HireBee – A Freelance Marketplace Theme
We’ve been busy working on a couple of awesome new themes and we’re proud to announce the release of HireBee!
HireBee is a WordPress freelance marketplace theme that will enable site owners to connect small businesses (known as “employers”) with freelancers, offering every business service imaginable, allowing you to monetize any niche. Sites like Elance, oDesk, and 99designs are perfect examples of this type of successful crowdsourcing model.
With HireBee you can create your own freelance niche site targeting work on a specific country, or remote work. We’ve worked to include all the major features that make these sites incredibly useful for those who are looking for work and those who need to complete work.
Of course, we didn’t forget the importance of monetization for site owners and so HireBee provides plentiful options to make money while providing a useful service like a freelance marketplace.
Considering the current economy, HireBee makes all sense. Starting today, any site owners with a WordPress install can provide a freelance marketplace in any country, by simply installing our theme!
On Sale Now!
HireBee is on sale for 25% off during the first two weeks (expires July 14th, 2014), after which it’ll jump back to its normal price of $99. Click here to apply the discount code (shows up on the checkout page). Sale is over.
Learn More
- The HireBee overview page outlines all the features and functions, complete with screenshots
- Test drive the theme by visiting the live HireBee demo and admin demo
Main Features
Fast and Easy Project Matching
Through skills, category or location type filters your site users can easily find the most relevant projects for their skills.
Post a Project
Posting a project is fast and simple and besides the usual title, description, category and sub-category fields, includes budget type (fixed price, per hour), budget currency, location (remote or location specific), skills, tags, file uploading (with file limit and allowed mime types configured in the backend) and duration (free projects only, paid projects duration is set in the price plan). Additional fields can be added using the custom form builder.
Dashboard
The dashboard is the nerve center for your site’s users – a single page where they have access to all their notifications, projects, proposals, purchases, reviews, contact info, site stats and favorites.
Notifications
HireBee is our first theme to feature our brand new custom made notifications API. Every user action, like posting a project, applying to a project, making a purchase, etc…, triggers a notification on the user dashboard and is also sent via email.
Workspaces
Each time a project is assigned to a freelancer, it get’s it’s own private workspace only accessible for the project participants. A workspace were each participant can easily control their work.
Monetize your Site
Lot’s of users are looking for sources of income online. A marketplace for employers/freelancers could be a great source of income, specially considering the current economy state. HireBee allows you to generate income with employers or freelancers.
It’s also compatible with our marketplace gateways plugins – Stripe, Authorize.net and 2Checkout – and also coupons.
Flexible Projects and Credits Plans
Still on the monetization topic, whom we believe is one of your most important features, site owners can monetize on employers by setting price plans that need to be purchased in order to post a project. Additionally, employers can pay for addons like: feature on frontpage, feature on project category page or, to mark projects as urgent. Monetization for freelancers work by selling credits that they can use to post, edit or to feature proposals.
Credits Perks
Give something to your users to make them coming back to your site.
Perks in HireBee are represented as free credits for freelancers. Site owners can offer free credits for each new registered user. Credits can also be offered each month.
Foundation Framework
The Foundation framework is one of the fastest and best responsive design frameworks out there, and makes HireBee easily accessible from any browsers or mobile device. Foundation is also very popular amongst developers and designers by virtue of being so easy to work with. Child theme designers be alert!
Much, Much More
These are only a minor fraction of the features that HireBee provides. We suggest reading the theme overview page or checking out the demo to learn more. It’s already one of our most feature rich themes and will only get better in the future.
What’s Included in HireBee 1.0
Most of the features that you expect from a freelance marketplace.
