WordPress as Article Directory - What Features Do I Want…
Well, I want to start an article directory. Yes, there are many article directories out there. But I don’t like almost ALL of them. Most article directories out there are created to receive feeds from another bigger article directory. It’s great though, because you can put up an article directory and have content immediately. You don’t have to start from scratch. The downside is, you will not be the only guy doing that … so there will be others who will have the same kind of article directory, with the same kind of content, collected from the same source.
Well, my article directory is not going to be something like that. I want to create an article where I will be taking in article submissions from scratch. And because of that, it’s not going to be just another article directory. It will be focused for a very specific niche.
Yes, building something like this will take much effort and marketing to get the site off the ground. But then again, when you do, it’ll be worth something. It’ll be a great community site.
I have looked into Joomla (open source portal script), ArticleLive (commercial), some article directory scripts like ArticleMS, Article Friendly and a few others. But right now, I am looking at the possibility of doing it with WordPress.
Wordpress is built for multiple authors. So you can put up a WordPress blog, become an administrator and allow visitors to register and submit posts. Yes, the posts will become articles. And you can manually approve or reject articles. Now, what is that the default Wordpress installation lacks to turn it into an article directory.
I am writing this down to make them into my TO-DO list, so that I don’t forget the things that I need to research on. So I may not list the plug-ins or solution here right now.
Authors Profile
I want each author to have a dedicated page about him or herself. The page should contain some simple bio, link to a website and maybe a photo.
Article Rating
We already know that posts will become the articles. Right now, the default installation does not have rating system. So I may need to get a plug-in for that.
Article Listing & Summary
With an article directory, you may not want to list out the whole article on the front page. Of course there’s the more tag that you can use when writing a post. But you can expect authors to do that. One other thing I discovered is that you can use the excerpt tag in your index.php.
Top Articles, Random Articles
I am thinking of having a widget, probably on the front page, where it displays a random of 10 articles, or maybe the top 10 articles based on the rating system. At this moment, I still don’t know how to get this done.
Social Bookmarking
I want people who like the articles to be able to just click and submit the articles to Digg, StumbleUpon or any other social bookmarking sites. For this, I am sure there are plug-ins that I can install. I’ve seen this on other WordPress sites, and I like them. Just have to find the right one.
Flexible Frontpage
When running an article directory, you don’t want the default WordPress frontpage, where it lists out your articles based on chronology. You may want to highlight a few things, like contests, latest celebrity authors or something like that. I remember reading something about this where you can just create a home.php, and when WordPress sees that it exists, home.php will be used as the frontpage instead.
I guess these are the things that I can think of right now. Hmm … now back to research and testing …
