Sound the Trumpets, Vantage is Here!
Here ye! Here ye! AppThemes is proud to announce our latest creation, Vantage!
Vantage is a powerful and robust business directory theme for WordPress that’s easy to use and even easier to setup. It’s fast, got lots of horsepower under the hood, and uses our new drag and drop form builder which will help transform your site into an interactive, money-making, community-building machine.
It’s on Sale!
As promised, Vantage will be on sale for 30% during the first week, after which it’ll jump back to its normal price of $99. It’s a little token of appreciation to everyone that has waited patiently (or not so patiently) for Vantage to become available. The sale lasts until next Tuesday, May 8th. Purchase Vantage here and use coupon code: GETVANTAGE
Learn More
- The Vantage overview page outlines all the features and functions, complete with screenshots
- Test drive the theme by visiting the live Vantage demo and admin demo
The Nitty Gritty
Business Listings
Once setup, Vantage makes it a breeze to add or sell business listings. Each listing contains contact info, website, social links, pictures, overview text, locator map and more. You can charge for listings and upsell featured listings prominently displayed on the home page and category pages.
Business Reviews
Since interactivity keeps visitors coming back to your site, Vantage includes a review and ratings system. Users can rate a business on a five-star scale and leave a detailed, text review about their experience with that business.
Monetize Your Site
Vantage allows you to charge for listings and upsell for featured listings. Or, you can use Vantage to build traffic to your site and charge for banner ads. Either way, Vantage give you a great start to creating an income-generating web site. If you can build the traffic, Vantage makes it easy to generate the revenue.
Not Just a Directory
Vantage includes pages, a blog, and all the other features you’d expect from a premium WordPress app. This means you can build a fully immersive experience and make the business directory just a part of that experience.
Much, Much More
These features just scratch the surface of what Vantage is capable of doing. We suggest reading the theme overview page or checking out the demo to learn more. It’s also just the first step in what Vantage will ultimately become.
Over the next few months, we’ll be adding more features like events, coupons and discounts, multiple pricing options, user favorites, owner responses to reviews, claim a business, more social integration, custom fields for users, additional payment options, and more. We’ll also have tutorials for developers on how you can easily extend Vantage (payment gateways, etc.).
Don’t Forget, It’s on Sale for Just this Week!
Seriously, it’s flying off the shelves and we’re running out of stock so you better get your copy now! Don’t forget to use the discount code GETVANTAGE for 30% off.
What’s Included in Vantage 1.0
All the basics of what you would expect from a business directory theme.
- Business listings with business address, contact, website, social links and description
- Pictures including a thumbnail / featured image – pictures open in a lightbox
- Reviews and ratings
- Editable user accounts
- User dashboard to manage reviews and listings
- Keyword and location-based search using Google Maps API
- Multi-tier categorization system
- Search engine optimized
- Multiple page templates
- Editable menus in header and footer
- Email notifications for new listings and reviews
- Localization support
- Theme color options
- Separate blog and page templates to promote your directory
Vantage Extras
- All new custom forms and custom fields with an even easier to use AppThemes form builder
- Refine search features like search radius, category and sorting filters
- Custom user admin bar that leverages the power of the WordPress admin bar
- Easy log in form on every page
- Integration with ShareThis social sharing plugin
Sidebars and Custom Widgets
- Four fully widgetized sidebars: main, single listing, search results and single page
- Four widgetized spots in the global footer
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One widgetized spot in the global header, perfect for a 468×60 ad banner
- Create listing button is widgetized so you control where it is placed on a page
- Sidebar map widget with exact location of business listing
- Recent reviews
- Recent listings
- Popular and related categories
- Sidebar and footer ad widget
- Vantage social connect widget for footer
Monetizing Vantage
- Charge a fee for business listings
- View all transactions via admin panel
- Additional fee for home page and category featured listings
- Standard ad widget can be used in four pre-installed sidebars and four slots in the global page footer
- Widgetized location in the header that is perfect for a 468×60 banner
Taking Payments
- All payment gateways created as plugins
- Comes prepackaged with PayPal
- Uses PayPal Payment Data Transfer for greater security
- Test gateway for testing transactions on your site (available version 1.1)
Comments (106)
If you promise to have features like the one i currently use (GeoTheme- look it up) then you will have one heck of a business directory portal. Nothing comes quite close to that theme, YET.
Contact me if you can, I have been involved with community portal sites for the last 3 years – I can share some great concepts and ideas with you guys at Appthemes.
