Soliciting Feature Requests

Hello there.

I’ve had a number of clients now looking for someone to create directory sites with specific features. In response I have decided to write a modular directory “platform” (i.e., one or more directories running from a single application).

I have looked at a number of existing scripts, as well as reviewed a large number of posts from the forums here at Digital Point looking for features, but before finalising the list thought I should start a thread asking for your advice.

What do you consider to be the “must have” features for a directory, what killer features do others have that would be nice, and what is currently lacking or poorly implemented in existing offerings? Any other advice you could offer would also be greatly appreciated.

I intend to make this application freely available and will report on my progress here.

 

Best of luck for your effort..

- Deep links, seo friendly urls,

Multiple payment options, automatic email notifications on link expiry..

 

That’s certainly going to be a focus of my efforts too.

Interesting advice, I hadn’t considered the payment options yet. Thanks again — reputation sent!

 

Now I see more number of directory scripts than what I saw 6 months ago

If you have good features and security ,you can beat even PHPLD

 

I'd like to see a field on the submission page where the submitter must indicate where they heard about my directory.

 

I myself like stats .... and lots of them on the sites included

EX: Accident Compensation

The more toys the better it is if you ask me...

But then again im one that likes a busy website or directory and not a plain jane so...

thx
malcolm

 

Thank you for the suggestion. I intend to make the data available to pluggable “widgets”, so something like the stats box on the page you linked should be easily made available.

 

Would you prefer I extended this to make it easy to customize what questions are asked during the submission process from say the admin section, rather than you as a directory owner having to mess with the templates directly, or would the latter suffice?

I take it either way you’d want this sort of information aggregated on a “stats” page the owner could view?

 

I have it in my directory:

http://www.directorydream.com/submit.php

You can find installation instructions here: http://blog.rakcha.com/

 

Yes it would be great if it could be accessed from admin.

That would be great

 

That's cool, thanks. Will the submission go through if they leave it blank? I was thinking along the lines of a drop-down list for easier submission.

 

To me, this would be the most important feature. The ability to add functionality without having to modify the core code or templates. If widgets could be designed where you can easily install them (and the source code were available so people could easily make / code widgets), this would put your script heads above the rest.


Right now, on most scripts, in order to add features, you need to make changes to the code itself, or to template files. This can become a nightmare when you want to upgrade or change template files.

Morty

 

I intend to make it possible to hook third-party code into different “stages”.

For example there may be a stage that determines how the links are sorted. By default this would be alphabetically, but it would be trivial to install a plug-in that would change this to sorting by page rank, or link popularity, or by £££ bid, or any other factor.

I hope to implement a plug-in system by which non-technical uses can easily control much/all of the installation process and configuration from a simple web-based admin interface.

Thank you for the suggestion!

 

I'll see what I can do then! Thanks again for the feedback.

 

Dave,

If you are going for the plugin route, I would recomend the WordPress route. If you haven`t used it, it's basically go download the mod, upload the files to your server and then login to your admin panel to install and configure. It's one of the systems I plan to emulate on one of my open source projects.

Aside from that, I would suggest multiple payment options like one of the other members before me.

 

I second jmorts idea about the widget "plugability". Having to do a forklift overhaul on your site with each template/script upgrade is BS.

Personally, I like the WordPress plugins just as the next person but I would have to say I like vBulletin's approach the best. Most mods/add-ons (not everything) can just be downloaded and then imported with the click of a button and easily turned on/off and manipulated in many ways from the ACP. Both vB and WP have a great Mod community due to this approach.

tom

 

In my head I’m imagining a system in which you enter the URL of the plug-in into a field in the admin panel, and the system downloads and extracts the code into the appropriate place for you. I’ll make sure I take a look at the WordPress system too — thanks for the recommendation.

It sounds like this is definitely a feature people are looking for so I’ll certainly be looking into it.

 

Thank you for the advice — I’ll definitely look into vBulletin’s approach to steal some ideas.