Steven Zahm@ David
re: Each person listed is linked to a webpage inside Connections through their name. We don’t need this. Most people in the directory do not have webpages nor will they even want them. Is there a way to disable this linking?
Yes. Go to Connections : Settings admin page and click the Advanced tab. Disable the Name link option.
re: We do want to be able to link to websites (not inside Connections) for our faculty as they are brought on-line. Is there a way to change where the linking that appears with the names points?
No because the name is reserved for the internal linking. However, Connections does have support for adding links to an entry. You can add as many links as you would like.
re: I have a page configured with the alphabetical indexes and anchoring, but they currently don’t allow movement around the page. When clicked on, they reload the page with at the top. Is there something that needs to be done to enable this navigation?
Are you asking about internal page linking? If so, no. When clicking on a character link, the page will reload filtering the entries based on the character clicked. If the list is not being filtered by the character clicked, this is due to the server config. The query vars are likely being stripped or not passed by the server. Generally I only see this issue pop up on dev server and local installs.
re: I see that some of the premium templates allow searching. We would like to have this, but, honestly, the original template (as configured by me) is almost exactly what we want. Is there a way to add the search functionality to the original template? We don’t mind paying for a plug-in, but don’t really need to change the template.
Then I recommend the cMap template. It is very configurable via the Template Customizer. Though it will not be exactly as the default template, it can be configured to be pretty close.
Hope this answers your questions thoroughly!