My WP Broadbean plugin to integrate jobs posted via Broadbean Adcourier has been a success in the recent months with many different recruitment companies using the plugin to get jobs they post on Broadbean to appear on their WordPress websites. Now it is time to take the plugin to the next level and coming soon with be the second version of the plugin with updates and enhancements. Lets take a look at what is planned.
Having been working on the plugin for well over 18 months now, in my spare time between projects and with a number of clients using the plugin I have learnt a lot about what changes would enhance the plugin. Here are what is planned in the new release:
Improved Extensibility
This is something that I am passionate about in plugins. The ability for a developer to make modifications and functionality changes without altering the core plugin code itself. In the next release there will be major extensibility offerings, some of which are outlined below.
Better Declaration of Fields for Each Job
At the moment the plugin comes with a set of job fields that are added when each job is published on the site. These include job reference, salary, contact name and email address etc. Adding your own fields up until now has been a little tricky to do and therefore the new version will easily allow you to declare what fields you want (additional) to the defaults. As well as this you can remove the defaults should you wish to do so.
Below is a simple example of how you could add your own fields to a job:
https://gist.github.com/wpmark/99273d700021bc8962d6
This will add the meta box field on the post editor for the job. Perhaps the best part as well is that it will also handle all of the saving of the post meta when the job gets saved.
It is worth noting here that this field would have to be added to your feed sent by Broadbean. They can do this as support and would not be a problem. In this case we would just need to request that an additional text input field be sent with the XML node <internal_ref>.
Add Your Own Taxonomies
The plugin comes bundled with some default taxonomies that work well with the default feed that Broadbean uses. Adding your own is also really simple and works in a similar way to the fields as above. Below shows an example of how we would add a new taxonomy for country.
https://gist.github.com/wpmark/6e8c2058eec452ce6195
Again this handles all the saving of the terms in this taxonomy when they are sent over to your site. As with fields Broadbean would need to add this field to your feed. The broadbean_field arg in the code above states which XML node to look for in the feed.
Thanks must go to Dave Smith for his contribution to this part.
WP Broadbean Website
Along with the launch of version 2 of the plugin comes the new WP Broadbean website that is currently in development. The site will feature information and documentation as well as some paid services which users can opt into should they find them useful. More information on this soon.
Visit the current version (rough and ready!) of the WP Broadbean website here.
These are some of the major changes that have been introduced. It is worth noting that they are still in testing and I hope to have the new plugin version launched early in the new year.
Important Note
With all these changes there is an important note that I need to make. Users that are using the current plugin, version 1.0.2 or lower, the new versions changes are likely to break your version. This is far from ideal I know, but having gone back and forth on a number of occasions this I feel is still the best way forward.
If you are on versions at or below 1.0.2 then I would recommend you add the Block Specific Plugin Updates plugin from the WordPress plugin repository and set it to prevent updating the WP Broadbean plugin until you are ready to move ahead with the new version 2 plugin.
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