Staff Directory
Posted on 17. Jan, 2010 by Adam in Plugins
This is a plugin that will allow any Wordpress driven site to manage a directory of staff members. This is very useful for small companies, churches, etc. The plugin is currently in a beta version, so many features have not been released yet. Also any feedback/suggestions are welcomed! For now, we are only offering the plugin through the Wordpress plugin repository. You can find it here.
Edit:
I’ve been very impressed with the amount of feedback we’ve received on this plugin in the first 7 days since it’s release. I just want to encourage anyone who has any questions / suggestions to post them here or hop over to our contact page and shoot us an email.
Thanks!
Adam Tootle
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Hi Adam
This is a great idea for a plugin and it looks like it has the potential to be very useful. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the future. Are there any plans to add a facility where a photo can be linked to each staff member’s record?
My preference would be for the inline style of the staff page output could be taken out and each field marked up semantically, so the styling can be added manually in the theme’s css. Maybe a checkbox to include an inline stylesheet?
I have found an issue in this beta version where after submitting the first category the browser tried to go to: http://localhost:8888/wordpress.2.9.1/wp-admin/admin.php?page=staff-directory-categories so returns the error msg: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost:8888. This did not occur for adding second category.
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Adam Reply:
January 21st, 2010 at 8:07 am
Hi Michael,
Awesome feedback, I really appreciate it. Yes, I do plan to add an image option for each staff member. I also have started laying groundwork for a templating system that will have a default look, but will be easily managed/customized. I’ll probably be adding a whole sperate stylesheet. I’ll be getting this implemented before the 1.0 release.
Also, thanks for pointing out that link to localhost! That was just something I missed from working on it locally
I pushed out an update this morning. Should be good to go.
Again, thanks for the feedback. Let me know of anything else you run into!
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Add users and roles! (like an editor can have access to editing the list)
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Adam Reply:
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:09 am
good point. I’ve had a couple of other requests for that. I just pushed an update that allows editors to manage the list. I’ll be adding a settings page for this plugin soon, so that an admin can set whether editors can use it.
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Adam
Is there any way to insert an image into the staff directory? I want to have a thumbnail picture of each staff member included with the rest of their info.
Thanks
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Adam Reply:
January 25th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
I’m working on getting that added. The beta version doesn’t have it quite yet, but I will be adding it before the 1.0 release.
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Wayne Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Will it also have the capability to insert links?
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Adam Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Do you mean having a link to associate with a certain staff member? Or insert a link in the bio?
Awesome product, Adam! Certainly a fantastic start.
Features we’d like to see:
* Categories with hierarchy
* Ability to use data from existing Wordpress users
* Customized HTML output
* Output caching
If you’d like some help with development to get these features done, we’re more than happy to contribute.
Best,
Zach
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Also Adam, is there a way to exclude the email field from showing on the page? In other words, I have a category that I want to publish and although I want the emails in the database, I don’t want them to appear to the public.
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Julie Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
(Sorry if I’m barging in here…)
At the moment you’ll have to tweak the plugin code, so if you’re not familiar with code, I wouldn’t do it or at least be extremely careful what you remove/edit. If you make a mistake you can mess up things badly! So you’re hereby warned
Look for the code that looks like this in the staff-directory.php file:
// get all staff in a category
if($cat){
foreach($all_staff as $staff){
if($staff->category == $cat){
$output .= “”;
$output .= $staff->name . ” – ” . $staff->position;
if($staff->bio){
$output .= “” . $staff->bio . “”;
}
$output .= “email_address . “\”>Email ” . $staff->name . ““;
$output .= “”;
}
}
}
If you want to remove the e-mail bit when listing out staff in a particular category, remove this line
$output .= “email_address . “\”>Email ” . $staff->name . ““;
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Wayne Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
You’re right. I’d better not mess around with it for the time being.
Thanks for the help though.
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Hey, great plugin!
I’ve just installed it and been playing with it a little. It would be a good idea to also exclude the e-mail field if it’s empty, so that you don’t get an empty mailto: link there
If I think of more I’ll come back and comment some more
Thanks!
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Hi Adam
I’m not surprised you’ve been getting some encouraging feedback, I think a lot of people will find this useful and even find ways to use it beyond a staff directory, ie for creating lists of anything which can be arranged in a list.
