WSN Directory Features

View Full Release Notes (lists all major features and fixes)

Overview of Major Features:

• Basic Features
• Google Maps Features
• Import and Integration Features
• Social Networking Features
• SEO and Traffic-Building Features
• Revenue-Building Features
• Multilingual Features
• Customization Features
• E-mail Features
• File Attachment Features
• Listings-specific Features
• Categories-specific Features
• Membership-specific Features
• Search Features
• Administrative Features
• Advanced Developer Features
• More Features

Basic Features

• A responsive default theme which is ready for desktop, tablet and phone users. Passes google's mobile site test tool to achieve higher ranking in mobile search results.
• Automated updates. Never miss a security update, never waste time downloading and uploading files -- just let your site keep itself current.
• Well-maintained. Reported bugs are fixed promptly and maintenance releases are issued regularly. A change log is available.
• Setup takes seconds. The setup script asks for your database info, asks you which languages you wish to install, and then automatically sets up your web directory for you. If desired, professional installation service is free.
• No branding required. If you don't want to advertise WSN Directory, just switch off the branding. You can even set a tweak to have the admin panel show your name instead of WSN's, making it a white label to use with your clients.
• Choose your complexity: simple, recommended or kitchen sink. You can pick and choose which features to enable with more detail in your switches later. The 'Switches' area in the admin panel allows turning features on and off instantly without needing to edit them out of the templates.
• Free support via email and forum. All support is handled by the script's author, not relayed through customer service reps who would lack sufficient knowledge of the software. Get help and advice with anything related to the script, not just troubleshooting.
• Available services. WSN offers a variety of services to help you complete and maintain your project.
• The full source code is provided, so you're never trapped and can always hire a third party to work on it. A guide to extending the source is available in the knowledge base.

Google Maps Features

• Listings with physical addresses are shown in maps on the listing details page, the category list, search results, and the front page.
• An unlimited number of pins can display on a map, thanks to progressive loading.
• If multiple pins are on the same address or close to each other, WSN Directory expands them when clicked to show all the choices.
• Driving directions are built into the maps so people can quickly find their route to a business.
• Fully customizable pin contnet (include thumbnail images, ratings and more).
• Option to turn pins on and off by listing type, live. The site visitor simply checks the boxes for whichever types they'd like to see.
• Automatic local maps: using IP geolocation, WSN Directory can automatically show the visitor a map of listings in their local area.
• Custom local maps: you can also easily make your own local map of any specified location in the world.

Import and Integration Features

• Import your data from various other scripts. If you're coming from a script not listed there, ask support about an importer for it.
• Import listings via WSN's XML format.
• Import listings or categories from CSV, TSV or any custom flat-file database format.
• Have an RSS feed monitored to grab new listings from it.
• Easily integrate with many MySQL member systems. Pre-supplied integration systems selectable in your admin panel include WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Invision Board 1.x and 2.x, vBulletin 3.x, phpBB 2.x and 3.x, Simple Machines Forum, FusionBB, e107, WSN Forum, WSN Gallery, WSN Knowledge Base and WSN Classifieds -- and more!
• Create an integration with virtually any MySQL-based script using the simple integration generator in your admin panel to select which fields mean what, how the passwords are encoded, and how cookies are stored.
• Share data from WSN scripts using toplists. For example, anywhere in your links directory you can show the top five topics from your WSN Forum. Some templates can be shared amongst WSN script installs as well.

Social Networking Features

• Automated tweeting of new listings.
• Select from a variety of social bookmarking options, including addthis, pinterest, google+ and facebook.
• WSN Directory includes a social feed wizard for displaying twitter feeds.
• Integrated facebook application version of your WSN Directory -- your own facebook app ready to go.
• Facebook Connect and Google Sign-In for one-click registrations and logins.
• OpenGraph tag generation.

