WordPress as Business Directory#2
Charles published this on 9:01 pm, Wednesday, 23rd July, 2008Development| News | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
So I did it and we’re in beta-testing phase at business.forargyll.com. Really chuffed that I have the functionality up and running …
How did I manage it? As I indicated in my last post I decided that I had to control the data that users input so using the built-in profile was essential, but this is unsearchable (at the moment — and I’m not that good). Therefore using code from partially written Tribe plugin I ensured that everytime the profile was updated, so was the corresponding (searchable) page. Luckily for us tribe also included the ability to add further items to the profile, but only for the logged in user themselves. The admin gets to add truncated courtesy listings to pre-populate the database and, in our case registration is free.
Next for the directory is the production of free and paid-for ad rotations which get served to our other forargyll.com sites (iframes wew thing, but who knows … ). And after that? The world!
So to get a directory from a WordPress install, take the following:
A WordPress 2.5+ install (recommend you do it on a fresh install)
Three freshly downloaded plugins:
One adapted Tribe plugin and several files for your favourite theme.
I don’t offer a warranty on this, but steps are
- Install all plugins (including tribe.php) and activate them
- Upload all the theme files
- Change the title of the newly created ‘Roster’ page to ‘Directory’, and change the template to ‘Users’
Comments are welcome, and although I can’t supply any level of proper support, am happy to look at things as they come in …!
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August 8th, 2008 at 5:47 am
how did you get the redirect to a cool profile page? is this a hacked wp-admin/profile.php page?
If you have any code you’d like to share, that would be great too!
Thanks
Matt
August 8th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Yep, it is the hacked up profile page. I suddenly realised that when I have a bookmarked links to the wp-admin directory and am not logged in WP remembers and redirects on logging in so used that for the front end “Edit your profile” link. However, I also by-passed the Dashboard for good measure as users of the directory want to see as little ‘noise’ as possible. It means that to administer the site I don’t get to see dashboard, and ‘begin’ each admin session on my profile page, but that’s not a problem. At some point when it becomes a problem I’ll sort, but in the meantime I’m too busy.
As for the code, I’ll post the revised code in the next 24 hours on this blog