[Steven Zahm]

@ Julie

Sorry, I meant Custom Category Order.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Julie

I refunded the Custom Entry Order purchase, you should see the refund in 5–10 business days. Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Rob

RE: actually you could do… “if top category, then menu option”… right?

Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean…

Maybe I can elaborate more of why this is not practical.

Suppose a user has 4 pages where they embedded the directory. Each of these 4 pages display a different category excluding the other categories. There is no way for Connections to know to which of the 4 pages that the category link should resolve to. With single page directories, this is not an issue as the page set as the directory home page would be used. This very reason is why the widgets in the Widget Pack only support resolving to the page set as the directory home page.

Hope this makes more sense.

[Steven Zahm]

@ James

RE: The “look” I was hoping for was similar to what is found on this page

I do not have a template which looks like the page you linked to. That would require a custom template.

RE: I would like to display the business address, telephone number, email and social icons, and not the lengthy description.

I am assuming, for now, that we are talking about adding this to the Circled template in the list view, correct? Because this info is already displayed when you view the entry detail/profile page. You can see this on out demo of the Circled template, click the “View Profile” link.

RE: I would appreciate, if you could enter the site and tweak those settings for me?

The list view of this Circled does not show this info and there are no settings to enable to have the list view of the Circled template to display the business address and telephone number. It already displays an icon for the email address and it already displays the social media icons. It also already displays an excerpt created from the bio field.

To change the display from this requires customization. I do offer customization services. YOu can email me using the link at the very bottom of the page for a quote.

[Steven Zahm]

@ karin

RE: I am still using Version 8.1.5. It workes fine, and I did not dare to update in case all entries would be lost again.

I am assuming you are referring to this where you had used phpMyAdmin to export and transfer the Connections tables. Is that correct? The loss wasn’t caused by Connections… The best solution would have been to update Connections as the updates were released. Version 8.1.5 is now about 3.5 and years old…

RE: Is there a possibility of “transfering” the old data to the new Connection?

Yes, this is very doable, even with such an old version. Since the latest version is already installed on the new site this is what you need to do on the odl site:

• Make a full site backup of the old site, files and the whole database, so you can revert the entire site if something goes wrong. I personally use BackupBuddy but there are freely available plugins which can be sued.
• Update Connections to the latest version by using the “Update now” link on the WordPress plugins admin page like you normally would.

After a successful upgrade you have a couple options to move the data:

• You could use the CSV Export Tool to export your entries and then use the CSV Import extension to import that file on the new site. I would recommend using the beta version that you would have access to after you purchase the extension.
• You could use phpMyAdmin to do a sql dump of the Connections tables on the old site (after you’ve upgraded Connections) and use phpMyAdmin to import that sql dump into the new site. If you follow this method, do this
  • Before the sql dump, navigate to the Connections Settings admin page and click the search tab. Disable the FULLTEXT option.
  • On the new site you would first have to drop the existing tables created by Connections when you installed it.
  • After you import the sql dump you will have to rename all dozen or so of the Connections tables so it has the same WPDB prefix as the rest of the tables.
  • Then you can enable the FULLTEXT search option.

Hope this helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Leigh

RE: I would like to keep our business directory public but a few of my members are getting spammed

What leads you to believe that the spammers scrapped email addresses from your directory vs using the readily available massive email address databases that scammers use to send their spam? There are email harvesting bots but from my casual reading there are far more efficient methods in building such databases.

RE: Do you have any suggestions so that email addresses can’t be copy and pasted and spammed?

Generally speaking, email address harvesting bots do not copy/paste. Implementing such schemes on a website only effectively prevent the users of whom you actually want to be able to use the email address from actually using it.

A few times a year I get the request to “hide” the email address behind a link. That effectively does nothing to deter a email harvesting bot. That email address is still plainly visible to the bot while only making it harder for the users which you want to be able to actually be able to use the email address.

The only way to foil such bots is to not actually make the email address visible to begin with. In Connections terms, that means setting the email address to “Private”. This way a the user must be logged in to view them.

Another solution to allow your users to contact your entries without making the email address public is to use the Contact extension. That will hide all email addresses from the public. The user can still email the directory entries by using the form that is added to the entries profile/detail page.

There is also the ROT13 Email Encryption extension. This still allows the email to be shown on the page normally for your users while using a very simple encryption in the page source where the bots actually scrape email addresses from. The user’s browser does the decryption which is how it appears normal to the user. Studies done by those in the security field have proven that this simple deterrent is enough to foil most simple bots which also happened to be the most common used by spammers. More advanced bots will still see the address and will be able to scrape it.

This is the best advice I can give. I hope you find it useful.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Michael

Sorry, only admins can create and edit families. Is is not possible to allow a user to create and edit families because any user could then add any other entry to their family.

Here’s a link to a FAQ which explains how to create a family. So you do not have to re-add addresses and phone or any common data, instead of Adding a New Entry, create the first. After you save that entry mouse hover over it and click the copy action. It’ll copy the entry info into a new entry.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Rob

Unfortunately adding such a feature is not practical to add. Many users put the directory many pages throughout their site separating them based on category. There would be no way to to know which one of these pages the permalink should resolve to.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Harris

What is this in reference to?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Rob

Yes, the export from Connections does meet the CSV Import file requirements ;)

This is my “stock” answer for the nothing imported question. The solution is nearly always the one presented in the FAQ that I linked to in my previous reply.

If you had not followed the instructions in the FAQ, then it was definitely the beta CSV Import that worked. The reason being I added logic to the import to account for that common error :D

Any great to hear that this is sorted!

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