[Diane Dunlop]

Hi
I have been trying to implement Excerpt Plus for a couple of days and I am beginning to think I may have the wrong template. This is what I need to achieve:
1. Bio of each member (doing that fine)
2. Categorise their fields of Practice, Commodity Expertise, Specialities, Regional Experience and lastly highlight if they are an Expert Witness or not.
Categories are no problem EXCEPT that it would be helpful to have it possible for people to search by these five topics. The category list is very long and is broken up into these five parent categories, so unless they know the keywords, searching through a dropdown category list is a bit of a pain. Can’t work out yet quite how to do that … is it a possibility?
3. v-Card or contact details: I need these to appear when the ‘more’ button is pressed, but I can’t get it to do that or to show searchers how/where to access the v-card (or better yet link to a contact form or even a clickable email address).
4. Optional extra which would be nice to have but not essential would be the ability for the member to update their address details, but not have access to their bio and the categories assigned to them.
I am currently rebuilding a site which needs to have the same/similar functionality to this one: http//mica.org.au. My test site is at http://blog.mica.org.au/blog.
Please could you comment as to whether the Except Plus template is the right one to accomplish this before I waste too much more time trying to make it work? Also having issues with the shortcodes – would like to change the colours for example, but when I tried to use the example elsewhere on the forum I couldn’t get them to work.
Many thanks

[Steven Zahm]

@ Diane

1. Yep, that is exact what Excerpt was designed to do.
   2.A. Filtering by multiple category drop downs would require custom work. There is no template available that has this type of feature. If this is something you’re interested in. I do have a developer I can recommend. Just let me know and I’ll has him to reply to this forum topic so you and he can connect.
   2.B. You could highly expert witnesses uses CSS. As an example, add this to the theme’s custom CSS area:

#cn-excerpt-plus .expert_witness,
#cn-excerpt-plus .expert-witness{
    background-color: yellow;
}

Now any entry assigned to you expert witness categories will be highlighted yellow.

1. Excerpt Plus was designed to show only the bio by default. You can selectively turn on the other entry details by using shortcode options. see this page for all the options avaiable to Excerpt Plus. Here’s quick example shortcode that’ll turn on most/all the details for an entry within Excerpt Plus:

[connections show_title='TRUE' show_org='TRUE' show_contact_name='TRUE' show_family='TRUE' show_addresses='TRUE' show_phone_numbers='TRUE' show_email='TRUE' show_im='TRUE' show_social_media='TRUE' show_dates='TRUE' show_links='TRUE']

1. The Link extension would be an option, but there is not a way to limit what they can edit. Meaning they would be able to edit their categories and bio.
2. What is the exact shortcode you’re using to change the color?

I hope that answers all your questions thoroughly!

[Diane Dunlop]

Hi again
I am still not able to get the contact details to show up. This is the code I’ve put into the “members directory” page: Please could you check what I’ve done wrong?

[connections_list=TRUE str_work_email=TRUE str_select=’Select Category’ str_photo =’No Photo’ ][connections show_title=true show_org=true show_addresses=true show_phone_numbers=true show_email=true show_links=true][/connections_list]

The site is http://blog.mica.org.au/blog if you would be kind enough to take a look. I also used the ccs you gave me to change the colours but that is not working either. I would really like to have each person’s name in the same gold as the logo. Any suggestions please?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Diane

The shortcode has a few errors. Try this one:

[connections str_image='No Photo' show_title=true show_org=true show_addresses=true show_phone_numbers=true show_email=true show_links=true]

That should fix it up.

[Dii Dunlop]

What can I say? :) the products are great but the support is just awesome! Thanks so much. It worked and you have saved me hours of time. I’d found a work-around but it would have required cutting and pasting 175 members contact details into the Bio.
Can I bother you with another small thing please? How do I get the clickable links to be more obvious – i.e. a different colour or an underline?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Diane

Add the following CSS to the theme’s custom CSS area or add it to the end of the theme’s styles.css file:

#cn-list a {
    color: green !important;
}

You can tweak the color to be anything you want.

Hope that helps.

[Ronald Monk]

I cannot seem to get my excerpt plus template directory to look like the sample that is on your website. Can you please help? I have included a screen shot of your directory and mine. What I am doing wrong? I’m not showing the catagories dropdown menu or the search box.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Ronald

TIFF/s are not supported, please attach JPEG/s or PNG/s.
Also, please take a look at this FAQ. It gives several solutions to when templates do not seem to be rendering correctly. If none of those solve the issue, please let me know. Hope that helps!

[Ronald Monk]

Sorry that you could not view the tiffs. I have attached Jpegs. The reference page is http://baltimorecityhomes.com/baltimore-business-directory. After looking at the FAQ it still doesn’t clarify why my directory looks different from the sample on your site and missing the search features. Would you mind helping point me in the right direction?

Attachments:

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Ronald

Have you installed the template? Here are the template installation instructions.

If you have installed the template, then go to the Connections : Templates admin page and Activate it for use.

Hope that help.

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