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[Resolved] Travel Guide – Destination Pages continent, country, city – where to start?

This support ticket is created 7 years, 3 months ago. There's a good chance that you are reading advice that it now obsolete.

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Supporter timezone: Europe/London (GMT+00:00)

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#472046

Dear Toolset- Team & Community,

first of all thanks for this amazing product and a enjoyable (hopefully) last working day in this year.

What I'm trying to accomplish is a Travel Destination Guide in a hierarchy like: Continent > Country > City where every Destination Page will have different sections/views like local weather, posts about that area, maps, woocommerce products (trips..), and also places like things to see, beaches, national parks, restaurants - reviews...

Some reference Pages:
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The plan is a Community website (Buddypress) where users (locals) can share activities(tours trips), events and also write content about their cities, post images that would be tagged to the location and would be added to the destination page gallery as well as the content...

I've done months of research and I cannot get me head around is how to start with the destination pages. I read so much about this that I just got confused. Should it be a taxonomy, Custom post type or would geomywp or toolset maps be enough... Everything (Users, Posts, Products...) needs to be connected to locations/places but they also need corresponding destination pages when clicked on.

Hopefully someone could point me into the right direction on where to start as this is my biggest project so far.

Wish you a good start into the new year.

Best regards,

Dorian

#472143

Nigel
Supporter

Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español )

Timezone: Europe/London (GMT+00:00)

Hi Dorian

I'm going to start at a little bit of a tangent here.

I have experience several years ago of creating a custom location-based social network built on WordPress and a heavily customised version of BuddyPress to add location based meta to all content (this was pre-geoMyWP days, or Toolset, for that matter).

It was a pretty big undertaking, requiring months of coding and $1000's.

The project was more-or-less a technical success, but nevertheless failed and I eventually pulled the plug on it just a year or so ago.

In my experience for a project of this scope I would say the technical concerns about how to build the site are the least of your worries. Maybe you are already confident in your research, but you need to be able to answer the difficult questions—honestly answer them—about where your users are going to come from, both those creating the content and those researching it, why they should care about you and your product (they don't), and why they should use your product versus any number of other well-known high profile travel resources which you will need to displace (they won't).

I learnt a great deal (technically, and about business) with my experience, and one of the things I learnt is that were I to try something similar again I should go in with the expectation of failure and the modest goal that I would learn usefully from that failure (with a smidgen of hope that I might be proved wrong and it succeed).

Now, that is not one of my typical forum replies, and if you want me to talk a little about how you might go about this from a technical perspective let me know and I will give it some thought.

#472609

Hi Dorian

I try to build something similar with Toolset. Maybe we can exchange thoughts and learnings in this case?

I agree with Nigel, to compete with the big guys in the travel business. But maybe you'll find your "sweet spot"? My niche is that I setup the site for one country (Ireland) and I'm doing it in one particular language (german) to serve the holidaymakers from this area. I began nearly four years ago with a personal blog. At the moment it is a travel blog with lot of advise how to travel in Ireland and with some stories and travel reports.

What I want to achieve is that the user can choose out of thousands of entries, collect them and can setup an own roadtrip. Maybe this can never be realized, but if I just coming in the near of that it's already good 😉

Maybe Nigel can share some thoughts how he would setup with toolset (in my opinion the only tool where a non technical user can design such website's) such a site.

Kind regards
Reto

#472634

Dear Nigel,

thank you very much for your (honest) reply.

I would love to take the opportunity and talk to you (maybe in private) about the trials and problems you faced with your project if you are interested?

You never stop learning and talking to others always helps.
Having the best idea can result in failure because of so many other reasons that are by far not technical or related to the service you offer.

We are two guys who spend almost all their lives in the travel industry.
Looking at the trends and sitting on the table with the big players (from Expedia to all the major airlines) is part of our daily business.
There are dozens of websites taking advantage of the sharing economy offering trips, tours, hotels, private accommodation, transportation..

