WordPress as a Membership Directory: After the recent tutorial on setting up WordPress as a Contact Manager, Chris Cagle has written up a tutorial on WP Designer on how to use WordPress as a Membership Directory. He has setup a Membership Directory for Pittsburgh Designers and uses his experience from that project to outline the steps, plugins and code required to set this up for yourself. Beside the annoying CSS bug that puts a text box in the middle of every page, the setup looks nice, highly versatile and very useful for both designers (in this case) and future clients. I really like the Members Directory and the ability to display detailed contact information and portfolio of every designer. Even the signup is automated (and modified to suit the need) and relatively painless. I am curious to know what they plan to do about possible spammers posing as designers, but thats another story.
[EDIT] Chris writes in the comments: “As for spammers – default registration for the site is subscriber, so they won’t get anywhere near the directory until they have been approved by the administrator (currently just me). Sort of in the way that if you submit your website to cssremix, you don’t get shown until John approves it.“
Mark – Glad you liked it!
As for spammers – default registration for the site is subscriber, so they won’t get anywhere near the directory until they have been approved by the administrator (currently just me). Sort of in the way that if you submit your website to cssremix, you don’t get shown until John approves it.
very awesome, I was about to embark on building something similar 😀
I was thinking about making a local directory of WP powered blogs on WP platform and this might come in really handy. I’ll defenently try this.
No need to give the spammers ideas 😉
I’m loving this idea and arrangement, I was also thinking of a directory for particular artists myself… thank you so much!
Hope people will make good use of it, I do not want to spammers abuse the system…
Mark’s comment about dealing with the spammers (comment #1) gives a nice completion to the original post. Maybe Mark can add it to the post.
Bradley Charbonneau’s Extended Profile tutorial and the forum tag, likoma, are also good references on member/user features.
Love this idea. I am a member of the Pittsburgh Designers site and signing up was a cinch. I think I was one of the first dozen to sign up and the site has evolved a littel (for the better) since then. Good work Chris.
I was wondering if anyone has found a way (or a plugin) to handle event registration. I am working with a non profit that runs usually 10 events a year and I want to use WP for this but cannot seem to find a plugin that does this. Guess I could tweak the above..??
@Michael – I originally used Brad’s techniques before the 2.3 WP came out. It was a very big pain to get anything done with it because i really had to hack up WP to get it to do what I wanted.
The new version of WP along with the 2 plugins I note allow me to do it all without any hacks.
@Bobby – thanks for the kind words!
I bookmarked this a while back just in case anyone would ask – it looks like it may work… http://gigpress.com/
As I said before I was thinking about something like this for some time and now with help from this post and the one Chris wrote it’s here. Not yet finished but I’m working on it. A WP powered directory for WP powered blogs/sites in Slovene language. I’m using Kubrick’s there since it’s the most recognizable WP theme out there. Now it’s time to think how to improve it.
Thanks for this post. We’ve been trying to set up a members directory with Joomla and gave up because it took forever to customize. Hearing the same can be done in WordPress is music to my ears.
Best wishes,
Martin
Heh.. i have also tried setting up a small directory with Joomla and it was a nightmare.. Thanks Chris.
WordPress always has something new to offer with wider range of functionalities. These functionalities with simplicity differentiates it from its competitors. I think by the time I’ve posted my comment it will have something new to offer 🙂
WordPress is my favorite for everything.
I was in the middle of testing a program we just created that does the same thing. Directories are so important, this is like a DMOZ for WordPress. I guess we should focus on something else since this one’s done, and works.
Hey, thanks for this! Question from a newbie: Is there any way to be alerted when a member changes his or her profile/homepage and, best yet, to be able to approve those changes so people don’t sign up and then later put questionable content on their member homepage?
Thanks!
Kristin
I know this is an older post but I still love having my listing on PGHDesigners – such a simple yet helpful website and I’m happy that Chris shares the behind the scenes inner workings of how the site was developed to make it easy to submit yet sensitive to garbage spam but incorporating the manual approval process.