New Toolset Course: How to Build Directory and Classifieds Sites

   Dario

Announcements

May 25, 2020
17

We’re very happy to announce a first complete course on WordPress Directory and Classifieds Sites. The course starts from the very basics and walks you through the principles and techniques that you’ll need.

Learn from scratch and skip what you already know

Some people building sites with Toolset already have a solid background in custom types, templates, etc. Others are starting from scratch. Our course starts with the very basics of which Toolset plugins to install and what themes we recommend.

Then, we explain the fundamentals of custom types and we start teaching how to build directory sites.

We cover everything through templates, Views, searches, forms, access control and more.

The entire course is modular, so you can learn the parts that you need and skip sections that you’re already familiar with. If you’re logged-in, you’ll see little “progress icons” that will remind you what you already covered.

Video + Text

All the lessons in the course have complete “text versions”. The more visual sections also have videos (like how to design templates). We’ll be adding more videos to lessons in the next couple of weeks.

Many more courses coming

This training course is the first. We’re looking to hear your feedback before we continue on the entire series. Eventually, we think that these courses are the best way to learn Toolset.

Leave your comments, let us know how this course helps you or what you’re missing, and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 17 Responses

  1. Thank you for all the team efforts to make this Toolset Course,my question in Chapter 11 there is no Blocks to Create a “My Account” Page.

    • Hi! No, there are no specific blocks to create a “My Account” page just by inserting them. You actually need to create this page and add some account -related actions and content to it:
      1. Make sure it’s visible only to logged-in users.
      2. Display the name of the logged-in user.
      3. Allow user to change their account information (through a Toolset User Editing form).
      4. And you can also list all the content (posts) that they submitted in the past, with links to edit and/or delete their posts.

      This lesson provides almost all information I just listed but I still want to add a bit of content and further explanations (working on it now). So, I hope that by tomorrow it will be clear and really easy to follow.

      Thank you!

      • Dear Dario,

        Thanks for your valuable input, but my question still valid in the sense there’s NO Blocks yet to complete the “My Account” Page. with the new Toolset gutenberg workflow.

        The steps you show still require working with OLD Toolset method with no design flexibility.

        My request is to complete NATIVELY all the steps with new Toolset BLOCKS workflow.

        Thank you

        • Hi! Please allow me to quickly list the things needed for creating the “My Account” page.

          When building the “My Account” page as shown in the lesson, here are the things you need to insert:
          1. Name of the logged-in user
          – You insert this using the “Fields and Text” block.
          2. Link to a page to edit your profile
          – This is just a link to a regular page and you can use whatever block to create this link. In the tutorial, we use the “Fields and Text” block.
          – The page to edit your profile is a regular page with a Toolset User Editing form. So, it uses the regular Toolset Form block.
          3. Link to a page to add a new post:
          – Again just a regular link.
          – The page to add a new post uses a Toolset Post form to submit a new form. So, it uses the regular Toolset Form block.

          So, that’s it… You insert the more specific links and forms using the “Text and Fields” block.

          Yes, there are currently no specialized blocks for things like “Logged-in User’s Name” or a “Login Form”, so the styling for these elements is limited.

          Is this what you meant? You would like to have separate blocks for each of these specific features that we currently insert using the “Fields and Text” block?

          Thank you!

          • YES we would like to have a separate blocks for each of these specific features that we currently insert using the “Fields and Text” block AND a comprehensive FULL My Account
            or Client Area for Toolset.

            Thank you

  2. Thank you for making this a free course. I think many people will take advantage of it and learn to love Toolset. A fuller title might be “Directory, Classified and Crowdsourced Database Sites.” It’s all the same but it emphasizes that your software allows your community to add value to your site, which in turn strengthens the community.

    • Thank you and also for the suggestion! I will run it by our team, it’s an interesting suggestion! 🙂

  3. A big thank you for your efforts in reducing the learning curve of your highly powerful sets of tools. This is a very well structured course, easy to follow, and very useful. Really a great job ! Congratulations for the course and for the features of your plugins.

    • Thank you very much for this feedback. I’m glad to hear that this format works for you. We’re completing two new courses this week.

  5. Hi Amir, thank you for all the new graphic interface on things –Blocks, etc., to make things easier.

    I wanted to put in a plug for programmers/database folks who are using toolset to be able to more easily integrate with wordpress data, themes and stylesheets:

    the tasks I have historically moved into a separate space (outside of toolset) and tackled with php/mysql are the things I expected toolset to take care of. but in many cases toolset seems stuck inside a wordpress cage.

    If I received this email I would ask for examples, but they only come up as I’m deep into a project.

    but one example that comes to mind is simple csv download function so that toolset data can be downloaded easily – those real life tasks that were expected to be easy with toolset because you think of toolset as handling data and dealing with the complex wordpress meta data, first and foremost.

    I come across these little things all the time, and I see others posting with the same issues, so just wanted to give a vote up for your development of these types of features.

    Thanks for listening.

  6. That’s great…looking at the way Toolset is developing…it would be good to have the tutorials for many to help !

    Much Appreciated…how long do we expect the complete tutorials with the videos attached ?

    • Hi! Thanks for the kind words! 🙂

      We are adding new videos to courses steadily. Now, we have videos covering the most important features first, like Views (lists of posts), templates, and custom search.

      Also, please note that these lessons have additional videos for advanced options. For example, if you scroll down the lesson about Views, you will see additional advanced options, with videos.

      The next videos that are coming are the ones for lessons about designing custom archives, custom homepages, and using maps.

      Are there any specific videos that you feel are missing at this moment?

  7. Hi Dario,

    Thanks for your reply.

    Is it possible for you to create videos on Chapter 10 to 12?

    Thanks,
    Pramod.

    • We’ll have videos for all chapters. It’s taking a bit of time, as each video is a lot of work to make, but we’ll cover all of them over the next weeks.