WP Job Manager: Free WordPress Plugin Lets You Build Your Own Job Board

Job boards have grown in popularity over the last few years. Due to the fact that more and more people work project-based rather than in lifetime occupations, searching for new jobs has become a frequent task to many of us. Especially in these cases, official job boards often fall short. Specialized boards are much better suited. So, if you maintain a service, say an online magazine, aiming at a certain industry, say designers and developers, you might have thought about integrating job board functionality already. We know, we at the Smashing family did. If you don't have the same power to invest, a free job board plugin by the name of WP Job Manager might just be what you're looking for.

[caption id="attachment_82000" align="alignleft" width="550"] WP Job Manager's Brand-New Landing Page[/caption]

WP Job Manager: Modern, Lightweight, Free

WP Job Manager by Mike Jolley is a modern and lightweight plugin for the popular WordPress platform. It adds job board functionality right into the backend of your CMS, where you can manage its contents just as you're familiar with regarding any other WordPress content. WP Job Manager is shortcode-based and supports custom post types.

Mike Jolley is not unknown in the WordPress community. He is the lead developer of WooCommerce and heavily involved in all things WooThemes. It is no exaggeration to say, Mike is absolutely on top of things and able to deliver what can be called state of the art development.

WP Job Manager is a perfect proof for that statement. Following the trend to a flat, minimal design and being based on shortcodes with support for the most recent WordPress additions, his plugin lays a solid and future-proof foundation for your job board project. The board can be easily integrated into any modern theme, supporting the most recent WordPress features. You'll need to know a little CSS, though ;-)

[caption id="attachment_81999" align="alignleft" width="550"] WP Job Manager: Frontend[/caption]

WP Job Manager has been around for a few months already, but it took until the beginning of this week for it to be presented on its own project homepage. Mike declares the core plugin to be Open Source, yet did not attach a proper license, so I cannot tell you about any potential restrictions of the free part.

The board comes with 18 languages pre-translated, among them German and Russian. If your language is not directly supported, you will be glad to hear, that the *.pot is included. So grab your Poedit and easily localize the plugin by yourself.

WP Job Manager requires WordPress 3.8 or newer. A demo is available to give you an impression of what to expect.

[caption id="attachment_81998" align="alignleft" width="550"] WP Job Manager: Backend[/caption]

WP Job Manager's Freemium Model

Mike Jolley chose to go for the more and more popular freemium business model. While the core plugin itself is completely free of charge, more advanced features have to be added through paid modules, the so-called add-ons. More than twenty of these are already available.

[caption id="attachment_81997" align="alignleft" width="550"] WP Job Manager: Plethora of Add-ons Available[/caption]

You need add-ons to accept paid listings, connect to different forms managers, integrate other job boards or add tags and deadlines or resumes. While some of the add-ons are more or less mandatory, if you want to build a full-fledged professional job board, others only simplify or beautify. A Job Board Designer e.g. allows you to design and customize your job board via the backend. A developer knows other ways. A Jobify theme is available as a turn-key solutions for those who cannot customize the plugin to look good themselves.

I'd go for one add-on or the other, if I had to implement a job board, which would still give me a next to perfect solution for around a hundred bucks. And if I had to implement a job board I would definitely go for WP Job Manager today. How about you?

Related Links:

• WP Job Manager | Project Page
• Mike Jolley | Homepage
• WP Job Manager | Github Repository
• WP Job Manager | Add-Ons
• WP Job Manager | Demo