Take the Directory to the next level

[NMillard]

Hi,

I think it’s awesome that you’ve made a directory site!

It really has some great potential, and I have some ideas on how to improve it.

1) Membership levels.
Making it possible to create different membership levels is kind of a must-have feature.
Also, restricting some pages (e.g. forums) from some membership levels would be nice.
And taking payments for membership levels shouldn’t be restricted to PayPal only. Pretty much every Directory theme I’ve come across only allow users to pay with PayPal – in some countries people are uncomfortable about using Paypal due to a lot of news sites warn people from using it due to scammers.

2) Two different kinds of users.
Listers – people who list things, businesses or whatever.
Browsers – people who browse the site for listings. Let admin restrict this user-status from seeing some content, pages, and so on. Maybe even build or use the message system from BuddyPress to handle interaction between listers and browsers. In that way u’d increase trafic to the site.

3) Featured listings.
I guess this is self-explanatory. Getting paid for letting users make their listing featured would be cool.

4) Fields, fields, and more fields.
The ability to create more fields and restrict some to only certain membership levels.
Maybe let users pay pr. field? Kinda like in this theme http://live.btoa.com.au/spotfinder/realestate/

5) Ratings.
Letting users with browser-status (or whatever u’d call it) rate the listings.
Multiple rating scores would be nice. Like, Quality, Service, Product, Overall Rating.

6) Packages.
This might actually in somehow be related to the membership levels.
Packages like users can choose to have a free listing, 3mo. listing subscription, 1y listing subscription and so on.

7) User area.
Let users see their statistics on their listing(s). Like.. how many times it has been visited. Average time spend on their listing(s). See their current membership level and packages – make the able to down- or upgrade. Let them see their invoices. Edit profil with avatar and whatnot (used for BuddyPress).

8) Gallery, shortcodes.
Let users make galleries and use shortcodes in their listings. It would probably also be possible to restrict the number of images based on membership / package level.

9) Tabs.
If listings had tabs then the users could to some extent substitute their website for yours. Have a look at this theme on how they did it: http://uouapps.com/portfolio/glocal/bar/?theme=uouapps

You already have the super search function – that’d be kinda cool to use for searching for listings!

I hope you will consider some of these suggestions on how to improve the Directory in your theme 🙂
I’m excited to see how far you will take it with the directory theme. You might even submit your theme to the Themeforest contest on Directory & Listings themes. I think it’s a $10.000 price for the best theme. Not sure though.

Have a look at these themes for inspiration:
http://www.themes.tdp-demo.com/atlas/
http://templatic.com/demos/?theme=geoplaces
http://live.btoa.com.au/spotfinder/realestate/
http://uouapps.com/portfolio/glocal/bar/?theme=uouapps

[Kyle – SUPPORT]

Hi

Thanks for the request, will forward this to the developer

– Kyle

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hi @NMillard,

Thanks for your requests. Cardinal isn’t a specific directory theme, so it of course won’t be as feature rich as those developed purely for that functionality.

We’ll see what we can do to add to the functionality in future 🙂

Thanks!

– Ed

[NMillard]

Yeah I understand 🙂

I’m doing a Directory site which is also supposed to work as a community for professionals.

I will send you a link once it is worth looking at. I think I’ve found some great plugins to deal with the user aspect.

I think the features that you should focus on the most are such as featured listings, gallery, and the ability to add more (custom) fields.

And thanks for taking the time to look at my post 🙂

[Kyle – SUPPORT]

Thanks for the suggestion, we will see what we can do 🙂

– Kyle

[Sotiris]

I did not want to start a new thread since NMIllard already covered this topic, however I would also like to add my name to the “request” list.

Today I started working on the “Projects” section of my site and since our work is property projects with descriptions and “categories” attached to them such as “service category”, “sector” or “usage type” and “location” I quickly found out that I can’t add more fields to the directory. If only I could add one more it would be great.

I just needed one more fields in my case (for now) but having the ability to add/remove fields would greatly enhance this tool.

So here are a few suggestions complementary to NMillard’s

1) Add options for the way the listings display. Allowing a “Grid View” with the ability to have info (heading & descriptive text) would allow for a neat way to present lots of things. E.g. products, projects, articles, books, BDs, etc… Then click on each “boxed item” in the grid view to see it on its own page as you can do on grid view with posts.

2) Allow to remove the map completely if the user wants to since not everything that needs listing needs a map.

3) Allow to turn off automatic display of listings upon page load so no listings appear below the directory bar. It would allow for a clean display of the bar.

4) The ability to remove the map from the test results is there already but you could also allow to “remove” the “found X results” message from below the filter/search bar for neater looking output. If the results are quite a lot pagination is needed as well.

In short the “Directory” feature could be used for displaying, sorting and searching a wide array of items with advanced filtering capabilities.

You could then, search, sort and display, Projects, Photos, Books, documents, posts and a lot more with ability to add advanced filtering. This way you would have yet another way to present portfolios (or posts) for example which is a standard needed feature but with a powerful “search engine” behind it.

BTW, is there such a plugin out there that you know of and allows this now?

[Kyle – SUPPORT]

Hi

Thanks for the request. Will leave the developer to go over them

– Kyle

[Sotiris]

Hey have a look at this plugin that better depicts what I mean:

http://demo.boxystudio.com/preview/?product=8782812

Horizontal search / filter bar
Simple and nice “custom post type” display

It does not have a map though. I have asked the author if it is possible to configure it for displaying other things than recipes.

It does not have a map though to link the results with location pins for those interested.

Now Cardinal could offer the same functionality for displaying and filtering custom post types only by allowing more fields.

Regards,

Sotiris

[Kyle – SUPPORT]

Ok thanks for the reference, like Ed said Cardinal isn’t a specific directory theme, so it of course won’t be as feature rich as those developed purely for that functionality. However we will see if we can make improvements from what it currently does.

– Kyle

[Sotiris]

Form my perspective, I suggest something that could make it usable for listing, sorting and filtering custom post types of all kinds so it is useable to more people. Think of it as a more advanced alternative to the portfolio filters available now and capable of handling a high number of posts more effectively. In that sense for certain content an enable/disable option for the map linking would be needed too.

[Kyle – SUPPORT]

Ok thanks

[Ian]

I would like to see some simple things added to the current directory that would make it much more useful for sites that need a simple directory listing.

1) A get directions link (we already entered the address)
2) The current pin link could then work for Visit Website.
3) Have the option to link to the full directory listing.

Either allow HTML and shortcodes in the directory text or better yet add fields for:
Telephone
Email

It would perhaps be best if the text was drawn from the excerpt, then we could use the page builder to design our own custom directory pages.

[Rui Guerreiro – SUPPORT]

Thanks for you input.
If I understand correctly your request 2 is already possible you can set the link of the map pin and choose the desired text in the button.

Will forward this info to the development team.

-Rui