Steven Zahm@ Petter
Sorry for the delay. The holiday has slowed things down a bit, but I’m catching back up. I’ll address your questions point by point so hopefully I do not miss anything…
I do not recommend showing a real long list as that would make the page slow to load. Being paginated would be best, however, if you choose a template that paginates the list, they all include an option to turn that feature off.
Search is included on many of the premium templates which include cMap, Market and all the *Plus templates. cMap is the most popular, if that helps.
It sounds like Excerpt Plus is close to meeting your requirements, although, you would have to alter the template, card.php file, to have it show the info that you would want shown in the “first stage”. The role, or title, of the individual can be entered in the title field within Connections. The title in Excerpt Plus would be shown right under the name, by default, nothing to edit.
Excerpt Plus is left aligned by default.
So, if I understand correctly, Excerpt Plus seems to come really close to meeting all your requirements. If you’re able to do some very minor PHP editing to the card.php file of that template, you would make the other slight tweaks you would like.
I hope that helps.