I didn’t realise you’d taken my approach for the Real Estate theme, apologies! I’m going to have another look.

We were in contact via email recently as I wanted to use only certain aspects of the RE theme, namely the registration and ad creation and payment module. My site, though dealing with real estate, is in vacation rentals, not sales, so many of the aspects of RE would be redundant for my purposes.

You should also take a look at this plugin for filtering and queries:

http://scribu.net/wordpress/query-multiple-taxonomies/

Very useful!

In this launch post of classifieds theme, we have already mentioned that we are open to users suggestion and will be tweaking the theme to make it more practical, useful.

Thankfully, expert users like yourself knows things better and the suggestions are really helpful.

With so many things going on at once, we have to schedule tasks as per the priority. There are certain things that we need to take care of first. Such as, better customer support, hiring good people, correcting the codes/glitches, be prepared for upcoming 3.0 version of wordpress etc.

One thing is sure. We will take the approach suggested by you – just like we did in our real estate theme. Only thing is, this will take a bit of time.

The theme’s developer has not taken up my offer to discuss my ideas further.

The thing about these premium themes, like Templatic’s classified theme and Classipress is that they look nice, and have nice options pages, but they are poorly structured. WP already supports custom post types and custom taxonomies, they’re just not built in to the UI of WP yet.

So there’s no reason why these theme developers should be using custom fields to store certain values, particularly geographical values. It is also totally unforgivable that neither of these themes have filtering functionality allowing users to drill down results etc.

And general tagging, and tag clouds, have become passe.

The only good thing about them, in my opinion, is they have ecommerce modules allowing users to create, maintain and pay for their ads.

I would like to see a more modular approach to these themes so that we can take certain elements and build the sites we need, otherwise, as you say, in their current form they are not helpful in monetizing our sites.

I would also like to see theme developers taking a more involved role in customisation work rather than ‘customisation’ services relating to changing the colours via css!

You bring up very valid points. Such so, that I must agree with you in order to make this theme useful.
I’ve been contemplating this theme for a couple of months now, but had not thought of your input before. I see that this is a must because it could get very messy and not helpful in monetizing without this structure.

If I select a country, I then want to see its associated regions, then cities and towns so that I can drill down and filter results. Custom fields will not give you this.

The ability to filter results is a MUST for any classified or listing site. I can give you many examples of this in the real world and it shouldn’t be difficult to develop if you’ve structured your content correctly.

I think perhaps with the release of WP 3.0 and its support for custom post types, and that tied with custom taxonomies, we’ll start to see WP become a proper cms and not just a blogging system which has been kludged together as a cms.

Another problem with the Classipress theme is allowing listers to enter their own tags. Another bad idea!. It’s OK for sites with maybe 5 members, but for sites with hundreds or thousands of members can you imagine how your tag table in your database will look? There will be so many redundancies by way of typos and inconsistencies etc that it will be of little use to the user (and as for SEO, next to useless as Google’s video on tags vs categories suggest)

This is another example of a badly thought out idea. Better for the site’s admin to predefine tags that the lister could then select by check boxes. For this, WP’s recent custom taxonomies is your new friend ;-) Ability to create groups of tags and even hierarchies. This will also help in terms of filtering results, and actually be of benefit to the user, i.e. the people visiting your site.

Even the look of the proposed new Classipress is wrong, it looks like a blog but it isn’t a blog, it’s supposed to be a classified site ;-)

That said, there’s also a lot of good things about the proposed new theme.

It’s interesting you’re developing a real estate theme as this could be of interest to me. I have quite a few idea in this area, mainly vacation rentals. If you wish to discuss further then you have my email.

“custom fields to hold geographical values, i.e. country, state, town etc. BUT this is such a bad idea because there’s no relationship between the values” – I’d love to solve this and implement in our theme(s). I just need to hear more of your idea on how and what can be done to solve this.

A wasted opportunity, in my opinion.

As you can see from the following discussion on Classipress, the author is advocating the use of custom fields to hold geographical values, i.e. country, state, town etc. BUT this is such a bad idea because there’s no relationship between the values:

http://wpclassipress.com/3-0-user-dashboard-and-ad-editing-preview/

It seems to me, that the next version of Classipress will still have quite a few shortcomings, i.e. the ability to filter classifieds being one amongst many.

As for Templatic’s classified theme I think it’s unfair to say they copied Classipress but I feel that Templatic’s theme has the same shortcomings as Classipress. I really don’t see anyone monetizing their classified sites unless there’s some serious customisation and design work involved.

Nice theme for sure! I am certainly interested. You have paypal options and the two tier payment options (like free and featured etc…) listed on your features in the blog, but it doesn’t seem like that in the demo.
Are these features ready now?

Thanks very much,
Harmony