Wordpress service provider listings (user submitted)

bernard

bernard

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I think this topic can carry a thread on its own.

I'm talking of course about making service provider listings on your niche/authority site, where providers can sign up (through Wordpress) and get featured on a "Find a provider" page.

This can be used for outreach purposes and monetization and both, which imo makes it an interesting prospect.

There are quite a few "member" plugins with profile pages for Wordpress, but is there any specifically for this? Ideally it would have the option to integrate payments, "featured listings" and the like and we don't need the typical social/add friend/follow stuff that usually comes with these types of member plugins. Any suggestions on that?
 
I've not seen a plugin like this, but this led me to think...

Do you need to integrate payments? Are you going to get so many buyers that you need to automate all of this? The reason I ask is because surely you'll review what the buyer places in the user profile that appears on the page anyways, right? I would moderate all user generated content, personally.

If you can't find a plugin for this, it should be easy enough to set up with custom fields in Wordpress, to build the page itself. If you wanted to get real fancy you could use the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin and loop through a repeater field and its sub-fields, where you would enter the data for each buyer yourself, having received it through email or whatever.

The only caveat here is you'd have to code the loop into a custom page template and then apply new CSS to style it. It's not too bad, and if you do it once with ACF, you can export those settings and save the CSS to it's own file and reuse it on as many sites as you want with a simple import.
 
Nah, payments is a second thought, this is mostly for outreach, but yeah, also some revenue, but that could easily be handled manually.

I am thinking, there should/could be a plugin with this kind of functionality. Seems fairly common,but I guess not. I am thinking some modified Member Profile plugin is probably the best.
 
That theme is cool. I like how they even edited the Wordpress dashboard CSS. You could install it on a subfolder under your main site and manage it separately but still on the same domain so both parts share their power.

Are you looking to give each provider their own page, or will you list them all on one page? If it's the latter, this might be over kill versus using custom fields.
 
You can try out GeoCraft V2 business directory WordPress theme. Actually, I have used for creating such sort of listing. It is also easy to install and use. I am sure; it will also be helpful to you. I suggest you to use it once.
 
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