[Bill Toney]

I have been asked to come up with a functional and accessible Club membership directory, 450 members. After a whole lot of internet searching, I came upon “Connections” which looks like it meets the need.

Please indulge me as I’m a complete novice to such an effort.

What we’re after is a simple form displaying an individual members’ basic information, to include: F.Name, L.Name, Spouse Name, home address, city, state, zip, applicable phone numbers, etc., etc. Also, the ability to add a photo of the member or member & spouse would be great.

We would like the information to be searchable – like you have set up on one example I saw where you had the alphabet across the top and it went to all the T’s for example. Also searchable by name,  etc.

It would be nice if the information of one member could be submitted by the individual or an administrator, with the administrator having ultimate control of what information is submitted.

We would like the data to be security protected, i.e., passcode protected so it was not available to the general public.

Is my studying correct that Connections will accommodate the above?

Can Connections be associated with a site built in a program other than WordPress? Specifically, one of the programs a small site will be built in is Freeway.

If Connections can’t be loaded in Freeway, is it possible to build in WordPress and then link the Freeway built site to the data in a WordPress site?

Not sure I’m approaching this all correctly or using the right language. Someone else is building the Club site in Freeway and is almost done. I know just enough to be dangerous at this point in time, but doing my best to learn.

Please excuse the wordiness, but I know exactly what I want, just not sure how to make it happen. It has taken me hours to find something I think is the answer and Connections seems to be it.

Your advice and counsel is much appreciated.

Bill

 

[Steven Zahm]

@ Bill Toney

Ok, where to start…

There’s Link that can be used to capture the users info. The form is a little more than basic, but they only need to fill in the details they wish to fill in. Using Link, the admin can moderate the entry submissions and edits the user may want to make afterward.

Several of the templates off search such as cMap, Market and Tile Plus. And all template support the alpha index, you just need to turn it on in the settings.

The directory can be set to require login. You just need to change the settings.

WordPress has to be used to run Connections an its add-ons. What others have done is use WordPress just for their directory and linked to it from within their other CMS. Depending on your skill you could even make the WordPress part of the site look like the rest so the user wouldn’t even know they’ve gone from one CMS to another.

I hope this helps.

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