Local Directory
The Local Directory app in Aiir lets you manage a directory of businesses on your website.
It supports adding businesses both in Aiir and via your website. Each business can be associated with one or two categories. The categories are the main way the businesses are navigated on the website.
Jump to:
Managing businesses
The first page of Local Directory has an alphabetical list of all businesses, and tab for showing businesses which are due to expire soon.
A business can be either a basic listing or a full listing. A full listing has more detail, including an image and a content section where you can add any amount of detail or media.
You can promote a business to be featured, which means it will appear at the top of the directory home page on the website, in rotation with other featured businesses.
The name for featured businesses, and the number shown can be customised in the Settings section.
Each business is associated with a category, and optionally a second category.
Go to the Categories section to update the available choices, and edit their settings.
Submissions via your website
By default, it is possible for visitors to submit their businesses through the website, although this can be disabled in the Settings section.
You must manually approve or delete all businesses that are submitted. Any Aiir user with access to the Local Directory app is able to approve businesses.
Visitors can suggest a category they believe their business should belong to, and it is up to you to choose the closest match.
Reviews
The Comments app makes it possible for visitors to leave a review of businesses. These work in exactly the same way as comments for any other part of your website, and must be approved via the Comments app, if you choose to require approval.
Geocoding
Geocoding allows you to associate co-ordinates with a business so that visitors can search for businesses based on their location.
When editing a business, you can select the Auto geocode option. The co-ordinates will be fetched from Google when you press save.
If you have a lot of businesses without geocodes, press the Geocode Businesses button at the top of the Home page. This will add geocodes for all businesses that are currently missing them.
Further settings
The Settings section has more options for:
- Hiding empty categories
- Changing the folder used for images submitted with businesses
- Mirroring the content of a local directory on another site in your group
- Custom content in various areas