- Project listings
- Freelancer listings
- Choosable budget currency
- Choosable budget type: fixed price, per hour
- Projects can be set to a specific location or ‘remote’ (remote work)
- User dashboard to manage projects, proposals, purchases, etc
- User activity – users can view their latest site activity from their dashboard
- Terms negotiation – employers/candidates can discuss terms before agreeing with work
- Favorite projects
- Clarification section in single project page
- Individual project workspaces
- Reviews and ratings
- Full profile pages – include user reviews and rating, and authored projects
- Assign skills to projects
- Assign skills to users
- Assign user price per hour
- Keyword and filters search
- Multi-tier categorization system
- Search engine optimized
- Multiple page templates
- Editable menus in header and footer
- Localization support
- Theme color options
- Separate blog and page templates to promote your site
- Foundation framework
Extras
- Custom forms and custom fields for the projects form through the AppThemes form builder
- Upload media to projects in the frontend through the same WordPress media manager UI used in the backend
- Shared roles capabilities – allow employers to apply to projects and freelancers to post projects
- Refine search features like skills, category, location type and sorting filters
- Easy log in form on every page
- Customize the theme visuals using WordPress builtin Customizer
- Integration with ShareThis social sharing plugin
Sidebars
- Seven fully widgetized sidebars: main, single page, single project, listings (projects and freelancers), post project, post proposal/apply to project, user profile
- One widgetized spot in the global header, perfect for a 468×60 ad banner
- Two widgetized spots for ads in listings – one for project listings and one for freelancer listings
- Two widgetized spots for the user dashboard activity page – one in activity header, the other in activity footer
- One widgetized spot for content bellow the main navigation bar – optionally visible on all pages or only on frontpage
- Three widgetized columns in the global footer
Widgets
- Post a project button is widgetized so you control where it is placed on a page
- Recent projects widget
- Saved Filters – allows users to save search filters
- 125×125 ads widget
- Facebook widget
- Social connect widget – includes most popular social networks
Monetizing HireBee
- Charge a fee for posting projects
- Charge a fee for relisting projects
- Additional fee for home page featured, category featured and urgent projects
- Charge fee for applying to projects (post proposal)
- Charge fee for editing proposals
- Additional fee for featuring a proposal
- View all transactions via admin panel
- Ads in project and freelancer listings
- Widgetized location in the header that is perfect for a 468×60 banner
Taking Payments
- All payment gateways created as plugins
- Comes prepackaged with PayPal
- Uses PayPal Payment Data Transfer for greater security
- Test gateway for testing transactions on your site
Comments (107)
Hi Bruno, could you please fix the blog bug (alignment of the image in a post). I’ve documented it in the forums, but no-one is responding to me.
@bradleyhebdon, the dev build should have the fix already. Please download the latest and make sure you clear your browser cache to update the CSS stylesheets.
Thank you, Bruno. I am now using those plugins on my HireBee site.
I also looked at Balanced Payments and there’s a WP plugin for it:
https://github.com/pmgarman/wp-balanced-payments
BP looks to be designed specifically for sites like HireBee. I hope a HireBee compatible plugin becomes available soon.
HireBee is very recent. I’m sure there will be similar plugins for it soon.
Nice tease for the taskerr theme on the themes page def has my mouth watering lol. So I’m guessing this theme will be released in the next week or two?
@gocards86, good eye! We also just published a Taskerr blog post. 🙂
What types of files/media is supported within the freelance/service provider profile portfolio?
Does Hire Bee currently support BuddyPress?
Thanks
@jgalileo, currently, the user profiles portfolio are limited to a URL. File uploads are only supported for posting projects.
There’s no support for BuddyPress at this time.
Thanks for the update Bruno. I am wondering if your team has portfolio (audio, video, photo), and BuddyPress integration on it’s roadmap. A portfolio is crucial for a service provider/freelancer to showcase their work. BuddyPress integration would allow the marketplace owners to do so much more with user profiles, fields, to customize the user experience. Just a thought.
Hi there, just looking at the phone application side of things and need to know if there is a rest API with appthemes framework? of if there is any plans for a rest API here?. Is it a case one can only read, or get, data from the appthemes with the current API or is there more to it here?
Is there a way to update, edit, create, or save data also? This would be very interesting to know from a mobile application development perspective. You guys have any general thoughts on this? Thanks for your time.
@jamesweb, good question! Actually it would be a WordPress REST API which is slated for 4.1. In the meantime, you can try using this plugin.
Thanks David, appreciate the background here I will do a little investigation here to see what is possible.
good and quite promising stuff..wanted to buy it at once….but noticed it’s without the escrow function…I am very doubtful how I could use this really as third part stuff is not a great idea for me.
I would like to know if does the Hirebee theme include escrow service right now?
I am thinking to buy it. It looks fine. please let me know.
Yes, Adryan. HireBee, is now escrow ready.
Will the demo be updated to version 1.2 soon?
@jgalileo, the demo has been updated.
When a project is posted will the freelancers be notified of the new projects?
Adryan, that feature is planned for a future release.
Would this notification feature send out notifications to all freelancers in a particular category when a project is posted or would it send to all freelancers in a particular geo area of a category? I think this is important depending on whether the site is using the remote or local function or both? This would be an amazing feature.
Thank you Bruno,
You are a great Web Developer, many thanks to you and AppThemes team and contributors.
I will wait a little longer then.
It is possible to see a Change log of what is and will be improved in future updates.
please let me know
@Adryan, the change log can be found in the 1.2 release post on our docs site.
I was reading the ideas section and wanted to ask. Is there any way to somehow hide bids, i mean when someone is bidding for a project and starter freelancers don’t have previous portfolio work is difficult to get awarded.
I would like to know if there is any way to stop the bidding process turn into bidding war? i am not sure if you understand what i mean,english is not my native language. thanks
We understand what you mean Adryan. That’s actually a great suggestion that we’re discussing internally and that’s something that might be added in the future.
Discussion is closed.