SEO and Traffic-Building Features

• Search engine friendly URL rewriting. If you're on an apache server, shorten your URLs and introduce more keywords into them better search engine result poisitioning.
• WSN Directory impliments canonical tags where appropriate for SEO.
• Control search engine spiders by disallowing them from unimportant pages. This way they get deeper into the important areas and don't put as much of a load on your server.
• Throw 404s to any undesirable IPs in order to control rogue spiders or thwart DOS attacks.
• An option to serve noindex/nofollow to non-rewritten URLs, in order to concentrate spidering on the important stuff. Error pages automatically set a noindex,nofollow meta tag.
• Meta tags. Set meta tags for general use on all pages, and set category-specific meta tags to override the general ones for each category.
• Syndication. Have a javascript code generated based on a specified toplist so that other sites can syndicate your content.
• RSS feed. Provide an RSS feed to visitors, containing urls and descriptions ordered in any way you (or the visitor) likes. The RSS feed can also be used to track comments posted. Apply custom templates to feeds.
• Google and Sitemaps.org sitemap generation. Help search engines find your pages.
• Phone/browser push notifications to bring people back the moment you have new content.

Revenue-Building Features

• A shopping cart system enabling visitors to add listings to their cart and review their total before paying through paypal.
• Cart options (color, size, etc) with associated price bumps (large size can cost $1 extra for example).
• Option to have payments go directly to listing submitters instead of using the cart.
• Listing sponsorship. Integrate with PayPal, 2checkout or Nochex to allow listing owners to purchase priority positioning in their category -- or process payments offline/manually if you prefer. Optionally switch this to deducting per unique click instead of per day (a simple PPC option). Use multiple levels of sponsorship if desired. You can require all listings to be sponsored if you wish.
• Member sponsorship. Allow members to pay for promotion to a more privileged usergroup, or require paid membership.
• WSN Directory's option for auto-renewing subscriptions for paypal payments makes it easier for people to keep paying you.
• Integrate your advertising code anywhere in the templates, and use the template conditionals syntax for control over when it appears.
• Google adsense generator included.
• Coupons system to offer discounted sponsorships.

Multilingual Features

• Translate into any language with the language system. Any character set can be used, utf-8 is the default.
• Language files can be searched and edited through the admin panel's language page, or by hand in a text editor if you prefer.
• A handy "show untranslated items" link tells you what you have left to translate.
• Enter listing and category details in mutliple languages and show the visitor the version for their selected language.
• Localization settings: choose date formats, currency, kilometers vs. miles, time zone, default country and so on.

Customization Features

• More than a dozen additional themes included for one-click install. Find the one that looks closest to the site you want, and start customizing from there.
• WSN Directory is fully customizable. All of the HTML which is displayed to your visitors (as well the admin panel HTML) can be customized through the templates. You may either edit your templates offline through the HTML editor of your choice, or make use of the online editor in the admin panel which allows you to preview changes, view the original version of the template, et cetera.
• The custom pages system makes it easy to add new pages to your site, like an "about us" page.
• The style designer and color wizard make it easy to change your site's color scheme or style without having to learn CSS.
• Use the wrapper template to encapsulate the WSN Directory content in your design very quickly without needing to search through all the other templates.
• Add as many new fields as you like, no limits. Use a text area, input box, checkboxes, radio buttons, combo box, etc to collect your data. Choose if new fields can be filled in by visitors or only by admins.
• Create toplists. Anywhere you wish, list the top x listings (or comments, members, etc.) ordered by the field of your choice and filtered by a condition of your choice. Works in custom templates, so you can create new pages with toplist content. Use the simple toplist generator in your admin panel. Toplists can now be 'live' as well, automatically seemlessly refreshing their content every specified number of seconds.
• Simple conditionals syntax available in templates. Use the power of PHP without needing to learn PHP. Example: <IF {MEMBERSUBMISSIONS} is greater than 10>You have submitted more than 10 times.<OTHERWISE>You have not yet submitted more than 10 times. Come back and submit more.</IF>
• Know PHP? Use it in your templates for simple stuff, or take advantage of the powerful plugins and modifications system to add major new features without worrying about losing them on upgrades.