I’ve been playing with v0.7b and I really like the template page – it makes it very easy to get the required layout and total control of classes & being able to omit fields if I don’t want to include them – such as email address. Also its good to be able to blank out the css – enabling me to keep all my css in to the WP theme stylesheet. I’m looking forward to seeing the image feature when that’s ready.
I have thought of a couple of features which I think will make the plugin even more flexible:
1. The ability to list each category individually in the back end for easier editing
2. Being able to specify the order of the entries within a category: a choice of whether the list is output in alphabetical order of a particular field or order the entries are added to the db. Perhaps some kind drag & drop ajax ordering similar to pagemash would be possible for a future version?
3. Additional description Fields for each category which can be output before the list such as Category name and Category description.
Of these being able to have each list arranged alphabetical order of name would probably be top of my wish-list.
Keep up the good work!
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Adam Reply:
February 17th, 2010 at 11:24 am
I am working on a re-order feature
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Michael Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 6:12 am
Great! I look forward to seeing it
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Hi again Adam!
Here’s a weird issue. I’m not sure why this is happening. I have been playing with the plugin a bit more and have created a few categories of staff and added the shortcode [staff-directory cat=1] to display each category where I want it on the page. I am also using a tweaked version of the posttabs plugin to get a tabbed interface, the plan being that although I have several categories on the page I only get one category displayed at a time. The issue I have observed is that instead of each staff directory appearing where I put the shortcode, each under a posttabs tab all are appearing at the top of the page before any other content with empty tabs below.
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Adam Reply:
February 17th, 2010 at 11:25 am
hmm…I’ll have to look at how I have it hooked into the content. I’ll download that plugin and see what I can recreate. Thanks for the heads up
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I would love to be able to assign more than one category to a staff member. I’m noticing that there’s a lot of crossover between departments in the directory I’m currently building and I’m entering people more than once so they show in both categories.
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Adam Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Interesting idea. I might look into that or possibly a tagging system. Thanks!
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Hi Adam, me again
I have noticed that when I have the plugin enabled on my test installation of WP, the number of database queries goes up by a large amount, for example from 29 to 205 to generate a page – even is the page doesn’t have content from the staff directory plugin. This seems rather excessive.
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Adam Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Are you absolutely sure that the Staff Directory plugin is responsible for that? There’s not a really a reason that it should be making close to 200 calls, even if you do have staff content on the page.
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Michael Reply:
February 25th, 2010 at 11:51 am
Hi Adam – I’m afraid it looks like it.
I have also just tried it on a new local install with no other plugins enabled and nothing configured in Staff Directory.
Without Staff Directory enabled It shows 34 queries but with Staff Directory enabled it shows 165 queries.
I am using [?php echo get_num_queries() ?] in my footer to check up on the db load.
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Adam Reply:
February 26th, 2010 at 9:16 am
I check it too and it’s doing the same for me. There’s not really a reason for it to be calling that much, it’s not a very intense plugin, or at least not yet
I’m going to look over everything and see if I can pinpoint what is causing it. Thanks for the feedback.
in admin show: Warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: No such file or directory in /home/site/public_html/wp-content/plugins/staff-directory/admin/admin-functions.php on line 454
in te version 8b
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Adam Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Did you get a message that the staff-photos/ directory could not be created? You may have to manually create it yourself. You might not have permissions on the wp-content/uploads directory set for the plugin to be able to create the staff-photos/ directory.
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Simon Reply:
February 25th, 2010 at 3:14 am
I got this message too! in the directory.php the path is
/home/site/public_html/wordpress2.9.1/wp-content/…
so I changed it to
home/site/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/…
and for AngelMay it would be
home/site/public_html/wp-content/…
i think…
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Adam Reply:
February 25th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Oh wow…thank you. I thought I had replaced all of the development url’s. I just pushed an update that corrects this. Thank you again
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Hi!
The idea of this Plugin is really really great!! That’s what I was searching for all the time!
I have one suggestion for improvement. I don’t want to public all the staff’s emails, so could you make a contact form?
That would be great
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Hi,
I get the following error when I install the widget in wordpress.
Warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: No such file or directory in C:\wamp\www\wp-content\plugins\staff-directory\admin\admin-functions.php on line 454
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Adam Reply:
February 27th, 2010 at 2:26 am
what version of staff directory are you using? 0.8.01b should take care of this
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David Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I am using 0.8.01b.
Thanks
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Another question,
Any way to sort these so they display alphabetically on the page?
And…email field is too short to contain the entire string. Is there a way to edit or enlarge the field?
Thanks
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