Happy New Year (Nearly) everyone! I have had a great Christmas but come the 27th Dec I was starting to get a little bored of the festivities so I had a look at a few small projects for people. A while ago I was asked to make a directory plugin. Instead of writing one from the ground up which would have been too time consuming at the time, I extended the Business Directory plugin which was sitting in the WordPress Extend Directory.
At the time the plugin was very basic, badly written and made huge overuse of AJAX as if it was the developers brand new hammer. Sadly he was mistaken and therefore I spent some time sorting out the code and removing a vast amount of dodgy Javascript code. The final version is by no means perfect and bug free but it does have some nice advantages over the original.. namely:
- Google Maps Geocoding for addresses
- Location based searching with distance calculations
- Additional fields for input and searching (secondary URL)
- A status system
- A templating system with different templates possible per status
- Email approval of new listings
- Priority Listings
- A listing widget
As I said the end result is by no means a beautiful piece of work but in a few hours I have managed to make at least two of my clients happy with a small bill and a functional system.
Feel free to take a look and let me know if there are any obvious flaws which I shall fix. Am happy to extend it as well if need be. I dare say I shall be using it again over the coming months.
Download: SB Business Directory (21.19 kB)
Have a great new year
Sean & Family