Steven Zahm@ Ellen
RE: I think it will be a definite improvement to hide the “Custom Fields” metabox by default – it was definitely confusing to see that box and read instructions about custom fields, when that isn’t the best way to go about adding a custom field!
Yep, I understand. The confusion itself comes directly from WP. I’ll try to explain…
Pre WP 5 if you scrolled to the bottom of the edit page/post admin page you would find a section named “Custom Fields”. This was a generic way to add support in core WP. In WP 5, you need a plugin to enable this feature again.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-fields-gutenberg/
On the add/edit page/post admin pages you find other sections, called metaboxes, often these are added by themes and plugins. These are also called “custom fields”. Notice the lack of capitalization.
Connections mimics these features. So it has a “Custom Fields” section (metabox) and “custom fields” which can be registered as covered in the dev docs.
RE: looks like I actually can’t search by this new field yet.
Navigate to the Connections : Settings admin page and click the Search tab enable search for the custom text field you registered.
Now, when you do keyword searches, that field will be searched for matches.
RE: I need to be able to add another drop down filter for “Location,” next to the category one that is available by default.
Adding such a feature would require custom development.
RE: The “Location” field is not visible on an entry’s preview panel or in an entry’s profile view page.
Make sure the edit the correct template file. This is probably one of the most common mistakes.
The Gridder template files are found in this folder:
../wp-content/plugins/connections-gridder/
The card.php file is the template used when displaying the grid of photos with the contact info panel.
After adding the code to display the field, you will very likely have to add custom CSS too. In order to achieve the grid layout, both the font size and line height are set to default to 0. So, you’ will need to add CSS to set the font-size and line-height to the desired sizes.
Place the code at line 119 to have it display before the bio excerpt. Make sure to take care of the required opening/closing php tags (<php and ?>)
The card-single.php file is used to display the entry detail/profile page. Place the code in line 72 to have it display after the bio.
RE: I placed the code at the end of the file, just before the last “ tag.
Make sure to take the code is between the required opening/closing php tags (<php and ?>) otherwise the code will just be displayed as text on the screen on not run by WordPress/Connections.
Hope this helps!