Today, I have some big news I'm excited to share. Business Directory Plugin and Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin (AWPCP) are joining the Strategy11 family.
Over the past 10 years, Dave Rodenbaugh has built up a great team, product, and community. But now he's ready to move on to other projects like Recapture. I have known Dave for years, and have a lot of respect for all he has accomplished. We first talked about taking over the plugins a couple years ago, but the timing just wasn't right for us. After working with Syed Balkhi as part of the WPBeginner group since then, we now feel like we have more to offer both the Business Directory community and the team behind it.
Who is Strategy11?
I'm Steph Wells, the co-founder and CTO of Strategy11. What? You haven't heard of it? We're the team behind Formidable Forms, the most advanced WordPress form builder. We've spent years growing our team and product and are ready for more.
What Does this Mean for Existing Users?
Aside from the ownership change, it's business as usual. You can continue to rely on Business Directory and its add-on modules as you have in the past.
With the exception of Dave, the entire Business Directory Plugin team joined Strategy11. This means that the same awesome team is still providing support and plugin maintenance. Some of the Formidable team will also be joining in.
What's Coming Next?
Over the coming months, we have plans to simplify purchasing, installing, and setting up paid modules. You can also expect to see redesigns for more beautiful directories right out of the box. We will be working hard to make building directories enjoyable with beautiful end results.
As a team, we labor for simplicity. Just like Formidable Forms, we will simplify the user experience without sacrificing the flexibility and power. There's also room for some great integrations between the two plugins.
Being new to the product, and missing out on the years of history behind it, I need your help. Can you take a quick survey to help us plan out the next 3 years? There's so much we want to do, but it needs to be what you want too.
I want to thank Dave for all the hard work he put into Business Directory Plugin, and I wish him all the best in his future endeavors.
I also want to thank all users who have supported Business Directory Plugin so far, and I hope to earn your support for years to come.
Talk Soon,
Steph Wells
Co-Founder and CTO of Strategy11
We need this plugin to work better for SEO. Right now it's just bad. Regions do not rank well.
Thanks for your comment. We have a long list of things to evaluate and improve. We'll add SEO to the list, and see what we can do. Thanks again.
Your plugin has a long history of not working well with sites with a large user base, especially if only site editors/admins create listings. particularly we have had to fix your issues with creating the author drop down and it wanting to contain all 370K+ users in our site when subscribers can't create listings.
your current version tries to fix this for the admin but is fundamentally broken due to your 'default-listing-author' setting passing all users in the options param when registering this setting.
Thanks for the report! I'll get this added to our list.
Steph - congratulations on your acquisition. You've got your work cut out for you! I've been a BDP user for 3+ years, and I have a love-not-so-much-love relationship. (there is nothing to hate 🙂 )
What is so odd is that here we are, more than one month after this post, and I just learned this week of the acquisition. I learned it by reaching out to support to help me get something working in the Contact form on my listed users' listings. (Support - as always - was right on top of things. I hope that continues. Bobbie is a the queen of great support!)
But why did I need to contact support to learn about this?
I did receive a request to take the survey - which I did, gladly... so I'm on "the" mailing list. But I never knew until now that a blog even existed! So that might be one of your early steps... coordinating your outreach to current customers.
re: your approach to begin improving the user experience, I say AMEN to that! I can't wait! My site looks oh-so-2015. The first clue is the fact that no image in a listing can be larger than 150px wide. Say what? In 2020?
Over the years, I have asked about several features I hoped existed (but didn't) and made several suggestions. I hope the BDP folks have those tucked away for you somewhere.
Overall, there is incredible potential for BDP. I'm happy to welcome you to the fold and invite you to get in touch if you need a user to provide her opinion 🙂
Best of luck. I'm watching!
Hi Trisha, Steve here. Thanks so much for your comment. And thanks for filling out the survey. We are super excited about the potential this plugin has and we are relying on honest feedback from people like you to help make this plugin better.
We have a lot of work to do so please stay tuned and keep the feedback coming.