E-mail Features

• Bounced email detector. Run a utility to stop sending emails to addresses which have bounced messages back. This prevents your email server from being blacklisted by ISPs, and saves you server load too.
• E-mail queue system can handle sending out an email to tens of thousands of people at once.
• MIME e-mail option. Use HTML in your emails, with it still degrading to text effectively.
• E-mail logging. Review a list of sent emails and the IP addresses of the senders.
• Use the advanced toplist feature in emails, just as in any template.
• Preview emails before sending.
• Create an email signature that will be appended to the bottom of all mail sent.
• Create standard emails which you can select to re-send in the future.
• Bulk e-mail members. Send a mass e-mail to all members or to members who fit the conditions you specify, and use any member template variables in your message.
• Bulk e-mail submitters. Send a mass email for all listings or for each listing which meets the conditions you specify to the owner of the listing, using template variables in your message.
• Let members e-mail each other. These e-mails are processed through a form which does not reveal the address of the recipient.
• Allow members to opt in or out. By choosing on registration or editing their profile, members can decide not to receive emails from other members or not to receive emails from the administrator.
• E-mail notifications to admin. Get an email informing you of new submissions, containing details of the submission.
• E-mail notifications to user. Let the submitter get an email notification of acceptance or rejection. Optionally send submitter notification that their listing is received and pending review, that their sponsorship funds have run out, that their listing has expired, etc.
• Send emails from different addresses. If you want validation emails sent by your moderators to contain their email address, for example, this is selectable.
• Subscriptions. Subscribe to be notified of new comments, or subscribe to a category to be notified of new listings in it. Members can also choose to be notified by email of every new listing, or those matching keywords. Member profiles offer a subscription management area.
• Option to add headers to outgoing emails coming from the admin address. Use this to set a reply-to value or the like.
• Option to send all email from the administrative address. A few hosting setups require that all mail be sent from the same domain.

File Attachment Features

• Visitors may attach however many files you specify, if you choose to allow it. The number of files per listing, comment or PM is configurable by usergroup. Set the allowed file types and maximum size. Track the number of downloads. Choose which member groups are allowed to download the file. If it's an image, automatically display it.
• A powerful uploader tool enabling numerous files to be uploaded at once with progress bars. Pure javascript, no flash needed. Simple plain HTML uploader also available as an option.
• Custom file attachment fields. Add unlimited file fields for listings, categories, comments, members. Track downloads, image size, etc for as many different file fields as you need.
• Show a thumbnail of any size for any image attachment.
• Show thumbnails for PDF files if you have ImageMagick.
• Convert video files to FLV, like YouTube.
• Resize images automatically on upload to fit your desired dimensions and avoid wasting disk space, without making submitters do any work.
• Show a lightbox-style slideshow of all attachments in a category, or attachments on a listing.

Listings-Specific Features

• Smart autofills. As soon as you type a URL, WSN Directory fills in the title, description and tags based on that site's meta data.
• The ratings with comments option enables an amazon-style reviews system, with star ratings and associated text comments.
• Track views. Set the amount of time between clicks needed to count as a unique hit. Separately track the views over a user-defined number of days (perhaps monthly, for example).
• Option to put outgoing links in a frameset.
• Google pagerank. Display pagerank, and sort listings by it if you wish.
• Feed parsing. If a site has an RSS feed you can display the latest items from it.
• For listings being sold, WSN Directory can handle multiple currencies smoothly. Payments can be sent either directly to the submitter, or to you via a shopping cart system.
• Bulk-edit all of the listings from a category on one page, when it's helpful to speed things up.
• Listings can be automatically marked as visited, and associated comments threads as read.
• Create a list of related listings for each listing, or with MySQL 4 display an auto-generated list of listings similar to the one being viewed.
• Visitors can rate each listing. Cookies are used to prevent re-voting, and IPs are also stored to prevent the same IP address from voting again. View details of each individual vote cast, delete bad votes. Show mean or median rating.
• Custom rating fields. Let visitors rate as many different aspects of each listing as you like.
• Remote voting code generator. Let listing owners put a voting code on their site which will direct their visitors to you.
• Visitors can report a listing, email a listing, bookmark a listing, or add it to their personal list.
• Copy, or place in multiple categories. Copy a listing to another category, or place it in secondary categories so it functions as one single listing in multiple categories at once.
• Create a custom formula to determine the importance of a listing (a standard formula is included) and sort by that value. Show the rank number of listings by this criteria.
• Limit submissions by usergroup. Set how many listings each usergroup can submit in total, and how many they can submit in each single day.
• Expire listings If you're indexing something which has an expiration date (such as coupons, for example), set listings to automatically expire after a certain number of days.
• PAD file support for software directories. Listings are automatically kept up to date with the PAD file's info, so all listed software can stay current.
• Option for members to claim ownership of a listing, with automatic verification process.
• Option to require guests to validate the email they supply for their listing.
• Switch to autogenerate accounts when a person submits a listing.
• Comments/reviews system. Allow discussions of each listing.
• Rate comments. Visitors can rate a particular comment on a listing as helpful or unhelpful.
• An optional illiteracy detector, to force people to write comment posts properly.
• An option to let listing owners respond to comments within them. This is especially useful when the comments are reviews, and the owner wishes to give their side of the story.
• Future effective date. Set listings to not appear until a certain date.

