Smart Functionality!

@gabrielesque and Larry,

What is broken for you? What improvements/changes are needed?

I’m just now taking a look at this plugin, as it’s fairly close to what I need to integrate into a PTA web site for my son’s grade school. I’m developing a fairly extensive PTA plugin, but always looking for plugins that have done a lot of the work I need instead of doing it all from scratch again.

I can’t promise anything, as I’m not sure if I can make this work for my needs or not without rewriting major parts of it. I need to be able to add more than just 2 officers for each position, as well as include phone numbers. Plus, I would add a switch so that the directory is only visible to certain user levels (not the general public), or at least hide emails and phone #s from the general public.

Thanks for the reply. Glad you found something else that worked for you.

It’s working for me on the most current WordPress and latest PHP/MySQL on my localhost test server (office machine). I just have the 2012 theme and some other plugins I’m working on. The only thing I noticed was some undefined index errors with WordPress Debug turned on. I was able to fix those pretty quick. I haven’t given it a thorough run through yet, though. I’m looking through the code and already getting prepared to modify it for my needs.

I haven’t programmed for over 25 years, so this is my first venture in PHP/MySQL. I was surprised how fast I picked it up again, and the code I’ve done so far for the new PTA site system is quite extensive. I only started trying to do this again because this was nothing else out of the all the plugins available that would do what I needed.

So far, I’ve developed a really nice volunteer sign-up system, which I did find a plugin that had about 50% of the functionality I needed, and then I heavily modified it and made it work for me. I’ve also made a student/parent/teacher database system with directory for students, but that only “parent” level users can view. Plus, a really extensive system to track reading time and prize levels for all the students for our school’s Eager Reader system. Probably around 6000 lines of code so far to do all of that.

I think I can make this plugin work for our simple PTA Officer and Committee directory. I’m going to add phone number, and allow multiple people for each position by just typing them all into one field and separating them by semi-colons (and then have the display functions split them apart when it sees that character). I already tested the email to see if it would work “as is” by entering two emails in the one filed using a semi-colon to separate them, which is the way most email programs separate addresses anyway, and that worked already. So, just need to add some code to handle the separation of multiple names entered with a separator, add the phone field (which requires modifying their database table a bit), and updating how it displays phones numbers and emails (I’ll add an option on the admin side where they can decide whether or not to display the info, and if users need to be logged in to see the directory).

My only weakness right now is I haven’t learned javascript and AJAX type processing, so I can’t do some of the fancy screen updates without reloading a page. But, that’s next on my “to do” list once I get this all working without that (which is good for people who disable javascript anyway).

I’ve pretty much finished the first version of my plugin that I wrote to do this type of task. Since it’s part of my learning process, and something I’m doing for a school PTA web site, I just wrote if from scratch, with the help of lots of Google searching to figure some things out.

I need to finish prepping it for release on the WP site and then submit it and see if it gets accepted, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

I decided to go with the custom post type and taxonomies for the staff/member directory. I made the staff/member positions taxonomies so that each person can hold more than one position, and there could also be multiple people for each position, since we have committees in our PTA that have several people. So, there are no limits to number of people per position or number of positions.

For display, I set up something on the back end where the admin user can drag and drop a simple list of existing positions to set the order they will be displayed, since we list by position on our site, and not by name. Within positions, members are ordered by last name.

Then I added some simple display options that the admin can set. They can choose whether or not the directory is visible to the public. If they choose not to make it visible to the public, they can choose a user level required to be able to see the directory.

Plus they can also choose whether to show the emails or to use a link to a contact form. I built my own simple contact form so that I could pass in the id of the person they are trying to contact. However, the contact form also has a drop down list of names/positions of all staff/members that they can choose from to send a message to.

The member directory and contact form can be used together or separately. They can be called two ways. You can either use the “/member” permalink which will show the directory listing and will also then generate the contact form if that option is chosen and someone clicks on the contact link. OR, you can use shortcodes for the directory and/or the contact form (any combination). If you embed the contact form shortcode in a page, all you need to do is enter the permalink to that page in the options, and the directory will automatically go to that page with the correct name already set if they click on that person’s contact link.

Got some ideas for future expansion, such as adding a field for “location” or “office” which would make it more useful for companies with multiple offices in other locations, so they can only show staff in those locations with just one web site and one directory.

Yes, my plan is to offer it to the public through WordPress. It’s my first time submitting a plugin, so I don’t know how long that process takes to get approved. Hopefully I’ll have it ready to submit by the end of the week.

If you’d like to check it out, just let me know and I’d be happy to send you an advance copy. You can contact me privately through my web site:
http://www.dbar-productions.com