It just got a lot easier to do a one state directory. By that I mean a directory where the category structure is all counties of a particular US state, or cities by county... not a directory of businesses in Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian One State.

For a while, we've had options in the auto setup to choose a category structure of counties by state or cities by county by state. That works well for a national directory, but in many cases people just want a directory for a particular state. Removing the undesired states was no simple matter, and then since having a single superflous top level category is undesirable you'd want to make all the subcategories into top level categories. With WSN 10.0.22 Beta 3 and the latest version of autosetup.php, all the required queries have been automated. All you do is select "Counties of single state" or "Cities by county of single state" under "Pre-Load Data" during setup, and then select your desired state from the dropdown that appears. As an additional convenience, either of these selections will also automatically trim your countries list at Admin -> Settings -> Localization to just "United States" and states list to just your selected state, so that submitters don't have a chance to mess up the address.

A further improvement I have in mind for the future is to create a "cities as autocategories" switch which will remove the category selection process from submitting listings, and instead automatically choose a category based on the city/state provided as the listings address. This of course would require that all listings have an address. It would also need to automatically create new subcategories for city names that don't yet have categories, and would have to wait until after validation to do so in order to prevent spammy category names.