@klausharms thanks!
@nicolasmn, ohh ok i see where are you coming from, with WooCommerce the use of post_status is clever, however, this solution has 2 main disadvantages which made me go with menu_order instead:
– in WC only admin can change the post status, in a classifieds site the post_status is set by users (when posting an Ad), i could have there post status “publish” and “featured”, BUT the Ad can automatically expire which changes its status to “expired”.
Now if an Admin wants to make the Ad visible again he has no way of knowing if the Ad was featured or not. I could add some status like expired-featured but this would require also having the “-featured” postfix for every other post_status, add to this a couple of WPAdverts add-ons and you have a nightmare to manage. I could also go with some “was_fatured” meta field, but it has it’s own set of problems.
Currently, in WPAdverts a featured listing is a post_status == "publish" && menu_order > 0. This makes it easy to manage, the add visibility is changed with post_status and making ad featured is as simple as flipping a switch (or checkbox).
2. What happens when the Featured Ads module is disabled? With custom statuses all featured Ads would disappear, of course, i could bulk change the status when module is disabled, but then when enabling it back again all ads would be non-featured, none of this is something user expects.
Compare this to the current elegant solution, disabling Featured Ads module makes all ads non-featured and enabling it back makes the Ads featured again.
On top of that breaking, the featured ads module requires installing a specific plugin which allows modifying menu_order for custom post types (by default this is not possible) and manually changing the Ads menu_order, this is far more less likely to happen than having the custom post statuses desynchronized.
There are a few filters and actions here and there, but most of the functionality is written in a way that makes it really hard to alter and extend the code. Also, most of the functions, filters, and actions aren’t documented at all.
Are you referring to WPAdverts or the add-ons? The WPAdverts has documentation for advrets_form_load filter and child templates (3 articles in the documentation), this on itself allow to do roughly 75% to 85% of customizations (based on support request tickets), add to this 10 paid add-ons, 25 free code snippets in the snippets library, a-lot of snippets i posted in the forums and WordPress API (which is the only thing you need to know to customize WPAdverts in wp-admin panel) and you can change a lot without modifying original source code.
The add-ons are a different thing, they are complete functionalities which implement the available API they are not really meant to be further extended by developers although it is possible to some extent.
Most of the code is added using add_filter and add_action functions in the “init” action, you can replace all of these functions by registering your own “init” function with lower priority, and inside it remove my functions and register your own instead.
I am wondering what did you had a problem with? Can you explain what is one thing you were trying to do but wasn’t able to due to how WPAdvrets is designed?
Sorry for the long post again :).
