There are several ways of creating a business directory but this is the way I did it.
Create a new document in the manager to use as a container to hold all your business documents. Let’s call it "Directory". All your business documents (Business1, Business2, Business3 etc.) will be created as children of the "Directory" document so you end up with a tree structure like:
-Directory
-Business1
-Business2
-Business3
-etc.
For each of the business documents, you can use a mixture of existing document settings and Template Variables (TVs) to hold all the business data. For example:
Business name = Title
Description = Document content
Telephone = TV
Web site = TV
Email address = TV
See the
documentation or
wiki for information on creating TVs.
To create the business categories, you need to create another TV, let’s call it "categories". If you have a fixed pre-defined list of categories you could use the "Check Box" input type for the TV and add the list of categories into the input option values field like:
Accounting||Automotive||Creative/Design||Engineering||Legal||Medical/Health||Retail||Tourism/travel
If your categories list needs to be more flexible, you can use the "Text" input type and allow any value to be entered for the category.
You could then use a combination of
Ditto and/or
TvTagCloud to display the listings. I used TvTagCloud to display a list of categories. Clicking on a category takes you to a Ditto call that lists all the documents "tagged" with that category. Clicking on the business name takes you to that document page with all the business data displayed.
BTW. For the business search facility, I used
TVExplorer to create a custom search form and use this as the primary way for users to find business profiles rather than the category lists.
