Business Directory tries very hard to work well with as many plugins and themes as possible. We adhere to all WordPress standards and API practices and keep up to date with any changes that come our way.
With that said, not all plugins and themes are quite as diligent or well-written, and even when they are, conflicts can occur. If you’re seeing a weird issue with BD, the first thing you should check is whether a plugin conflict is causing it or not.
To determine if a problem exists, we recommend following the steps outlined below:
NOTE: Some themes don’t persist all their settings when you deactivate them (this is BAD behavior by a theme, not a problem caused by us…). Make sure you either keep track of where your widgets were or you have a reliable backup to ensure that you don’t lose any settings.
Plugins don’t generally have this issue, but not all plugins are well-written. BD will ALWAYS preserve its settings and data if you deactivate it.
Plugin Conflict Check
This is a temporary check to find out if any other plugin is interfering with BD’s functionality. It’s not intended as a fix, only as a way to find out what the cause of the problem is.
- Temporarily disable ALL other plugins except BD (and related modules for BD)
- Test the problem again.
- If the problem disappears, then you have a plugin conflict on your hands.
- Enable the plugins ONE at a time and test the problem (step 2) each time.
- Repeat this until you see the failure.
- The plugin you just enabled is the culprit. Skip to step 5.
- If you disable all plugins and the conflict is STILL there, continue to “Theme Conflict Check”.
- Re-enable your disabled plugins again.
Theme Conflict Check
This is a temporary check to find out if your theme is interfering with BD’s functionality. It’s not intended as a fix, only as a way to find out what the cause of the problem is.
- Temporarily switch to a default theme, like TwentyTen or TwentyEleven.
- Test the problem again
- If the problem disappears, then you have a theme conflict on your hands.
- If the problem remains, the bug is in Business Directory. Report this.
- Switch back to your original theme again
It’s important to understand if a theme or plugin conflict is happening, since every plugin and theme can be a little bit different. For theme problems, we will likely refer you to the theme developer or perhaps offer a simple fix (if we know of it). Plugin problems may be resolved if you recently updated to a new version by downgrading to the last good version you were using.
In general, we can’t really fix issues with other plugins if they are doing something that violates WordPress standards. We will do our best to help, but if we find this to be the case, you’ll need to get in touch with the plugin or theme developer and ask them to fix it.
Please report any new conflicts you find to customer support.
Recommended Themes
Business Directory Plugin will work with any well-written, WordPress compliant theme. Generally speaking, paid themes tend to be higher quality than free ones.
Here are a couple we recommend and test with Business Directory:
Whatever theme you pick, we recommend using the Theme Check plugin (available for free on WordPress.org) to validate how WordPress-compliant that theme actually is. The more errors and warnings you see on the theme when you run that check, the worse the theme is. You can read more about it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-check/
(This plugin was developed by WP Core developers to validate their own default themes and is highly respected in the theme community.)