WPAdverts Review: Build Your Own Classifieds Site with WordPress

Classified advert sites have been around since the dawn of the internet, sites like CraigsList and Gumtree allow users to post items for sale in different categories and locations around the world. If you run a website, adding a Classifieds section to allow members to sell items to each other or even creating your own Classified website and taking on these large sites is now possible using WordPress as the framework.

A new plugin which aims to make it easy to add Classifieds functionality to WordPress is called “WPAdverts” its a commercial plugin costing from $39 for a single site license and will work with any theme, in this review I will take a look at how to install it and configure it.

WPAdverts Plugin »

Plugin Configuration

After you upload and activate the WPAdverts plugin, you will see it has created a new menu in WordPress named “Classifieds” and it will also create some new pages on your site – Adverts, Manage and Add. If you visit “Classifieds” > “Options” you will see some modules which you can activate.

Under the “Core” settings you will see the option to decide how long to display and advert for ( default is 30 days ) and you can configure your currency settings here to match your local currency.

If you wish to charge people to post adverts, you can enable the “Payments” module and either “PayPal IPN” or “Bank Transfer” modules so you can receive payment. Under the “Payments” module you can set up different options such as “Free” and “Premium” listings, and choose how much to charge and for how long etc.

The “PayPal IPN” module settings allows you to enter your PayPal email address and choose whether the payments are live or in sandbox mode.

Any payments you then receive via the site will be listed under the “Payments” menu link, along with info such as whether they are “Pending”, “Failed”, “Refunded” and so on.

Setting up Categories

The next stage of setting up the plugin is to create your categories – these will be where your users can submit their listings to, obviously this part will depend on what sort of Classifieds site you are setting up. To add them, visit the “Categories” menu link and create parent categories and child categories that are relevent for your site. Creating categories work the same as if you were creating categories for your blog, in this example you can see I have created a “Video games” Category with different genres of games for the child categories :

Submitting an Advert

Once your categories are created, you can visit your site and see the pages that the plugin has created. The main page which will list the classifieds is “Adverts” which you will see is empty :

To add the first advert, visit the “Add” page and you can fill in the info about what you are selling – item title, description, image, price and so on.

Click “Preview” and then “Publish” and the item will be added to the site.

Pricing

Pricing for WPAdverts is quite reasonable, starting at $39 for a single site license which includes standard support and 1 year of updates which will be enough for most people. You can also pay $99 for 5 sites and priority support and 1 year of updates or $199 for unlimited sites, priority support and 1 year of updates.

Conclusion

This seems like a solid plugin – very easy to setup and configure and it worked well with a number of themes which I tested with – the front-end uses your theme’s styling so it matches in well and the backend is very concisely implemented. It doesn’t have a huge number of features at the moment, due to the fact it has just launched – the addon module section only contained payment modules at the moment so Im guessing they plan to add more modules over time, this seems a common way to run premium plugins at the moment. I would like to see extra modules for things like:

• More Payment Processors
• Messaging between members
• Notifications
• Admin Approval of Adverts

Check it out if you’re looking for a Classifieds plugin with premium level of support.

WPAdverts Plugin »