Solid plugin, just a few things to consider for developers

The plugin is definitely powerful and works very well for a directory! They have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into it.

As a developer accustomed to using ACF, I do feel GeoDirectory is less naturally-intuitive and has a steeper learning curve. I think many of the features & settings are in odd places, named strangely, and/or work differently than I would have expected, and it has taken me a lot of back and forth with support to get my bearings. Most things I need are “there,” it just takes a lot of digging around.

I want to stress that the QUALITY of the email support is outstanding. They give thoughtful answers and have written me custom code on multiple occasions to accomplish tasks, and I am deeply appreciative of that. But I am still not a fan of the “closed” support system itself. They do not have any type of user support forum anymore, and they have gone so far as to obscure answers in past conversations from their old forum. Their documentation also feels unpolished, disjointed and incomplete, lacking much in the way of examples and user-generated tips—it really pales in comparison to the thoroughness and cohesiveness that ACF offers. With ACF I am always able to get my questions answered with a quick google search, whereas with GeoDirectory almost every question I have ends up becoming an email conversation over a day or two.

Also, GD works very differently than I’m used to in the way it stores data to the database. They have a full explanation about the reasoning behind this (for query performance basically), which I’m not equipped to argue with. But this approach does result in things being more siloed off from the “normal” WP ecosystem. GD has its own separate internal management system for categories, tags, custom post types, custom fields, etc. This means some of my beloved, always-installed plugins for bulk editing content (like Admin Columns and WP Sheet Editor) do not work at all with GD, and that interacting with GD content using common “vanilla WP” ways is not possible. Just something to consider.

Overall though it’s solid and reliable, does the vast majority of what we need it to do, so we’re quite happy with it!