Jon's Network

You may have noticed a slew of posts about vendors with boilerplate descriptions. It’s part of a new feature I’m building on the site to hopefully have a place for IT shoppers to compare and learn about possible solutions. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but always balked because I didn’t have the right tool. I think Expression Engine would be ideal, but didn’t want to migrate my blog or start another site. I built a solution using WordPress page templates, but that wasn’t scalable since I would have had to create a new page template for each category in the directory. I improved upon that by using regular WP categories with a single custom category template. I integrated related resource links using a custom field and WP bookmarks. I will still have to create a bunch of category templates since I want the directory listings to appear different than my usual category archive page unless there is a way to assign a template to a group of categories (I don’t think so).

Once all the boilerplate listings are in, more detailed information will be posted as I come across it or as it is submitted to me. It could be the type of information vendors want their prospects to see, but more interesting will be the user reviews and feedback about small details that are only found out during bake-offs and production.

If you have any suggestions or feedback or want to submit anything, I’d love to hear it.