BePro Listings is built to scale to millions of listings. Typically, Visual Form Builder’s trap all of the information in a single database cell. At best, they will store the title in a separate cell. As you can imagine, its not possible to search and filter much more than the title in such a case
ADVANCED SEARCH AND FILTER
BePro Listings uses addons to facilitate search features. Each addon focuses on specific types of information and search criteria. For example, our BePro lisitngs Real Estate addon will add bath and room related search criteria options.
Whats more important, is that BePro Listings Real Estate has its own table where it stores each piece of related information in its own cell. So in a particular row, number of baths is in its own cell and so is number of baths. As you can imagine, this is very conducive for searching and filtering.
ADDON INTEGRATION
What we have created, is a situation where the Real Estate addon focuses on Real Estate information. It focuses on making the real estate experience as focused as possible. The form builder doesn’t know or care about what its doing. The only thing the form builder knows, is that you used the Real Estate button in the form.
Thats right, you unleash all of these real estate features by simply dragging the real estate option into the form and saving it. The Real Estate plugin is alerted to this event and will begin facilitating the features on the upload form and details page.
SEARCH ALTERNATIVES
Other plugins may try to offer you the ability to search custom post types and custom fields. This is limited since it cannot facilitate range searches or anything other than a string match. Also Remember, category and custom field information are each buried 3 joins deep in wordpress per record. That’s 3 joins per category and 3 joins per custom field. It is not possible to scale this beyond a few listings and a few visitors.
The approach taken by BePro Listings, is to have multiple pieces of related information in a table row. So there are limited joins to get the information. Ask your database or software developer, this approach may not allow you to search everything, but it will allow you to scale to millions of listings and visitors.
CONCLUSION
When trying to design a directory for hundreds of thousands of listings, the information needs to be stored in easy to reach table rows. BePro Listings does exactly this via addons. Real Estate information have their own table with the Real Estate Addon. Vehicle information has its own table with the Vehicles addon. So if you need new custom search features, that are not included with the stock plugin, you will need a dedicated addon to facilitate those features.