[Steven Zahm]

@ Lynn

re: I know from everything I’ve read i can’t have columns in cmap… I have been working on this all day with all the heavy formatting involved just to get it to look half way decent I found that I can’t even use this template with columns

Sorry, but, nothing anywhere says cMap can be formatted in a columnar format The sample on the product page, the demo page and all live sites using it show how it displays. I do put in a lot of effort to attempt to make sure nothing is hidden and the design of the templates can be seen plainly. If you have suggestions on what would have made it more clear to you, do please share them. All feedback is taken very seriously.

re: I’m very disappointed I don’t have the freedoms to tweak the template so it’s usable for my needs.

Actually you have a lot of freedom. I’d say the templating engine in Connections is one of the defining differentiating features. cMap has over 60 shortcode options to do for small tweaks.

Fo complex tweaks there are custom template CSS and custom template override files that you can create.

You can use these features to do pretty much do anything you want without ever having to edit the actual template files.

re: Do you offer custom builds so this will actually work the way I need it to?

Yes, I do offer custom development services. I frequently develop custom templates to meet whatever the specific design requirements of the user.

re: I also need custom buttons on my “card” that will link to different pages. Is there a way to add those?

Yes. Likely the best way to add custom links would be add a filter to add additional link types. The new link types could then be designed into the template as buttons.

Here’s a sample filter which will add additional link types:

add_filters( 'cn_link_options', 'cn_add_new_link_types' );

function cn_add_new_link_types( $options ) {
    $options['new_one'] = 'New One';
    $options['new_two'] = 'New Two';

    return $options;
}

You can test this by installing the Code Snippets plugin and adding it as a new snippet.

Displaying a button is a bit more complex but if you know PHP is should be pretty straight forward.

To call one of the new link types in a template you would do this:

$new_one_link_types = $entry->getLinks( array( 'type' => 'new_one' ) );

This will return an array of objects. Each item in the array (the object) will contain the link data entered in the admin. So you can pretty much do anything you want with that data.

Hope that helps!