Where we see potential are nieche markets, not yet fully covered countries/cities and emerging destinations (South Eastern Europe as one example), different languages (German, Russian..) which could give us an advantage. Doing all in one is hard but focusing on these little sweet spots could be enough to have a functioning sustainable business model.

The idea we have consists of many parts and we surely don't want to offer private accommodation like Airbnb does it or start only with a review site like TripAdvisor/Yelp.
The best thing would be to take the best out of these sources, incorporate them and extend with our ideas. Show unique things other don't in our way. Our key point would be local people writing about spots that are not the typical things you'd find on such travel websites.

We will never know if it'll be a failure or success if we don't try, but be sure that we are prepared for a slap in the face.

The Destination guide is more or less just a little part of the puzzle but an important one
since we plan the destination pages to be some sort of HUB/Archive for all the related content.

The content should be "localized" and shown on the corresponding parts of the app.
Eg when someone creates a tipp for Vienna, the CPT tipp should be displayed on the destination page for Vienna inside the view/section tipps for vienna.
In best case everything should happen automatically so that for example I have a CRED form where the user indicates where the content belongs to (just an address, city or country).
Same would mean for other things like Bookable products (Woocommerce Bookings) and other CPT's.

Would I need to set up a custom post type for the destination pages?
Geocode the content to be able to map it throughout the system?
Create a continent, country, city taxonomy?
Or could the Destination pages be custom archive pages of a taxonomy?

I just don't know in which direction I should go because I can't see it clearly.
Until this localization part is done I can't move forward because everything depends on this.

Would love to hear your expertise on this?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Dorian

#472639

Dear Reto,

I just realized your post.
Definitely! We could exchange contact details if you want?

I have this point on my Wishlist too, just in a slightly different way (read your support ticket) 🙂

Best regards,
Dorian

#472970

Nigel
Supporter

Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español )

Timezone: Europe/London (GMT+00:00)

Hi Dorian

Here are a few thoughts, if you want me to expand on anything please ask.

A key feature for such a site is that all content needs to be geo-tagged. Types offers an address field but you will probably want more than this. Specifically, you will probably want location-based queries, for example, and that is not something that Views currently offers.

In my case GEO my WP didn't exist so I had to develop a custom system to add lat/long coordinates whenever content was created, including BuddyPress members, and write custom SQL queries for distance-based searches (e.g. show other users within a 10km radius, show restaurants within a 2km radius). I haven't used GEO my WP but glancing at its features it sounds like it will do a lot of this for you out of the box and you are probably well advised to use that as your starting point.

I don't know what's involved in integrating it with Toolset, but I see it has an API and together with the Toolset API means that you should be able to hook them up together. You will have to go through the docs and try it out to know whether you can directly add the required GEO my WP location/address fields to a CRED form, or whether you will need to hook into the form submission and add them via the API.

How the GEO my WP plugin works will have a bearing on whether you decide to add taxonomies for locations etc. or if that even makes sense. Depending on how it stores its location data you may be able to display the results as archives, listing all posts of a particular type in Denver, for example, or it may only offer search forms (search for camp sites in Denver) and you would still need to add location as a taxonomy so that you can use the taxonomy archive for Denver as a starting point to further filter posts. You will need to try it and see, I don't know without trying myself, but I expect you will have a lot of use for Types (creating custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields), but I'm not sure how much Views functionality for custom queries and archives will be displaced by the location search features of GEO my WP.

Another factor I would mention is the chicken-and-egg problem of user-generated-content sites. To the extent that you are relying on local users to generate content that will be read by visitors, when you launch there will be no content. You should identify what value you are adding, and borrow/steal/mash-up the rest as much as possible.

You might use the foursquare API for example to show content for an area (e.g. restaurants, sites, places to visit etc.) which you augment with your own content as and when you have some so that you are not starting with nothing. That will involve extensive customisation, but I suspect you will need quite a bit of that along the road in any case.

Good luck!

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