I have been dreaming of building a couple of directory sites for some time but could never find the right solution. Over the Black Friday sales flurry, I found a plugin called the Directorist that had added support for Bricks Builder. I wrestled with the purchase for a few days, and then bit the bullet on the LTD (supposedly going away). This is a quick review after a day of working with it.

Bricks Builder Integration

The integration with Bricks Builder is pretty limited and essentially adds the primary shortcodes to the element library. The upside is you can use the dynamic data and layout features of Bricks to build out some custom layouts. I can see this being a very successful integration, especially if they extend the shortcodes to the filters and give us the ability to target a Bricks query.

Screenshot of the 18 Directorist elements in Bricks Builder.
Directorist Elements

ACSS and the Directorist

If you are an Automatic CSS user like me, the Directorist will probably frustrate you. The structure of the cards and the listings get wonky with the auto spacing and card layouts enabled. The Directorist adds sections inside of articles inside the query loop. The automatic spacing creates havoc with the design as you will see in this video (no sound).

I had already added a bunch of CSS to fix the basic cards, but the listing is nuts, and after looking at the code, way more work than I want to do.

Here is the same feature without ACSS enabled and some custom CSS applied.

The Verdict

I may do another article on the Directorist, but all in all I think it is a really nice product and provides an all-in-one solution for directory projects — better than others I have tried. I may use it on a few projects, but the primary project I am working on now will likely be all custom post types and fields, WS Form, SureMembers, and SureCart to replace the functionality. I find these canned solutions limited in that they handle the majority of use cases, but don’t address special needs in a flexible way. I am sure if I spent more than a day or two digging in, some other shortcomings I noticed could be resolved. I will be watching the progress and making feature requests along my journey.