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 has finally released with many new features as what I have posted previously. I have upgraded one of my blog to 2.3. Some of my plugins that rely on category database such as Collapsible Categories & Dtree were all unusable. Wordpress 2.3 does change the structure of category database that breaks all plugin that relies on the old database created prior this new version. Hopefully all the plugin authors will update their plugins to compatible with this version of wordpress.

Whoever uses plugin that relies on database = “categories” & “post2cat” is better not to upgrade to version 2.3 until the plugin developer updates the code.