Oh, and I was impressed with WPDLR.com. We met them at the last DD. Their plugin looked superior to DealerTrend but it was only $50 cheaper a month and we didn't want to rebuild all of our sites.
Anyone using Wordpress to post vehicle inventory?
- Thread starter JR1980
- Start date
I highly DO NOT recommend this solution!!!
We struggled now for well over a month to get this to work with what we need. Its ok if you are an independent dealer with a few cars on your lot, but their app requires that you update inventory manually -- one at a time. We tried a number of solutions and even spent money on an outside programmer so that we could setup an import from our DMS, but nothing works.
Just an FYI for anyone considering
Hi folks. We were creeping Google and stumbled onto this post. We decided to make an account to offer an angle.
First of all, you are trying to bend basic page builder into an inventory and/or object management system. Let's face it, wordpress is a public comment system not a management system.
Second of all, forget all the selling points of wordpress and realize its feature set and scalability. Any frame is seo friendly. Any frame has easy menus with wysiwyg editors. This is year 2013 - the entire feature set of wordpress has been successfully mimic'd well over 50 times.
Third, if you're gonna do this open, use drupal. Think feeds... Get your InvRM to export xml, csv, or even Google base txt. Use views or bend drupals news feed system to craft display nodes from your feed files. Make a secret ftp for drupal and/or your web servers wget + cron schedule to pull updates. Set subscription alerts so when content changes you can easily monitor it via a salted catch all email.
You can also bend good open commerce solutions to do this for you. Just make "products" the cars... Hide pricing, payments, and cart stuff.... Nopcommerce was a good one we benchmarked lately.
There are other ways but like yourselves, we are all bout diy. Just thoughts friends! Good selling!
First of all, you are trying to bend basic page builder into an inventory and/or object management system. Let's face it, wordpress is a public comment system not a management system.
Second of all, forget all the selling points of wordpress and realize its feature set and scalability. Any frame is seo friendly. Any frame has easy menus with wysiwyg editors. This is year 2013 - the entire feature set of wordpress has been successfully mimic'd well over 50 times.
Third, if you're gonna do this open, use drupal. Think feeds... Get your InvRM to export xml, csv, or even Google base txt. Use views or bend drupals news feed system to craft display nodes from your feed files. Make a secret ftp for drupal and/or your web servers wget + cron schedule to pull updates. Set subscription alerts so when content changes you can easily monitor it via a salted catch all email.
You can also bend good open commerce solutions to do this for you. Just make "products" the cars... Hide pricing, payments, and cart stuff.... Nopcommerce was a good one we benchmarked lately.
There are other ways but like yourselves, we are all bout diy. Just thoughts friends! Good selling!
Good advice, thanks for chiming in.. But Drupal? No thanks... Drupal is outdated, and nobody uses it anymore. There's many various reasons outside of that, but Wordpress is still the best setup hands down.
- Dec 30, 2009
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- Yago
I highly DO NOT recommend this solution!!!
We struggled now for well over a month to get this to work with what we need. Its ok if you are an independent dealer with a few cars on your lot, but their app requires that you update inventory manually -- one at a time. We tried a number of solutions and even spent money on an outside programmer so that we could setup an import from our DMS, but nothing works.
Just an FYI for anyone considering
Don't take these solutions lightly, doing your own website is a lot of work! The plug ins are just a good base code to start but you can't just buy a plug and play inventory solution with integrated feeds and fields.
WP also has lots of constant security updates, if the plug in you buy doesn't get better you will get hacked sooner or later.
Wrong on this on. You can buy an inventory plug-in from DealerTrend, which is essentially a plug-and-play solution needing very little work out of the box. They offer 4 standard inventory themes with the plug-in and best part is its extremely easy plug-in to customize the inventory theme and VLP and VDP layouts. Just need to know a little php, html, and css.
We have 100% control over look and feel. With our customized theme we have an inventory system that is unique to us and not 1000s of other dealerships.
New Ford For Sale in Lincoln, Grand Island, St Joseph | Anderson Auto Group
GREAT Job Chris! I rarely, if ever give out compliments on here, but love your work! I'm in the process of switching over to DealerTrend as well, just trying to wrap up this PSD design for the inventory pages. We're getting there but I'm still about 2 weeks off from wrapping it up; have been tweaking it around for the past year... (I don't code myself, just design so trying to get it right the first time around). Anyways, nice job I love your creativity here!
- Apr 7, 2009
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- Joe
- Apr 7, 2009
- 4,835
- 2,295
- Awards
- 10
- First Name
- Joe
Another WordPress player from the real estate world that came to our space: WordPress Car Dealer Theme | WordPress Theme for Car Dealerships
Not a bad looking theme for a smaller dealership. I see they're displaying the inventory as a custom post type, my only concern is whether inputting vehicles would be a manual entry or if it could accept an CSV or xml file from a Vehicle Management System. If it doesn't include this automatic entry, it would be easy to develop a plug-in to do so, but would require further development.
