Directory site

[obrian7]

I have several ideas in mind for directory-based websites, and came across ProcessWire in my search for a starting point about a year ago. There are several good WordPress themes that are commercially available, but all the ones I've seen have various limitations that would preclude their use for what I have in mind.

As a starting point for experimenting with ProcessWire, I had access to a list of churches and used that to develop a map-based directory here: Baptist Blue Book.

The central issue for me was the map interface, and how to handle a reasonably large number of listings (~6,000) in that view (Most of the WordPress themes I had come across restricted the map view to a certain city, which I suspect was to limit the number of markers that had to be loaded.)

A few notes:

1. I'm using Ryan's Form Builder to accept suggestions for new listings. I liked having the packed solution for this, and the ability to control what happened to those submissions on the back end (e.g., the ability to hold them in a queue for review rather than posting immediately to the site).
2. The church pages are subdivided by state (e.g., Directory > Texas > [church name]) by using a script to push a new listing to the proper sub-directory once it's approved. In hindsight, this may be an overly limiting approach, particularly for adapting it to international use, but once I had started on that path I needed to stick with it and focus on other issues.
3. For the map view, a separate script pulls the latitude, longitude, and page-id from all listings and caches that in a JSON file. When the Map page is viewed, that file is retrieved and used to generate the markers. The content for the popups is only loaded as needed to minimize bandwidth. (Side note: I'm using MapBox for this, along with Leaflet and the MarkerCluster add-in.)

All in all, I've been very pleased with the flexibility of ProcessWire, as well as the helpfulness of the community. I've also noticed several directory-type sites listed in the showcase, so I'm wondering if it might be useful to develop a module tailored to that application (or is each one so unique that this would not be feasible)?

Any comments or feedback would be welcome.

Brian

[MindFull]

The church pages are subdivided by state (e.g., Directory > Texas > [church name]) by using a script to push a new listing to the proper sub-directory once it's approved. In hindsight, this may be an overly limiting approach, particularly for adapting it to international use, but once I had started on that path I needed to stick with it and focus on other issues.

All in all, I've been very pleased with the flexibility of ProcessWire, as well as the helpfulness of the community. I've also noticed several directory-type sites listed in the showcase, so I'm wondering if it might be useful to develop a module tailored to that application (or is each one so unique that this would not be feasible)?

I don't think the pages being subdivided by state is a bad approach, it provides you with some extra organization in the back end. In all actuality, just create a new parent page ie USA and place all the states underneath that. Now when you expand to other countries, just create a parent page for each country under your home page and categorize children according to province, district, county, city, etc. I think it's a sensible choice you made that can be expanded on rather easily.

As far as the module for directory listings, as far as I'm concerned, PW has a very suitable back-end for such sites and since implementation is as simple as displaying children of the parent page based on whatever condition you desire, I can't see where a module could add much more simplicity except on a use case basis. But by the time you cover those, you'd have an entire library of directory listing modules.

Good job on the site. I like its ease of use.