Directorist v8.9: Custom Badges Put Listing Labels Fully in Your Hands

We ship new features to the Directorist core plugin frequently, and that plugin is free. It’s fair to ask why we put so much into something that doesn’t generate direct revenue on its own.

Here’s the honest answer: the core plugin is the foundation of our entire ecosystem, and Directorist now powers 25,000+ active users worldwide. As part of the WordPress open source community, we see that as a responsibility, not a bonus feature. We build for everyone who uses Directorist, whether or not they’ve ever purchased a pro extension.

Version 8.9 is a good example of that. Here’s what’s in it and, more importantly, what it actually means for how you run your directory.

TL;DR: Directorist v8.9 introduces Custom Badges, lets users cancel their own pending orders, adds timezone and always-open support to the Business Hours API, ships new map lifecycle events for Listings With Map, and includes a set of order, dashboard, form, upload, and authentication fixes.

View Full Changelog →

Table of Contents

1. Custom Badges: Listing Labels You Actually Control
2. Cancelling a Pending Order Without Waiting on You
3. Business Hours That Actually Respect Time Zones
4. Keeping Your Map in Sync
5. A Few Things We Made Steadier
6. Fixes in This Release
7. Growing Your Directory Beyond This Update
8. FAQ

Custom Badges: Listing Labels You Actually Control

What can a directory owner actually flag on a listing before Directorist v8.9?

If you’ve used Directorist for a while, you know the badges on your listings: New, Popular, Featured. They’ve always been there, and they’ve always been fixed. You couldn’t change what they meant, and you couldn’t add your own without hiring a developer to hard-code a new one.

We heard about this often. Owners wanted a way to flag a listing as “Top Rated” because it genuinely earns strong reviews, or “Trending” because people are suddenly paying attention to it, or something specific to their niche that “Featured” doesn’t capture.

What changed with Custom Badges

With Directorist v8.9, you can build your own badges from scratch. Give it a name, choose how it looks (a colored text label or an icon with a tooltip), and set the condition that triggers it. That condition can be based on view count, listing age, average rating, review count, or featured status, and you can combine more than one so a badge only appears when everything you care about lines up.

Once it’s set, Directorist checks every listing against your rule automatically. If a listing qualifies, the badge appears. If it stops qualifying, the badge quietly disappears. No manual tagging, no spreadsheets, no remembering to update anything by hand.

You’re also not limited to one spot. Badges can appear on the listing’s own page, on the cards in your directory grid, or both, and a single listing can carry up to three badges per position at once, alongside the built-in ones.

This is the kind of change that affects how a directory feels to a visitor. Instead of every listing looking the same, the ones that actually earn attention start standing out on their own, based on rules you set once. Want to see it before setting one up? Browse a few live demo directories to see badges in context, or head straight to the settings documentation to set up your first one.

Set Up Your First Badge →

Cancelling a Pending Order Without Waiting on You

This one is small, but it removes a genuine point of friction. If someone places an order on your directory and changes their mind before it’s confirmed, they used to have to contact you and ask you to cancel it. Now they can cancel it themselves, directly from their dashboard.

For you, that means fewer “can you cancel this for me” messages and a smoother experience for anyone using your directory to sell or promote listings. If you run paid listings or any monetization, it’s worth checking the order and payment documentation to see how this fits into your checkout flow.

Business Hours That Actually Respect Time Zones

Why would a listing show as “open” when it clearly isn’t?

If your directory covers more than one region or country, you’ve likely run into this: a listing shows as open when it shouldn’t, because the system compared the wrong clock against the wrong hours.

Directorist’s Business Hours feature now handles time zones properly at the API level. The Rest API Listings support timezone data and validation, plus a simple “always open” option for listings that genuinely never close, like 24-hour services. Whether a listing is open around the clock or keeps very specific hours in a specific city, the open/closed status you show visitors is now accurate.

This change is mostly felt by anyone building on top of Directorist through the API. If you or a developer you work with pulls business hours data programmatically, this is what changed under the hood.

Keeping Your Map in Sync

If your directory uses maps to display listings, v8.9 adds lifecycle events that make map behavior more predictable behind the scenes. The map now clearly signals when it has finished loading, when someone changes the viewport, and when a marker is clicked.

As a directory owner, you won’t notice this directly. But if you or someone helping you has built anything custom around the map, these events give a reliable way to keep that custom code in sync with what’s actually happening on the page, instead of guessing or polling for state.

A Few Things We Made Steadier

Alongside the new features, we tightened a few things that already worked but could work better.

Orders API compatibility. The current order, checkout, and payment endpoints now run on the v2 API, and we restored the v1 order routes at the same time. If you or a developer integrated with the older v1 endpoints, those integrations keep working without needing an immediate rewrite.

Guest and deleted customer records. If you’ve ever had an order tied to a guest checkout or a customer whose account was later deleted, you may have noticed those orders looking incomplete in your admin area. That’s fixed, so order details stay complete and readable regardless of what happened to the account behind them.

Extension settings guidance. If you use any extensions, you’ll notice a small but welcome change: when an extension’s settings actually live somewhere else in your dashboard, Directorist now tells you clearly instead of showing you an empty screen.

Dashboard listing action menu. If your dashboard shows a shorter list of listings, the action menu now behaves the way you’d expect, without display quirks in short tables.

Fixes in This Release

A handful of frustrating bugs are resolved in Directorist v8.9:

• Hidden conditional fields that were marked required used to sometimes block a listing submission entirely, even when the visitor had done nothing wrong. Submissions now go through correctly.
• Multiple File Upload fields on the same form used to fail when used together. Uploads through multiple fields now process correctly.
• REST API authentication issues affecting password-reset PIN validation and temporary media uploads for Application Password requests are resolved. You likely never saw these directly, but if you or a developer uses Application Passwords to authenticate against the REST API, this is what changed.

Growing Your Directory Beyond This Update

A functional directory website is an important foundation, but many directory owners still struggle to attract the right traffic and turn it into sustainable growth. That’s why we have a Growth & SEO plan in place, to help Directorist users improve visibility, reach the right audience, and build momentum.

Want to learn more? Book a call with our team.

Where That Leaves Us

Custom Badges is the feature we’re proudest of in this release, and the one we’d genuinely encourage you to try today. But every part of v8.9, fixes included, was chosen because it makes running your directory a little easier and a little more reliable.

As always, back up your site before updating, then upgrade Directorist from your WordPress dashboard.

Update to v8.9 →

If you try Custom Badges, or run into anything at all, tell us. We read every comment, and we build the next release around exactly this kind of feedback. You can also join the conversation in our Facebook Community.

Frequently Asked Questions about Directorist New Features

Read More

• Directorist v8.7: New Advanced Fields to Make Listings More Actionable
• Directorist v8.6: A Practical Upgrade for Growing Directory Sites
• Directorist v8.5 Is Here with a New Look, Essential Upgrades and Fixes