[Steven Zahm]

@ Charles

Oh… I should add things will work the way they always have for you.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Charles

No worries here, those are simply informational notices created by WordPress. The DB table engine for the tables used Connections do not support FULLTEXT search indexes. Connection will fallback to a simpler/less accurate search routine in this case.

My guess why you’re, specifically, saw these notices during the update is that you have an older install of Connections … older meaning initially installed a year or two ago. Newer installs, this is properly detected at the initial install and will create the tables with the correct table engine to support FULLTEXT indexes. Older installs, when the tables were created, it just used whatever default table db engine the web host defined as the default.

Any way… probably more than you wanted to know, but I hope it helps.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Debbie

The data is stored in the db, this error would not have affected your data in any way so it is still there.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Andreas

You can create two top level (root parent) categories. One for “Shops” or whatever is applicable in this case and put all the shop categories under it. The second top level category would be “Brands”.

You can then use a template like cMap. This would allow the user to filter the results by shop categories or select which brand they are interested and see a the shop results filtered by the selected brand.

Hope that helps.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Kartik

The login fails so I can not really see the page … I may not need to though…

re: As soon as I select a ‘category’ search is performed with the keyword ‘search’ by default.
This is likely being caused by the theme including a “buggy” (in my opinion) HTML5 shim script.

The purpose of these shim scripts is to enable HTML5 features in browsers that do not support them. They work pretty well … but, there seems to be a bug in this shim script.

When you click on a category, the “Search” placeholder string in the search box is being sent too. So you’re actually searching for “Search” within the category being clicked. Obviously not what we want to do.

The fix will be to remove the “Search” placeholder text. To do this easily, we can use another plugin.

Changing the search string can be done with the Say What? plugin.

It’ll add a new Text Changes menu item under the Tools admin page.

Click Add New, enter the string exactly as shown in Connections, Search.

Next enter connections (notice the lack of capitalization, that’s important!) as the domain and then enter your new text.

The new text you want to add will be nothing, leave it blank.

That should fix it.

re: In excerpt plus, I can’t get Notes, work address, other address fields to get displayed after clicking ‘read more’. Can you please advise me on how to do that?
I just replied to another user asking a very similar question, rather than repeat it, here’s a link to my reply:

http://connections-pro.com/support/topic/information-shown-before-and-after-read-more/#post-321498

re: Also i will need to assign custom labels to those field.

See this FAQ. All the calid shortcode options can be found on the [Excerpt Plus doc page(http://connections-pro.com/documentation/template-doc/excerpt-plus-shortcode-options/).

Related… check out this QuickTip.

Hope I answered all your questions thoroughly!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Nick

re: can i create both category and city search combined?
It can be done but this is not available “out of the box”. It has to be custom coded into the template.

re: are all urls seo friendly
The URL/s have semantic meaning, yes. See the demo for cMap. Connections appends it semantic URL/s to the current page in the case of the cMap demo the root URL created by WordPress is http://connections-pro.com/demo/template/cmap/ the links for individual entries woudl append /name/{entry-slug}. If that is hard to visualize, feel free to visit any of the many links to actual live sites using Connections.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mowafag Ali

My guess is another plugin actually reset the custom user roles required by Connections. The s2member plugins is so very guilty in doing this …every update they release will wipe all other plugins custom roles and permissions.

More can be read about it in the following link. It also includes a solution.

http://connections-pro.com/support/topic/absurd-problem-with-connections-installation/#post-309737

One thing I have to mention … its seems the the Code Snippets plugin is currently buggy and does not correctly install itself. So the code I gave, you may have to add it to the theme’s functions.php file. This is very important … after you add it and gain access to the Connections admin pages, remove the code from the file.

Hope that helps! Let me know.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Debbie

re: Just wondering there there was any way to give a category a colour so any entries under a specific category would have a coloured background for example?
Depends … what template are you using?

The entry category slugs (found on the Connections : Categories admin page) are added as classes to the entry container div; so a generic CSS statement would be:

#cn-list .uncategorized {
  background-color: #eee !important;
}

Whether or not this works really depends on the template in use because many of them add background color within the entry container div. In this case, it would require a more specific CSS statement.

These CSS statements can be added to the theme’s custom CSS area if it has one.

re: Also is there any way to “Pin” certain entries to the top?
Sorry, no, not yet. Planned to be added in a future release.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Nick S

re: The user also have access to the rich text editor’s menu like File, Edit, Insert, etc. Is there a way to block these features of the rich text editor for these two fields?
Take a look at the demo for the Form extension, it does not have a menu bar or the File, Edit, Insert, menu items. The Form extension and the core Connections plugin uses the core WordPress text editor with a good many of the core WordPress added items removed. The menu bar and items are not part of the core WordPress text editor, so my guess is that there is a plugin installed that is adding those to the editor. If that is the case there is probably not much I can do about other than suggesting that you deactivate the plugin that is adding the menu bar. If you can identify the plugin that is adding the menu bar, I’ll take a look to see if there is a way I can ensure it does not add itself to the text editor when used by Connections.

re: Ideally I want the user to just have a free-form text field with some basic options for styling like Bold, Italicize, bullet points, etc.
That all that should be showing, like mentioned above, it is like another plugin adding this to the editor.

re: Or would I be better off not using the built in Biography Info and Notes fields and just create a custom field?
Probably not.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Nick S

All the shortcode and an example for the Excerpt Plus template can be found on this page.

This site is probably using something like this:

[connections show_addresses='TRUE' show_phone_numbers='TRUE' show_email='TRUE' show_links='TRUE' show_social_media='TRUE']

I think he template has over 50 shortcode options to tweak it, just add the option to the existing shortcode with the desired value.

Hope that helps.

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