Business Directory Suggestions?

[STEVEN CYRKIN]

I’m a new customer and just purchased Pro and 3 plugins during your sale a few weeks ago. I’m looking for quality business directory software that works well and will compliment Pro. Any suggestions? Warnings? Insight?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

[Geoff]

Hi there, Steve!

First off, thanks for purchasing the plugins! We’re stoked to have you aboard and I want to welcome you here to the forums. 🙂

Good question. How do you intend on using a business directory and how would events be used in that directory?

I imagine any integration is going to require at least a little bit of custom development to get things moving. I am unaware of any business directory plugins or software that I could recommend, but it might help to know how you would be using it.

Cheers!
Geoff

[STEVEN CYRKIN]

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for the welcome…and the quick reply! We’re in the collecting field, and want to list events such as auctions, shows, meetings and sales. We’ll be listing some events for free and charging for others.

We want to make the business directory available to reputable dealers, auction houses and other businesses in each collecting category we cover. They could list their events in the calendar.

We’d like for businesses to be able to sign up once for both the directory and the calendar, we want a cohesive look and feel, and we’d like to be able to have section pages that show widgets from the calendar and directory together.

Thanks,

Steve

[Geoff]

Gotcha, thanks! That sounds pretty interesting.

One idea might be to use the Organizers feature in The Events Calendar PRO. Each organizer can be a business rather than a person, and each one automatically gets its own page on your site right out of the box (e.g. [your-site]/organizer/[organizer-slug]). Organizer pages even include the events associated with them.

If you use that alongside a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields, you would have everything you need to publish information about the businesses in the directory. You’ll likely need to customize the Organizer page template (more on customizing templates in our Themer’s Guide), but it seems like a viable solution without needing other major software.

Other than that, I’m afraid I haven’t seen any solid examples of sites that match what you’re building. You may be able to find a dedicated plugin for creating a business directory, but then the hard part will be creating the integration between that and other plugins.

Does this help? Please let me know. 🙂

Cheers,
Geoff

[STEVEN CYRKIN]

Geoff…I’m kinda floored. As long as we can categorize the organizers, where each can be a member of multiple categories, and search them…. I think my prayers have been answered!

Do you have a list of recommended developers?

Thank you!

Steve

[Geoff]

That’s great! I really hope that ends up being the answer you were looking for. 🙂

Yes, we do have a list of freelancers who may be able to help out. Send us an email to pro [at] tri.be (you can reference this thread) and we’d be happy to send it along.

I’ll go ahead and close this thread, but please feel free to hit us up if any other questions pop up–we’d be happy to help.

Cheers!
Geoff

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