Local Business Directory - advice

I’m being asked to produce a local business directory - I think this will be an ideal project for MODx but it’s not something I’ve done before so I was just wondering if anybody had advice as to any ’do’s and dont’s’? in terms of functionality and SEO.

Many thanks

I have moved this topic to General Support as it was not really a Webdesign question...

Now the question is a bit wide. This being said you have to choices when building a directory : use the power of template variables or build custom tables along with a custom snippet. It depends how many records there will be in this directory. The current cache mechanism doesn’t handle more than 5 000 documents very well (the cache file tends to become very big) and TVs won’t replace custom tables when speed is needed...

I’d say if you have a reasonnable number of companies in your directory, go for TVs you’ll benefit from being able to use exisiting addons. If you know there will be a lot of companies listed, build custom DB/Tables and have a custom snippet / module developped.

SEO wise, MODx and the SEO Strict plugin do wonders, no need to add anything here unless you plan on having specific query strings which would mean customize the .htaccess rule a little...

Thank you David

@David

Can I ask a question on this thread? I have a similar question.

I realized that it would be too much to handle thousands of records and I created a new table for my data. Do you know of a way that I can use modx and still take advantage of all the great snippets that people have already created? Specifically Ditto, Ajax Search, CSS Star rating, and pagination? I dread trying to recreate all the function that have already been built, that is why I like using modx in the first place.

Quote from: bwente at Apr 15, 2008, 07:52 AM

Do you know of a way that I can use modx and still take advantage of all the great snippets that people have already created? Specifically Ditto, Ajax Search, CSS Star rating, and pagination? I dread trying to recreate all the function that have already been built, that is why I like using modx in the first place.

Undoubtedly this is probably why lots of us are waiting for 0.9.7 : what you need is not possible at the moment, and my (limited) understanding is that xPDO will open those doors for MODx. According to xPDO’s page you’ll have "Fast generation of xPDO model definitions from an existing database" (don’t ask me how it works )