Interesting and nice looking addon. We're going to have a classifieds system on AVForums and I had planned on having one written from scratch.
Currently we just use the forums with a custom form for creating ads, and the classified forums are hugely popular.
http://www.avforums.com/categories/classified-adverts.242/
Early stages yet, but if your system
@Micheal can do what we need, then we could avoid writing our own.
I'll put together a functionality list and hopefully we can discuss what we need. I am a coder of some 35 years experience, so I would only suggest features which would be useful to other people and which would enrich MicroClassifieds. Hopefully I can persuade you to add the functionality
Kicking off with some initial thoughts, we prefer negotiations to remain in the public domain so that if a transaction goes sour, we have a record of what was said.
This is why it's important that each new advert have a related discussion thread created. It would be useful to associate a forum with each advert category so that discussion threads are automatically created in the appropriate forum.
So we'd need every ad to have a comments thread, and that thread created in the forum associated with the advert category. The thread starter would of course be the user posting the ad.
We use XenCentral and having imported our historical data, have hundreds of thousands of feedback records. I prefer your method of rating traders as it's more detailed (the rating out of 20), but can people leave comments? We'd need that.
Also an advertiser might list a whole bunch of items in one sale. We need to ensure that feedback is only left between the thread starter and one of the posters in the thread.
The XenCentral system can do this and is also pretty sophisticated from a reporting point of view.
We'd need to be able to integrate the XenCentral system or import that feedback into MicroClassifieds.
Could we set up Paypal charges for people to feature their ads? When lots of ads are featured, are they rotated sensibly?
Do you require the location of the advertiser to be entered? Could this be picked up using GeoIP? Or by them entering (the first portion of) their post code?
Thanks in advance.