feature considerations

I’ve been playing with Plugin for a few days now for charity site. Great work!

there’s a few things that I thought might be helpful. (and would entice me to upgrade to Pro for)
+ Checkbox for enable “Buy it now” — if option checked validate value in BIN price box is greater than 0 .. if not checked ignore value .. the problem is that when you go to EDIT an auction, the BIN value defaults to 0 .. and this confuses people that can’t save (get a non-valid message) without BLANKING OUT THE FIELD. This is more of an annoyance and BUGFIX than a big feature request.
+ Ability to create a non-live auction .. in some cases, as auction items come in and descriptions and details are being determined .. there is the desire to set up an initial skeleton but not have the auction go LIVE .. would be nice to be able to set up an auction but SAVE FOR LATER or SAVE DRAFT type of function. Right now the workaround is to Save then immediately end the auction for later editing and reactivation
+ Ability to Buy It Now multiple lots of same item… because we are using this for charity and driving people to this site, we would like to keep them sticky and allow sale of Fixed Price Raffle tickets .. this is all well and good, the problem is that currently, there is no way to set up MULTIPLE LOTS available of same item .. For raffle tickets, I might set up something that is Qty 500 of $1 tickets.
+ Ability to autobid (by increment) to MAX amount .. I know this is not a lightweight request .. but people are perhaps used to setting a MAX amount which would auto-bid in assigned increments until such time as you are OUTBID or AUCTION ENDS. I’m not sure I’m explaining this properly, but I think you understand the way eBay does it.
+ Ability to define in settings “# Items Per Page”
+ Correct EMAIL FROM address .. it kept sending bid notifications and other emails as wordpress@[domainname].com .. I finally went into pluggable.php and hard-set it since I couldn’t determine another way to do it.
+ Ability to BULK SET Auction End Date .. as a charity we have a distinct “event” when a large list of items are available and they all close at the same time .. would be nice to BULK SET end time in this instance. Right now I did it via SQL, but would be nice to have it on front end.
+ (+1) Ability to edit email templates (notification, outbid, etc.)
+ BUGFIX?? linebreaks in descriptions ignored?? In the description EDIT, the linebreaks are seen.. in LIVE public auction page linebreaks are ignored .. am I missing something? Should I be putting in special chars to get linebreaks visible?
+ Ignore missing thumbnails .. right now if I only have 1 image for an auction, I see BLANK thumbnail placeholders .. this is not visually pleasant .. can you please center thumbnail images which EXIST under main image and ignore placeholders for non-existent images.
+ (+1) Ability to display currency SYMBOL ($) rather than currency CODE (USD) .. I went into DB and edited the substr(-3) of the appropriate record, but would be nice to have front end option.
+ Fix description layout on the feeder page .. I edited something somewhere (in CSS??) that allows the description to run full across under image and other li’s rather than somehow misaligned and held to the right of the image. Looks much better now, much more readable.
+ (+1) Ability to sort .. at least alter “post creation date” .. I understand the feeder is being pulled from get_posts .. but even an individual normal post has ability to hard-define the post-date in order to sort posts. Would be nice to give user front-end ability to do so.
+ Ability to have users “subscribe” to “NEW ITEMS ADDED” emails. As we piecemeal up items during the week, it would be nice if users had the option to subscribe to alerts about newly added items.
+ User watchlists. User ability to add an item(s) to their personal watchlist
+ Maybe already available in Pro .. but different shortcodes, hence different pages, for distinct groups “NEWLY ADDED”, “NO BIDS YET”, “CURR PRICE GREATER THAN $xx” or “LESS THAN $xx”, “CLOSING SOON”, “RECENTLY CLOSED”, etc.
+ Don’t force IMAGE HEIGHT on feeder page it leads to all sorts of distorted images .. I understand best image is square, but most are not. Constrain the width but not the HEIGHT
+ Ability to show at least a snippet of description in manage auctions. Maybe with a “more…” hover-div-expose so you can easily see the whole description for each auction without leaving the page. At least provide user an option in settings to “allow descriptions in manage auctions” .. I know it may slow the display if there are many auctions.
+ If user has EDIT privileges for a particular item, provide an “EDIT link” directly on the feeder or auction display page rather than needing to go to dashboard–>manage_auction
+ Display Increment and Reserve and BIN Price on Manage Auction list screen. In which case all info is visible. Currently, need to click into EDIT simply to get record of these values.
+ Ability to enter a REASON for “END AUCTION” click. i.e. HIDE AUCTION, ITEM NO LONGER AVAILABLE, INCORRECT LISTING DATA.
+ Ability to END AUCTION withholding winner/alerting bidders. If you have REASON field for END AUCTION, then you should be able to END AUCTION and not award the item to winner/inform bidders as to the reason for the CANCELLATION. I don’t want to have to Cancel several bids to achieve same results. “You are attempting to end an auction with active bids .. should I cancel all bids? should I declare a winner based on highest bid? Why is this auction being cancelled? Custom emaill message to active bidders (textbox)..”

Yep … I think that’s it for now 🙂

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-auction/