As you may have noticed we have updated the CarDealerPress website and consolidated the blog from SellingCarsOnlineAcademy.com. We have done this so that we can be more focused in 2013. We will be creating more tutorials for our members section, blogging, and keeping you up to date on the evolution of the plugin and Vehicle Marketing System (VMS). Going forward we will be posting all of the Inventory API Plugin updates so you can see all the great new features.
In this Plugin release
Vehicle class filtering. This allows you to filter either New or Used vehicles. This makes it easier to create class specific microsites so you don’t have to use custom javascript or css to hide the vehicle class you don’t want.
Vehicle make filtering. Most dealership groups these days are sharing their used inventory across all of their brand specific websites and this feature helps accomplish this. For example: Dealer group with 3 franchises/roof tops and consequently 3 sites. Each franchise site would like to share used inventory, but can only have their specific franchise make for new. This filter allows you to put the dealer ID for the group into the plugin and filter new by franchise, leaving all used and only the selected franchises for new.
Responsive on/off toggle button. When the responsive inventory themes were release they automatically change the display for mobile/tablet even when the website isn’t a responsive site. Even though this still works, we had some dealers request that the inventory not change. By adding this toggle each site owner can choose whether or not to utilize the responsive inventory.
Auto updating within WordPress admin. We have managed the plugin on Github since it’s inception and had built in auto updates from that location. Recently Github changed how this works and it broke the auto update function. We have now moved the most recent version of the plugin to S3 and implemented auto updating from there. So going forward one click updates are once again available. Just beware if you have modified the plugin or created unique inventory themes that you will still want to use ftp, sftp, or ssh to update your plugin so that the default WordPress updater won’t overwrite your modifications. Also you may need to update to this version manually depending on the current version that you are using.
There were a couple of bug fixes in this release too.
Previous releases
Since we haven’t been posting updates, I am going to list some of our past enhancements.
Responsive inventory themes. We all know that mobile is very important and going with Google’s recommendation for mobile SEO and general usability all of our built in themes are now responsive ready. To utilize the responsive layout you will need to have a responsive website to begin with.
Introduction of Armadillo 2. Armadillo has been our most popular theme because of it’s clean layout and ease of modification. One of the most common modifications has been to move the images to the left and the form to the right, so that is all we did with Armadillo 2. This is also helpful on responsive sites since the site will wrap with the images at the top now.
There were also some bug fixes relating to our new car Showcase product and some various other bug fixes.