Dirstarter provides a robust content management system that handles both user submissions and admin-created content. This guide explains the complete content workflow and available features.

Content Workflow

Manual Content Management

Admins can also create and manage content directly through the admin panel. You can structure everything hierarchically, make certain items stand out as featured, and create clear relationships between different pieces of content.

Our admin interface is packed with sophisticated data tables that make managing content feel like a walk in the park. You can filter and sort your way through content, take quick actions right from the table, and handle bulk operations without breaking a sweat. Even with tons of content, you'll stay in control with our intuitive design that makes everything just work.

Tool Statuses

Every tool has a status that determines where it shows publicly and which admin actions are available. There are six statuses across two groups.

Active — visible in the admin queue by default:

Archived — hidden from the admin queue by default; admin toggles the status filter to surface:

Rejected is for submissions that didn't meet the directory's criteria. The page returns 404, but the row is preserved so you can re-evaluate later or use the corpus to train submission filters.

Deleted is a soft-delete for previously-published tools. The detail page stays reachable so SEO equity isn't lost, but the tool drops from listings, sitemap, and related-tools queries.

Admin actions per status

When editing a tool, the admin form shows two buttons in the bottom-right:

• A status button (left, with popover) — its label and contents depend on the current status. Clicking opens a popover with available transitions.
• A submit button (right, "Update" / "Save Draft") — saves field edits without changing the status.

The transitions exposed by each status's popover:

Soft vs hard delete

The "Delete" action in the admin tool table — both the row action and the bulk-delete confirmation — picks the right behavior automatically based on each row's current status:

• A Published row is soft-deleted: status flips to Deleted, the row stays, S3 assets are retained, and the public URL stays reachable. SEO equity is preserved.
• Any other status (Draft, Pending, Scheduled, Rejected, Deleted) is hard-deleted: the row is removed from the database and S3 assets are cleaned up.

Clicking Delete on a Deleted tool a second time is the escape hatch to fully remove it.

Notify submitter

When transitioning into Published, Scheduled, or Rejected, the popover shows a "Notify submitter via email" checkbox (default checked). Each transition sends a different email template. Uncheck the box to silently transition — useful for spam rejections.

If the rejected tool was on a paid tier (Standard/Premium), the rejection email automatically includes a paragraph telling the submitter we'll process a refund. The refund itself is manual via the Stripe dashboard.

Mental model

Draft     ──▶ Published
          ──▶ Scheduled

Pending   ──▶ Published
          ──▶ Scheduled
          ──▶ Rejected

Scheduled ──▶ Draft (unschedule)
          ──▶ Scheduled (reschedule)
          ──▶ Published

Published ──▶ Draft (unpublish)

Rejected  ──▶ Pending
          ──▶ Draft

Deleted   ──▶ Draft
          ──▶ Published

A few notes worth holding onto:

• Published → Deleted is not in the in-form popover. Soft-deletion happens via the row/bulk Delete action in the admin table — single source of truth for "delete a tool".
• Every state has a path back to Draft, so admins can always recover a tool to a clean editing state.
• Rejected and Deleted tools cannot be upgraded. The /submit/[slug] page 404s, the dashboard Upgrade button is hidden, and the Stripe webhook refuses tier updates as defense-in-depth.
• Resubmitting a Rejected or Deleted tool's URL via the public submission form flips the status back to Pending and re-triggers the standard "thanks" email so the admin sees it in the queue again.
• The status filter in the admin tool table defaults to the four active statuses. Tick Rejected or Deleted in the filter dropdown to surface archived tools.