Yes this is in my plans and is the most requested thing.

First of all, there is already a ShapeShift extension. This is simply a frontend for the shapeshift.io service and should be OK for exchanging between the coins supported by that service.

I do intend to build a full exchange with an orderbook on WordPress. This is a huge task and I am currently at the analysis phase, so it’s not really possible for me to give an exact estimate. It will be at least a few months.

Note that this will not be an exchange that can scale to large volumes, due to the limitations of WordPress. One issue is the unavailability of websockets, which makes polling necessary. The exchange should be good enough for low volume markets though, and should provide some liquidity for small coins.

Learning from the mistakes of the past, I am currently preparing to upgrade the plugin to a better API, and the current PHP and JSON API will continue to work but will be marked deprecated. This will occur at version 3.0.0 which I am planning to release over the coming month.

This API upgrade is a prerequisite for working on the exchange. This still has epic status in my backlog, so I do not want to give an estimate. I have done this in the past for other things and I am always off.

It will not be very soon.

Hope this makes the situation a bit clearer for you.

The exchange extension is now released. See the relevant blog post here.