Using Wordpress To Create a Directory Listing

I have created a directory listing site with wordpress manually to see how flexible is it. The result was quite satisfy for me ;). I know there is a directory plugin available and I have tried it and sad to say it is not what I want. Let me explain what I have done :

In frontpage, there is a welcome message at the top (of course, it will be always on top). Immediately after the welcome message, there’s a News section for me to post news update. Every news I post will be automatically sent to all customers who have an account with the site. At the sidebar, there is a list of category & sub-categories which uses javascript to expand the list of each parent category. When a visitor click on the parent category, it will bring them to that particular category and all sub-categories will be shown at the top of the listing. All listings within the parent category & sub-category will be shown and the user can pick a sub-category from there. I have tweak the stylesheet to span the subcategory through multicolumn.

When the user click on the company name, it will show its particulars. There is also an enquiry form at the bottom which is expandable and foldable. This way, I can save more space. The comment form is also expandable and foldable to save space and this looks more like a directory. Every submission of the enquiry form will be delivered to the respective company emails.

There is also a feature listing appears at the most right sidebar. It is use for customer who subscribe to the feature listing package. There is also a list of 5 recent submissions shown at the sidebar. In each listing, there is also a Hit Stat and Rating.

Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1

Wordpress 2.3 Beta (Visit The Credence Dot Com for more info about wordpress) has been released with some beautiful features. It has a built in Plugin Update Notifier, Tags Support, Faster Javascript, SEO Friendly URL, etc. There is not much details about this beta release but it worth to try it out. Remember, a first beta may contain many bugs and it is mainly for beta-testing only. Do not replace with your live wordpress. If you feel comfortable, remember to backup your all the files. For me, I will set a subdomain to test it out.

You can download this beta version at Wordpress Site and the following is quoted from their site :

The past 3 months we’ve been working feverishly on the next version of WordPress, 2.3. Today we’re releasing the first beta of 2.3 and we’re hoping the more adventurous and savvy among you will help us test it.

Some of the features of 2.3 include plugin and core update notification, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.

However all of the new functionality is still very rough, so only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously.

I am testing it out now and will update here is I found any interesting stuff and of course, “bugs”.

Update - Screenshot
A New Tag Bar
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New item in Post Status - Pending Review
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A new Converters & Importers in Categories Section
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A new Plugin Update Notifier
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