Steven Zahm@ Hassan Hafez
RE: we need to rebuild the website and wondered if the new version of your plugin could be used with less customisation.
This is somewhat tough to answer not knowing how Connections has been altered. What I can see…
The Gender is being added to an address field. I would suggest creating a “Gender” category with “Male” and “Female” as children.
It seems the Specialties are being added to the Title field and sub categories added to the Bio field while also being assigned as categories. I would suggest just assigning them as categories to avoid all the duplicate work/display.
The bio seems to be entered in the Notes field. I would recommend using the Bio field.
The consultant photos are uploaded to the Logo image. I would recommend uploading them as the Photo image.
RE: Can the new version of your plugin be searched by Category, gender, keyword to show results?
If these are added as categories and the entries assigned to the appropriate categories. Yes.
There is the advanced search addon which enabled multiple category search as seem here on this live third party site:
The “Insurance Plan”, “Specialization” and “Group” dropdown are all parent categories allowing the user to filter by the chosen children categories.
This addon is offered, to those that request it, who purchase the Extension Pack of the Pro Pack
Or as installation/configuration service.
The addon comes styles as is. Although I can provide the CSS necessary to change the color.
RE: Can we also export the existing data into the new version easily?
Assuming none of the core Connections files were altered and its database structure was not altered you should be able to upgrade to the new version. From appearances, it appears only the template itself was altered, but there is no way for me to know that for sure.
I would recommend backing up the files and the database before applying the update so you can roll back if it does not go well.
I hope this helps and answers your questions.