We've completely redesigned the schedule calendar to provide a better experience for planning and managing your directory content. The new calendar offers improved visualization and makes it much easier to see what's coming up at a glance.

What's New?

The updated schedule calendar offers significant enhancements for managing your content timeline, featuring a cleaner and more intuitive visual design, improved date visualization, and a responsive interface suitable for all screen sizes.

It enhances the user experience with faster month-to-month navigation, clearer indications of scheduled items, and distinct identification of content states.

Performance is also improved with more reliable data loading, especially with large content sets.

Why It Matters

Having a clear view of your content schedule is essential for maintaining a consistent publishing cadence. The new calendar makes it easier to:

• Plan content ahead of time
• Avoid scheduling conflicts
• Maintain a steady flow of new listings
• Coordinate promotional activities

The new schedule calendar helps you stay organized and on top of your content strategy.

Search engine optimization is crucial for directory websites. We've implemented comprehensive structured data (JSON-LD) across all pages to help search engines better understand and display your content in search results.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data provides explicit clues about the meaning of your content to search engines. By adding this markup, your directory can appear with rich snippets, enhanced search results, and better visibility in Google and other search engines.

What's Included

We've implemented structured data markup for various elements. This includes organization and website elements like your directory's identity, branding, contact information, social profiles, and website structure.

Content types covered are individual tool or product listings, category and tag pages, blog posts, articles, and breadcrumb navigation.

Additionally, we've added business information such as products and services, pricing information, reviews and ratings, and business hours and locations.

Impact on your SEO

Implementing structured data is one of the most impactful SEO improvements you can make. While it doesn't directly affect rankings, it significantly improves how your content appears in search results, leading to:

• Higher click-through rates from search results
• Better user engagement
• Increased trust and credibility
• More qualified traffic to your directory

This foundational SEO improvement helps ensure your directory content is presented in the best possible way across all search engines.

Understanding your revenue trends is crucial for growing your directory business. We've added comprehensive revenue analytics and redesigned the dashboard to give you better visibility into your financial performance.

New Revenue Chart

The centerpiece of this update is the new revenue chart that visualizes your earnings over the last 30 days.

Key Features

• Visual representation of revenue trends
• Time-based analytics to track growth
• Integration with Stripe for accurate financial data
• Clear metric labels for easy understanding

Dashboard Improvements

We've also cleaned up and reorganized the admin dashboard to make it more useful:

The schedule is now on a dedicated page to enhance focus, the layout is cleaner with improved information hierarchy and intuitive navigation, while metrics feature updated revenue labels, better data visualization, and improved performance with large datasets.

Why This Matters

Having clear financial insights helps you:

• Make data-driven decisions about pricing and promotions
• Identify your most profitable periods
• Plan content strategy around revenue patterns
• Set realistic growth targets

Whether you're just starting out or managing an established directory, these analytics tools help you understand what's working and where to focus your efforts on revenue growth.

Managing media files is now easier and more intuitive with our revamped upload experience. You can now upload images and other media directly through forms. Just drag and drop files, see instant previews, and enjoy seamless integration with S3-compatible storage.

At the core of these improvements is the new FormMedia component, which ensures a consistent and reliable upload experience across all forms, from tool submissions to user profile updates and admin listings. It handles image optimization, preview generation, and robust error handling.

We've also prioritized performance with strict file validation, secure presigned URLs, and optimized upload flows. Direct-to-S3 uploads reduce server load, and lazy-loaded previews help pages load faster, ensuring a smooth experience on any device.

AI-powered content generation is one of Dirstarter's most valuable features for quickly populating your directory. We've made significant improvements to how AI generation works, making it smarter, faster, and more user-friendly.

This feature was already available in Dirstarter, but we've made significant improvements to how it works.

Key Improvements

• Smarter, more reliable AI: The AI now processes your requests with greater accuracy and provides clearer feedback. If something goes wrong, it recovers more gracefully—automatically retrying when possible and showing better error messages.

• Real-time, relevant suggestions: As you fill out forms, the AI instantly suggests related tags and categories. With debounced suggestions, you get fast, relevant results and a smoother experience, even with large amounts of data.

