Update: 09/30/2010
The plugin I reviewed in the past has since received many negative reviews from the WordPress community. If you are looking to do a Business Directory the BEST solution would be to follow the WordPress Codex and work up a little PHP and customize it into your theme. That way you can use the default links management with WordPress without having to depend on a 3rd party plugin. To learn more about this read my post Build Your Own Link Directory in WP.
If you are looking for a quicker/easier solution, I would recommend checking out the Yellooh! Premium WordPress Theme located towards the bottom of my Premium WordPress Theme Match-Up page.
Somebody finally stepped up to the plate and created a Business Directory plugin for WordPress. A good friend of mine and owner of Square Compass, Cary Snowden, has put together a free plugin so that you can easily add directory capabilities to your WordPress cms Blog or site.
How to Install this plugin
- Rename the folder ‘business-directory’ to ‘biz-directory’. We are going to get this fixed in the future, but please bear with us for a while.
- Upload
biz-directoryand it’s contents to the/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Place
[bizdir_directory]in your ‘Directory’ page (this is where the directory will appear) - Place
[bizdir_addform]in your ‘Join’ page (this is where your submission form will appear) - Use the ‘Business Directory’ tab under the ‘Manage’ tab to manage your submissions
The Main Idea
Basically you can now easily turn a WordPress site or blog into a simple directory where people can submit their links and you can moderate those submissions. And for your blogs, instead of using your “Blogroll” for swapping links, you can dedicate a page on your blog for those links and actually have some content to go along with the links.
Some Needed New Features
There are 2 major things that the plugin still needs. 1) currently the Admin cannot add links manually through the back end and 2) there is no support for categories that I can find. There are of course many other features that could be useful, but those 2 would seem to be the most important.
Cary Snowden
September 29, 2008
Thanks for writing us up, Chase! The Business Directory for WordPress plugin has been surprisingly popular, and we are getting a lot of great feedback.
Regarding the two ‘missing features’ you mentioned in your post: We are currently working on an addition to the Admin panel that will allow you to add your own listings from within the Control Panel. For now, we are telling people they can simply use the ‘public’ Add form to do this, and then ‘approve’ their own entry. I realize this is an extra step, and we have added it to The List.
Support for categories is an interesting idea that we are working on, too. Your suggestion has sparked some new discussion. We originally thought to include a pull down for a static list of ‘business’ categories, but realized many people would use the plugin for church groups, book clubs, regional groups, etc. As you suggest, it makes sense to tie this into the Categories feature of WordPress and allow the Admin to establish the groups. We will come out with this feature soon.
I’ll keep you posted.
PS: One exciting feature we are working on is the ability for Admins to ‘promote’ an upgrade to existing listers, and to be able to charge any amount for the upgrade via PayPal. Stay tuned…
Trevyn
September 29, 2008
http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com/example-directory/
Here is the example it looks great. We should create a directory for Utah IT/Web companies. I am not an expert in the purpose of directories, but it would be nice to Comment/Rate/Poll/Dig differetn companies in your directory.
I am not sure if I am confident that this plugin wont store your submitted information in other places than the site you store it on. I am scared to submit my link and contact info. I could see the value of storing all the links form all downloaded plugins. In any case I would love to add in other links, and give good or bad feedback on those links, if I knew that my rating would effect more than the one site I posted the link on.
ronnie
October 14, 2008
I cant seem to get this plug in activated. I get this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function add_shortcode() in /home/domain/public_html/wp-content/plugins/business-directory/business-directory.php on line 25
ive tried renaming the folder as instructed above.
any ideas? anyone? I appreciate your help.
Trevyn Meyer
January 11, 2009
^^ Haha
Hotels
February 19, 2009
Hello,
I checked this plug-in but after the installation and activation I detected more than 14 W3C compatible bugs
Could you offer to me a really W3C compatible solution? It would be greatly appreciated.
24/7 WEBPROS
March 13, 2009
This plugin looks as though it may have potential. We are currently using ‘Wp-Directory-List 1.4.0′ Plugin and it does have a manual ‘add link’ in the back end among other things.
