Directorist - creating a WP Directory

[NickGrogan]

Has anyone created a business directory using Wordpress?

Currently testing Directorist, not the worst, but a bit awkward. Anyone got any experience of setting up, correctly?

Any better scripts? I tried GeoDirectory, but that looked even more badly designed.

 

[fisicx]

Depends on what type of directory.

Most of them a bit poor, I tend to try them all until I find one the client likes.

The only time I did one for myself I built a plugin that did exactly what I wanted.

 

[NickGrogan]

Depends on what type of directory.

Most of them a bit poor, I tend to try them all until I find one the client likes.

The only time I did one for myself I built a plugin that did exactly what I wanted.

Directory of business - company name, profile, contact, etc - nothing to clever.

Location search, name search, text search. Directorist seems to handle all that ok.

Looking at multiple levels of paid subscriptions, seems a bit harder to setup.

 

[fisicx]

Agree it is a bit fiddly but I seem to recall the supporting documentation was pretty good.

 

[NickGrogan]

looks like you have to add plugins to the plugin and some have similar names. looks better now

 

[NickGrogan]

Something very strange, not had this problem before.

The site has a simple menu and works fine on desktop, but on tablet/mobile it changes to a hamburger menu, which links to a totally different menu.

Using Astra as I do on all sites.

energybrokers.org.uk

What menu do you get?

 

[fisicx]

I see a hamburger menu that lists all your pages.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Like any similar question, it depends on what you want to do.

Using custom fields or even a custom page/post creator will allow the easy/quick building of a directory.

I think the one I used a few years ago and was OK (good features on upgrade) was Business Directory plugin (yeh, their marketing department really tried hard with that name!).

 

[NickGrogan]

I see a hamburger menu that lists all your pages.

So a different menu compared to desktop? Weird. Not sure how that's happening.

 

[fisicx]

Check the menu settings. It’s possible a plugin has added additional menu options.

And try a different theme to see what happens.

Are you using a page builder?

 

[NickGrogan]

Astra theme, no page builder. Dont know why the hamburger menu is linking to a menu that doesn't seem to exist.

Solved it by getting rid of hamburger and sticking the menu under the logo.

 

[Stiofan]

Hi Nick,

I am one of the creators of GeoDirectory! We have been around for a very long time and our system has lots of options, which is great for customising but can make it a little harder at first.

Did you try GeoDirectory with Astra or one of our own themes? I'd love to get feedback on your design feedback

I'm sure GD has every feature you could possibly need, and if you want to give it another try, I'd be happy to advise and you won't find a better support team. We also have an option to split the UK into the 4 countries so users can filter and have pretty URLs for that, I would guess that's something you would need with this type of directory.

I don't want to start going through competitors here, we have blog posts comparing them, but as a security researcher, the one you picked has worst code I have ever seen.

Anyway, if you have any questions, please ask.

 

[NickGrogan]

Tried Geodirectory with Astra, first thoughts are there are too many settings to get things started. Directorist is easier to start, but customising things is harder. I guess the two go together.

I seem to remember GD having a weird location setting, where you had to pick your directory location and it could only have one. With a UK wide directory, not sure how that would work.

 

[Stiofan]

For locations, we have (again) lots of options. By default, it is set to use ONE city/town, however there is setting to bypass this and allow listings to be added anywhere, the core plugin does not allow for specific location filtering by things like country, region, city (that is added by the location manager addon) but you do have zip/post code or location proximity search (order by distance to that).

 

[NickGrogan]

Finished uploading initial data last week, submitted sitemap on Thursday, as of day 2,321 pages listed on google, and appearing in results, including first page for some keywords.

So seems to work from an SEO point of view.

I might use Geodirectory for the next one, so I can compare.

 

[Stiofan]

You are braver than me running it on a live site

 

[fisicx]

You are braver than me running it on a live site

Why is that?

 

[Stiofan]

I don't want to start going through competitors here, we have blog posts comparing them, but as a security researcher, the one you picked has worst code I have ever seen.

I know as a competitor, saying bad things about another product does not make me look good so I won't say too much here. I'd recommend you have a dev with a security background look over the code.

 

[fisicx]

We shall first see if @NickGrogan gets hacked and then worry about his choice of plugin.

It seems there was a security issue last year but that’s been fixed. Reviews do say it’s buggy with poor support but that doesn’t necessarily point to security holes.

 

[Stiofan]

When we do a blog post about competitors, I usually do a quick code check to check the quality of the code. No code is perfect but I usually find 1-3 small vulnerabilities in most large code bases, the last time I reviewed theirs I found 18, including ones like just being able to set the admins password by any user... It was so bad we just left them out of the review as it would have taken so long for them to fix them before we published.. I checked just now and that specific one is fixed, so I'm not releasing any new vulnerability info here, but I can see issues still.

 

[lesseo]

It might be better to use it as a theme, not as a plugin. Because it's much easier. Of course, if I understand what you want correctly. Like this: demo.temavadisi.com/firmarehberi/