Welcome to our tutorials/guides related to phpMyDirectory! There is a few articles on this page so be sure to scroll down.

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Data integrity and sources, this is VERY important. If you are starting up your own business directory whether it targets local, national, or international markets you are probably going to buy a database of listings to 'seed' your directory and get you going.

Make sure you keep records of all transactions and the sources where you bought your data! We recently got hit with a Copyright Infringement notice for one of our ZipLeaf sites. The copyright holder (a company that holds and protects the copyrights for their clients) notified us that we are infringing upon their copyrights by displaying data copied from another website. A very common practice with major companies such as YellowPages is to put false data inside their directories to catch data scrapers and other websites displaying their data.

This is exactly what happened to us. The copyright agent sent us a formal letter containing a list of all allegations and demands including we immediately shut down the site. We obviously did not want to do this so we fought back. Emails back and forth for a few weeks and we finally reached an acceptible deal which satisfied all parties. We ended up supplying them with copies of all transactions for the data we purchased, a copy of the database we received, and then removed all data from the database from our sites.

How was this a good outcome for us? We were able to keep our domain name (which we could have lost), we were able to keep all business data submitted by businesses through our site. Although the site took a huge impact on rankings and 404's, it's finally beginning to climb back up. We're not going to say which site was hit with the infringement, doesn't really matter.

So advice to you is keep all records and a static copy of the database you buy. It can be used as a bargaining tool. One thing is for sure, you can't keep using the data there is no way around that. The copyright agent's firm is now going to sue the data supplier and the data we've supplied to them will seriously help their case.

The infringing data was NOT purchased from any data suppliers listed on pmdmods.com, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful!

This is a tough issue and there is a lot of disagreeing between publishers, some will say text and others will say images.

On one of our sites which generates on average 12,000 unique visitors monthly (not a lot to benchmark against I know, this is just an example) my original advertising impression was image ads must generate the most amount as you earn not only from clicks but also from impressions because, well, the ad is graphical. I was completely wrong. During the first 4 months of using image ads, we received around 150 clicks on the ads. which generated very low values per click.

About a month ago we changed the ads to text based, changed the colors of the text ads to match our site and now we generate a significanly higher amount of clicks as well as a higher value per click. We are excited!

Possible reasons for this change: a lot of people say the odds of getting more clicks and higher revenue with text-based ads is because Google (for example) has a signifcantly higher amount of text-based ads to server than image ads. This means the relevancy of the ads to your webpages is higher and therefore the amount of clicks could go up.

These are of course our own personal experiences and while we recommend text ads we can't guarantee you will see an increase in revenue over image ads. I suppose it all depends on what the content of your web pages is!

YES IT DOES MATTER! Again, some may say it does not matter and some may say it does. I personally believe without a doubt it does!

Validating your HTML markup to be 100% valid XHTML (for example) is a crucial task in getting better results. Not only are the chances of higher full cross-browser compatibility significantly higher, I believe (yes I may be wrong) search engines use this for page ranking/scoring as well.

Not only could it make a difference in page ranking, it also could increase your ad revenue.

One of our clients recently told us that after converting their website from a no html doctype into an xhtml valid site they saw an increase in ad value (total amount of revenue per click) shortly after the upgrade. Whether or not this may make a difference on your site I can't say, but virutally every web designer will say the same thing - build a valid W3C template or convert your existing one!

Having issues with your phpMyDirectory delivering emails to your users?

Over the past several months we have been having major issues where emails sent through our server did not reach their destinations. Most of the time email delivery issues are solved with proper SPF records, however setting up proper SPF records can be a nightmare especially if you are not server-literate.

The mother of all delivery issues we had is hotmail email accounts. Gmail/Yahoo and other free email based services were not a problem, but Hotmail and other MSN email services flat out rejected all our emails sent.

We finally found a solution that is unbelievably simple which solved all our email delivery issues.

Check out http://www.smtp2go.com/

This service is very cheap (as low as $23.88 / year) and took us only 1 minute to setup on our servers! Test emails sent were delivered straight hotmail inboxes (which amazed me) and there were no delay's in delivery.

Not only can you use this for your server/phpMyDirectory installation, you can also set it up for your email program on your computer. This is especially handy for users who travel a lot. Whenever you are at a different location and you use email applications such as Microsoft Outlook, you have to manually configure your SMTP server settings depending on the Internet ISP you are using at your new locations. With smtp2go you only have to configure it once and you can send emails wherever you are in the world without having to reconfigure settings!

If you decide to go with this service (highly recommended) here are the steps to set it up for your phpMyDirectory after you signup with smtp2go:

1. Login to your phpMyDirectory admin control panel
2. Expand the 'Configuration' tree in the left menu
3. Expand the 'Settings' tree
4. Click on the 'Email' link
5. Set 'SMTP Enable' to true
6. Set 'SMTP Server' to smtp2go.com
7. Leave all other settings blank

For more information about their service visit their website at http://www.smtp2go.com/

This handy little module will add forced ssl redirects when viewing your members area as well as forced ssl redirects to http:// when viewing the directory.

Open up .htaccess and add the following changing 'yourdomain.com' to your PMD url:

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} members
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !members
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]