Have a great weekend 🙂
Hi Shannon,
Very excited about Vantage, have been working with it the last few days and love it, great job.
I have a question regarding the original screen shot of the home page. Will we see layout similar to the original screen shot, a more magazine style layout???
Here is the link to to the original Image:
It would be huge improvement to the current layout. And would also have space for all the other features that are planned, favs, share it, events, members area ect.
Thank you
wppete, I’d be interested in knowing what specific elements of the linked image you are looking for.
Hi Shannon,
Thanks for the reply. The elements that would be great in the magazine style home page are:
A tap section that include:
– Newly Listed
– Recently Reviewed
– popular
– Random
Also My Favs button and Share button.
A new member section (as shown in the screen shot)
Eventually when Events Feature is added:
– Popular Events
– Recently added Events
Here a link to the screen shot.
http://www.appthemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/vantage-home-full.jpg
Thank you.
wppete, you mention newly listed, recently reviewed, popular, and random. I assume you are looking for the tabbed style browsing at the top. If so, I’m not sure if we will do that or not. We’ll keep it in mind.
Share is already available on single listing pages by using the ShareThis social plugin. You can read about setting up ShareThis for Vantage in our docs section. We will look into adding it to items on the listings pages.
Faves are coming in 1.1.
New members…maybe.
Popular events and recently added, yes.
Thanks for the reply Shannon,
I really hope appthemes considers The Tabbed style browsing at the top, similar to the original screen shot.
Look forward to the next update.
Thank you
Hi, just wondering if you’e still planning on adding an event listing capability to this theme? If it’s still on the cards I’ll purchase the theme now whilst the discount is being offered and wait for this functionality to be released.
Thanks!!
Yes, events will be added.
This theme could be what im looking for.Does this come with any language packs?My clients site is Spanish?
@mike…Language packs can be found here.
Shannon,
Is this particular pack is assigned to Vantage or
is it pretty much the same language pack for all
themes such as Classipress?
Vantage Language Packs
Never mind !
We can’t use paypal in our country so i want to know if there is any other alternative to purchase the theme.
You can purchase the theme with AlertPay and Google Checkout. If you purchase the theme please realize that Vantage only uses PayPal as a payment gateway. That could be a problem for You if PayPal is unusable in your country. More payment gateways will be added soon.
May I know how soon maybe I can wait because I love this theme?
@Jay, a bank transfer plugin should be available within a couple of months if not sooner. We already have a Google Checkout plugin but we need to modify that for our new payments API. That also might be available within the next couple of months.
Your response is rather contradictory or not so clear. You say one can purchase the theme with AlertPay, where and how? But at the same time you say that that could be a problem if Paypal is unsable in one’s country. Its time you developers realise that you serve a global market and the assumption that Paypal is the mother of all gateways is rather ill-founded. I simply can’t use it in South Africa cause R100 becoems $100 meaning R700 for the poor buyer. You follow!
If someone wants to purchase a theme from us, they can use PayPal, Google Checkout or AlertPay to make their purchase.
The theme itself only has the capability to accept payments in PayPal. We will realize this is a problem for some countries which is why we are creating plugins for other gateways.
I also bought vantage. I’m happy for the work you do. I’m sure will become strong and better than many other directories! Give us into the people have confidence in you. 🙂
Thanks adriano!
Hi Shannon,
I have coupon of questions:
1: Can I apply Vintage coupon/savings towards AppThemes Club Developer/Lifetime price of $349
2: If I buy Vintage today for $111 (including the coupon), can I pay the difference later towards AppThemes Club Developer/Lifetime version?
Thanks,
1. You cannot use the Vantage discount to buy Club.
2. If You purchase Vantage, You can pay the difference between the price You paid for Vantage and the cost of Club.
Can you give a realistic timeframe for when the promised Events functionality will be added? Will this include the ability to link a place to an event and vice versa? This is vital for me.
Thanks
I cannot give a realistic time frame. Sorry. There are just too many variables for me to say it will be ready at any specific time. As always, we will be working on it as quickly as we can.
Thanks Shannon, are you able to say whether the events function will link places to events. eg. Show upcoming events at a particular venue, and show a link back to the venue on the event listing page? If this functionality is coming I will be interested in purchasing the theme.
I think we’ll consider that. We’re going to look at the requests we get for events and use that to help us decide what to include.
Hi. Any plans to add an event calendar (if this is different from events) and classifieds or a bulletin board? Or would those be external plugins?
thanks
Events calendar? Potentially. Classifieds and bulletin board? Not likely.
