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.
Go download the Business Directory plugin for Wordpress and try it out. Just like most Wordpress plugins it’s extremely easy to install and get configured.
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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…
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.
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.
^^ Haha
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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