Adding Name Fields, Link to Profile, Profile Templating

1) That’s an interesting idea. I think hold up on my end would be migrating existing staff names (1 field) to a 2-field system. I could do something super simple and just split and existing staff name on a space, so that “John Doe” becomes “John” and “Doe,” if that makes sense. Of course, that is not a sure-fire way to do it. And a manual migration could be super annoying for existing users who have more than a dozen or so staff members. I’m open to a discussion on that and am definitely interested in moving in that direction.

2) This is on my list of to-do’s, but I don’t have an answer right now, unfortunately. I’d definitely like to provide support for a single staff member template, if possible. I just haven’t done enough research on it quite yet to offer any sort of an answer.

3) This falls right in line with #2. I don’t have any official plans to support single staff members (thus, links to them), but I’m definitely interested in adding it. I may see if I can work something up next week on this.

Hey Adam,

Thanks for the reply. I think the easiest would be to add new fields for first name, last name and then use the current as full name. This way, in places where perhaps MD or other designation might be used, then they can write up the full name as preferred, but sort using the last name field.

I don’t think trying to pull from current would be the best idea, definitely could cause issues like you noted.

The real use for me is lack of thinking long term. I’m using this on a medical site and have 40-50+ people on a single site. Various categories and various titles and degrees and such. Being able to sort by last name would be best since I don’t have to go back and remember what number someone was.

Just a thought.

Thanks for the information on the theme side of things. I think the direct link to the staff member should be an option since I can theme it up, and it would use the CPTs that you’ve built on. There should be a check in place. If the URL field is blank, then default to the single page for the speaker. Otherwise, use the link that is provided by the user.

Again, thanks for your hard work on bringing this guy back. So happy to have it in its current state.

Ok, that could work. So basically I need to add a way to sort by a custom field. That way you could use the staff-directory shortcode like so: [staff-directory orderby=last_name order=asc]. Then you could just add whatever custom fields you’d like and sort with any of them. That would be easier than trying to replace the current name field with 2 different fields, plus you still get a generated template shortcode for the custom fields if you’d prefer to use those instead.

How does that sound?

Also, thanks for the feedback and suggestions!

Yeah, I think that could work. Ability to sort by a custom field would certainly be a good starting point. I think long term, having first name / last name fields isn’t a bad idea but definitely could be handled by custom fields initially.