to add these items to their auctions.

6. Add the Taxonomy Filter

Visit Appearance | Widgets and add a Prospress Taxonomy Filter widget to you Auction’s Index Sidebar.

In the taxonomy filter widget, select the taxonomy you created earlier and give the widget a title.

7. Test your Taxonomy Filter

Visit your auctions index. In the sidebar you should see a list of the taxonomy items that have been applied to your auctions.

Click on an item to filter your auctions.

If you get a 404 page when filtering by a taxonomy, visit the Settings | Permalinks admin page and click save. There is a bug that causes 404s on occasion, but I haven’t been able to diagnose it yet. Saving permalinks is the workaround for now.

Custom taxonomies are valuable tool in the right hands. They’re hidden in Prospress by default to keep it simple when starting out, but for larger marketplace, they’re a must have feature.

If you want to see custom taxonomies in action, checkout the “Artist” and “Heist” taxonomies on the Demo Marketplace. As always, if you have any questions about using Custom Taxonomies, please ask in the Forums.

Anthony is a qualified aerospace engineer living in Italy. He likes long runs on the beach, followed by a 1.9km swim and 90km bike ride. What more could a fledgling open-source project ask for?

Anthony explained aerospace engineering to me like this:

“Engineers build things not to fail. Aerospace engineers build things not to fail at 30,000ft travelling 1,236km/h”

Prospress isn’t rocket science, but Anthony will bring this rigour to the core to ensure the quality of future releases. Welcome to the Project Anthony.

Thanks to all who downloaded the beta, especially those who provided feedback and helped me debug any issues. A big thank-you to everyone for being patient enough to wait for this release before using Prospress on your live site. I’m very happy to say, Prospress is now ready to run your marketplace!

New Features

Credit card payments with Authorize.net are now fully tested and working. SSL support for the payment page, very important for credit card payments, is also tested and working. Feedback is now a custom post type, which means it can easily be displayed on the front of your site. Prospress is also ready to be translated into languages other than English.

However, most of the work for this release has gone into testing and other core changes. This is very valuable for the future and I felt now was the right time to do it. Unfortunately, it came at the cost of being able to implement feature requests.

I will be following up on feature requests over the coming weeks. Work will begin immediately on a system for charging for posts and a “Buy it now” option. If you want either of these features, your input is much appreciated. Make a post in the forum or comment below to let me know what you’d like to see.

Download & Install

You can download and install Prospress now, either from your Plugins administration page, or the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Stay Up-to-Date

I now have more time to put into Prospress and a new contributor has come on board. This means there will be more rapid progress than during the beta period. To ensure you hear about future releases and keep up-to-date with other Prospress happenings, follow Prospress on twitter or subscribe to the blog via the RSS feed.

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities.

From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa) and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume. New marketplaces such as Swaptree, Zilok, Bartercard, AirBnb, and thredUP are enabling “peer-to-peer” to become the default way people exchange — whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world.

I look forward to reading the book. I feel like Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers are enjoying the same ether that’s fueling the Prospress Project. The book’s ideas are so closely aligned to the Prospress vision, if Prospress was closer to achieving that vision, I’d rename it ‘the platform for collaborative consumption’.

If you want to join the movement by creating your own marketplace, you’re in the right place. Prospress provides a solid technical platform waiting to be moulded to create your own unique marketplace. If you haven’t conceived a disruptive idea just yet, you’ll find plenty of inspiration on the Collaborative Consumption website, especially in the showcase section.

I’ll be blogging more about the book as I read it and the movement as it swells, but for now, enjoy the slick promo video.

Despite my gross lack of publicising Prospress, 30 people have signed up to try the demo marketplace, it’s been downloaded 150 times from the plugins directory and this site has seen just over 350 visitors. Releasing Prospress without any promotion what-so-ever was a good way to test demand for a marketplace plugin. I think there is evidence healthy demand exists.

Thanks for the Feedback

So far feedback about both the code and the idea has been very positive. There were issues with trying to run Prospress on WordPress versions prior to 3.0, which is now prevented. I received a couple of emails about the odd compatibility issue with other plugins, all now fixed. Template quirks were bound as Prospress tried hard to work with 1,400 different themes. Fortunately, it’s easy to create new templates.

The majority of emails I received were about the forums and bugs caused by bbPress’s integration with WordPress. Sorry to all who tried to post with no success! I’ve squashed all known bugs in the integration and added an email function so you’ll get a notification in your inbox when I reply to your post.

Where to from here?

Working on bbPress & WordPress has meant that I’ve had less time to work on Prospress. However, I hope to release just one more beta in a couple of weeks, and if it’s as stable as the current beta, a couple of weeks after that will be the first official release. Exciting times.