There are numerous ways to receive the actual content for the job listings. The easiest way would be to just have people e-mail listings to you, and you’d then put them in yourself, but that’s tedious work. Better to use a plugin and have the advertisers put the data straight into a draftpost that the administrators can approve.
We’ll be using a plugin to do this, TDO Mini Forms, in fact (wordpress.org/extend/ plugins/tdo-mini-forms/). It is by no means the only option available, but it seems simple enough while offering cool options for more advanced features in the future.
Anyway, the only thing you’re interested in at this time is a plugin that lets users, which in this case are the people either advertising for a job, or the people looking for one, to post content into Word- Press that is stored in draftform in categories. So you want to build a form where you can send in the following data:
That’s it, although you may consider spam protection as well. The TDO Mini Forms plugin can handle this easily enough, but you may want to build or use other solutions.
When using TDO Mini Forms to build this solution, you can specify that the posts be saved as drafts and append the advertiser information to the post content so you won’t have to create a WordPress user account for everyone posting an ad. You can do that, though, and force advertisers to register first to access the actual “post a job” page. If you do, they will use the user info from WordPress instead, and there’s support for that in TDO Mini Forms. If you force advertisers to register, you can easily create archives for all their posted job offerings, for example, which can be handy. It also means that you can mark some advertisers as reliable and hence bypass the administrative approval stage, publishing their ads automatically. You can do it any way you like. The important thing is that you can get advertisers and people looking for work to post content directly into WordPress (as drafts) so you can manage the job listings easily enough.
So where to go from here? After all, at this stage the WordPress-powered job board is fully functional, but there’s certainly room for improvement. The first thing one may come to think of is how to charge for job listings, and how to control how long they are visible. After all, a lot of job boards out there are charging for use, and you may want that, so attaching PayPal or a similar payment service is a natural next step. Controlling how long a post is displayed can be done by running a script that automatically changes the post status from “published” to “draft,” but it is probably better to just add a code snippet at the top of the post that either outputs a “this job listing is outdated” message, or even hides the job information or redirects the visitor. This can be easily done with PHP and a little use of conditional tags, for example.
Other natural enhancements would involve more control when an advertiser submits a job listing. This may include image attachments, tagging, not to mention geographical localization. That last part can either be maintained by a custom taxonomy, or using custom fields. That way, it can easily be queried and listed for location-based job offerings.
Sticky posts can be used to make some jobs featured, for those generous advertisers that want more exposure. You can just style the sticky posts accordingly (larger fonts, stronger colors, borders, or whatever) and let them jump to the top of the post display, which may not be so much fun in the job board example design presented here since it is based on just links in lists. Another solution would be to have a separate loop that queries just posts marked as sticky, and displays them independently. That would mean that you had full control over them, naturally.
There is no doubt that it is possible to take the job board quite a few steps further. The whole idea with this example is to show you that WordPress can be used to power such a site. Now it is up to you, or someone else, to make it grand and a killer site. Good luck! And with that, the next section moves on to another non-bloggish concept. From job board to knowledge base. The step isn’t as big as you may expect.
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05132010
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