Title: Using WordPress for Directory Website
Last modified: August 20, 2016

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# Using WordPress for Directory Website

 *  [4dmedia](https://wordpress.org/support/users/4dmedia/)
 * (@4dmedia)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/using-wordpress-for-directory-website/)
 * Hello,
 * I am wondering if anybody could help me think through the best way to develop
   the following site.
 * I am the web developer for a website called [http://www.hiatusclub.com](http://www.hiatusclub.com)
 * This is a membership site, where people pay an annual fee for access to the website
   and the discounts that merchants offer.
 * We have about 300+ merchants in 9 different cities.
    In each city, there are 
   12 categories (restaurants, pubs, rentals etc.)
 * People can browse the merchants available in each category, within a city, but
   in order to view a merchant’s actual listing, the user must be registered & logged
   in.
 * The site is currently built in Joomla. For various reasons, I would like to “
   rebuild” the site on a WordPress framework.
 * I have some ideas about how I could do this, but I am wondering if I could have
   some input on the best ay – most efficient, easiest to scale, and most logical
   for the user.
 * What is required:
 * – Each merchant’s listing page should contain the following:
    – logo, email, 
   phone, website, google map, description – The merchant’s listing page should 
   be protected so only subscribed & logged in members have access
 * – Each category page (rentals in Vancouver) within a given city should contain
   the merchants we have on board in that city (their logo and name and links to
   their particular listing page)
 * – Our current live site (hiatusclub.com) has it so that the cities are listed
   as the 1st menu item beneath “benefits directory”. I think it would be cool &
   easier to navigate if the user could select a city when they first visit the 
   site, or maybe have a nice looking dropdown menu of available cities in the corner
   of the page (top-right). And maybe the available menu items could be filtered
   according to the city selected.
 * – So, if you have selected “Vancouver” and are on the main page, the homepage
   would say “hiatusclub.com/vancouver”
    – If you have selected the “rentals” category
   and are in “Vancouver”, it would say “hiatusclub.com/vancouver/rentals”
 * What we have
 * I have created 3 additional tables in the wordpress database
    – listings: this
   is a table with the merchant info: id, name, email, phone, website, category_id,
   region_id
 * – categories: this is a table with categories like: restaurants, pubs, rentals
   etc.
 * – regions: this is a table with available cities like vancouver, los angeles 
   etc.
 * How to do this:
 * Instead of creating a page or post for every merchant listing, I was thinking
   I could create one page called “listing” and assign it to a custom template which
   queries the “listings” table to retreive the merchant’s information (name, phone
   etc.) depending on the variable in the url (?merchant=3)
 * Then, I could use a subscription plugin like “Membership” to protect the “listings”
   page.
 * How would I deal with the menus? Should I try and use WordPress custom menus?
 * Say the listings page is ?page_id=24 – should I manually assign custom menu items
   to ?page_id=24&merchant=1
    page_id=24&merchant=2 ?
 * Is there a way to only show menu items when a particular city is selected?
 * Am i thinking about this stuff the right way? Any input would be appreciated.
   Thank You!

The topic ‘Using WordPress for Directory Website’ is closed to new replies.

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [4dmedia](https://wordpress.org/support/users/4dmedia/)
 * Last activity: [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/using-wordpress-for-directory-website/)
 * Status: not resolved

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