One of our recent personal projects called for a job board solution. There are quite a few non-wordpress open-source projects available, each with their advantages and disadvantages. In the end we decided to look for a WordPress solution, though, mainly because we wanted to be able to pick and chose from the huge amount of available plugins to extend our job board.
A quick look around the net brought up a good few options:
- WP Job Ads (plugin)
- WP Job Board (plugin)
- JobPress (theme)
We actually went so far and bought a copy of JobPress (why re-invent the wheel?), it being a theme and thus giving us more flexibility, just to realize that this wasn’t exactly what we wanted or needed (bummer!). For one, it hadn’t been updated in quite a while. It seemed to be in a pre-WP 2.6 state. Just upgrading the theme to be able to utilize the power of 2.8 would have taken a full day.
We would have had to keep upgrading the theme ourselves as well. It doesn’t look like the author is interested in keeping JobPress up-to-date. It’s not what you’d expect from a product you paid money for. The code wasn’t written that efficiently and some features we wanted, like PayPal integration weren’t fully implemented. Also, JobPress is not GPL. In fact, it seems it doesn’t have any license attached. The author only told us that it was not GPL, but not, what it actually is.
In the end it boiled down to two choices. First, use JobPress, but heavily modify it (for all its disadvantages, it still does, what it’s meant to do). We wouldn’t be able to share the code, it not being GPL, but our job board would be up and running fairly soon, say a week. The other option would be to write our very own job board theme from scratch. It would take a lot longer, but we’d be able to do with it what we wanted, so we went with that choice and JobBoardr was born.
Basically, JobBoardr is a parent-theme, meaning that it can be modified easily through the use of child-themes. You can put all your changes into a separate theme that still uses the templates and functions of its parent-theme. This way none of your modifications get lost during an upgrade of the parent-theme.
There’s a bunch of other features as well, like localization, front-end accounts for both employers and employees, sending job applications as pdf to employers, premium job ads, 7 advanced widgets, an API (so other people can feature job ads on their site), automatic pdf invoice generation for companies posting a job, a complete backend for admins, through which many options can be changed and a few more…
Future features will include a lot of AJAX goodies, an affiliate programme and CV generation for employees, just to name a few. Plus, the job board engine will be GPL compatible. That’s the good news. The bad news is (for you anyways), that we will still need to charge for it. The price will be somewhere between €70 and €100. Our main reason for doing this is that job boards are making money for the people running it.
Here’s a little screenshot from what we have so far (things might change slightly):
At the moment we still consider JobBoardr unstable. The current version is 0.7 alpha. Once it reaches beta stage, we will upload a public hosted version and invite everybody to help test it. As a little incentive, we will give beta testers a discount. The bigger the help, the better the discount.
If you’re interested in helping with the beta testing or just want to be notified when JobBoardr reaches beta stage, then go to JobBoardr and submit your email address.
hope you will make a german version too? – i need a proper wp job board solution… looking foreward to see this!
hey niko,
the theme is completely internationalized and there will be a german .mo file with the first release. I’m hoping to get a first hosted beta out within the next 5 days. It’ll still have some bugs and will look slightly messy in IE7 and completely messy in IE6, but you can get a first impression. There’ll be a page, where people can help with debugging it. And everybody who did help will get a discount. The bigger the help, the bigger the discount :)
There will also be a page dedicated to future features, so if you feel you absolutely need something, then that’s the place to leave a comment.
Boris
hi, is this theme still in development? any idea when will it be release?
Yes, it’s still in development. We are working on a BP/WPMU based social network at the moment, that takes precedense, but a requirement for that project is also a jobboard, so as soon as we get to the stage where the network is set up and themed properly, we’ll start working again at JobBoardr.
I can’t really give you a proper release date yet, sorry. I’m hoping a month for the network and then JobBoardr a couple weeks later.
bp as in travel-junkie? that’s how i found out about your blog and jobboardr…
i’d love to assist in beta-testing, i’m currently running a jobberbase site with around 5000 jobs listed…
Wondering if there was a release date for this theme…? I see January 2010 in the blog… are you still targeting January 2010 and if so, what do you think will be the ballpark price for this? Thanks for the work on this.
Yep, hopefully it’ll still go online late January 2010. Might be a couple weeks later than that. We’ll be charging a little less than EUR 100 for it. This will include support for 3 months and full access to our support forums. If you should need support outside of the initial 3 months, then you will have to purchase another support package.
by the way, would love to help beta test the site
Yes, you can. There is a test site up at http://test.jobboardr.com/. You can leave feature requests and bug reports there. Cheers!
I have been playing with the text site. Now, I am so excited. I can’t wait, I can’t wait !!! LOL
Good morning. Well, I was really hoping you would have jobboardr ready for purchase by now. Unfortunately, I really must roll out a job board this month. Any chance you will have this ready soon? Thank you.
Hey Boris,
What ever happened to your Jobsboardr Buddypress plugin. That looked like just the kind of thing we needed for our organization’s website. We have a theme with bp integrated. We just need a bp based jobs board. Any chance yours is still available in plugin form?
Matt Edminster
The site we were developing it for never really got off the ground, so development stopped.