Category-Specific Features

• An option to create search-based categories -- a category dynamically populated with any listings from the rest of the site which match your criteria.
• Unlimited levels of subcategories. If you need 1000 subcategories 100 levels deep, it's not a problem.
• Select related categories to listing to from a particular category, or show an automatically generated list of similar categories.
• For each individual category, you may override the default listing order, choice of mixing listing types or not, and number of listing and subcategory columns.
• Per-category sponsorship settings.
• Category usergroup permissions. For each category, you can override any of the general usergroup permissions with specific permissions for the particular category.
• Use the category usergroup permissions to select who can submit to a particular category, and the select box on the submission pages will gray out categories which the user does not have permission to submit to.
• Bulk addition of subcategories. Add many subcategories at once by using subname1[,]subname2[,]subname3 etc as the category name.
• Alias categories. Make a subcategory of one category become also a subcategory of a different category.
• Moderators. Appoint moderators/editors to oversee specific categories. Choose if you wish to auto-approve submissions by moderators to their own categories. Moderator inherit all subcategories of their category.
• Moderator control panel. Let moderators handle the validation of listings, listing edits and comments within their own categories. Moderators can also keep notes on members or search IPs. Moderator actions are logged for you to review.
• Make a category act as a link to a url.

Membership-Specific Features

• Visitors can register or login via facebook with WSN's facebook connect integration. This easy one-click process increases your signups.
• A convenient member home area where registered users can manage their submitted listings and comments, preferences, subscriptions, etc.
• Visitors can register an account either while submitting a listing or from a separate registration screen.
• Registration options. Use direct registration, require e-mail validation, require manual validation of members by the admin, require both email and manual validation, or make registration invitation-only.
• Advanced usergroup permissions. Create custom usergroups, and specify the exact permissions of guests, registered members and administrators. Assign secondary usergroups or special access to a category as well.
• Allow usergroups to edit listings they've submitted. Require validation of edits if you wish, based on usergroup.
• Member list and profiles. View all members and various details, make this publicly available if you wish.
• Members may choose avatars and signatures. These appear by comments the member posts, although you could use them with listings if you desired. Avatars can be automatically resized to the desired dimensions, no need to reject based on size.
• Member time zone. Members may select to view all dates and times from their own time zone.
• Member ratings. Use a custom formula (or the standard one provided) to determine the value of members, and show their rank ordered by this formula.
• Member rank titles and images, which can be determined by number of listings, number of posts, or rating.
• Option for members to subscribe to notifications of matches for a list of keywords.
• An option for members to be notified of moderator actions on their submissions.
• The total time online of each member can be tracked and displayed.
• Custom permissions restrictions. Via html comment at the top of any template, quickly restrict the viewing of that page to particular usergroups. Or, just edit a category to quickly restrict it from being viewed by particular usergroups.
• Personal lists for members. Members can make a list of their favorite listings, either directly transferring existing listing from your directory into their list or by submitting them manually if you choose to allow it.
• Personal guestbooks, where members can say hi to each other.
• Auction-style feedback system, suitable for marketplace or services directories.
• Registration invitations system, allowing google-style beta marketing.

Search Features

• Autocomplete. Search suggestions pop up while people type.
• Simple search boxes. Do a simple search for listings, and choose in the admin panel which fields are searched for this.
• Remote search boxes. Allow people to place a search box on their own site which let their visitors search your site.
• Search in category. Let people refine their searches to all content beneath a particular category.
• Advanced search. Find items where any particular field is equal to, contains the term, has any of the words, has all of the words, is less than, or is greater than the search term... or search for where items are between two numbers.
• Boolean searches. Use 'and' and 'or' operators and group with parentheses in advanced search, or configure the simple search box to be boolean if desired.
• Configure the strictness of the search. If you don't have many articles yet you may set it to be lax and show any results where any of the search words are found even in the middle of a longer word, or if you have more content require the full word to match and require all of the searched-for words to match if desired.
• Highlight search words. On the search result pages, the words which were being searched for are highlighted (this uses the .searchhighlight CSS class so that changing the look of the highlight is simple).
• Sort search results. Order the results by any field.
• Search within results. Refine the results to only those containing a particular term.
• Log searches. Track the searching habits of your visitors by logging their searches to a file.
• Show most searched terms. Display whatever number of most popular search terms you wish in whatever format you wish.
• Search result columns. Put search results in any number of columns per row (default is 1).

