I’d like to add placeholder text to the county/state dropdown that is created by the plugin. If the UK is selected in the country field it needs to say ‘Select a County’ or if the US is selected for example I need to change the placeholder to ‘Select a State’ . Do you know how I can I set this up?

Thanks

I have the directory page *almost* to where I want it, but need to figure out 1 more thing in order to get it “perfect”.

The people in my directory have 2 distinctly different categories that are unrelated:
1) a list of counties (in Texas) in which they service
2) the TYPE of bee removal they will do.

The way it is setup is that I have 2 top level categories:

• Is this a Swarm or Colony?
• What County in Texas are you in?

The 1st category has 2 child categories: Swarm & Colony
People in our directory who only do Swarm removals are in the first category; People who do colony removals get both categories checked (because everyone who will collect a colony will also collect swarms).

The 2nd category has 256 child categories – each county in the state is a child category.
The people in our directory will have 1 or more of the counties selected.

————
What I want to have happen is for visitors to go to a landing page where they have to narrow down the directory entry by choosing BOTH types of category. I saw a post (and reply) you made a week ago to “sk101” and tried to do a landing page where the only thing on the page was [connections_categories]. That page is at
https://txapbr.org/helpme/

Obviously that is not exactly what I was looking for – I wanted the drop down buttons, but it’s just giving me text for the categories.

But what I really want is for visitors to the page to have to select something from BOTH categories, then hit a “search” button and get the combined results. I’m trying to get the landing page to look something like this:
https://txapbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Category-page.jpg

……
And then when the results are displayed, I want them to be randomized (so that the same person does not always appear at the top of the list).

This plugin is exactly what I require for French Regions.
The only issue is that I need the field to be marked as required NOT Optional.
I have tried various field editors and adding code to the function.php in the child theme but to no avail – would you know how I might to achieve this?

Regards Ian

The 1 choice was in a previous post (it got too long, so I split them up).

The 2nd choice deals with location – Texas is a BIG state. Our members, when they join, give us 2 pieces of information:

1) a list of the counties they serve / operate in
2) their HOME county (where the live and do ‘most’ of their work).

Part 1 of this question:
How should I setup the counties in the database?

• 1 category that lists all of the counties as sub-categories (there are 256 counties in our state)?
• 2 separate categories (one for the home, one for the list of counties served), again each with all 256 counties listed as a sub-category?

The reason we have our members list the “counties served” separate from their “home county” is that when a visitor selects a county, those members who listed that matching county as their HOME get listed at the top; then the rest of the members who had it in the “Counties Served” get listed below.

This is because some members simply try to list all 256 counties in the state, just to get their name to show up on the hit list more often. We want to be more fair – giving the “locals” a better display location.

Part 2 of this question then becomes
On the page where the visitors go to see the directory of our members, how do I ‘code’, the search?

Also, I’ve read a dozen or so other posts and have to say I am VERY impressed with how fast a person gets a response to questions asked here (usually by Steven). Really nice. I have the base Connections installed, but have not yet bought any templates or extensions (I’ll probably just get the “pro pack”). I’m hoping that some of my questions below are answered by “use this template or extension”.

Ok, so on to my questions:

1) I’m using Kadence as my theme. I haven’t seen any “gotchas” yet, but just wanted to ping to see if there is anything already known?

Harder questions.
The website is there to provide the public a list of people who can remove honey bees from places where people don’t want them. Therefore, the directory information is all public. We have 2 kinds of people who remove bees:

* General hobbyist beekeepers who can remove simple problems such as swarms
* Professional removers who can get bees out of the walls of homes, trees, equipment, etc.

Question 2) I’m not sure of the best way to create the categories for our members. When we display the list of members to the public, we ask them to identify the kind of problem they are having (swarm or colony).
When they look at the list of members, it should default to “colony” (the professional members only). But if the public person chooses “swarm”, then the directory needs to list ALL of the members.

Right now I have 2 categories setup as “Everyone” and a sub-category under that of “Professionals”. Is that the right structure to use?

Question 3) When a person joins our organization, we ask them 2 questions regarding their service area (our group is for the entire state of Texas, but nobody services the entire state). We ask them:
* What counties do you service?
* What is your HOME county?

Question 3a) How do I create custom fields where I can upload the list of counties in the state (254 of them). For the first field, a person could (almost always will) have multiple counties listed. For the 2nd field, a person can have only 1.

Question 3b) We give the public person viewing the list of members an option to narrow their search by telling us what county they are in. Obviously when they do that, they will only get our members who listed that county in that first field (the list). BUT, if a member lists that county as their “home county”, we want their listing to float to the top of the list.

Question 4: keeping (3) above in mind, we want the order (sort) of members within a county to be random, so that no one member gets an advantage of being listed above other members simply based on the name of their company (or last name).

Question 5: Obviously, up to now, nobody has needed to logon to the site. BUT, we would like to give our members the ability to logon to the site and update some of their own entry information. At a minimum, upload their picture, update their phone, email, & website addresses. Perhaps (undecided) their updates would have to be approved by a “moderator”.
I’m not sure how to go about doing any of this stuff.

You guys choose to ignore the fact that a lot of countries of the world — most in fact — don’t use states and counties as part of a postal address. Only the largest countries do, but for the rest of world, where merchants ship domestically, this is an absolute disaster. This function is so deeply integrated into the plugin, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of. Hiding fields through CSS is a very dumb hack and doesn’t address the problem anyway.

This is the only thing for me that plagues Woocommerce, but it’s unfortunately a deal breaker.

Why the developers after so many years and so much complaint still insist on having those fields in all forms, instead of making it a toggle, is beyond me. I’d love to use Woocommerce, even pay for some services, but this situation is extremely disappointing.

I need to be able to:
– Make the state/county field an empty text box rather than a select
– Be able to edit the erroneous counties such as Turks & Caicos out.

any help would be really appriciated.