General requirements
Overall, a new Drupal business directory module should answer to the following requirements:
- Easy to integrate into a Drupal website
- Basic default features, but easy to extend (for example with additional fields)
- ...
Basic features
A business directory module should have the following core features:
Search function
The module should have an advanced search functionalities that allows to search the directory based on:
- The name of the company (of course)
- Keywords (i.e. search for flowers, books, scissors, drupal, ...)
- Physical location (i.e. search for "drupal developer in Brazzaville")
- ...
Listings
It should be possible to present search results by:
- Proximity to a physical location (ev. through the Openlayers module
- Rating: The better the rating, the higher in the list an entry should appear
- Relevance: Do the research key words appear in the entry?
- Keywords: Show all entries that have a specific keyword (using taxonomy)
- ...
Other features
- Show rearch results on a map
- Statistics: It should be possible to easily see how many hits a particular entry received and how many people click through to the website of a company in the directory
- ...
Non core-features
The following features are not a "necessity" but would be great to have:
- Bridge to CiviCRM: Would allow to handle all the contact details in a CRM
- Android/iPhone/iPad app: Allow mobile users to easily search the directory