[Jake DiMare]

Hi Steven,

First, great plugin and thank you so much for the phenomenal documentation for extending it with custom fields. I’m leading marketing for a small business and your package has saved me a ton of time so far.

I’ve successfully added a couple of custom checkbox group fields and they are rendering where I want them on the page. You can see my work on this staging version of our website: http://staging.digitalclaritygroup.com/digital-partners/ (Areas of Expertise and Verticals are custom.)

What I’d like now is to make each of the items in each of these custom groups a link to a sort page similar to, for example:

http://staging.digitalclaritygroup.com/digital-partners/country/United+States/

But instead, the URL for this new template might be something like this:

http://staging.digitalclaritygroup.com/digital-partners/expertise/design/

or

http://staging.digitalclaritygroup.com/digital-partners/vertical/education/

Any direction you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if the answer is it would be easier to use sub-categories for this, my question is, could you provide some direction on how to render the items which are the children of one parent item in the hierarchy?

Best,

Jake

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jake

Apologies for the delay in my reply. I’ve been running a backlog all week due to illness. No excuse but it is the reason.

There is no way to do this “out of the box” in Connections because this require a whole set of custom rewrite rules to be registered with WordPress so WordPress will know what to do with such links. And then something would have to be done to allow Connections to query the entries assigned with the requested meta.

The correct hook for the rewrite rules is cn_page_rewrite_rule-view found in the class.rewrite.php file.

You’ll also need to register the expertise and vertical with WordPress using the query_vars filter.

The you can hook into the cn_list_atts found in the class.shortcode-connections.php file. YOu would want to read the registered query vars for you meta and add the to the meta_query array key as an array.

Not easy, but doable, I think.

Not sure if this helps… hope it does, let me know.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jake

Oh, forgot… then you would have to update custom template you created to display the lists and turn those lists into a list of permalinks.

[Jake DiMare]

Thanks, Steve. I had a feeling this was more of an enhancement than a support request. Put me on the list of people to notify if this ever gets into your feature set so I can update our install immediately!

:)

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jake

Not sure anything like this ever could be a “standard” feature since custom fields could be literally setup for any type of data.

Looking at what you’ve done, I actually thing categories would be a better solution. There are trivial (relatively speaking) to split up for displaying separate lists, filtering by, permalinks and even split into separate options in the admin for selection when adding/editing an entry.

For filtering, you could even use a beta add-on for Connections which allows filter based on multiple categories. See it in action on this live 3rd party site: https://sscit.org/ in the “Find A Therapist” section.

I can send you this add-on since you purchased the pro pack with a sample shortcode used for configuring it. Or as a service I do offer installation and configuration of this add-on since it is a bit more difficult. I think I plan on implement the final result into the core search feature that the premium templates.

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