In the first post in 2018 i wanted to wish you a happy new year, i hope 2017 was great for you and 2018 will be even better!
The beginning of the year is a perfect time to reflect on what we did in the past year and what we are planning for this year. According to self-help guides, writing down and making your new years’ resolutions public increases the chances of keeping them.
What are we up to in 2018?
Each year, since 2009 we are doing around 8 – 10 releases. This includes two major releases with a lot of new functionality. We are planning to do the same this year. In the WPJB core you can expect following features this year:
Customizer – It will allow customizing how the job, resume and company details page looks like using the visual editor. This will include selecting icon, label and display type for the custom fields. For example, if you will be providing a YouTube video URL in the custom field then you will be able to render this field as an embedded video instead of a link.
This one feature will make it much easier to customize the job board to your and your clients’ needs. I am very excited about this and it will be coming soon.
ZipRecruiter Integration – This is often requested feature and we will be adding it soon as well. This will basically work the same as the Indeed Integration. The reason why users want this feature is because Indeed decided, for the most part, to abandon the APIs or at least make them inaccessible to small site owners.
Resume Memberships – Right now WPJB allows to charge Employers only. We want to allow charging candidates as well. We do not have an exact plan yet, but most likely it will be possible to charge one-time or recurring membership for having the resume visible or featured.
Custom Fields Rewrite – The current Custom Fields editor in WPJB is few years old and needs an update. The main feature we are planning is the ability to create multiple form schemes. The example use case is a recruitment company which has a different job application form for each job type or even for each job.
Additionally, each field will have more configuration options. This is a huge update and it will be available by the end of the year if we will manage to have it finished.
Job Applications Update – This is another update for users who own recruitment websites and need better applicant tracking system. We want to allow the administrator to manage job application statuses from wp-admin panel. Each company will be able to set preferred job application vetting process without custom programming.
We will be also adding job applications logs. Each user managing applications from the wp-admin panel will know when application status was changed and by whom, which email message was sent to the candidate, and the users will be able to add comments to the applications.
Google Maps – Google Maps integration is another one which needs a huge makeover. It will integrate with [wpjb_jobs_list] shortcode to allow searching for jobs on the list and map at the same time.
Extensions
This year we also want to release a couple of extensions. These are things you might or might not need.
Google Analytics – This integration will allow displaying a number of page views on the Job Details pages. It will also show a chart when editing the job from wp-admin or Employer panel.
WooCommerce Integration – We want to finally release the integration with WC. This will allow you to accept payments for job postings using any WC compatible payment method.
Jobs 2 Careers Integration – This is yet another integration similar to Indeed. Since the backfilling APIs are being deprecated we want to make sure everyone will be able to backfill his job board using some different system.
BroadBean 2.0 – We already have integration with BroadBean available but we want to release a new version which will allow to visually generate XML which will be submitted to BroadBean, this shortens the time required to integrate with Indeed.
Application Methods 2.0 – The Application Methods add-on is also already available. We are planning to release a version with a major under-the-hood update.
Sliced Invoices Integration – Currently users who pay for a job posting or membership receive only an email informing them about payment. The integration with amazing Sliced Invoices plugin will allow to automatically generate an invoice when the order is paid.
Summary
As you can see there are about 12 major updates. Some will be available in the WPJB core some will be added as extensions. We are aiming to have all 12 points finished (plus some other not listed here). Some of the projects are huge (like the Custom Fields editor) and i cannot tell we if we will be able to finish them for sure.
I hope you like this list and you are as much excited about new features as we are.
One final note, while some of the functions are partially ready or we are working on them others are just an idea right now, therefore they do not have any priority assigned. If you would like to see some feature soon feel free to “vote” for it by posting a comment.
First week of a new year is usually a time of summary, to take a look at the last year (to see what went great and what not so much) and plan for the year ahead of you.
How was 2013 for WPJobBoard?
Not bad at all. The biggest win was releasing WPJB 4.0 and Jobeleon theme. Both of them were welcomed warmly by the community and are real improvement to what WPJB used to be. The biggest positive surprise for me was how often users used Jobeleon as theme since i am marketing WPJB mainly as a plugin.
Good decision was also hiring Jeeni as a half-time QA (quality assurence) tester, fresh pair of eyes really help find bugs and problems in the software.
I can’t think of anything that went particularly bad, i would say that even though the KB articles were rewritten for 4.0 the quality is less than satisfying.
What is ahead of us?
First of all version 4.1 which is planned for middle of January, the codebase is locked there will be just few more small changes there and i will be passing it to QA (if you would like to see what i do have planned there check out our Facebook).
Next up will be probably WPJobBoard officials site redesign, i am guessing this is not something you might be interested in but this is still on my roadmap.
We are planning native Android and iOS WPJobBoard apps. Users are checking their smartphones multiple times a day, showing them instant job notifications on their mobile devices seems like a great idea. It would be huge success to have them ready in the middle of the year.
In order to develop native mobile apps, the WPJobBoard would need to have a full OpenGraph-like API that will allow to remotely manage all WPJB data.
These are the biggest plans so far, other than that we will be doing multiple updates with small (yet important) UI and functionality improvements.
Happy New Year Everyone!
