Suitability of aMember for a Listings Directory on a website...

Discussion in 'Pre-Sales Questions' started by achtungchris, Feb 25, 2014.

  1. achtungchris

    achtungchris New Member

    Joined:
    Feb 25, 2014
    Messages:
    1
    Hi,

    I've been looking at aMember this morning for an hour or two, and have to say it looks like a really slick looking, professional, fully-fledged secure solution for site memberships.

    However, I do have some questions regarding the suitability of using aMember for a project I am currently in the midst of - a Listings Directory of businesses that will serve as part of a niche website I am also currently in the process of building, which I probably better explain a little bit about first.

    The Listings Directory on the site will feature businesses in the particular niche the site is focussed on, I'm sure you know the kind of thing I'm talking about. And right now I am populating the directory with several thousand free listings, which I am hoping to setup some kind of mechanism whereby business owners can claim and then upgrade their listing to an enhanced / featured listing with more detail.

    Now, I appreciate that aMember is not an application / script designed for building a Links Directory and that is ok.

    I actually decided at the outset when I started against using any kind of script / app to handle the directory / listings aspect of the site I am building, because frankly I didn't see anything that I liked the looks of, much of the scripts / apps appeared to be cookie cutter, and not very customisable, particularly with respect to appearance / layout, and I don't want the look and feel of my listings pages to be dictated by an app / script which seems to be the case with the majority of them.

    So, crazy me, is hand-coding each listing page!

    None of the free listing pages are tied up to an MySQL database or anything - just pure html / php. Yup crazy, I know, but I can live with the drawbacks. I know all that content for the listings would ideally be better off sat in a big MySQL database, and I may well go down that route later on, but for now I am happy to continue to process the listings pages manually.

    What I was hoping to do... and aMember may or may not be the solution in this regard - is find an user account / membership app/script that I can bolt on to my site - so that if an owner of a business sees their free basic listing on the site, they can click a link on that page to sign up via a membership / account system and claim that specific listing, and then upgrade it if they so choose to either an enhanced, premium or featured listing on the site (each will be a different tier with different benefits).

    Once they have signed up and claimed their free listing on the site and paid for an upgraded listing if they wish, the idea is that I can have a form that only they have access to when they are logged in to their account so that they can submit additional / updated information for their listings such as editorial copy, opening hours, pictures, all that kind of stuff. I could set the form up I think, but ideally I'd want it to marry up with their account so I know it is coming from the person who owns the listing.

    So is aMember suitable for all this kind of thing?

    Whilst I am not creating a 'members' site per se, I do want users to be able to create user accounts through the site, and then through their account claim a listing on the site and then pay to upgrade said listing via aMember, and provide me with updated listing information through their account which I can process manually.

    The mechanisms for actually updating the listing pages based on information a customer has submitted through a form is something I shall just endeavour to process manually after a listing has been claimed, and an upgrade has been purchased and a form submitted with all the updated info to go on the listing.

    Hope all that makes some sense!

    Hopefully someone can clarify if aMember is suitable in this regard or if I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely.

    I've spent so much money on scripts down the years that haven't really been able to do what I'm looking for (particularly with regards to Links Directories), so am getting really careful about shelling out for anything without doing some research first wherever possible.

    Thanks in advance!

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