Thread: My downtown city portal project

My downtown city portal project

So I used v2.9.2 on http://www.DublinMarket.net and had pretty decent results with it. At one point I had 78 ads and around 120 hits/week. I know that's not great but it's honestly not bad since the town of Dublin is very small. So anyway I wanted to build a more inclusive site that covered almost everything about the city... and that's where v3.0.1 comes in. I've built the new site http://www.DowntownDublinGA.com and here's a list of some simple mods I've done.



At the moment I have restaurants, classified ads, and jobs listed. I plan to include entertainment (live music, festivals, arts & crafts.. etc) soon and maybe an 'Events' section. With PHP alone I have done so many small tweaks like these:

- On the homepage, search page, and single post page I have incorporated the GD Star Ratings plugin. The only category you can rate with stars is 'Restaurants'... I don't want people rating jobs or classified ads.

- Also since the classified ads have a price show on each homepage listing, I wanted something for restaurants too. I've included the number of 'Reviews' for this.

- On a single posting it usually says "Leave A Reply" for the comment box at the bottom. I've changed it to say "Post Your Review" for the 'Restaurants' category and also added a GD Star rating widget just above the description box so people will vote while leaving their review.

- the sub-categories sidebar on 'Restaurants' page says "Food Styles" instead of "Sub Categories". And also "Job Types" on the 'Jobs' page.

- I switched the Contact and Map tab so that it doesn't look like an error if there's no address and the map is blank.

- Most everything I have done is just setting specifics depending on which category my visitors are looking at, but it does make a great bit of improvement in my opinion. The leprechaun logo was free from http://www.SXC.hu if you need good free images.

Thanks for looking and I'd love feedback from you guys!

Re: My downtown city portal project

Looks great! The ratings look great on the home page too

Re: My downtown city portal project

Thanks Pepsi! I'm still tweaking too of course. This plugin is pretty complicated at first so if anyone needs help... send me some questions!

Re: My downtown city portal project

Its good to see an actual site up and people talking about how many visits they got. The image looks good and the site worked as it should when I browsed around...a bit slow it seemed, but overall, well done. The star ratings look good too..a nice addition.

Re: My downtown city portal project

rnaylor thanks man, I actually thought the site was a bit slow myself. I've tested the site with Pingdom Tools and I get 9 seconds total load time. The biggest file that loads is from the Sexy Bookmarks plugin, see the image --> http://www.downtowndublinga.com/wp-c...exy-sprite.png

im not sure how that compares to other days or previously on my same site but I plan to keep an eye on it

Re: My downtown city portal project

Great site, i like your ratings.

What plugin do you have and how do you exclude ratings from classifieds?

Re: My downtown city portal project

I'm using the GD Star Ratings plugin.

There's a lot of different functions that will display either the star rating, the thumbs rating, or different summaries of the ratings for each article. An example of the code you would need to show the star ratings is like this
This will display the stars and and the number of votes and total voting score like on my site. Now to prevent the ratings from being shown on classifieds, jobs, or anything else you would use this bit of PHP in combination.
Or if you have an array of categories you want to show listings in, like my restaurant sub categories you can use an array parameter like this.
Hope that helps!

Re: My downtown city portal project

i have sent pm to you /Dirtbag/ ...

Re: My downtown city portal project

Hey there..was checking out restaurants on your site and wanted to know if its possible to make restaurant links active? Is this possible?

Thanks.

Re: My downtown city portal project

What do you mean by "restaurant links" exactly?