Showcase – Helloperiyar.com

Hello Readers

Welcome to the first ever showcase of Open-Classifieds.com. In this initiative of ours, we are going to show you some outstanding projects that have been powered by our powerful script – Open Classifieds.

Let me present to you in our first showcase – an initiative from a common man that has tried putting whole of his city on a single website. With no prior knowledge of PHP and internet, this guy from India has really done a great work with a custom advertisement mod and some minor tweaks. Read on to find out more about the project from the man himself.

An Open-Classifieds Success Story

www.helloperiyar.com is a free classifieds site having 13 main categories and 100’s of sub-categories and locations and has been running successfully for many months.

I am running this free classifieds site, www.helloperiyar.com which allows users to post free classified ads. The site serves the local area of Idukki district in the state of Kerala, India. The site is currently in beta testing phase and undergoes minor changes every other day but has managed to reach the 10000 daily visitors mark already. A thing which I am proud (and amazed) of is that, I and my team has not put in a single minute to promote our site. Of course we have done some basic SEO but one cannot count it in promotions. Every visit we have received is because of the love and affection of the local community which this little site has served.

The project, ‘www.helloperiyar.com’ is fully based on the mighty php classifieds script ‘open-classifieds’ script (v1.74). I have modified the script as per my requirement and I am quite happy with what I have achieved so far. Honestly, I had no prior knowledge of PHP, but the clean and simple code structure used by the developers helped me get hold of the language and customize the script as per my need.

I am really thankful to the people at ‘open-classifieds’ and respect their effort in developing such a wonderful product for the world to use for free and I am also grateful for providing great support (you should buy the premium support if you are serious with your project . My very special thanks to the leader of the free classifieds script project, Mr. Chema for his sincere efforts and dedication.

What I have created till now is not a marvel. In fact, it hasn’t met even my expectations yet. Till now, I have just created a basic structure that I had in my mind when I thought about a classifieds site. The look and feel of the site can be greatly improved using a little CSS here and there and I am constantly working on it.

How I decided that OC is THE BEST for me?

When I realized the fact that the people in our rural area are in need of a common marketplace where they can exchange anything, place advertisements for free, look for jobs, people, vehicles, real estate etc, a passion developed in me to make a classifieds site dedicated specially to our hilly backward district which is based purely on agriculture. I approached several web developers with my idea and was ready to start at that very instant but none of them gave me a positive response. It was then when I decided to take matter in my hand started to search the web for a solution. I tested many softwares and scripts, but none of them provided me the amount of flexibility I needed. Finally after a lot of research I reached the script which I finally used – the open-classifieds script/software system.

When I started experimenting with open-classifieds script, I had no idea about the scripting language PHP, what it is, how it works, nothing! When I went through the OC code with the help of the OC support help and documentation, I was able learn a few commands and tags of PHP. OC compelled me to learn the language bit-by-bit and now with that knowledge, I was able to develop a WordPress theme almost completely on my own (Its called Freeworld and has been submitted for testing/approval to the WordPress team)[The theme’s support site is under development and will be available soon at ‘http://zetozone.org/freeworld’].

Our Mission

We are running this website non-profitably with an aim to donate all income generated from it to a charitable trust, which is in the initial stages of creation and will be aiming at serving abandoned, rejected, neglected, people with different abilities irrespective of any caste, creed, religion or regional differences.

Customization

Paid Ads

The project has provision to place a maximum of 5 display/banner ads (paid Ads in the form of static/animated image banners) in each page to get some money from advertisers. The site is currently operational with some sample ads for an initial trial but posting a classified ad is totally. Each page has got a certain weightage, depending on which the Ad rates vary. For example: Home page, Home page → Main category page (Automobiles, Real Estate etc), Home page → Main Location (Major towns), Main category → Main location, Main category → Sub-location (Small locations under Main Towns), Sub category → Main Location, Sub category → Sub location etc. I have added a small javascript for this in the ‘Admin menu → Settings → Adsense and Advertising → Top Advertisement’ section and some (5 Nos) ‘default’ ads which shows when no or insufficient number of ads(less than 5) are there in the selected page. The ads cycles every 12.5 seconds and each one is shown once in every minute.

There is a Control panel through which our representatives/Admin can login and search for free slot availability in a particular page, Block an advert space, fill details of advertiser/advertisement including validity days (For how many days the ad should be displayed), removal of expired ads, Activation/Uploading of Ad banners to the appropriate directory path etc. (Other options include listing of deleted/expired ads, listing/editing/removal of blocked space/ad slot, etc.) When a directory listing is inserted, a free classifieds ad is automatically placed in the free classifieds section to get it noticed in web-searches by extracting the details of the firm from the user input.
Directory Listing

Our site is designed for serving the local area with a provision for ‘Directory Listing Service’ for our district with the details of the different firms in our district, which can be viewed and searched by anyone for free. A user can search for any firm in any place/category by giving the appropriate details. In addition, a user can search the database by giving any part of any/many details of a firm they wish to find. Any user can suggest/add listings to the directory themselves, in which a verification/approval by the administrator is required before it is added to the database. When anyone adds a new listing, administrator gets a mail with the details of the listing and of the sender. There is a control panel mechanism for adding/editing/deleting categories, places, listings etc and activating all inactive listing’s suggestions from users.

There are some more minor modifications that I have done here and there for customizing the script. For example, I have added one more field in the ‘Accounts’ menu of admin menu, to display the last ad put by the account/user along with their details – to easily identify spammers and hi-jackers, and thus making it a lot easier to control spam.

When people are thanking me/us for the benefits they have obtained utilizing the helloperiyar.com ad service, we really feel proud in been able to provide such a service to the deserving society, absolutely free of cost.

Once again my thanks and regards to all team members at ‘open-classifieds’

Thank you

Siby P Varkey

Zetozone Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd
Kerala, India

We wish Mr. Siby all the best for his current project and we would love to see this project evolve and blog about it again in future.

If you want to be a part of this initiative of ours and get your website showcased, feel free to contact us.