Before installing the “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” plugin, please ensure your WordPress installation meets the following requirements:
- WordPress 4.4.0 or higher
- PHP 5.3 or higher
STEP 1: DOWNLOAD & INSTALL
Installing “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” is just like any other WordPress plugin. Navigate to your WordPress “Plugins” page, inside of your WordPress dashboard, and follow these instructions:
- In the search field enter “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro”. Click “Search Plugins”, or hit Enter.
- Select “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” and click “Install Now”.
- Once installed, click “Activate”.
If you are new to WordPress, start by reading our comprehensive Installation and Upgrades Manual.
STEP 2: CONFIGURE PLUGIN SETTINGS
After installing the plugin, the first step is to configure the plugin’s settings to meet your purpose. One thing which you will notice immediately after the installation is the appearance of a new section named “Classifieds & Directory”. Let’s look into this.
By hovering your mouse over it, you will find this section being further divided in 7 different sub-sections:
- All Listings
- Add New
- Categories
- Locations
- Custom Fields
- Payment History
- Settings
Let us begin with the Settings submenu. Inside the Settings submenu you will see several tabs those help you to customize from some of the very basic to advanced settings, which are as follows.
STEP 3: CREATE CATEGORIES
Categories help you organize your listings conveniently for users to browse desired areas of interest.
Management of “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” categories has exactly the same functionality as standard WordPress categories, but these are separate items and have special administration page.
Site Admin can create/edit/delete listing categories under, “WordPress Admin Panel => Classifieds & Directory => Categories”
STEP 4: ADD CUSTOM FIELDS
The default listing form will only contain the form fields that a standard WordPress POST form uses. But, there are cases you may like to have some additional fields in your listing form based on listing categories.
For example, Let us assume that you have a “CAR” category in your classifieds website and looking to add a drop-down field option called “Brand Name” in the listings form. So, a seller can select the brand name of his car when posting his listing in your website and the visitors of your website can search cars by “Brand Name”. Here is where the CUSTOM FIELDS feature comes in handy.
All the fields in this form are self descriptive.
Site Admin can create/edit/delete custom fields under, “WordPress Admin Panel => Classifieds & Directory => Custom Fields”
STEP 5: ADD LOCATIONS
Locations help you organize your listings conveniently for users to browse by location.
Management of “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” locations has exactly the same functionality as standard WordPress categories, but these are separate items and have special administration page.
Site Admin can create/edit/delete listing locations under, “WordPress Admin Panel => Classifieds & Directory => Locations”
STEP 6: ADD YOUR FIRST LISTING
“Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” listings form looks very much like the standard WordPress POST form.
Site Admin can create/edit/delete listings under, “WordPress Admin Panel => Classifieds & Directory => All Listings”
Also, you can allow your users to submit their listings from your site front-end. To get this, you just need to add some pages to your site front-end which is covered in next topic.
STEP 7: SETTING UP PAGES
During the plugin installation, “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” will add some pages dynamically in your website. You can find these pages under “WordPress Admin Panel => Pages => All Pages”
Totally, 15 pages are added by the plugin and you will only need to add the following pages as menu items by using the standard Menu functionality of WordPress under “WordPress Admin Panel => Appearance => Menus”
- Listings
- Categories
- Locations
- User Dashboard
- Listing Form
- Manage Listings
- Favourite Listings
And, still you can extend your site functionality by creating pages specific to a category, location, user, etc… by using “Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro” shortcodes. Read more
STEP 8: CONFIGURE SINGLE LISTING PAGE
By default, the single listing page display the content in 2 columns. The right side column show informations like “Listing Address & Map”, “Contact us form to contact Listing owner” and the “Listing Video”.
Some users don’t like the second column, instead they would like to show these informations using the standard widget area from the theme. So, we have developed some special widgets those help you to display these informations in your website’s sidebar. Moreover, they get displayed only in single listing pages and this is the reason we call them as special. Adding these widgets to your theme’s sidebar will automatically hide the second column from the standard content area.
The Widgets are,
- ACADP Listing Address
- ACADP Listing Contact
- ACADP Listing Video
STEP 9: THE FINAL STEP
Congrats, we almost covered all the basics required to create a basic listing website. But, still you will get tons & tons of questions when working in reality. So, we have drafted some questions ourselves which we feel that a first time user of our plugin can struggle and formatted them all with the solution in Q&A format in our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Still having issues? Just submit a ticket.
ADVANCED TOPICS
- Fee Plans – paid listing submissions
- Set Up CRON – recommended setup of scheduled tasks
- Using Widgets – for sidebars
- Short codes – for pages/posts