[Maurice Green]

I was just looking at the demo website you listed – http://narpmphoenix.com.
It appears that they have three (3) templates installed: tile-plus, slim-plus and cMap and that they use slim-plus on the ‘Members’ page and c-Map on the ‘Affiliates’ page.
Is this correct?
If so, it is a major plus for me so I can have different directories formatted with different templates. I am using Paid Membership Pro so I can control which pages members can see and that would work perfectly for me and I wouid switch from Business Directory Pro to Connections.
Maury

[Maurice Green]

UPDATE on my question –
I saw there was a previous answer to my question and multiple templates are possible. That’s great.
I just noted that there has to be a ‘home page’ with the ‘connections’ short code. If I am using separate pages for different categories (e.g. local businesses, baby sitters, board members) I can control which member group gets to see each of those pages (I’m using Paid Memberships Pro), but how do I protect the ‘home’ page so users can’t see everything? Can I make it a ‘private’ page and still let people see the category pages? This was the problem I ran into with BusinessDirectoryPro.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Maurice

What you want to do is possible, but is definitely more complex.

To answer your question, yes, you can make the directory home page private.

On your individual pages, make sure to use the home_id shortcode option. Set it to the current page id of the page that you are using the [connections] shortcode on. It should default to the current page, but this should help ensure that. Hope that makes sense.

Now, the directory home page, you could make that private to only you or one of your groups, which ever makes sense to you. With this type of setup, the “View” links on the Connections : Manage admin page will always resolve to your directory home page. The same for the widgets in the Widget Pack. Important to know since you are segregating the directory. Off the top of my head, they is the only limitation that I can think of. Everything else should “just work”.

You can try this out with no purchases using the included templates to make sure this will meet your needs. Hope that helps!

[Maurice Green]

@steven
Great answer. You can’t see the result yet because I’m still working in a localhost development site. Making the home page private worked and I added the home_id shortcode just to be sure.
I’m working in a child theme to modify the ‘card’ template. I was able to modify the category listings OK , but when I look at the detail listing (by clicking on the name of the entry) I can’t get the bio or notes to appear. Which .php file controls which listing?
Finally, in the demo site I originally mentioned, http://narpmphoenix.com/, some of the listings are ‘featured’. Is that done by putting them in a separate category using a different template or some other way?
Thanks again for all the great help.
Maury

[Maurice Green]

[Maurice Green]

OOPS! Finger was too fast on the return key.

CORRECTION to my last statement about the use of a PRIVATE page for the connections home page.
1. NOT logged in: Connections page is 404, as expected. Category page, with ‘home_id’ shortcode shows ‘private material for members only’.
2. Logged-in (non-admin member): Connections page is 404. Category page shows correctly. ‘Name’ page (by clicking on name link on category page) shows 404 error and URL shows ‘/connections/name/jane-doe’.
3. Logged in as admin: Connections page shows as ‘Private’. Category page shows correctly. ‘Name’ page displays content with URL ‘connections/name/jane-doe’ and page title showing ‘Jane Doe >> Private:Connections’.
Am I missing something?

[Maurice Green]

OK, I’ve answered my own question about the multiple templates, on a single page.
I created a category called ‘Featured’ with an ID of 13. Then I created a new page for one of my business categories, e.g. 7. I marked several of the entries as ‘featured’.

On the page I put the following:
[connections category_in='7,13' template="card"]
[connections category=7 exclude_category=13 template="profile"]

VOILA! I had all of the category 7 businesses on one page with the ‘featured’ ones on top with the card template and the rest below with the profile template.
EXACTLY what I wanted. One small victory!

Maury

[Maurice Green]

UPDATE

Finally, I solved the problem of the 404 error on the name-link page for the non-admin user. The problem was the use of the ‘home_id’ shortcode. It was referencing the original connections page which was PRIVATE so it was not viewable by a non-admin user. When I removed the short code the URL referenced the category page as
/category/name/jane-doe and this worked correctly.

This is a great plug-in. Thanks

[Steven Zahm]

re: the demo site I originally mentioned, http://narpmphoenix.com/, some of the listings are ‘featured’. Is that done by putting them in a separate category using a different template or some other way?

I poked around the site, I didn’t see anywhere where they were featuring entries. Car you share the direct link? I’ll take a look and let you know the method they used.

You could use a category named “Featured” to assign your featured entries to and then use the Custom Entry Order extension to bump them to the top of the list.

You can use multiple shortcodes on the same page to do featured entries but that does become a bit problematic if you introduce a way to allow a user to filter by category. Both shortcode will respond to the filter. So, depending on the shortcode options, one may output the no results message while the other shows the results or you could end end with the list showing the same thing twice (or more, depends how many times you add the shortcode on the page).

re: Finally, I solved the problem of the 404 error on the name-link page for the non-admin user.

Great to hear!

I’m working in a child theme to modify the ‘card’ template. I was able to modify the category listings OK , but when I look at the detail listing (by clicking on the name of the entry) I can’t get the bio or notes to appear. Which .php file controls which listing?re; I’m working in a child theme to modify the ‘card’ template. I was able to modify the category listings OK , but when I look at the detail listing (by clicking on the name of the entry) I can’t get the bio or notes to appear. Which .php file controls which listing?

The file is the card-single.php file. Here’s the doc page on how to weak the default templates](http://connections-pro.com/2014/05/13/quicktip-tweaking-core-templates/). And here’s one discussing how to implement custom template override files. Lastly, here’s the docs for custom CSS files. These docs cover how to make these changes in an update safe way. If you alter the files in the plugin, you’ll lose all your hard work when an update to Connections is released.

Hope this helps!

[Maurice Green]

@steven
First, you are correct. There are no ‘featured’ entries in the website I mentioned. I don’t know which of the showcase sites I was looking at.

I have been trying to get some form of ‘featured’ entry working with the default ‘card’ template without success. IF THIS IS ALREADY AVAILABLE IN THE CMAP TEMPLATE, TELL ME AND i WILL STOP WORKING ON THIS AND BUY IT STRAIGHT AWAY.

Following your suggestion, I created a category called ‘Featured’with ID=1. I set up my directory page using a page editor to have 3 rows of image icons http://mauryg.com/newbpa/directory and linked each icon to a separate page with TWO shorcodes:

[connections category_in='1,x'] AND

[connections category=x exclude_category=1]

This worked perfectly to order the results with the featured ones on top (‘sticky’). For example http://mauryg.com/newbpa/directory/realtors.

BUT I also wanted to change the background color of the cards for the featured results. I had been able to add a box shadow to the cards by creating a ‘cn-custom.css’ file in my child theme folder, but I simply couldn’t find the correct CSS selectors to change the background color. Then I discovered that the background color was being set in the ‘card.php’ file in the template folder. So I figured I could use the template override option in the shortcodes to change the backgrund.

I copied the ‘card’ template folder to the plugin folder, named it ‘connections-card’, activated it and tested the background setting. That worked. I then created a second copy of the ‘card’ template, renamed it ‘connections-featured-card’ and activated it. I changed ‘card’ to ‘featured-card’ in the slug, the ID and the initOptions in the card-default.php file, but I keep getting a “ERROR: Template featured-card not found.” message on the results page.

WHAT AM I MISSING???

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