Administrative Features

• WSN Directory's validation interface is full of helpful tools. Request revisions of listings or comments with a click. Got spam from members? Check the boxes, then select "delete and ban" to remove the submissions and member accounts at once.
• IP banning. Rid yourself of troublemakers by banning IP ranges. IPs are tracked for each submission, member registration and vote. Ban from site, or just from re-registering if you prefer. Select to block all unresolvable host names and proxies from registration if you wish.
• Search users and listings by IP city with geolocation -- quickly find everyone in a given city to spot suspect activity. You can also block by city.
• An option to block spammers based on stopforumspam.com's blacklist.
• Numerous control and collaboration features such as a warning points system, moderator whiteboard, reports resolution area, the ability to suggest bans, and the option to flag posts containing terms.
• Validation. Specify for each usergroup if the admin will have to validate their listings, categories, comments, or listing edits. When a listing edit needs to be validated, the original listing remains visible as it was until the changes are approved. Send custom messages to submitter on acceptance or rejection.
• Backup and restore. Use the admin panel to download a quick backup of your WSN Directory database content, and then easily restore backups through the admin panel. Have backups automatically generated for you every x days if you like.
• Censor or replace words or phrases. Prevent users from swearing, and/or place links around particular text, etc.
• Mass-replace. Globally replace one bit of text with another across all language items or all templates. Also globally replace according to advanced criteria for listings, categories, comments and members.
• Control behavior of redirects. Decide for yourself exactly which page you want the user sent to after they take a particular action.
• Required fields. Select exactly which fields you wish to require the user to fill in. If it's not filled in, the user doesn't lose any data but has the chance to complete the missing field(s).
• Reset fields. If you wish, select particular listing fields to automatically reset to be blank every x days.
• WSN Codes. Replace HTML's functionality with custom WSN Codes. Create as many as you like.
• Smilies. Add as many smilies as you like.
• Option to restore default settings, in case you do something which turns out to be a particularly major mistake.
• Restrict administrative account logins to a particular IP range for an extra level of security.
• View stats on registration and submission rates.

Advanced Developer Features

• Use PHP in templates, in addition to the conditionals syntax. If you know php, make use of it in any way you like. This makes it easy to do major changes without having to edit the source files.
• Pluggable functions. If you know PHP you can easily incorporate new behavior without complicating your upgrades.
• Pseudomethods. Create new template variables by writing a function, without complicating upgrades.
• Drop in new tables... they'll just work.
• Run scripts at set intervals as simulated cron jobs.
• Place files in a /modifications/ directory to have their content auto-inserted into every page. Use the modification generator for more complex changes.

More Features

• Distance searching. If your listings involve addresses, your visitors can search for listings without x miles of their postal code. Results are ordered closest first, with the distance listed.
• A rich-text (WYSIWYG) editor.
• Supports LaTeX and MathML markup for math and science sites.
• Online users list. Optionally display a list of who's currently browsing your directory, including their IP and browser. Show who's in a particular category or comments thread, and show the most ever online stats.
• Calendar system. Schedule events, edit them, join events, or subscribe to the calendar.
• Shoutbox for quick public messages between users.
• Quotes display system, to enterain people with witty quotations or build a collection of quotes of your own users.
• A scalable HTML5/AJAX chat room for community meetings, seminars or peer-to-peer support.
• Submitters can add an RSS feed whose items will be inserted into the directory daily.
• Tagging, with a tag cloud.
• Payment detail logging.
• Filters for links and comments.
• A private messaging system to allow members to contact each other.
• An integrated instant messaging system to allow members to chat with each other while browsing the directory.
• Contact form, to allow visitors to quickly email you (without your email being revealed).
• An extensible help system to allow you to write instructions for your visitors.