[Darrin Goodman]

Hi Steven, I have some feature requests please for cMap/Connections:

1) Sticky/Top Listing: The first person listed in our A-Z directory listing gets inundated with general questions because our customers don’t take time (or perhaps don’t understand how to use the search tools) to find the person who might be best qualified to answer their question. Is it possible to add a main office listing that would appear at the top of the list when viewing the default A-Z directory page listing? Perhaps this would be as simple as adding a radio button next to the ones that already exist when adding a new person – where you have “Individual”, “Organization”, and “Family”? Maybe “Top-Level Listing” or something like that?

2) Custom Titles for Search Tools: Our users seem to have troubles understanding what the search tools do, or that they even exist. I’ve tried adding some titles but they get overwritten whenever a Connections update takes place. I would like to be able to add the text, “Search by Region or County” above the drop-down menu for categories, and add “Search by Name, Expertise, or Keyword” above the text search box, and add “Search Alphabetically by Last Name” above the A-Z links. Also, it would be great if the three search tools could be stacked vertically with the custom titles listed on the left side. People tend to not see these tools with the way they are currently presented. So, something like this would be great:

Search Tools:

• Search by Region or County: [category drop-down menu]
• Search by Name, Expertise, or Keyword: [search box]
• Search Alphabetically by Last Name: [A-Z links]

3) Fix Accessibility Issues: Our University is currently pushing hard to have all of its University related websites compliant under WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards. They are testing websites using the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool (http://wave.webaim.org/report#/http://extension.colostate.edu/staff-directory) and unfortunately the search tools in cMap don’t quite pass their tests. If you select “No Styles” and click on the flag icon on the left, you’ll see that there are some missing form labels and an empty button. I would greatly appreciate if you could please add form labels and fix the empty button. We get dinged on this kind of stuff and I am in the process of trying to clear up all errors and alerts.

4) URL Editing: Name changes are common in our organization – usually associated with marriages. Connections will create a URL for a person’s directory listing using his/her last name as part of the URL. Whenever someone changes his/her last name, I have to build a new directory listing for that person and delete the old one so that their URL matches up with their new last name. It would be great if the directory featured a URL editing functionality as found in WordPress’s page editor. That way I could edit the existing directory listing and also edit the URL for that person’s listing.

These are all important features that we would greatly benefit from, and I would imagine that others would benefit from too. Please let me know if any or all of these would be possible. Thanks so much!

-Darrin

[Steven Zahm]

@ Darrin

RE: Sticky/Top Listing

You could do this using the Custom Entry Order extension. With this you could edit the entry you want at the top, set the Order to 1 and leave the others as is. That entry will not be at the top of the list.

RE: Custom Titles for Search Tools

This can be done with custom CSS and perhaps some custom code snippets for cMap. That way the change would be update safe.

RE: Fix Accessibility Issues

I can correct the “Search Directory” field label. I might be able to do empty button. That is the button that has the magnify glass image for search. NOt sure I can have both an image and text. I’ll investigate and fix if possible.

The two remaining missing field labels I will not be able to do anything about. Those for the enhanced select category dropdown. It is created using a third party library. Looks like there has been a lot of requests for better support, but not much forward movement.

I do see I do need to update this library to the latest release. I’ll do that today, perhaps it just might have corrected those two missing form labels.

RE: URL Editing

I do get this request once or twice a year. It is on my todo list but it does fall near the bottom. What I suggest, rather than creating a new entry, use the Copy action instead. Change the last name and save. You can then delete the original. Admittedly it is a bit rube goldberg, but is a lot quicker than creating a new entry from scratch.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Darrin

RE: Fix Accessibility Issues

I correct the missing field label for the search input and corrected the empty button. I also updated the Chosen library. Hopefully this helps to clear up a few of those errors and alerts.

I’m assuming the duplicate text alerts are of no big deal. I could make them different but not in any way which would be meaningful to a11y.

[Darrin Goodman]

Thank you Steven. The Custom Entry Order extension is working nicely and does exactly what I am looking for. Thanks for looking into the accessibility stuff and considering the URL editing feature. As always, I greatly appreciate your help!

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