Sinela
April 11, 2009
It seems that this plugin can add more value to blogs. But I will continue to follow comments here because I’m a little bit scared regarding installation and eventual bugs, if any. Thank you.
Brainerd Lake
June 15, 2009
I would like to have a business directory on my blog for the only reason of recip links. Can I moderate listings via a specifically-placed reciprical URL? I’d assume it wouldn’t be very difficult disabling the displaying the URLs in the blogroll too? I’m looking forward to giving this a shot!
Video Submission Service
July 14, 2009
Love the idea of having a business directory on your blog, never really thought of that. I am going to give this plugin a shot and see what happens. Thanks so much for showing me this.
Brian
August 13, 2009
Really love the plugin but as pointed out above the messes up the XHTML Validation – has anyone corrected the validation errors?
If not I will look at correcting over the weekend when I have some free time.
AKT
December 17, 2009
I tried out the said plugin with wordpress
Ver 2.8.6
But The plugin seems broken
While trying to fetch the directory itself.
It is giving Ajax Error
Like wise Add form in not working. So basically
Author need to check the issue of compatibly with recent word press versions
If He is your friend Please ask him to check the issue. This is really a very good plugin.
If It works with the latest pace of word press itself
regards
AKT
jackfitz
February 12, 2010
I have tried the plugin but it does not show correctly I am trying 0.8.5 on wp 2.9.1. Has anyone had the same problem ?
jackfitz
credito pessoal
May 14, 2010
Any news on this plugin? Love to see it updated to latest WP version!!
Gouri
June 14, 2010
Looks simple and nice.. Has the categories feature been added?
May
June 18, 2010
I have been looking for a comprehensive directory plugin like this. Any updates on the new features? Would be very useful to be able to do paid upgrades.
Jack
June 19, 2010
Stay clear of this if you are expecting any support because their is none. I have had this product since may this year and emailed support a number of time concidering a problem with compatability and have not recieved one single reply, he is quick enough to answer sales questions but that’s it.
Chase
June 19, 2010
@Jack – thanks for informing us of this. This along with several other complaints seem to leave us with the conclusion that it’s best to find something else.
Dr S K Verma
July 28, 2010
Dear Sir/Madam,
This is a great plugin. I was wondering if it is possible to create different forms for different categories? For example, if my category belongs to the profile of Professors, then the required fields they would expect in their profile would be, their Honours, Medals, Students supervised etc. BUt if the category is ‘students’, then the obvious fields for them would be their graduation year, name of Guide/supervisor etc.
Can this function be included by any trick/hack in the current version of the Business Directory Plugin?
Nigel Nix
August 18, 2010
I find this a great plugin too but would love if you could display more than just the URL and description. I found where this info is called in the “business-directory/functions.php” lines 483 – 497 but have no idea how to call adress or name etc.
—————————————-
(empty($l["company_url"])?
str_replace(“Â&”,”&”,@$l["company_name"]):
““.
str_replace(“Â&”,”&”,@$l["company_name"]).
“”
).
““.
“”.str_replace(“Â&”,”&”,$l["company_description"]).”"
—————————————-
Anybody done this yet?
medical assistant
February 22, 2011
Please someone create a premium plugin. I hope there is a demand for it. All the directories now available are not complete in some way or their support is not that great.
L'Homo Economicus
March 9, 2011
I am looking for a wordpress directory plugin but i never find it. Those i find do not have all the features i want for my website. “All the directories now available are not complete” for sure
But the best way si to do it by yourself.
Andrew
March 29, 2011
It would be fine, if the author could update the Business Directory.
I would pay for it.
Have a look at
http://musikschulwelt.de/branchenverzeichnis
I have modified the plugin a little bit:
In business-directory.php the (german) language and the reading
In config.php the number of items
In functions.php the reading and the shown information
Anuj@Improve Blog Loading Time
January 9, 2012
Spot on. Thanks for the exellent plugin.
I have an issue though. I am able to install the plugin, activate and set the options. But when i create a page callec directory and paste the code as you have mentioned, the directory doesnt show up. What could the problem?