Developing OTFA

Developing a business directory using WordPress and its user profiles functionality is a challenge – of this there is no doubt. Aside from the issues of why one would use WordPress in this way*, there are two main challenges:

Making the profiles searchable
Giving the profiles a meaningful and useable taxonomy — altho’ this might be sorted if the search functionality is good enough

However, things have been made easier in other ways by some excellent plugins:

• Profiler – which will be the basis for outputting to the consumer of the business details — though there’ll have to be some tinkering in the background to enable it to display
• the fields I’ve added using Skullbit’s very excellent Register Plus alongside
• Weston Ruter’s recently updated User Photo.
• Also in the mix for the site will be Julius Jurmaa’s Symbiosis for Businesses which upgrade to a blogging-capability, and the very simple, and already effective Invite Friends by DjZoNe (though again I may tinker with the titling and get it to call itself “Invite Businesses”).

So once I have persuaded someone like John Godly, author of Search Unleashed to include user metadata in the ‘Unleashed’ then it’ll be out of alpha into beta and the fun bit of designing the theme around the newly added functionalities.

* Things like it just works, WordPress is open source, another step in the line toward Social Networking, we have local capacity etc etc. Maybe this discussion’ll be #2!