Nice… everything looks and sound pretty cool.. but what about for those of us that already purchased the club membership just for Vantage!!
Don’t we deserve a little something?
I would hate to think that you don’t care since we already purchased the product.
Well, we’ll have to think about what we can do to show our appreciation for our club members – perhaps a free child theme? I’ll let everyone know when we have an idea worthy of announcement.
What about the Bulk Upload?
Can you give us some information as to how this will work. Can we upload millions of business listings at once, are there limitations, Is there a format that must be used?
We recently had a discussion about importing data. It’s tough. Even with a good importer tool, it can be tough. It’s even more difficult when you have huge numbers. We start to get into db server performance issues when you talk about millions.
The new importer for our themes should work quite well but you will need a properly formatted data file. That can be cumbersome work. It can also be overwhelming for the lay person.
We are going to be there to help people use the importer but there will be difficult cases where more assistance is going to be needed. We’re looking at some services that can import data for you. When we are satisfied that we have found a competent and reliable service, we will post to our partners page.
Frank, we are resolving a couple of bugs in the importer but that should be ready to go for maybe 1.0.1. While it will help with importing data from other sources, there are caveats. The data file needs to be properly formatted. Millions of listings might be a bit of a load on your DB.
I purchased the theme for the future developments and the hope that the theme would gets better.
The search bug is a big mistake and should never have been released, the themes lack of initial features makes the homepage just a list of entries, no nice tabbed styling that was on the preview and the overall websites style looks so dated. Very little theme options in the admin, for example uploading a logo and favicon is a standard even for free themes….
Having said all of that I did buy the theme 🙂 just wished you would have worked on it a bit longer to make it better before release…
/rant
All the items you mention, binary, are on the way. At some point, it’s best to just get the product out and then continue to develop from there. Vantage will be continuously evolving into the theme we originally envisioned.
Is it possible to allow free listings but also charge for the Featured listings? My manager recently purchased this theme and we’ve been trying to achieve this.
Jason, you can charge for featured and nothing for listings.
Admin > Vantage > Settings > General tab > Enable Featured Listings checked
Now click the save button at the bottom of the page.
Next
Admin > Vantage > Settings > Payments tab
Charge for listings…yes
Listing Price…0
Price for home page featured…add your price here
Price for category page featured…add your price here
Now click the save button at the bottom of the page.
Hi Shannon,
Can you add the the option to change the colour scheme to the Vantage Demo like you have done with the other themes?
Can you also advise if it is possible in Vantage to display business listings by city or other geo region and then category?
Thanks
We will add the color options to the demo, I’m just not sure when we can do that.
Currently, Vantage is not able to do multi-region. That is a very in demand feature for ClassiPress, too, but I think we are a long way off from implementing that feature in either theme.
Thanks Shannon, do you know if anyone has come up with a good workaround/plugin for the multi-region function in Classipress or Vantage?
I have tried looking in the forum but being limited to the Pre-sale questions makes it impossible to see if any existing customers have come up with a solution.
Would you consider changing your forum policy to allow prospective customers to be able to read replies to questions in the product forums? As long as posting is not allowed I don’t see that it effects the privileges of paying customers?
Sarah, I know of a multi-region child theme for ClassiPress called Statify. You might want to check that out.
We will continue to keep our forums closed to customers only. you can definitely ask any question in the pre-sales forums that might help the decision to buy any product. If You have further questions, you can always email me direct at sdunn@appthemes.com.
What are the editing capabilities of the theme? i am a developer, can i get access to the code and change it to make the homepage look how i want?
I hope so because this sounds like a GREAT theme for what im after.
Thanks
Chris
We have several action hooks for our themes ( http://docs.appthemes.com/category/action-hooks ). You can build child themes to modify at will. Modifying the core theme files are not recommended as updates my eliminate changes that you have made. Finally, anyone can have access to the theme for the extremely reasonable price of $99.
Hey Appthemes,
Just thought you might like to know – we finally released our premium child theme for Vantage. At the risk of shameless marketing – I thought you might want to check out http://bit.ly/LLBCxH for a demo 🙂
Bravo, TinyGiant. We encourage everyone to check out this child theme.
What’s so great about your theme?
just a few different backgrounds and gradients?
I personally like the current theme from vantage.
Thanks for the props on Vantage, Chrsitian. The theme from Tiny Giant Studios provides more choice to our customers. If a customer does not like the look and feel of Vantage out of the box, Tiny Giant Studios provides a nice alternative. More choice is a good thing in this case.
Discussion is closed.