WordPress 3.8 should be released this Thursday, according to latest official news. It is also about time to check if plugins are working properly with new WP version. I just did a final check for WPJobBoard and everything seems to be working properly, if you are using WPJB 4.0.5 or newer you can safely upgrade your WP site … at least as far as WPJB goes.
The WordPress 3.8 update will include complete wp-admin panel redesign, if you would like to see how it integrates with WPJobBoard you can check it on WPJB Facebook Page, i posted there a couple of screenshots.
The long awaited WP 3.6, is almost done and Tomorrow first release candidate is expected. The release is almost 2 months late and it seems that the main new feature Post Formats UI will be removed from core and will be avaialble as a plugin in WordPress repository.
What does this all means to WPJobBoard users? Not much really, the latest WPJobBoard version (the whole 4.0 branch) is developed using also latest WordPress version, so i am pretty sure they are already compatible and once new WP will be available you can safely update.
The version 4.0 release is delayed a couple of days, should be released on Monday, there was a major change i needed to make in the API, so whole plugin needs to be tested again.
In the meantime, here are a couple of screenshots from new job board theme we are working on. The theme will have flat, minimalistic design (popular this days i was told).
The idea is that unlike current WPJobBoard-Theme, this one will have neutral look (so it should work for any niche) and will be far more easier to modify, of course like previously in order to use this job board theme on your site you will need to have WPJobBoard plugin installed first.
The existing WordPress job board theme will most probably be discontinued once the new one for version 4.0 is ready.
WordPress Job Board Theme Home (click to view in full size)
Job Details Page (click to view in full size)
Blog Listings (click to view in full size)
What do you think?
WordPress 3.3 should be released somewhere in November this year. One change in the API that interests me most is improved Editor API. According to a post on WordPress development blog new API will allow to use TinyMCE anywhere.
WordPress Editor API. This is an updated API for both TinyMCE and Quicktags that outputs all parts of both editors in the same way as used on the Add / Edit Post screens, #17144. Plugins will be able to use the WordPress editor anywhere including the Visual/HTML tabs and the links to upload files and show the media library.
By anywhere i understand it will be both frontend and backend, if so then i will be able to implement WYSIWYG in WPJobBoard 3.5 for job description (and maybe some custom fields). There are already few examples how the new editor API could be used and i must say it looks really promising, but let’s wait for final WordPress 3.3 release.
When i first started to learn about SEO (about 5 or 7 years ago), there was a concept of Google Authority site. Basically the site that have an additional links in Google search results was considered an authority site.
I am not sure if the concept is still valid? Either way, i always wanted to have one of them, for no actual reason and today when browsing search results for “wpjobboard” i found out that WPJobBoard is now an authority site. I even made a screen-shot as an evidence.
Recently i have been asked a lot about possibility of adding resumes from the frontend instead of WP Dashboard, usually the argument is that the dashboard is ugly :).
I think i will add this feature in version 3.4 (released probably in March along with some other awesome features), however this will mean that managing resumes from the backend (ie WP Dashboard) will no longer be possible, so i figured out that it will be best to ask you (the WPJobBoard user) what do you think about such change? Please post in comments.
BTW. If there will be no comments i will probably go ahead with it.
I almost finished automatic updates feature for WPJobBoard 3.1, i hope to release the whole package soon. At the same time i needed a new instance of WordPress at my computer to test the upgrades, so i decided to give WordPress 3.0 a try.
After quick installation i uploaded and activated WPJobBoard. So far, i haven’t had a single problem with it, so it’s safe to say that WPJobBoard 3.0 and 3.1 are compatible with WordPress 3.0. I guess that WP developers did a great job to retain backward compatibility for plugins and (probably) themes.
One thing i might change or rather add is new default WPJobBoard theme that takes advantage of new theme, on the other hand as far as i am concerned my demo version is the only blog which still uses Kubrick theme so that might not be a priority.
In the following month i am going to implement few changes on this website … in fact i am going to rewrite it. There are few reasons for it. First i need a better admin panel to help you more effectively, second i want to make ordering even more simplified and third i want you to make money from WPJobBoard, therefore i am in the process of creating affiliate program when one will be receive commision (about 20% to 30%) for each sale.
Obviously that does not mean i will stop working on WPJobBoard 3.0, far from it. In the meantime i will collect feedback and implement improvements and i hope to get stable version (although beta version seems already stable enough) released in April, i won’t tell the exact date because i am myself not sure when it will be.
I want to make a “double launch” (if you will) and release stable version along with upgraded official WPJobBoard site.
By the way, i am courious how many of you reading this post are interested in becoming WPJobBoard affiliate?
I noticed that lately a lot of you try to contact me by posting comments on this blog or at http://ditio.net . That’s awesome if you want to comment a post all insight are always welcome. However if you have some specific question about WPJobBoard (for example troubleshooting) then it’s not the best method at all.
I always recommend contacting me using form at https://wpjobboard.net/contact, or even faster by sending email to support[at]wpjobboard.net, i am the only person that answers those emails so basically you are communicating directly with me and even better i answer every single email in my in-box.
On the other hand it’s the other way around with comments, especially those at ditio.net, i don’t get notification about new comments so it can be there unnoticed for few days – i am not even aware of them.
The only exception to this is when i do not answer email for about two days. You might expect then that email was not delivered for “some” reason. In that case it is a good idea to post in comments, but ONLY on THIS blog.
