Direct links to staff profiles no longer work

I just figured out I’m experiencing this as well and am very frustrated by it.

Same here. It seems that providing users of Staffer to have the choice to have the individual staff pages open as they had (in a direct url) prior to the new version (which now opens individual staff in a lightbox) in order to preserve backwards compatibility is essential to avoid a nightmare of links to staff returning 404 errors. I really hope that CodeWrangler, Inc. is monitoring this support area and will provide a fix soon.

You can still link to staff profiles directly. Each time you click on a profile you’ll notice the URL is appended with a custom query string.

Such as this on your Staff page:

https://uumedford.org/about-us/our-minister-and-staff/?uid=rev-marta-valentin

The parameter “uid” contains the staff member “slug” and that URL will automatically open the modal for that specific staff user.

So if you need to update old links, you can use a 301 redirect to point them in the right place.

Note that you need to be running the latest version (2.0.2 at the time of this writing) for those URLs to work on pages using “shortcode” staff display.

Edward,

It doesn’t look like the staff member slug can be edited. Is that true? For our use case, since the “staff” rotate frequently (church positions) – it makes the most sense to have the permalinks for the staff be the position rather than the staff members name so that even though the title will show the staff member’s name, I would have the staff position as the permalink. This way it is easy for the church to swap out the content of a staff member, when the position rotates. This also helps in areas where that position is referenced in other places of the site, or in the newsletter, or wherever so that the link doesn’t need updating and 301 re-directs and it helps to maintain that SEO. So, …can we edit the staff member slug?

Thank you.

Presently it cannot be edited. I will add this in a future release.

Thanks Edward. In evaluating whether to return to v 1.3.3 or continue forward with v 2+ it would be helpful to know your roadmap and an estimated timeframe for this feature and others like the ability to style specific fields of staff on the archive pages as well as on the modal pages. Are those things you can provide?