The answer is ‘No’.

Business Directory for WordPress can be used for any yellow-pages style directory. Here are a few examples and suggestions. If you are a web developer, these might help you make suggestions for your clients. If you know of someone who fits one of these categories, please tell them about our plugin. If you have a suggestion, add it to the comments.

Business Directory: Of course this can be used as a directory of business that belong to a region, or a vertical market. For instance, Utah Valley Business Blog uses the plugin to invite Utah Valley businesses to participate in their listing. You could easily use this plugin to build a directory of ‘Florida Companies’ or ‘Fence Companies’ or ‘Great places to find arts and crafts’, depending on your blog subject.

Membership: You might use this plugin to create an online list of your group membership. For instance ‘all the companies that belong to the Save The Belltower organization’, or for a local Chamber of Commerce.

Groups: This plugin makes a great way to enable the members of your group to pitch their business or affiliation. For instance a local Kiwanis group or a local BNI group. Groups can also be temporary such as ‘participating groups’ for a local event or sponsorship.

Church Groups: We have actually heard from some church groups using the Business Directory for WordPress plugin to enable their local church membership to post their businesses. This is a great way to support your local economy and help promote the members of your local church.

Sponsorships: This is also a great way to gain and post sponsorships. As you approach companies for a sponsorship, you can add them to the directory.

Clubs: A presence in the ‘club’ business directory can be presented as a major perk for participation. For example, everyone in our cycling club gets to post their business in our club business directory.

Affiliations: The listings don’t always have to be business oriented; you could, for example, list affiliate clubs, organizations or businesses. If you happen to be a Bike Shop, you could easily list all the local affiliate bike clubs.

MLMs: We have seen a few Multi-level Marketing organizations use the plugin to list all the members of a ‘downline’. This effectively increases search engine optimization and helps raise the attention given to the members of a specific group.

Any other ideas? Let us know in the comments! And please pass the word along to anyone you can think of who might be interested in using our plugin. Thanks!

Although we haven’t been able to replicated this error on our own servers yet, we believe the error is due to a javascript error. Unfortunately, it appears that this javascript error is not our fault (If it were, we would fix it), but rather the result of incompatibility issues with other javascript scripts from other plugins, custom hacks, or themes.

For now; we have updated Business Directory so that the submit button is not dependent on javascript to function properly. If you have been experiencing this error, download Business Directory again and reinstall it.

We have uploaded a quiet update as of October 13 at about Noon.

Details about the update: We have inserted a small bit of code that allows the Submit button to function even if there is a conflict with another javascript (such as, we think, Google Adwords). Users experiencing a conflict will not get the auto-populated instructions in each of the entry fields of the Add Form, but the Join button will still work. Users with no conflict will experience things as normal.

We have a plan for a more robust fix in future versions.

I have received a handful of questions about how to change your Business Directory Name. The answer is ‘Yes’, you can change the name of your Directory.

We have posted information on how to do this in our documentation, however I will quickly review the process here, too…

We work with ‘shortcode’, which is the short piece of code that you put on your page to display the Directory on your site.

Normally, the shortcode for the Display page looks like this:

To rename your Business Directory, all you need to do is add a little text to the code, like this:

In the above example, the colored part (blue/red) needs to be added in order to change your Business Directory name. Specifically, the RED part is your new name. In this example, you would be changing the name to ‘Cool Directory‘. Easy as pie.

You can also change the width of your Business Directory. I don’t recommend changing the width unless you are an experienced coder because you will likely end up with some text wrapping or CSS problems to deal with. Regardless, if you want to change the width of your Business Directory, you would change the shortcode to look like this:

In the example above, you are changing the width to ’90 percent of your page width’, and you are also changing the name of your Directory to ‘Cool Directory’. You can change the width without changing the name by simply eliminating ‘name=”Cool Directory” ‘ in this example.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, please let us know in the comments for this post.

I want to report them here so more people can find them. Here they are…

Do Not place both the Directory Form and the Add Form on the same page.

The two public forms in this plugin are not designed to be on the same page. Putting them together will cause a failure, and your Add Form will not work (the ‘submit’ button appears dimmed and does not respond, for instance).

There are aesthetic reasons you won’t want them on the same page, too. For example, if you placed your Add Form on top of your Directory listing, your visitors would not realize you have the Directory until they scrolled down past the Add Form. Likewise, if you put the Add Form below the Directory, you will loose the Add Form down the page as your Directory fills up.

Place them on separate pages, and add a little intro text above each with a link to the other.

Do Not use the old version.

You should be using v0.6 or higher. The new version is already much better, and does not require the folder rename. In addition, we have addressed a couple minor bugs that seemed to be generating problems for some users.

NOTE: If you have updated from v0.5, your folders may still need to be renamed. Be sure to read our Update Guide to make sure you have upgraded properly; this could be a problem for you if you had/have our earlier version. Upgrading will be ‘normal’ for all future releases.

Don’t forget to Join Our Directory if you have the plugin installed. Thank you!