[Mitch]

Hey Steve,

As usual, my question crosses several forum categories and I have no idea where to place it. :)

The Widget Pack, which is worth twice what you charge, has a couple of widgets (imagine that) :) that *almost* but don’t quite do what I’m looking for. I wanted to have a category (or department or whatever I choose) based output of connections records, that I could list in a single column without the entire cmap template layout. I tried to use Names as a template but wow, it threw every record out in three columns squished into a 140px sidebar, and gave me a headache.

Simply the Name of the Company (filtered from all records based on the criteria I selected) each output on a single line and linkable to its regular /companyname page. (again, not based on New or recently modified, which are great widgets – just not useable in this application – but based on my criteria).

How would I do such a thing? (short of manually creating links in a text widget).

Thanks!

[Mitch]

OK, here’s what I did… please point me in a better direction if you have it. I modified the css file of the Names template to make it ONE column instead of 4 (or 3,2,1, as responsive). Then I just put the shortcode in a text widget [connections template="names" category='6' department='featured'], and modified the look with css.

Obviously, I hate to lose the Names template for other use. Could I duplicate that template, rename it, and then have both?

Any better ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mitch

You could use the Names template for both, unaltered. You would just add some CSS to the theme’s style.css file overriding the regular styling for the template. What exactly that CSS is, I don’t know, but if you can share a link to a page with that sidebar and Names unaltered I’m sure I can figure it out in shortcode order.

[Mitch]

OK, so what I did was take your idea, use the css from Names, add the part that mattered to the template style sheet with the changes and an !important and tied it to that specific widget-id in the css manager. Voila! Some additional widget styling and we’re good to go. Thanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mitch

No problem!

[Mitch]

OK, to sorta ‘reopen’ this… while the css mods worked great, back to my original premise.

How would you recommend that I list all records that:
have a specific ‘department’ (I’m using that as a ‘custom field’);
sorted by ‘category’;
using the Names template,
and where the category ‘name’ would be listed above each grouping (sort of like using the ‘alphahead’).

Something like this [ connections template=’names’ department=’featured’ order_by=’category|sort_acs’ ] (it doesn’t work, but you see what I’m after).

Yeah, I do realize I can accomplish this via entering 40 or so different [connections ] shortcodes in a text widget, and manually adding the category name, but being super lazy (not really) :) I was just looking to see if there was a more ‘efficient’ way to do this.

Thanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mitch

Sorry to day I have no solution. I get the request to group by category from time to time … it is on the to do list; but, honestly, I’m not even sure how to pull that off. The problem is categories are hierarchical to n-depth. I’m not sure what the presentation should look like once flattened down to a list.

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