Site-Sift Listings: A mini review

Not a Native English Speaker — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 07:42:52 +0000

For one of my directories I use Site-Sift Listings. It’s a free directory script that you can find here. They also offer a paid version that has no real differences from the free script other than it gives you permission to remove the Powered by Site-Sift from your pages. Personally I have paid to remove it for various reasons that I will probably discuss in a future post.
Let’s start from the basics, Site-sift was very easy to install and configure. It looks pretty nice out of the box and just by adding a nice logo you can have a Botw.org style directory. It provides SE friendly URLs that can be crawled easily from the search engine bots and all the listings are search engine friendly. Finally it is quite easy for users
to submit their links, a fact that is very important if you want to get a lot of submissions.

Now let’s go to the negatives.
My biggest gripes with this directory script is that the admin panel is not really user friendly. Some examples:
The awaiting validation page isn’t paginated, so you may ask what is wrong with that? Wait until you get a few hundreds or thousands submissions awaiting validation and then you will see why this is a big problem. Everytime you approve or delete a submission the page reloads and if you have that may listings it becomes time consuming. Recently that I had this problem I decided to do the reviewing from PHPMyAdmin, no I am not kidding.

Another thing that is missing is the mass approve or delete buttons, something like the wordpress comments moderating system would be ideal.

Adding categories or moving them wasn’t thought out very well in my opinion as well. Why? because the categories tree doesn’t allow you to identify parent and child categories easily.

Overall it’s a good script, however I would like a bit more user friendly admin panel *hint hint*

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Site-Sift Listings: A mini review