Sunday, March 22, 2009

SOBI2 Customization

I have been working on 3 Joomla sites that have a SOBI2 business directory at the core. All of them needed customization

The BIA site needed only a custom look and images.

The Dental site need custom display to prevent viewing of contact information and details unless logged in.

The Mr. Bob site required 3 levels of membership: Free, Basic and Pro with Paypal subscription payments, many custom fields, and automatic expiry using the AEC - Automatic Expiry Component.

What a learning curve. All 3 sites will be launching this week - I still need to create the images for the BIA site, the dental site needs minor cosmetic tweaking and menu edits.

The Mr.Bob site was the biggest challenge. I found I could not have SEO turned on with the AEC plugin or all payment plans were disabled. Not so good - a paid community site nobody could subscribe to.
The next challenge was just offline planning - with all of the extra components and the three access levels.
All paid members can post ads, only pro members can post events and content. Free members can add simplified listings to the SOBI2 directory. All paid members get advanced listings but Pro members also get an image gallery and extra fields.

I eliminated all paid fields in SOBI2 because their a-la-carte style is kind of irritating.
All paid items are packaged in AEC. Then when editing their entry in SOBI2 the entry form does a database call to AEC to determine their plan id # and shows or hides fields for editing and submitting based on their plan level.
AEC also sets as Registered, Author or Publisher - other components are controlled by those levels.

Thanks to SOBI2 forum member k2xl for inspiring this solution through his Author name solution.
This is a huge amount of work and customization. Contact me if you want this for your site.