• Higher quality content: Description generation now matches the quality of main content generation. Results are more consistent, and the AI uses more of your input for context, giving you more relevant and helpful suggestions. Prompt building has also been improved for even better results.

Best Practices

To get the most out of AI-powered content generation:

1. Provide Good Input: Better titles and basic info lead to better AI-powered content generation
2. Review and Edit: AI suggestions are a starting point - personalize them for best results
3. Use Suggestions: Take advantage of automatic tag and category suggestions
4. Iterate: Regenerate if the first result isn't perfect

The improved AI generation system is designed to help you build your directory faster while maintaining high content quality. It handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on growing your business.

A new feedback widget allows visitors to quickly share their thoughts and suggestions about your directory.

Users can now report issues with listings, request new features, and provide general feedback - all through a simple interface that makes communication effortless.

The widget is automatically displayed when the user has taken a certain amount of time and acted on the directory. This is to prevent the widget from being displayed too often when the user may not have any feedback to giv yete.

The exact thresholds are:

• Minimum time spent on the page: 60 seconds
• Minimum number of page views: 3
• Minimum scroll percentage: 66%
• How often to check the engagement: every 5 seconds

You can configure those thresholds in the configuration of your directory.

We've launched embeddable badges that make it easy to showcase tool's presence on your directory directly on your users' website.

• Theme Options: Choose between light and dark themes to match your site's design
• Size Control: Adjust width and height dimensions to fit perfectly in any layout
• Live Preview: See exactly how your badge will look before embedding it
• One-Click Copy: Instantly copy the embed code to your clipboard

Features

1. 📱 Responsive Design: Badges automatically adapt to different screen sizes
2. ⚡ Lazy Loading: Optimized performance with lazy loading enabled by default
3. 🔍 SEO Friendly: Includes proper alt text and semantic HTML
4. 📊 UTM Tracking: Built-in campaign tracking parameters for analytics

This new feature makes it easier than ever to let visitors know that their tool is featured on your directory, helping to build trust and credibility with your audience.

Dirstarter now offers full control over your viewing experience. While dark mode has been available since launch, you can now manually toggle between light and dark themes whenever you want.

There are now three ways to switch themes:

• Click the theme toggle in the website footer
• Access it through the command menu (Cmd/Ctrl + K)
• Use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + L

User can now customize their visual experience to match their preference, regardless of system settings.

Search is one of the primary ways to navigate any website, but directory websites are often overlooked. We've introduced a new way to search for tools in your directory and access quick links.

Search

You can now search for tools in your directory using the search bar. You can also use the quick links to access tools directly.

The search bar is hidden by default. Users can show it by clicking the search icon in the header or by pressing Cmd/Crtl + K on your keyboard.

The integrated search functionality employs basic text matching, laying the essential groundwork for Dirstarter users to implement more advanced search mechanisms such as full-text search, fuzzy matching, semantic search, and beyond.

Quick links

Before users begin typing their search query, they are presented with a set of predefined links for quick access to your site's most valuable pages.

If the user currently signed in is an admin, they will see a set of helpful links for managing the directory.

We've introduced a new way to schedule, publish and generate content for your directory.

Publishing flow

First of all, you can now schedule content to be published at a specific date and time. This was possible before, but was not very user-friendly and required some getting used to. Now, you can use an easy to use popup to decide when your content should be published.

Automatically generated content

Secondly, we've introduced a new way to generate content for your directory. You can now do it directly in the tool form.

This used to be hidden in the background job system, which confused a lot of users. Now, it's right in front of you. You can generate content, favicon or tool screenshot with a click of a button. The results will be streamed to you in real-time.

We hope this will make it easier for you to create content for your directory.

I'm excited to announce that Dirstarter is now in beta! This is a big step for the project and I'm looking forward to your feedback.

What's included?

• A complete Next.js boilerplate that you can use to build your website
• A storage system that allows you to store and serve files
• A CMS system that allows you to manage your content
• An authentication system that allows you to manage your users
• An analytics system that allows you to track your users, visitors and more
• A dashboard that allows you to manage your website
• Complete monetization system built on top of Stripe
• And much more!

What's next?

• We will continue to work on the platform and add new features.
• We will also improve the documentation and make it more helpful to you.

If you have any feedback, please let us know.